1 Introduction
Alan Greerâs idea that ownership regimes developed by Europeans and Amerindians involved diverse and simultaneous practices of land acquisition and loss is an appropriate departure point that invites further granular and singular iterations of land ownership regimes. Intertwining a local-global perspective, such approaches could capture ownershipâs unfixed, processual quality and its own historicity. The multiplicity of historical relationships between people, land, and various forms of government that took place in the colonial Andean landscape came to generate complex orders of ownership. Rather than a clear-cut structured and regulated system, ownership remained a work in progress well into the sunset of the colonial regime and beyond.1 From within this formative framework, questioning the stability of the foundational notion of possession and its probatory means in the courts of justice offers a productive angle for discerning Andean land and judicial authority relations, including ownership.
Calling attention to long-term processes and local legal procedures, this Chapter suggests that, in its long trajectory, the colonial administration of justice effectively undermined its own practices for legitimising the possession of indigenous commonsâ lands, which were well-established processes from the 16th century. In the process, it destabilised the very notion and protection of possession for Andeans. In the late 18th century, amparos de posesión (writ of protection of possession) lost probatory power as possession protective orders, while new empirical media, such as landscape cartography, emerged in the Tarma province. Maps proved to be more expeditious in supporting Spanish land claims, accelerating the dissolution of the communal space in the Andes. As representations of ownership, land maps found more receptivity in the courtrooms towards the 18th century, in line with contemporary changes both in the probatory means of possession and space representational techniques in Lima. But these were also times when a steady decline in the long-term protection of possession occurred more frequently in some Andean settings of colonial Peru and Ecuador. What seems an inconsistency, however, was in fact integral to the colonial formation of a territorial regime of haciendas and estancias tied to a landed aristocracy, which was consolidated out of the dispossession of the lands held in common by the pueblos de indios (indigenous villages). At their inception, the pueblos de indios had obtained land grants in the form of ejidos, or communal lands, allocated in common usufruct to the pueblo, such as grasslands, hunting grounds, woodlands, corrals, watering holes, and foraging areas, along with solares, or land plots, allocated to families for their usufruct. To be sure, not all indigenous lands in the pueblos were tierras de repartimiento (royal land allocations) given in usufruct at the inception of the pueblo. There were also lands individually owned by Indians, mostly newcomers, who eventually purchased lands in the pueblo. It was only the communal lands of Vico and Pasco, given to them in repartimiento, with which this chapter is concerned.
In this Chapter, special attention is given to the late colonial practices tied to land ownership, including legal rituals, cartographic evidence, and procedures inscribed in the land. The actions of jueces comisionados (Audiencia-appointed judges) in Tarma pointed to the emergence of new representations of ownership based on cartographic texts and landscape paintings, which eventually rendered ineffective the amparos de posesión that protected the possession of the pueblosâ communal lands.2 Although possession and ownership were closely related, possession specifically alluded to the holderâs (or holdersâ) effective use of the land (ârealâ and âcorporalâ) even if the possessor did not have other instruments to prove ownership.3 This Chapter also examines how Andeans themselves intervened locally and in the Audiencia (Royal Court) of Lima itself to modulate the notion of possession related to communal lands, by both manipulating the social memory of the town through amparos de posesión and destabilising the rationale of the procedures of the juez comisionado through the intervention of the indigenous procurador general de naturales (attorney general for natives).4
I closely read the 1776â1778 conflictive encounters of the caciques (Andean ethnic lords or kurakas) and Indian cabildos (municipal councils) from Vico and Pasco in the Tarma province with the powerful Lima aristocrats in the region over the possession of valuable communal pastures and majadas (corrals) or canchas in Quechua. These pueblos had long been dispossessed by the Conde de las Lagunasâ mayorazgo (entailed lands) located in the surrounding area.5 I use this instructive case as a three-fold analytical device to discern, first, how land maps became evidence of ownership in the court. Second, I demonstrate how colonial legal rituals and protocols, originally implemented to investigate and sanction land possession, turned into de facto mechanisms of dispossession. That is, the vistas de ojos (visual land inspections) and the deslindes (boundary demarcations) intended to substantiate the veracity of land claims, along with a combination of Bourbon-era land maps and instruments of ownership of lands obtained in composición, served to formalise the transfer of pueblo communal lands to the domain of Spaniards and other non-Indians in late colonial Peru.6 Although caciques and alcaldes (municipality judges) of Vico appear together as witnesses of the vistas de ojos and eventually as individual declarants in the proceedings of the case, it is difficult to distinguish other specific roles they played in the defence of the pueblo lands.
Andean historiography on land relations has made significant strides in the last half a century, moving from the socio-economic and political histories of large agrarian structures7 to more nuanced localised studies that incorporate transdisciplinary approaches.8 Numerous ethnohistorical studies have illuminated colonial indigenous groupsâ internal dynamics related to lands and the associated cultural, social, and intellectual practices, while studies in legal history have also contributed to cross-cultural understandings of land tenure and ownership relations as well.9 In studying the role of law in shaping ownership regarding indigenous commons, however, the instructive potential of looking at local procedural praxis and protocols associated with land conflicts has been little explored.10 This approach invites meticulous archival digging and critical close reading to âextractâ the saliency of the fine technicalities of the law applied on-site and subject it to an interpretation of larger transformations in Andean land relations.
I build the argument of this Chapter in sections thus: I first introduce the environment and social settings of the dispute (Vico, Pasco, and Llacsahuanca) to provide some context for the case. In the subsequent section, I intertwine the contours of the litigation with a detailed critical analysis of the legal procedures used to investigate the conflict, showing how they constructed the dissolution of the commons through a selection of probatory evidence and the questionnaire application. Next, I demonstrate that the cartographic mechanismâs visual and textual rhetoric along with the judgeâs approach to the vista de ojos and mensuras (measurements) served to instrumentalise dispossession. These two sections lead to a synthesised examination of the power contest between amparos and maps in the Bourbon provincial courts. Before concluding, a view of contending perceptions of commoning by Lagunas and the Andeans offers a wider perspective on this protracted litigation as an iteration of the continuous formation and destruction of ownership regimes in the Andes.
2 Vico, Pasco, and Llacsahuanca
The general resettlement programme that the Habsburg undertook in Peru produced the colonial towns of Vico and Pasco.11 Vico lay to the south of and a league away from Pasco, on a central and narrow inter-Andean valley, at 4104 metres and 4184 metres of altitude respectively.12 As of 1772, the Quechua-speaking Yaros Yanamates, along with mitmaqs from Yanacache, appeared resettled in Pasco.13 Restricted agriculture of high-altitude crops, such as barley, maca, and potatoes, alternated with sheep herding to the north of the long Mantaro River, 22 kilometres south of Vico from the Chinchaycocha Lake. In the 18th century, Pasco and Vico residents may have worked temporarily in the silver mines located in Cerro de Pasco 19.3 kilometres north of Pasco. Also drawn by the prospect of silver mines, Spaniards moved in, thereby intensifying demand for land as expanding estancias and haciendas increasingly absorbed communal lands, while the indigenous population rapidly declined.14 Mining shaped the history of the Villa de Pasco, particularly in the 18th century. Along with the Spanish landowners, miners of different backgrounds came to work in the mills, or obrajes, established in the mining district of Cerro de Pasco for grinding silver metal.15 According to the Tarma Contador in 1772, the ethnic groups that resettled in Vico were the Yaros Yanayacos and those in Pasco were the Yaros Yanamates along with mitmaqs from Yanacache.16
Llacsahuanca itself had a long history before it became an estancia and later landed in Lagunasâ estate. Royal economies of grace and patronage galvanised empire building through gifting lands to meritorious imperial subjects. In addition to strategic marriage alliances, these land grants helped the lineage of the Vasquez de Velasco and its 1696 matrimonial alliance with the Casa Tello through Doña Ana Maria to amass large land holdings and other valuable assets in the Tarma region and in Lima and passed them down through inheritance to Lagunas and his descendants in the late colonial years. The family managed territorial wealth mostly through renting out rather than directly undertaking productive activities in the land. The estancia Llacsahuanca was apparently formed in the late 16th century through a composición to the conqueror ancestors of Lagunas. Along with the Paucartambo obraje, Llacsahuanca became the largest portion of a mayorazgo constituted in 1725 by Lagunasâ grandmother, Doña Ana MarÃa Tello de la Cueva, acting as the executor and holder of her deceased husbandâs assets. Before his death, the spouses had agreed to create a âtÃtulo y vÃnculo de mayorazgoâ in the name of their son Joseph Ventura Vasquez de Velasco, Lagunasâ father, worth a third and a fifth of the total assets belonging to the Paucartambo obraje and the estancia Llacsahuanca.17 The family managed landed wealth mostly through renting out rather than directly undertaking productive activities in the land. Residing permanently in Lima, Lagunas was one of many absentee landowners, living off the rent of his vast landed assets in the Tarma province and his real estate in Lima. His legal affairs were attended to remotely by various attorneys and a network of high-ranking officials in the Lima Audiencia and the Tarma provincial corregimiento (district).18
