Cabildos de naturales en el ocaso colonial: jurisdicción, posesión y defensa del espacio étnico

The foundations of the “Republic of the Indians” in the New World rested on a legal substratum that took more solid shape in the everyday interaction between indigenous subjects and the Spanish courts. Grounded in the local cabildos of some pueblos de indios in cosmopolitan areas of late colonial Peru, a higher level of legal activism that emerged was engaged in the production of laws seeking to modify well-established imperial practices of protección originally intended to assist Indian cases in courts. This essay reconstructs the genealogy of the process of law formation based on a crucial legal campaign led by Indian leaders of El Cercado in 1735 Lima aimed at substituting Spanish protectores de naturales for indigenous ones. The long-awaited legal victory of El Cercado’s native authorities demonstrates that the “República de indios” was shaped legally from below, instead of being overdetermined by the laws emanating from Madrid or the audiencias. Strategizing for the production of a real cédula, the cabildo leaders also manipulated imperial legal history and its rhetoric of “protección” as well as operated within social networks of Indians and other allies on both sides of the Atlantic and regionally in Peru.

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Building Indigenous Subjectivity: Jesuit Pedagogies of Emotion in the Colonial Andes

Dueñas

2022

Ethnohistory

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Transforming the religious outlook of Indigenous populations in the colonial Andes became an imperial undertaking that required more than an external change. In the Andes, the missionary enterprise of the Jesuits created a wholesale design of mechanisms for an effective intervention in the psyche of the Native children of the Andean kurakas. Indoctrinators used the schools of caciques and other missional spaces to direct these young students’ mental and bodily dispositions toward cultural comportment changes. Colonizing Andeans’ innermost realms, the king and the Jesuits expected that out of “idolatrous heathens” would emerge Indians with European customs who embraced and expanded Christianity. To that end, the Jesuits systematically applied the “medicine of the soul,” an assortment of pedagogies employed to set in motion a variety of psychological states to produce a Christian subjectivity that occupied the inner space of Andean children’s lives.

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Cabildos de naturales en el ocaso colonial: jurisdicción, posesión y defensa del espacio étnico

Cited by 15 publications

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How to Approach Indigenous Law?

How to Approach Indigenous Law?

Indian Colonial Actors in the Lawmaking of the Spanish Empire in Peru

Building Indigenous Subjectivity: Jesuit Pedagogies of Emotion in the Colonial Andes

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