3 Dispossession Through Litigation
The consolidation of Lagunasâ mayorazgo in 1725 conjured up old tensions with Vico, since the inception of Llacsahuanca when Juan Tello, its first owner, challenged the grasslands commons of Vico in 1576, three years after the Indian townâs foundation. Vicoâs cabildo successfully defeated his pretensions with newly issued amparos de posesión.19 On 8 October 1776, Pasco and Vicoâs lawsuit came as a response to Lagunasâ legal challenge (1771â1772), suing the Royal Treasury for the alleged destruction of his Paucartambo obraje in 1746 during the construction of a fort to counter Juan Santos Atahualpaâs insurrection in the frontier, and also demanding monetary restitution from the Royal Treasury.20 The lawsuit involved Pasco because Lagunas denied its commons, claiming that it was not even a pueblo de Indios but a recent and illegal foundation situated next to his Paucartambo obraje and inside Llacsahuanca. All in all, Lagunasâ lawsuit included specific claims against parts of Vicoâs common grasslands, including âcanchas y majadasâ,21 and questioned the presence of Pasco on his land altogether. While the cabildos from Vico and Pasco filed their lawsuits in the local jurisdiction of the Spanish provincial magistrate, or corregidor, Lagunas had started his own litigation from above, filing an initial complaint before the king himself in 1771 and then formalising a lawsuit in the Audiencia de Lima where he had connections to lawyers and judges.22
As is common procedure in land disputes, the Lima Real Audiencia ordered the land judge and corregidor of Tarma, Don Francisco Javier de Arcona, to conduct the reconnaissance and visual inspections of the location of Pasco, Vico, and the Paucartambo fort, âdrawing a map with the corresponding dimensions in the clearest and most specific way you can.â23 Prior to the vista de ojos, Don Juan Jose Melgarejo, a lawyer for Lagunas, asked the Lima court that, for the inspection and the drawing of the map draft, the judge should be delivered âthe titles and mapsâ Lagunas furnished so that the judge could âproceed to do the inspection of the lands with them.â24 Most of the witnesses invited to the stand by Lagunasâ lawyer were Spanish âvecinos [neighbors] and hacendados, mine owners and azoguerosâ, and members of the colonial frontier militias, or a combination of the two. According to Corregidor Arcona, the interim protector de naturales (protector of the Indians) legally representing the Indians presented 60 witnesses to the interrogatory in his office, including âcaciques, alcaldes, regidores, ministers, and other members of the comun [community] from Vico and Pasco.â Except for Cacique Don Joseph Chavin Palpa, unfortunately there is no reference whatsoever to these indigenous witnessesâ names or their declarations in the proceedings.25 The questions fielded to the witnesses were only geared to verifying the existence of the two pueblos de indios vis-Ã -vis the foundation of the mayorazgo in 1725. All the Spanish witnesses asserted that Vico was very old, and that Pasco was definitely founded after the mayorazgo. But they overlooked the possibility that the pueblos existed prior to 1725 and perhaps with a different name. None of them acknowledged that Pasco was given tierras de repartimiento and called it âVilla de Pascoâ, which suggested that Pasco was not even a pueblo de indios. As discussed below, Cacique Don Joseph Chavin Palpaâs declarations made clear the underlying incorrect assumption in this question and declared that Pasco had indeed existed as a pueblo de indios since at least 1603.26
Lagunasâ second lawyer, Sebastián Arias y Araujo from Pasco, insisted that the judge conduct the ocular inspection closely following the single linderos (boundaries) listed in the Lagunasâ âtÃtulos de Llacsahuancaâ and the map, which the Audiencia heeded. Arias demanded simultaneously that the indigenous litigants âwould present their titles.â There is no indication that the corregidor asked the Indians to furnish their own maps, and the citation to Caciques Don Joseph Chavin Palpa (Pasco) and Don Joseph Pio de la Barrera (Vico) only required them to furnish âtheir titlesâ, thus only accepting unproblematically the maps of Lagunas, before the reconnaissance, on 3 February 1778.27
The corregidorâs report of the visual inspection and the verification of distances in the map he attached (see Map 8.1) are a rendition of the various stops that were to be made at every single boundary recorded in Lagunasâ âinstrumentosâ (documents of proof), including his map. Vicoâs cabildo disputed at least four of those boundaries, the first one being Cotocoto, the first stop recorded in the report. Arcona conveyed that, according to the native litigants, Cotocoto was the original head town before they were resettled by Visitador Juan de Fuentes and re-Christened on 23 April 1573, as Nuestra Señora de la Concepción de Vico. Arcona added that âtoday there is no trace left of itâ (hoy no le ha quedado vestigio alguno).28 There, the Vico Indians exhibited some royal provisions and tÃtulos de amparo to substantiate their boundary claim.29 Since Lagunas also claimed Cotocoto as part of Llacsahuanca, Arcona decided to settle the dispute by measuring the statutory one leagueâs distance from Vicoâs square outward to verify the extension of the townâs lands. He concluded that Vico had exceeded the original size of the repartimiento lands (1573) and proceeded to render his findings in a map he attached to the report, showing the distances from the townâs plaza out to each of the linderos listed in Lagunasâ documents and map. In practice, he rendered these lands âin excessâ as open to royal disposition and out of the domain of the pueblo community, thus evoking older interpretations of these lands âin excessâ as vacant.30
From 1576, Vico Indians deployed their tÃtulos de amparo as a weapon to defend their communal lands in the absence of other proof of ownership. They were the treasure trove documents of their townâs foundation issued in 1573 by the judge visitor. For the most part, in the 18th century, pueblo communities were unable to furnish proof of the lands assigned to them at the time of the original repartimiento, since they either got lost over the years or they were simply not issued in a written manner at the time of the townâs foundation. Even ownership titles of individual Andeans and communities were rare.31 It is then remarkable that, after about 200 years, the Vico authorities had still conserved these amparos from the time they were resettled on 6 April 1573. In that year, on behalf of the king, the Royal Visitador Fuentes granted repartimiento lands to the ayllus (the basic indigenous political unit) resettled in the town of Vico. Even though tÃtulos de amparo were not ownership titles, Vico had long used them to protect the original repartimiento lands. They exhibited amparos in litigation, a few times successfully, as valid instruments to defend their communal right to land usufruct in the face of several previous challenges by Lagunas and his predecessors. Some judicial officials, such as Protector General de Naturales Don Diego de León Pinelo, supported the granting of amparos de posesión in 1656 to Cacique Don Francisco Chavin Palpa âso that it serves him as a better title to the lands.â32
What the Vico cabildo argued about Cotocoto reveals the Indiansâ effort to adapt to the Spanish culture of possession the best they could to beat the power of the instrumentos and maps exhibited by their counterpart. In the pueblo social memory, the 1573 colonial resettlement must have been a time of significant historical change. The previous head town, or cabecera, in Cotocoto remained in the puebloâs memory as part of their colonial homeland, a symbolic centre, a rather cultural and social argument with little or no validity in a colonial court in the Bourbon era. The cabildo officers and the caciques in 1778 remembered Cotocoto as a landmark of colonial chronology for their commons, after they were relocated to Vico. In his report, the corregidor disavowed the importance of this cultural and legal significance for the Indians, noting that there was no remnant of the town, no traceable mark of pueblo commons attributable to the Vico Indians, although this was a significant part of what the Indians claimed to be theirs. In fact, when Cacique Don Joseph Chavin Palpa answered the judgeâs questions about the status of Vico and Pasco as pueblos de indios (âwith church and designated lands and commonsâ) and their age with respect to the creation of Lagunasâ mayorazgo, he referred to the same historical moment of the townâs foundation and pointed to the amparos, as well as to the âtÃtulos del repartimientoâ. These social and community memories held in common and in lived spaces constituted part of the genealogy of the pueblos that Andeans wanted to associate with their possession.33
Cacique Don Joseph Chavin Palpa found among the cacicazgoâs titles an indication of possession that verified the existence of Pasco as a pueblo de indios as early as 1601, prior to the foundation of Lagunasâ mayorazgo. This was the appointment year of his third grandfather, Cacique Don Francisco Chavin Palpa, as Cacique Principal and Gobernador of the Repartimiento de Yaros Yanamates. The title specified that the Yaros Yanamates resided in Pasco, pueblo de indios, in 1601.34 In the 1650s Cacique Don Francisco Chavin Palpa had petitioned for subsequent mandamientos de amparo to defend six endangered sites of Pascoâs commons. Viceroy Conde de Alba de Aliste approved the mandamientos, which also confirmed the residence of the protected Indians in Pasco, pueblo de indios. They also proved that the possession of Pascoâs commons was confirmed several times with mandamientos.35 The recurrence of these mandamientos de amparo reveal the continuous challenges posed to Pascoâs commons despite the legal function of these instruments, which eventually came to exemplify the prevalence of âprecarious possessionâ over the right to hold the land. Indeed, and despite the mandamientos, Lagunas denied the existence of these commons and referred to the residents of Pasco as âintrudersâ.36
4 Mapping for Dispossession
Arconaâs cartographic interpretation and inspection method deserve more pondering. Measuring one league from Vicoâs plaza outward, he excluded de facto the possibility that Llacsahuanca both exceeded its original granted extension (even if not as far as one league away from Vicoâs plaza) and that it was too close to the pueblo lands.37
Map 8.1
Map of the pueblo de indios of Pasco
AGNP, Mapas y Planos, plano no. 043
Thus, Cotocoto appeared unproblematically registered in 1778 as part of the estancia and was claimed by Lagunas as his own in the instruments and the map he furnished to prove his land possession.
On the other hand, and according to the Protector de Naturales Alberto Chosop, who drew from the Recopilación, Arcona did not verify if Llacsahuanca lands conformed to Law 20, Title 3, Book 6, which prohibited estancias from being too close to the lands of the pueblos de indios.38 Along with Cotocoto, however, Vico disputed two other linderos. The first one was Gangana (mojón No. 2 in Map 8. 1) next to the San Juan River, claimed by Lagunas, and which Vico denied, pointing to a site known as âTutiâ (mojón No. 5 in Map 8.1) as the actual lindero of Llacsahuanca. Thus, Vico claimed as its own twelve more cuadras (blocks) of land between Tuti and Gangana. The second disputed land was âGuancarpanâ (mojón No. 11 in Map 8.1) where, according to the map, the majadas, or corrals, of the Llacsahuancaâs cattle stood, and which ran up to two other majadas of Llacsahuanca known as Raquicancha and Paquidormida (mojón Nos. 12 and 13 in Map 8.1). Vico claimed these linderos as theirs, adding that they extended to the site known as âTitacruzâ (mojón No. 14 in Map 8.1). The cabildo considered these their own grasslands, including those running all the way to Rieran, measuring around three leagues (mojón No. 9 in Map 8.1).39
Looking closely at the representation of boundaries and verified distances on the map, however, some facts stand out as striking, revealing aspects of the use of land maps as legal evidence in Tarma. If the standard one league around the town were to be applied as the yardstick to decide which party expanded beyond the legal mark, it would in fact be Llacsahuanca that encroached several times upon Vicoâs lands. At least five out of the 20 boundaries inspected, including two of the disputed ones (Gangana and Cotocoto), fell inside the one-league circumference of lands belonging to the pueblo, meaning that the estancia encroached upon them, thus contradicting Arconaâs concluding statements against Vicoâs claims.40 What emerges here more clearly is the corroboration of the bias in measuring, mapping, and reporting by Arcona. At a time where, elsewhere in the Americas, measurements were not yet given a status of exactitude, the single distances he reported in the mapâs legend, packed with a substantial amount of text in a rather fine print (numbered 1â20 in Map 8.1), in fact, contradict his own conclusion in the report of the vista de ojos. The legend lists the various distances measured from the boundaries inward to the townâs plaza, as opposed to the outward approach Arcona chose to measure the townlands when settling the Cotocoto dispute in the report. Therefore, Llacsahuancaâs uneven encroachment is unveiled in the map legend but not acknowledged as a major statement in the conclusion of the visual inspection report that Arcona submitted to the Audiencia. With respect to Pasco, Arcona included no inspection report, although he glossed a map with 38 mojones (boundary markers) without reporting any distances to the town. In the âNotesâ section of the map legend, he concluded that, because no one from the pueblo submitted titles, he had to go by Llacsahuancaâs titles, submitted by Lagunasâ lawyer. And âfrom them, I know that [Pasco] is erected in the lands of the said estancia and that its inhabitants have received no common grasslands.â41
When asked the question about his knowledge of the existence of Pasco as a pueblo de indios, its cacique, Don Joseph Chavin Palpa, responded that the town had existed since at least 1601 as a âtown with a churchâ and that the possession of Pascoâs lands could be verified in his ancestorâs cacicazgo titles.42 Whether Arcona was aware of them or not, the mandamientos de amparo that the Lima Audiencia issued on 28Â November 1656 to Cacique Don Francisco Chavin Palpa appeared attached to the 1771â1772 lawsuit file that Procurador Fiscal Don Alberto Chosop helped put together to advance the case in Lima on behalf of the Pasco Indians. In April 1697, the Audiencia extended a new amparo to Cacique Don Francisco Chavin Palpa confirming possession of Pascoâs lands. In August 1772, Chosop asked the Audiencia to send the provision that approved Pascoâs mandamientos de amparo and the amparos themselves to the corregidor and commissioned judge, before conducting the vista de ojos and deslinde.43 Although the Audiencia approved the request, the fate of the visual inspections of 1772 remain unknown and went unreported in the file. It seems incomprehensible why, in the new lawsuit of 1776â1778, the Audiencia and Arcona chose not to look at or at least acknowledge the mandamientos de amparo that protected Pascoâs right of possession of its commons, not to mention the request for the cacicazgo titles that Don Joseph Chavin Palpa mentioned and offered to furnish during the 1778 interrogatory.
What could explain the oversights discussed above in this legal case? And what does that tell us about the protection of the communal lands managed by the native cabildo in the Bourbon period? What can be said about the role of legal cartography in land tenure change, and, overall, in the administration of justice in a late colonial and relatively remote setting? Concerning the apparent discrepancies in the map legend vis-à -vis the land judgeâs report, the truth is that even in the âNotesâ (a conclusion section under the map legend and before his oath and signature), Arcona reiterated the outcome of the inspection of Vico. That is, that the totality of the pueblo encompassed substantially more lands than the one league officially distributed at the townâs foundation by Visitador Jose Fuentes in 1573.44 That statement is clearly what the corregidor intended the Audiencia to focus on. The map legend in these 18th-century land maps was a rather convoluted narrative with details on some mojones indicated in the map. It may well be that this section was included as pure formality, and that the reader would expect the judge to have verified it beforehand. It may also be that the mapmakers and the surveyors, of whom the file gives no information, took the 20 measurements independently from that of the Cotocoto mojón, which seems to be the only one the corregidor reported to have personally inspected.45
Regardless of the technical issues of the visual inspection, there was a stark contrast between the legal resources at the disposal of both parties and how the judges handled their respective stakes. The Indians from Vico were represented by a substitute fiscal protector that Arcona chose for them among local vecinos and who, in turn, chose mostly anonymous declarants on behalf of the Indians for the interrogatory and as witnesses of the visual inspection. Perhaps this explains why the amparos from 1656 and the cacicazgo titles from 1603 never reached the hands of the judge before the vista de ojos.
Lagunas, instead, enjoyed representation by two lawyers, one in Lima and one in Pasco. Significantly, this aristocrat enjoyed the protection of an influential network of upper-ranking members of the Lima Audiencia, who enabled his land claims against Vico and Pasco with potent resources that the indigenous cabildos could not possibly have accessed. A powerful lawyer of the Audiencia, Don Mariano Carrillo, who had also been a lawyer of the Lima cabildo, produced a meticulous alegación en derecho (juridical argumentation) defending the Lagunasâ claims over Llacsahuanca and supporting his demands on the Real Hacienda. The alegación en derecho was a strategy lawyers had used since the 16th century.46 They sought to create a public forum about a case, usually to defend the vested interests and honour of the elites, geared toward forming a legal clientele (a kind of public opinion) that would exert persuasive pressure over the judges. Alegaciones en derecho were costly and required a publication license by the Audiencia and the oversight of its Escribanos de Cámara before they were printed and circulated. The 16th-century alegaciones were lengthy discussions of the jurisprudence that supported the case, glossed with long references to Roman Law and jurists and appeals to Christian moral values. The alegaciones of the 18th century, like Carrilloâs, superseded the former in expediency, precision of juridical doctrine and argumentation, an example of the rationalistic spirit of the Bourbon times and the long-term changes in colonial legal culture. Alegaciones were certainly a privilege of the Spanish elites, often used to defend in court the entitlements that the âeconomy of graceâ bestowed upon them. As the final report with the judgement of the juez comisionado dismissed the claims of Vico and Pasco, it is clear that the alegación en derecho empowered Lagunasâ defence of the various prerogatives historically concretised in the estancia Llacsahuanca and his own noble title as âCondeâ.
Even though alegaciones en derecho lay far away from the universe of possibilities for the Indian cabildos and the caciques gobernadores from Vico and Pasco, they did live to see, at least in 1772, how the changes the indigenous letrados introduced in the ProcuradurÃa de Naturales allowed the first indigenous Procurador Fiscal to temper the ownership ascriptions of Lagunas and legally deconstruct the power of his mayorazgo titles over the Indiansâ amparos de possession. Don Alberto Chosop was the first indigenous protector and Procurador de naturales that the Lima Audiencia appointed, after decades of pressure by an El Cercado native cabildo, and he acted as the âFiscal Procuradorâ of the case in question in the Audiencia.47 His discussions and requests countered both Lagunasâ arguments in court and the procedures of the juez comisionado with meticulously devised ideas in support of the two pueblosâ possession of their commons. Chosop refused upfront Lagunasâ allegations against Vico and his casting of doubts about the existence of Pasco as a pueblo de indios with entitlements to common lands. In plain language, he demanded that the Audiencia deny Lagunas the right to âposesión y propiedadâ and the restitution of possession for the indios del común from Vico and Pasco through various arguments.48
First, Chosop disputed the power of the mayorazgo titles as the basis of Lagunasâ âposesión y propiedadâ of the disputed lands, and their assumption that because the king authorised the mayorazgo and because they paid for the composición, the amparos the Indians exhibited were less authoritative [âno estan tan autorizadosâ].49 The titles of the mayorazgo, in Chosopâs words, stated clearly that it would be established âsin perjuicio de las tierras de Pasco.â Therefore, these titles were useless, and they simply did not support the current aspirations of Lagunas, which amounted to both depriving Pasco of its lands altogether, even taking over the âfundo urbanoâ where the pueblo rests and expecting the Indians to pay rent for it. In support of his claim, Chosop cited the âLeyes de Toroâ about foundations, which state that all existing buildings in mayorazgo lands remain in the hands of their holders or possessors. Also, none of the previous owners had dared to claim dominium over Pasco, even more so as the mayorazgo was founded just 46 years before and the town had been so for more than 200 years. Therefore, the right of the pueblo to their lands would prevail over Lagunasâ entitlement to his mayorazgo, since the law established that sales and composiciones had to be done âwithout harming the Indiosâ and that they had to replace their lands and pueblo sites with plenty of lands and âmountains for their tillage and an ejido of a league long where they can have their cattle without mixing with those of the Spaniards according to law 8 title 3 book 6 of the Recopilación.â50
Second, in order to establish the foundation year of Pasco, Chosop required the court to conduct an archival excavation of the 1573 visitas reports to locate the specific information about the foundation of Pasco and the repartimiento de tierras they received by the grace of the king.51 This request was an effort to reconstruct the history of the spaces in dispute, looking for signals of possession in the records that carried part of the townsâ social memory in visitas reports. The community memory was also recorded in writing in past amparos de posesión and cacicazgo titles that Chosop enlisted to advance the defence of the townsâ right to the lands through possession.52 Since 1771, Chosop had also argued that, even if Lagunasâ allegation that Pasco was situated inside Llacsahuanca were true, the Laws of the Indies on reducciones, or Indian resettlements (Law 14, Title 3, Book 6), established that, if the lands, pastures, waters and woodlands the pueblos needed fell into lands of Spanish owners, they should receive equivalent compensation somewhere else, and they had no right to dispossess the Indians. Further, the Andean Fiscal Protector emphasised that Law 20, Title 3, Book 6 established that the pueblos should receive at least three leagues for large cattle raising and at least one for small livestock, in addition to the lands for planting.53 Therefore, Chosop requested restitution for Vico and Pasco of their possession of the lands in dispute. Chosopâs arguments would have invalidated the 1777 vista de ojos, since the distances in the maps should all have conformed to the established distances from estancias to indigenous commons, as opposed to just marking the one league that the judge upheld in 1777. Vico and Pasco would then be the legitimate possessors of the disputed lands.54 But that was not the case. Apparently, the estancia continued the despojo, or encroachment of the pueblosâ commons, after 1772, since the cabildos had to go back to court in 1776 for a new attempt to recover the full possession of their commons.
In the end, however, in 1776â1778 the two parties were unequally enabled to furnish and choose the type of evidence to show in court. At the request of Lagunasâ lawyers, Melgarejo and Arias, the court allowed them to provide the judge, before the inspection, with the maps representing their stakes in the case and asking specifically that they should be used in it. They also furnished the titles of Llacsahuanca and demanded that the Vico and Pasco cabildos bring their respective titles, not maps, to the inspection. When Arcona summoned the Indians, he prompted them to bring their titles but made no suggestion that they could or should draft and submit their own land maps. This is important because at that time land maps were already being allowed in court and furnished by indigenous cabildos elsewhere in the Andes.55
5 Amparos and Mapas
The use of land maps in litigation certainly predated the 18th century and existed both in the Americas and Europe prior to the Spanish conquest. As is well known, pre-colonial and colonial Mesoamericans produced scores of multipurpose maps. Their use of land maps as evidence to settle intercommunity land disputes and entitlements in Montezumaâs tecalli or teccalcu courts, for example, has been documented.56 In late 15th-century Europe, a time when maps appeared to play purely illustrative and informational purposes in Castilian courts, landscape maps also became probatory and/or disproving tools in disputes over land and water rights.57 In Spanish America, maps were linked to the process of land tenure change and their use as evidence in court signalled the inception of the land dispossession process.58 In the colonial Andes, landscape maps became more visibly used as legal evidence in the 18th century as appropriations of indigenous lands by Spanish land grabbers intensified. In the Cerro de Pasco region, a few miles away from Pasco and Vico, silver mining had taken momentum, attracting an influx of Spanish forasteros that strained the land market and endangered the stability of indigenous communal lands.
At least in the 18th century, technically speaking, the ability to furnish maps to the judge was apparently open to all parties in the land dispute. In colonial Ecuador, for example, indigenous communities furnished maps in court during that period. Interestingly, however, such maps appeared as evidence in land disputes between native communities only. In Vico and Pasco, and, as opposed to the legal cartography tradition of Mesoamerica, in most litigations confronting Spanish landowners with pueblos de indios, maps by indigenous communities were rendered non-existent.59 The Spanish law may not have precluded the ability of indigenous pueblos to represent their communal land claims in a self-produced map. But the late colonial legal culture and procedure management often defined an asymmetrical field, not to mention the unequal access of the parties to legal capital (technical and costly resources).
Occupation and contestation in the case of concern here transpired in a spatial continuum of landscape and courtroom, and maps bridged the two. It seems that, during the 18th century, innovation in legal evidence favoured the use of maps as synthesising visual evidence, supported with lengthy text and numbered glosses. They appeared to care more for exact measurements of lands, natural resources with ubiquitous captions and descriptive assessments of wealth, productive practices and landmarks of economic potential.60 Although this kind of cartography often neglected the actual topography and relief of the Andes, mapsâ mimetic appearance endowed them with an almost mystical power of persuasion, meaning that the coloured image of the landscape and the official report of the inspection often obscured the inconsistency of the measurements. Geographers, art historians and some historians of law, among other scholars, have extensively demonstrated that maps are fundamentally social constructs of reality that represent discrete understandings of space shaped by ideologies that undergird vested interests. Alain Pottage poses that âa view of the land is inevitably a view from somewhere.â61 Jordana Dym and Karla Offenâs take on maps and the transformation of land tenure is particularly pertinent to the colonial Andes. Maps, they argue, are crucial instructive devices for explaining how, by way of either occupation or contestation, among other factors, spaces undergo redefinition and resignification for people over time.62 As representations of spatial reality, maps also had the power to create and recreate ascriptions of ownership in such a contested continuum.
The amparos de posesión, by contrast, contained elements that made them vulnerable vis-à -vis titles obtained through composición, something that became more evident in the late colonial period. First, even if the courts upheld possession as a more decisive basis for land entitlement than ownership by land title, and even if they were mandates issued by the viceroy as president of the Audiencia or by its judges from the 16th century on, the mandamientos de amparo were not proof of ownership. Rather than validating property rights, the mandamiento de amparo fundamentally endorsed the possession of the land and granted recipients legal protection against any real or impending infringement of their rights by others in cases of de facto despojo, or potential usurpation. More specifically, the mandamiento de amparo granted the recipient the right to defend their lands in a legal forum or court to continue to enjoy possession.63
Second, even as early as the 16th century, the âamparoâ had been in jeopardy in the Andes as abusive corregidores and other local functionaries made a personal business out of first demanding that caciques and other Indian litigants furnish amparos, and then issuing these documents to them for a fee. As a result, Viceroy Toledo himself altogether prohibited corregidores from issuing mandamientos de amparo and made them the exclusive prerogative of the Viceroy and Audiencia judges on his behalf.64 In advancing the resettlement programme in 1570 Jauja, Toledo conducted inquiries on legal costs and found out that caciques and communities paid outrageous amounts of money to corregidores, escribanos and letrados for the much needed mandamientos de amparo, legal advice and other necessary documents.65 Over time, the clash between the local powers and the indigenous communities rendered the amparos ineffective, even though the Audiencia often leaned towards protecting native land possession through amparos. However, the reiteration of communityâs complaints for desalojo, petitions for amparo and their recurrent lawsuits over the same land disputes reflected the gradual loss of amparosâ juridical force and the institutional disregard for the enforcement of laws.
Towards the mid-18th century, as the courts shifted towards accepting a narrower set of titles as evidence of land ownership, the vulnerabilities of the amparos reached a critical point. Generally speaking, the text of the amparos tended to be generic and responded to a standard template basically indicating the name of the aggravated party, the grievance and the petition, as well as the decision of the judge mandating the pertinent protection of possession through either restitution or removal of the usurper from the encroached land. Since it was an executive order of the Audiencia that carried the power of a mandate (mandamiento de amparo), eventually the judges referred to them as âtitulos de amparoâ, just like Arcona did when the Vico Indians showed him the 1573 amparos in Cotocoto. But the document of amparo itself usually lacked specificity about land location, quantity, distances and other precise identification deemed important as part of the Bourbon interest to centralise and rationalise the administration of the government. Eventually, the amparos issued to protect the common lands of the indigenous pueblo communities could no longer match the power of estancieros (estancia owners) and their titles of composición, whose authenticity and truthfulness were authenticated by royal notaries, as well as the detailed location, boundaries, distances, owners and origin of the amparo.
Lagunas supported his claims for the grasslands of Vico and Pasco with the titles obtained through composición from his predecessors which listed the estanciaâs mojones. The territorial ownership of Llacsahuanca during its colonial lifetime came about as a compound of subsequent composiciones de tierra, mercedes de mita and encomiendas that granted land and native labour for the estanciaâs growth (starting in 1573).66 In 1696, before the mayorazgo was constituted in 1725, Lagunasâ grandfather also acquired lands (Paucartambo obraje) through marriage. The corregidor accepted his instrumentos without objection, even though the Indians from Vico had previously defeated Lagunas with the same amparos in 1576, when the Audiencia ordered him to move his livestock away from Vicoâs commons and to the opposite bank of the San Juan River.67 Although still incipient in 1778, landscape cartography played its own part in adding a sense of visual evidence of the Lagunasâ land boundaries vis-à -vis Vico and Pasco, and imbued the findings of the vista de ojos and deslindes with an almost undisputable power of persuasion. Over the years, Lagunasâ landed properties effectively consolidated and expanded by land transfers from the pueblosâ commons. Cotocoto itself was âreducedâ to a mojón and eventually absorbed by Llacsaguanca. The corregidor uncritically assumed Cotocoto belonged to Lagunasâ estancia, even though the estancia was formed after the foundation of Vico in 1573. Arcona could not contemplate the different perceptions of the native commons by Vico residents who seem to have identified Cotocoto, their original head town, and its surrounding lands as part of their commons, the commons of both pueblo memory and pueblo land.
The fact remained, however, that the âtitulos de amparoâ from 1573, a powerful protection tool of the Toledan era, almost as old as the first tÃtulos de composition given to Llacasahuancaâs first grantees, bore little or no probatory value of collective possession in the eyes of the late colonial officials, who focused primarily on the map and the titles Lagunas submitted to the Audiencia. After the vista de ojos took place, Arcona himself acknowledged that âpara la mayor inteligencia hice copiar el mapa que por V.A. se me remite, anotándolo con la mayor claridad con sus nombres y números para la mayor especificidad.â68 The corregidor basically used Lagunasâ map to endorse the visual representation of communal dispossession that Lagunas intended and apparently accomplished. After Lagunasâ death, Vico and Pasco continued to fight in court for their communal lands, as his son Don Joseph Vasquez de Velasco, the second Conde de las Lagunas, continued to deny the encroachment of Llacsahuanca into the commons claimed by the towns of Vico and Pasco and turned the accusation back on the Indian towns in 1786 and 1789, when he finally received official recognition of his possession over the lands occupied by Pasco.69
The fact that the judgeâs report method of âcopying-and-pastingâ Lagunasâ own map to render in writing and image the visual inspection was unapologetically acknowledged no less than three times in both the written and visual report, and previously requested by the Audiencia, raises questions about the meaning of âlegal evidenceâ in the Andean late colonial courts. Neither the Audiencia nor the judge seemed to see any bias in authorising Lagunasâ map as the sole guiding script of the visual inspection, not to mention that the measurements were in fact wrongly interpreted against the common interests of Vico, as demonstrated above. Perhaps the powerful aristocrat benefitted from higher credibility in court given his noble status.70 It is also possible that the judge proceeded one-sidedly with this guide only out of trust and pragmatism in approaching a difficult terrain.
Even if only incipiently, the use of maps in this manner is indicative of a new trend in legal procedure of land disputes that already existed in other Andean locales, such as Machachi and Imantad in the northern Andean Audiencia of Quito. Altogether, nevertheless, it appears that the use of land maps, which unilaterally strengthened the interests of landowners, appeared to be in themselves acceptable evidence of territorial ownership. Impartiality seems not necessarily to be an attribute of justice and appeared to be a peculiar quality in the settlement of late colonial land disputes, particularly when they confronted Andean communities with Spanish or Creole landowners. In any case, the interpretation of evidence and the modulation of procedure by the juez comisionado in this land dispute is a telling example of casuismo (casuistry) in Spanish early modern legal practice. That is, rather than following the letter of regulations, the law was a process of constant construction, attending to the unique circumstances of each case and with the concurrence of various legal views, which altogether explains the variation of juridical pondering over time.71
This procedural practice, on the other hand, was by no means unique to the Tarma regional jurisdiction. In the 1760sâ1790s similar patterns appeared in land disputes of pueblos de indios ascribed to the Audiencia of Quito, where amparos confronted the new autonomy of maps as evidence that eventually formalised communal dispossession.72 Such practices simultaneously reveal that the late colonial state had substantially moderated or even forgotten its 16th-century preoccupation with settling and securing Indian subjects of the king in manageable social economic and religious spaces for imperial control. The defence of indigenous common landsâupholding their possession with amparos the Audiencia issued on behalf of the kingâseemed to have waned as the official expectation of yielding new income to the royal treasury prompted growing land transfers to the non-Indian domain. These lands had been both given in composición and retained within elite families through mayorazgos that came to challenge the survival of even colonial forms of communal lands.
6 Misunderstanding Andean Commoning
It is possible to interpret the land conflicts under discussion from the alternative perspective of the Andean culture of commoning within the colonial situation that underlay land tenure changes. Greer discussed the notion of commons as tied to practices of commoning in both pre-Columbian and colonial New Spain, New England, and New France.73 The commons was a collective practice of land use specific to each group, and access to it depended on local custom and rules. For colonial Andeans, the practice of commoning was embedded in local knowledge and practices that obeyed group rules that may or may not have been colonial in origin, although they did change according to the rhythm of colonial relations.74 The practices of Andean commoning in Vico and Pasco were varied and, as in Carantia, they defied colonial juridical definitions of communal space. These villagesâ commoning practices superseded the rigidity and oversimplification of imaginary lines between mojones arbitrarily placed on a map. They challenged restrictive land sizes that were stipulated generically in Toledoâs resettlement programme and other mandates for the pueblos.
Commoning for these two locales related to collective activities and relations involved in their use of territory, which also varied during the year. Andeans attached to regionâs local and collective memories of recent and distant pasts, which shaped their understanding of what the commons meant even in colonial times. Their customs and arrangements for land access superseded the letter of titles given by composición and the abstractions of pre-defined maps. The mojones in Lagunasâ map were placed in an orderly, imaginary circular landscape around the town, where the imposing presence of nearby mountains, for example, is rendered invisible. The long-transited grazing trails and journeys to watering holes that supported Andean sheep raising were often movable, cyclical and hard to represent on a piece of paper or to perceive in a single vista de ojos. Their woodcutting grounds were more dispersed, irregular and shifting than a one-league rule of unspecified terrain can ordain. Their commons and commoning, in sum, obeyed an Andean ecological specificity and social and cultural dynamics irreducible to the simplified representation of territorial cartography.75
Herding sheep regularly, or during land fallow periods, and perhaps woodcutting together and by turns around the disputed boundary of Cotocoto, for example, were forms of commoning, and were established and changed by long-established custom. Cacique Don Joseph Chavin Palpa and the Vico authorities remembered Cotocoto as the original place of resettlement and Pasco as a âpueblo con iglesiaâ, or a town with a chapel. Pasco was the town where his ancestor, Cacique Don Francisco Chavin Palpa, was displaced to exercise the cacicazgo of the Yaro Yanamate ayllu in the early 1700s, and perhaps also earlier. Such memories evoked local Andeansâ coming together to Cotocoto and the surrounding lands to graze their sheep and perhaps llamas, sharing stories and engaging in a common sacred landscape. For them, Cotocoto was then a common by local rule and group customs, just as were the Pasco lands and other resources and spaces they used in common since the foundation of the town in 1573. Thinking strictly from the colonial perspective of the pueblo communal lands, Lagunas and the juez comisionado viewed Cotocoto as part of the lands of Llacsahuanca, simply because it lay out the one-league rule for Vicoâs commons and, therefore, readily assumed it lay inside the estancia grounds completely.
Lagunasâ and Arconaâs assumptions, on the other hand, may have responded to a mental framework rooted in older colonial practices of land tenure. The original meaning of the term estancia may help to discern the dispute from another angle. Estancias were originally understood as spaces devoted to cattle raising in a transitory fashion though not solely for that purpose. In the early years of Spanish America, cattle raising was rather transhumant and relied mostly on pastures from the cityâs ejidos, or commons, pueblos de indiosâ commons, and even on lands that were not held in common. Towards the 1570s, the Viceroy and some cities offered mercedes (grants) to ranchers, sanctioning their ownership rights of estancias (an established corral and additional infrastructure for stock raising), which generally lacked clearly specified boundaries, although the grant specified site and size. Over time, some estancias came to control vast amounts of land, often as mayorazgos, although they were not originally meant to have full and exclusive rights to ownership.76
This old practice of grazing cattle in the pueblosâ commons might explain the origin and evolution of both Llacsahuanca and the litigation under discussion. As discussed above, Lagunasâ estancia started as a grant to Juan Tello somewhere around 1576, not too long after the foundation of Vico and Pasco, and it expanded rapidly thereafter through royal grants. It is likely that the colonial practice of ranchers accessing the pueblosâ pastures continued for centuries in Llacsahuanca and that, towards the late 18th century, Lagunas came to assume Cotocoto and other pastures, including the canchas and majadas from Vico and Pasco, as his own entitlement to exclusive rights to the land.77 If we are to accept that the early estancias evolved from itinerant practices of stock raising that relied on pueblo commons, the disputed lands in question may well have been part of a formerly integrated commons that included llama canchas or sheep canchas kept by the Vico and Pasco communities. The whole commons may have been severed by the colonial intervention in 1573, and came to be understood as two different domains: the pueblo commons (of Vico and Pasco) and the estancia (belonging to Lagunas).78 The protracting lawsuits over ownership and possession in Llacsahanca and the two pueblos may thus be viewed as episodes in a long history of the formation and disintegration of the Andean commons, with the 1777â1778 litigation exposing perhaps a form of uncommoning from without, in which the pressure of estancia owners obtained the support of the justice authorities.
7 Concluding Remarks
Andean pueblosâ commons were simultaneously constituted by benevolent royal repartimiento and threatened by the kingâs magnanimity to Lagunasâ lineage. This was the case even though Vicoâs commons had been protected by Limaâs Audiencia in 1576 and Pasco had received a series of amparos in the 1650s. By the late colonial period, land judges in some areas of the Andes began to disregard the protection of Andean commonsâ possession, giving preponderance to ownership ascriptions embedded in the letter of ownership documents that, in turn, dictated the autonomous force of mapsâ visual discourse. In Vico and Pasco this was the case even though amparos were still used elsewhere. The judgeâs ignoring of the mandamientos de amparo in 1772 and then in 1778 for these towns, however, signalled the vanishing economy of grace for the Indian republic, rendering a dislocation of the reciprocal bonds it was meant to generate between the monarch and his Indian subjects, as their possession was not ultimately upheld by the courts. Also, the procedural culture of the judge reveals how a strictly Spanish legal definition of the commons (one league of common lands from the town centre) came to prevail at the expense of its social and cultural definition by Andean memories and social practices.
Along with understanding ownership as a changing process of formation, this Chapter has demonstrated that changes in both the practices of land judges and probatory means of possession influenced ownership normativity, instrumentalising the shrinking of pueblo communal lands. The land conflict in Tarma is one telling example of how the consolidation of territorial ownership and a landed aristocracy introduced protracting volatility to a time-honoured right to indigenous lands that supported communal possession over other claims. These confrontations between the ways in which possession and ownership are defined in the Andean late colonial courts were, in the end, articulated by colonial actors occupying asymmetrical positions in the distribution of royal grace.
Finally, looking closely at micro-level iterations of changes in ownership regimes affords scholars a concurrent opportunity to reflect on the politics of colonial archival formation. The silences of the record-makers in this case speak loudly. Aside from the Cacique Don Joseph Chavin, the choices of escribanos and the land judges when reporting on the trial render the native residents of Vico and Pasco nameless and voiceless. Even the presence or absence of an interpreter in the courtroom went unrecorded. In contrast, it is worth noticing the intervention of the native fiscal protector, even if only recorded in the 1771â1772 lawsuit. Don Alberto Chosop empowered his defence of the two pueblosâ rights of possession by digging deep into the genealogy of the pueblos, demanding state records on the visitas and revisitas of the pueblos from the 16th and 17th centuries. He wrote pointed memoriales (memoranda) re-centring the discussion on possession, rather than on land titles and maps, reminding both the land judge and Lagunas of the pueblosâ rights of possession of their commons. Chosop put together a full dossier that, alongside his memoriales, included a series of old mandamientos de amparo, as well as cacicazgo titles and Indiansâ powers of attorney. He created a legal narrative that recentred the discussion toward pueblo memory and the local knowledge of Vicoâs and Pascoâs caciques. These archival interventions shaped the design of ownership regimes in different ways as efforts to control Andean commons emerged from myriad actions documented with various emphases and omissions. The archival strategies considered here, overall, expose the glaring erasure of Andeansâ presence and interventions in the colonial archive of land tenure, which stood in stark contrast to the pervasive voices empowering the vested interests of powerful landowners in the official record.
Acknowledgements
This chapter owes much to the intellectual generosity of Renzo Honores and Herman Barreto, and the productive conversations during the Max Planck Institute workshop on âOwnership Regimesâ in Frankfurt. I am particularly grateful to Alessandro Buono for his insightful suggestions. The reviewers of this publication helped me improve the content in various important ways.
Even in Europe, the institution of property was still in its formative stages at the time it travelled to America with the early Spanish immigrants. Greer, Property and Dispossession.
In this Chapter, I understand âtitlesâ as solemn juridical documents that constituted either possession, ownership, or usufruct rights over a piece of land. Even though civil law theory maintains that facts engender rights, a long history of colonial forensic practice in the Andes shows that documents in themselves were the source of or generated rights. It is well known that the lack of legal titles or documents, to be submitted in court, frequently complicated the protection and enforcement of indigenous rights. Even though amparos de posesión or mandamientos de posesión were not technically land titles, Andean authorities consistently petitioned for and deployed them in court in the face of dispossession. This was the case because this written document (and its associated public ceremonies) gave possession its legal force and the holder the right to land. See Guevara Gil, Propiedad agraria y derecho colonial, 211â212. Most pueblos de Indios did not receive written land titles at the time of their foundation but instead titulos de amparo or mandamientos de amparo. Landowners consistently demanded titulos de repartimiento be shown, generally to counter native land claims, but this has rarely been documented.
Scholarly discussions of possession are varied. The symbolic means of vast territorial possession by conquest were the focus of Patricia Seedâs Ceremonies of Possession. For the legal mediation and translation of indigenous land rights, see Herzog, âColonial Law and âNative Customsââ¯â. Bastias Saavedra, in âThe Normativity of possessionâ, 223â238, cautions about the tendency to project contemporary notions of property onto the early modern past, neglecting its normative context of possession protection and its precedence in the rights to land over the modern concept of property. For a juridical and historical analysis of possession in the Cuzco region, see Guevara Gil, Propiedad agraria y derecho colonial; Hostnig, Palomino, and Decoster, in Proceso de composición y titulación de tierras, offered a rich compilation of land dispossession records from Andean Peru. For the possession/dispossession dynamics in colonial Colombia, see Lopera Mesa, âCreando posesión vÃa desposesiónâ, 120â156. For a detailed analysis of possession and amparos in New Spain, see Owensby, Empire of Law.
Starting in 1763, the Procurador General de Naturales was an indigenous legal representative of the Indians at the Real Audiencia, or high court. By 1772, he was designated as âFiscal Procuradorâ.
The mayorazgo was basically a strategy used by landowners to perpetuate territorial ownership within a specific family lineage. This ownership was inalienable and constituted exclusively in the name of an older son, with specifications of the intended line of inheritance, assets to be protected by it, etc. Interestingly, among the various kinds of mayorazgos defined in Spanish law, there was also the mayorazgo de femineidad that gave daughters, extending to an exclusively female lineage, the right to the entailed land. Cornejo, Diccionario histórico, 420â442.
Composiciones de tierras were a process of legitimising de facto Spanish occupations of land qualified as âvacantâ; for a fee, the Crown would graciously grant proof of ownership. The years 1590â1596, 1615â1622, 1665 and 1722â1725 yielded the majority of composiciones de tierras in the Andes. Stavig, âAmbiguous Visionsâ, 92. By law, the composiciones were contingent on respecting indigenous commons and causing no damage to neighbouring properties. Composiciones could, therefore, be challenged in court and Andeans brought numerous lawsuits to reverse them. See Recopilación de Leyes, Libro IV, TÃtulo XII, Leyes XVâXXI. For an emblematic example from the Sucusuma valley (Charcas), see Jurado, âTÃtulos de la tierraâ, 49â64. Andeans themselves eventually also obtained composiciones de tierras. Jurado, âBaldÃos, derechos posesorios y tierra realengaâ 1â24, discusses the polysemic nature of the term baldÃos (vacant lands), arguing that composiciones reasserted royal power over vacant and realengos (royal lands). It is important to mention that, although the composición was not in itself a title but a juridical act leading to a title, the expression titulos de composición is used in the litigation papers several times in reference to the ownership instruments given to Lagunas and his wife as beneficiaries of several composiciones de tierras. See also Jurado (Chapter 6) in this volume.
For the sake of space, only a short sample of the large historiography is offered here: Larson, Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation; Keith, Conquest and Agrarian Change; Burga, De la encomienda a la hacienda capitalista.
Ramirez, Provincial Patriarchs; Spalding, Huarochiri; Stern, Peruâs Indian Peoples.
Murra, Formaciones económicas y polÃticas; Penry, The People Are King; Rappaport, The Politics of Memory; Graubart, âShifting Landscapesâ; Bastien, âLand Litigationsâ, 101â131; Vieira-Powers, Andean Journeys; Puente Luna, âOf Widows, Furrows and Seedâ.
A recent exception examines the various interpretations of âbaldiosâ (vacant lands) and the right to possession as expressed in the practices of jueces de comisión during the implementation of the first composiciones de tierras in 1600 Charcas, where they rendered indigenous lands as baldias and available for sale. Jurado, âBaldios, derechos posesorios y tierra realengaâ, 1â24; Jurado, âTitulos de la tierra, y nociones posesorias y de dominioâ, 49â64.
The programme relocated Andean communities into reducciones, as they were spaces more suitable for their conversion to Christianity, tribute-payers and Spanish law-abiding âIndianâ subjects. See discussions on the nature of this process and its historical iterations in Mumford, Vertical Empire and Penry, The People are King, and the various works compiled in Saito and Rosasâ Reducciones.
The larger area had been the homeland of the Yauros until the mid-17th century, who presumably corresponded to the Wankuy ayllus in the 18th century. As a pueblo de Indios, Pasco appears interchangeably designated as âVilla de Pascoâ and âPascoâ in the litigation documents. In 1776, ten years before the creation of the system of Intendencias in the area, Vico and Pasco belonged to the colonial jurisdiction of the Tarma province.
Archivo General de la Nación, Perú (AGN), Causas Civiles, leg. 179 cuad. 1512, 1772, fol. 2r. This information was reported by the accountant of the province. The mitmaqs were groups of Andeans resettled by the Inca.
For the Tarma province in general, the local indigenous population not only declined vis-à -vis the non-Indians (roughly by 54â¯%) by the last decade of the 18th century, but also the originarios represented only 13â¯% of the already decreased native population at large. Concurrently, from the early decades of the century, the provinceâs population of non-Indians steadily increased. Arellano Hoffmann, Notas sobre el indÃgena, 29â30.
Biblioteca Nacional del Perú (BNP), Impresos Varios (IV), Mariano Carrillo. Abril 3, 1782, p. 15. The year of Pascoâs foundation is uncertain. Lagunas maintained that it was after the foundation of his mayorazgo in 1725, which would obviously support his point that Pasco encroached upon his Llacsahuanca lands. The Andean authorities contested this claim as will be seen later.
AGNP Causas Civiles, leg. 179, cuad. 1512, fol. 2r. 1772. The mitmaqs were groups of Andeans resettled by the Inca whose colonial identity was grounded both in their labour status under the Inca and in their own traditions and social practices of origin.
AGNP, Real Audiencia, Causas Civiles, leg. 53, doc. 359. Lima, 1725, fols. 1r, 10v. From 1725, they rented out both the obraje and the estancia, which included 41,000 sheep, to various renters.
AGNP, Real Audiencia. Causas Civiles. leg. 326, cuad. 2975. 1794, fols. 1râ19v.
The Lima Audiencia ruled in favour of Vico and ordered Tello to move his cattle a league away from the townâs lands and onto the other side of the San Juan River. BNP, Impresos Varios, Mariano Carrillo. 3 April 1782, p. 16. The 1776 lawsuit by the Indians suggests that the Lima Audiencia mandate had lingered unenforced for more than two hundred years, which unleashed more successive lawsuits.
Lagunasâ lawyer in Lima, Melgarejo, and a powerful Audiencia ally and lawyer, Mariano Carrillo, rendered the destruction of the Paucartambo obraje and the land disputes by Vico and Pasco as threatening the economic stability of the mayorazgo and Lagunasâ very noble status. In fact, his noble title was about to expire due to overdue taxes (Lanzas y Medias Anatas), for which he had pleaded for a waiver since 1769 and again in 1782. AGNP, Real Audiencia. Causas Civiles, leg. 169, doc. 1431. 1769. BNP, Impresos Varios, Mariano Carrillo. 3 April 1782, pp. 13â15. Carrillo claimed that the Villa de Pasco and more than 60 mills for crushing metal were illegally situated in the lands of Lagunasâ estancia.
Gonzáles HolguÃn defined the Quechua term âcanchasâ as both corrals and herds. González HolguÃn, Arte y Diccionario Quechua, 50. He also translated the Spanish term âmajadasâ into Quechua as âllama canchasâ. González HolguÃn, Vocabulario en la lengua general del Perú, 301. Notably, Puente Luna describes canchas as a form of Andean commons (sapçi) since they were âbuilt and maintained by community membersâ. Puente Luna, âOf Widows, Furrows, and Seedâ.
BNP, Impresos Varios, Mariano Carrillo. 3 April 1782, pp. 2â3.
âlevantándose un mapa con las dimensiones correspondientes en la forma más clara y especÃfica que podais.â AGNP, Lima, Tierras de comunidades, leg. 11, cuad. 92, fol. 7v.
âproceder con ellos a hacer la inspección del as tierras.â AGNP. Lima, Tierras de comunidades, leg. 11, cuad. 92, fols. 48r.
AGNP, Lima, Tierras de comunidades, leg. 11, cuad. 92, fols. 42r, 47vâ48r. Cacique Don Joseph Chavin Palpa was the last witness to be questioned. He was introduced as âGobernador y cacique principal â¦, minero y azoguero de Su Majestad, dueño de ingenios y Sargento Mayor del Batallón de los Naturales.â Corregidor Arcona designated Juan Antonio Racines as substitute Protector de Naturales, because the protector of record, Christobal Zabala, was absent from the region. The fact that no interpreter, or lengua, was listed as present in the interrogatory suggests that no indigenous depositions were made by local Quechua speakers or native speakers of languages other than Spanish.
AGNP, Lima, Tierras de comunidades, leg. 11, cuad. 92, fol. 42r.
AGNP, Lima, Tierras de comunidades, leg. 11, cuad. 92, fol. 47r.
AGNP, Tierras de comunidades, leg. 11, cuad. 92, fol. 48v. âY habiendo llegado al sitio y lindero que llaman Cotocoto, pueblo que dicen haber sido en la antigua cabeza de los indios de Vico y hoy no le ha quedado vestigio alguno, me presentaron los indios de dicho pueblo unos tÃtulos de amparo con varias reales provisiones con ellos sujetándose en todas al auto de visita de Juan de Fuentes de 23 de abril de 1573 en que los reduce a la mansión en que hoy se hallan en el pueblo de Nuestra Señora de la Concepción de Vico, señalándoles un lengua en contorno para su estabilidad.â
These are the surviving records of the creation of Vico by Inspector-General (Visitador) Fuentes, which apparently established one league as repartimiento lands around the townâs plaza. The Vico cabildo officers countered that the amparos included Cotocoto, which Lagunas claimed as part of Llacsahuanca according to the documents Arias submitted on behalf of Lagunas.
Analysing the interpretations and actions of jueces comisionados in Charcas (1600) during the first composiciones de tierras, Jurado, in âBaldios, derechos posesorios y tierra realengaâ, 19â21, argues that not only did they come to assume they could, on the kingâs name, dispose of indigenous communal lands held âin excessâ of their subsistence needs, but they also tended to exclude what âbaldiosâ meant for native colonial actors themselves. See also, Jurado (Chapter 6) in this volume. In Vico, Juez Comisionado Arcona dismissed the meaning of places like Cotocoto to the detriment of Andeansâ spatial referents of collective identity in the past and present.
Owensby, Empire of Law, 129.
âpara que le sirva de mejor tÃtulo de las tierras.â AGNP, Causas Civiles. leg. 179, cuad. 1512, fol. 96r. Cacique Don Francisco was the great-great grandfather of Pascoâs Cacique in 1778, Don Joseph Chavin Palpa. Even the âlibros de repartoâ served as a community land title elsewhere in the Andes. These land registries were drawn up upon the first composiciones de tierras when visitadores distributed âroyal landsâ to the ayllus of the town. In Sumaro (Cuzco) in 1595, this alternative function of the âlibros de repartoâ was clearly stipulated in the title: âSe le dara a entender para que le sirva de tÃtuloâ. Amado Gonzalez, âReparto de tierrasâ, 205.
Bastias Saavedra (âThe lived Spaceâ, 17) explains that ownership was also tied to lived spaces and marked by the shared local memories of community members. In Vico, the memories of landmarks like Cotocoto played a similar role.
AGNP, Tierras de comunidades, leg. 11, cuad. 92, fol. 42r. âVico es más antiguo que la Villa de Pasco y las tierras que se le señalaron constan en sus tÃtulos.â Cacique Don Joseph Chavin Palpa had previously stated that Pasco was indeed a pueblo de indios: âahora ciento setenta y cinco años era pueblo con iglesia y consta la posesión de los indios de Pasco en los titulos de cacicazgo de mis antepasados los que en caso necesario manifestará.â He conserved those titles in 1772 and added them to the file later. AGNP, Real Audiencia, Causas Civiles, leg. 179, cuad. 1512. 1772, fol. 89r.
The mandamientos de amparo were issued on 26 June 1654; 28 December 1655; 5 April 1656 and 28 November 1656. AGNP. Causas Civiles, leg. 179, cuad. 1512, fols. 94râ94v; 96r; 100v. The commons from Quinuacatay; Cau Cay; Atoc; Enquiguasin, Manyanquin and Yacallumay, located in the Repartimiento de Yaros, received protection. The witnesses of the ceremonies of possession were the native alcaldes ordinarios (municipal council judges) and regidores (aldermen) of the Pueblo de Pasco.
Owensby, Empire of Laws, 129. AGNP, Causas Civiles, leg. 179, cuad. 1512, ff. 105vâ106r. Lagunas accused Don Joseph of illegally granting the Indians lands on his own.
By law, estancias must be situated at least two miles away from the Indian land commons. Recopilación. Law 20, Title 3, Book 6.
See fn. 53, below.
AGNP, plano no. 043. Majadas were important corrals where Andeans collected fertilising manure. In fact, the toponym âRaquicanchaâ denotes the existence of an Andean corral, or âcanchaâ, for llamas. The Andean commons in this case included, all in all, a series of majadas (Raquicancha and Paquidormida), llama canchas, highland pastures (from Raquicancha and Paquidormida to Titacruz), and farming land (Gangana and the lands between Tuti and Gangana), as well as woodcutting grounds elsewhere.
In fact, two of the other boundaries claimed by Lagunas as part of his lands were not even disputed by Vico, but, when applying to the map the respective distances glossed in its legend this corroborates that Llacsahuanca had encroached upon the pueblo lands in at least the four boundaries named Gangana (No. 2, which lay three-quarters of a league away from the townâs plaza), Ingenios de San Juan (No. 3, same distance), Cotocoto (No. 8, half a league from the townâs plaza) and Pampa Alegre (No. 10, half a league away from the townâs plaza). In two other boundaries, the distance to the townâs plaza was barely one league (Tuti and Guancarpan). AGNP, Mapas y Planos, plano no. 043. Although the cartographic technique in Map 8.1 seems incipient, it is important to remember that the use of landscape paintings in the court was but a moment in the long history of the modern legal practice of land surveying. Modern maps began to display substantial written text, descriptions, and measurements that were estimates rather than exact measures. As with modern land surveying itself, these landscape maps were but discrete points in a long and dissimilar process, rather âgradual and unevenâ. On the other hand, the purpose of land surveying in the colonial Americas seems to have been âto remake the property landscape rather than to record and preserve existing arrangements.â Greer, Property and Dispossession, 312.
AGNP, Tierras de comunidades, leg. 11, cuad. 92, fol. 49r. The âNotesâ section of the Pasco map legend also asserted that the whole pueblo compound of church, royal treasury, and other buildings were situated in the grasslands and corrals of Llacsahuanca. In addition, it specifies that neither the Cacique, nor the Alcalde or any other minister from Pasco submitted documents of any kind to Arcona. AGNP, plano no. 024. Indeed, the file bears no reference to either summoning native witnesses nor their declarations. It did copiously record, however, details of the only witness declaration rendered. In it, Lagunasâ wife wholeheartedly supported her husbandâs claims and described the residents of Pasco with notorious stereotypes. AGNP, Causas Civiles, leg. 179, cuad. 1512, fol. 2r. 1772. The map also renders glosses for the 38 boundaries noting geographical features, roads, economic activities, and resources, and religious buildings. Arcona reported on the inspection of the Paucartambo fort, detailing the building structure, size, materials and objects found. The emphasis is placed on the source of the materials (from the Llacsahuancaâs grounds), the bounty of local food and other resources used for the building of the fort and the support of the sentinels working there. The report supports Lagunasâ claims about the destruction of his obraje and his demand for restoration from the Real Hacienda. AGNP. Plano No. 024a.
AGNP, Tierras de comunidades. L11 C92, fol. 42r. 1778. See Note No. 32 above.
AGNP, Real Audiencia, Causas Civiles, leg. 179, cuad. 1512., fols. 94râ96v. 1772. The documents Chosop requested were significant because they contained pertinent Audiencia mandates, describing the specific âcanchas, pastos, las dichas tierras en cuestión y la dispossesión perpetrada contra mis partes.â (fols. 101râ101v). Lagunasâ lawyer rejected this request asking for the procedure to continue without waiting for the documentation.
AGNP, plano no. 43.
AGNP, Tierras de comunidades, leg. 11, cuad. 92, fol. 49r. The Audiencia of Lima ordered the vista de ojos in 1777, asking that the measurements were to be verified by the judge. It is also possible that the inspection was conducted that day without the presence of an escribano (scribe), as Arcona noted before his signature. It also appears that the corregidor ordered others to make the copy of the map (admitting that he would simply annotate it) and perhaps others conducted the measurements of the 20 boundaries, which required arduous walking in the rugged Andean terrain of Vico.
The legal aspects of 18th-century alegaciones en derecho are discussed in Camallonga, âEl derecho en las alegaciones jurÃdicas del siglo XVIIIâ, 277â317. Jordà Fernández, in âAlegaciones jurÃdicas del siglo XVII en Cataluñaâ, 56â58, offers a more juridical typology and definition of alegaciones en derecho.
For the long history of such advocacy and intervention in legal change, see Dueñas, âIndian Colonial Actorsâ, 51â73 AGNP, Causas Civiles, leg. 179, cuad. 1512, fol. 48v.
AGNP, Causas Civiles, leg. 179, cuad. 1512, fol. 48v.
AGNP, Causas Civiles, leg. 179, cuad. 1512, fol. 91r.
âsin perjuicio de los indiosâ âmontes para sus labranzas y un ejido de una legua de largo donde puedan tener sus ganados sin que se mezclen con los de los españoles según la ley 8 titulo 3 libro 6 de la Recopilación.â AGNP, Causas Civiles, leg. 179, cuad. 1512, fols. 91vâ92r.
AGNP. Causas Civiles, leg. 179, cuad. 1512, fols. 77râ77v. The accountant in charge of the search found no record of Pasco from 1573, arguing that earthquakes had disturbed the archive. He found records from 1659 and 1683, however, that referred to the pueblo de Indios of Pasco whose inhabitants were recorded as ânativosâ (potentially children of forasteros) but, based on localsâ depositions, he estimated that Pascoâs foundation occurred at least before the 17th century.
In 1772, Fiscal Protector Chosop connected possession to the social memory of the townsâ foundations and brought to bear legal documents protecting possession to demonstrate the nexus. Bastias Saavedra, in âThe Lived Spaceâ, 3â21, also established a link between social memory and possession in land demarcation practices in late colonial Valdivia.
These laws in fact determined the minimum distance between estancias of livestock raising and the pueblo lands. Other laws, such as Law 12, Title 12, Book 4, explicitly prohibited the estancias from having livestock anywhere near the pueblos de Indios. It even allowed Indians to sacrifice, without penalty, all livestock from estancias that were found roaming in pueblo lands.
AGNP, Causas Civiles, leg. 179, cuad. 1512, fol. 76r. 1772. He added that if affected Spaniards wanted to appeal these rulings, they should do so directly to the Council of the Indies and no other tribunal, according to that law.
In Cariamanga (Loja), for example, the native cabildo submitted land maps of their own when litigating to defend their commons. See ANE, caja. 9, exp. 15, fol. 174r.
Interpreting early accounts by Europeans Alonso de Zurita and Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, Ana Pulido Rull argues that land disputes were common in pre-Columbian New Spain, where land maps were also used as evidence in courts. The author argues that the Second Audiencia (1531â1535) had been accepting Amerindian maps and manuscripts as evidence since the early land disputes and had given the pressure of Indian litigants (Pulido Rull, Mapping Indigenous Lands, 2â3; Ruiz Medrano, Mexicoâs indigenous communities, 284). These legal changes, in turn, established the genre of indigenous map painting in the colonial era.
Vassberg, Tierra y sociedad en Castilla.
Harley, La nueva naturaleza de los mapas.
In similar cases from late colonial Ecuador, however, the indigenous litigants claimed to have submitted maps to the court, but they âmysteriouslyâ disappeared before the vista de ojos took place. Archivo Nacional del Ecuador, Quito (ANEQ). Serie IndÃgenas (SI), â4 Cuaderno.â Quito, 10Â December 1768; ANEQ, Serie IndÃgenas, caj. 88, exp. 19.
In 1787, for example, as part of a general survey of communal lands ordered in Lima for the Partido (province) El Cercado to assess the existing pueblo lands âin excessâ, later to be sold in composición, a deslinde took place in Surco on 26 September. The ensuing report on the procedural measurements detailed meticulous land measures taken from âángulos y triángulos por el orden de planimetrÃa que cada uno de ellos contiene ⦠con que queda medida geométricamente deslindada y amojonada dicha primera suerte de tierras con el nombre de Yguereta.â The procedure preceded the drawing of the land plan with the participation of architect surveyors and jueces comisionados. AGNP, Fondo Campesinado, Tierras y Haciendas, leg. 9, doc. 52, âMedida de chacra de yguereta,â 1787, p. 17, in Andazabal and Rojas, Indios, tierras y caciques, 8â29. Elsewhere in Lima, the curriculum of lawyerâs education also changed significantly in the late 18th century, turning toward scientism and exact sciences and giving more emphasis to land surveying.
Pottage, âThe Measure of Landâ.
Dym and Offen, âMaps and the Teaching of Latin American Historyâ, 3.
See a detailed exposé of the institution of amparoâs formative process in Lira, El Amparo Colonial, 24.
Levillier, âOrdenanzasâ, 42â43.
To simplify litigation paperwork and avoid mediation in the processing of Indian petitions for protection, Toledo conducted mass burnings of documents he deemed obstructive and empty of legal value. According to Toledoâs accountant (Salazar), the legal costs of Andeans in 1570 Jauja amounted to more than $â¯200,000 pesos. Torres de Mendoza, Colección de Documentos inéditos, 246â247; Levillier, âOrdenanzasâ, 257â259.
BNP, Impresos Varios, Mariano Carrillo. 3 April 1782, pp. 16â17. According to Lagunasâ legal advisor and lawyer of the Lima Audiencia, the first beneficiary of the composición of Llacsahuanca was Juan Tello (titles confirmed in 1576), who also received several mercedes de mita. Viceroy Toledo granted Juan Tello 30 mitayos and an encomienda of 30 Indian tributaries in 1576. In 1595, upon Telloâs death, Cristobal del Villar bought Llacsahuanca and obtained titles through composición. Llacsahuanca returned to the Tello family in 1597 when Fernando Tello purchased it. His son, Juan Tello Jr., obtained another mita de obraje in 1601 worth 130 Indios. In 1696, Doña Ana Maria Tello bought in auction an additional land and, in 1700, she received ownership confirmation for the obraje of Paucartambo. Altogether, the âfundoâ, or piece of property, was finally âcomposedâ in 1713 in favour of Don Gonzalo Ramirez de Baquedano and, finally, again in 1724, in favour of Doña Ana Maria Tello for $â¯600 pesos. By then, Llacsahuancaâs titles listed all the mojones and lands disputed later in 1772 and 1776. This relation ends by asserting that Doña Ana Maria Tello took possession of Llacsahuanca âsin contradicción ningunaâ, after a vista de ojos and deslinde took place, for which the Indians from Vico, Pasco, Uchumayo and Catgusmayo were allegedly summoned. The mita was a forced labour obligation for Indians and mercedes were royal rewards for service. For a discussion of the estancias in the Andes, see also RamÃrez, The World Upside Down.
AGNP, Tierras de comunidades, leg. 1, cuad. 92, fol. 6r.
AGNP, Tierras de comunidades, leg. 11, cuad. 92, fols. 49, 50â50v.
AGNP, Causas Civiles, leg. 257, cuad. 2261. 1786. AGNP, Causas Civiles, leg. 283, cuad. 2509, fol. 1v. 1789. The Audiencia adjudicated the case in 1784, ordering the Tarma lieutenant assistant to mark (señalar) the one league of land to Vico according to the 1573 text by Visitador Juan de Fuentes, and: â[â¦] consiguiente a él se ejecutó la posesión que corresponde al Lagunas en las partes de su estancia de Llacsahuanca que circunvalan aquel terreno las que fueron manifestadas tanto por efecto o consecuencia de aquellas obligaciones como por el resultivo de sus peculiares tÃtulos que se tuvieron presentes: comprendiéndose en dicha posesión todo el considerable terreno que ocupan la Villa de Pasco y los molinos de moler metales que varios particulares rodean su circunferencia con conocimiento del dominio que en todo aquel sitio pertenece al referido Conde ⦠Bartolomé de Bedoya. (Relator de la Audiencia de Lima)â. Emphasis added.
Social status was of tremendous importance in colonial legal culture. Don Pablo Vasquez de Velasco, Lagunas, not only held the noble title which he acquired by marriage to the actual Countess of Lagunas, Doña Nicolasa de Ontañón y Valverde, who in turn inherited it from her parents and direct descendants of the conquistadors; Don Pablo himself also descended from a powerful lineage of Spanish nobles and high-ranking members of legal and religious institutions. His great-grandfather was president of the Audiencias of Quito and La Plata. His grandfather was a knight of the Orden de Santiago and oidor, or judge, of the Lima Real Audiencia. His father Joseph Vasquez de Velasco was a knight of the Order of Calatrava. AGNP, Causas Civiles, leg. 326, cuad. 975. 1794.
Anzoátegui, Casuismo y sistema.
ANEQ, Serie IndÃgenas, â4 Cuaderno.â Quito, 10 December 1768. For a full discussion of this case, see Dueñas, âThe Virgin and the Land Surveyor.â See also, similar cases in ANEQ, Serie IndÃgenas, caj. 88, exp. 19; ANEQ, Serie IndÃgenas, caj. 96, exp. 1775â1776: ANEQ, Serie IndÃgenas, caj. 99, exp. 15. Cariamanga (Loja) 1777â1797. In the 1768 case, it was clear that the community of Machachiâs cacicas had faced the loss of pueblo lands for the last century as powerful Spanish landowners and the local corregidores basically ignored their amparos in recurrent lawsuits where the maps and the challengersâ instruments prevailed.
Greer, Property and Dispossession, 253.
Analysing the internal aspects of land tenure in the central Andean village of Carantia, in 1644, Puente Lunaâs âOf Widows, Furrows and Seedsâ, 376â407, proposes that commoning, or collective practices of land use, and uncommoning, or âin-aylluâ family holdings, in fact, happened concurrently within the ayllu, defining a coexistence of communal and single-family rights. They obeyed a shifting dynamic of labour and local control of production, land holdings, cyclical practices, planting options, etc.
On the problems of local settlement practices in the accuracy of maps in 18th century Angola, see Alfagali (Chapter 9) in this volume.
Greer, Property and Dispossession, 254â255. By law, the grants only gave estancias limited right to pastures, waters and other grazing resources with the expectation that estancias would not infringe upon the rights of other rangers or the pueblo commons, whose control Indians were supposed to retain. In 1541, Charles V opened all pastureland in Peru to common use; however, stock-grazers managed to secure ownership rights, particularly in the Peruvian Andes. Keith, Conquest and Agrarian Change, 61.
This was perhaps what Lagunas meant as he asserted, according to Chosop, that he had the dominion of the lands from Pasco, which he acquired in composición, as purchased from the king, âcuando eran tierras sueltas.â AGNP, Real Audiencia, Causas Civiles, leg. 179, cuad. 1512, fol. 88v. 1772.
The sources for this case do not allow me to reconstruct the pre-1573 history of the lands that came to constitute Llacsahuanca as an estancia, nor those that eventually were distributed to the ayllus that came to be resettled in Vico and Pasco.
Bibliography
Manuscripts
Biblioteca Nacional del Perú (BNP), Impresos Varios, Mariano Carrillo, págs. 1â15.
AGNP. Real Audiencia, Causas Civiles, leg. 53 cuad.359. Lima, 1725, fols. 1 r, 10 v.
AGNP. Real Audiencia. Causas Civiles, leg. 326 cuad. 2975. 1794, fols. 1 râ19 v.
AGNP. Real Audiencia. Causas Civiles, leg. 169, doc. 1431. 1769.
AGNP. Real Audiencia. Causas Civiles, leg. 257, cuad. 2261. 1786.
AGNP. Real Audiencia. Causas Civiles, leg. 283, cuad. 2509, fol. 1 v.
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