Village Settlement and the Colonial Legacy in Southern Peru

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Geographical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Geographical Review. THE current rural settlement in the highlands of Peru and Boliva reflects an administrative fiat imposed on the Andean landscape by an alien culture four centuries ago. The dwellings of the indigenes were dispersed, but between 1570 and 1575 the Spanish viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, ordered their concentration in more than a thousand compact villages known as reducciones.1 A million or more Indians were torn from their homes and resettled in tight clusters so that it would be easier for the Spanish authorities to control and acculturate them.2 Subsequent rural settlements in the central Andes developed mainly as offshoots of the original reducciones; most post-Toledan villages resembled the ones built in the early 1570s.The reduccion system is one example of landscape design imposed by bureaucratic decree. Three prime geographical components can be identified in this type of landscape design: the characteristics of the physical environment, the cultural configuration of the habitants, and the goals of the imposing authority or group. The native peoples of the Andes had adapted to the mountainous terrain, the highly compressed climatic zones, and the availability of local resources. That finely tuned man-land adjustment culminated in the Incan empire which ended when the Spaniards conquered Peru between 1532 and 1533. The Spaniards were self-consciously the bearers of the Mediterranean variety of Western civilization. One aspect of Andean society and culture that they altered was the settlement system.Mindful of the role of the past in molding the present, we examine the results of the implementation of that Spanish edict on a portion of the high Andes. To examine the fate of the European-imposed nuclei, we focus on the southwestern portion of the department of Cuzco. This rugged, remote zone of the southern Peruvian highlands encompasses nearly 14,000 square kilometers. A plateau between 3,500 and 4,200 meters above sea level dominates the area; in some places mountains rise as high as 5,271 meters (Fig. 1). The

El desarrollo espacial de las comunidades Chachapoyas bajo la dominación colonial inka y española

“…El plan de reasentamiento forzado del virrey Toledo se promulgó mucho más rápidamente en el sur que en el norte del Perú (Gade y Escobar 1982). Como resultado, los nuevos conceptos de orden social pueden haber influido en la arquitectura chachapoya de las comunidades del norte antes de dispersarse en las comunidades reasentadas.…”

Produciendo Chérrepe: reducción, etnia y performance en los valles de Zaña y Chamán, siglos XVI y XVII

“…La reducción, legislada por el virrey Francisco de Toledo entre 1569 y 1575, fue un intento audaz de rehacer los pueblos, paisajes y sujetos andinos (Málaga Medina 1974;Gade y Escobar 1982;Toledo 1986;Cummins 2002;Mumford 2012). En pocos años, trató de mover la totalidad de las poblaciones indígenas del Perú a una serie de pueblos planificados con el fin de transformarlos en sujetos «civilizados» de la Corona española y de inculcarles lo que llamaban «policía» (Lechner 1989).…”

Order (and Disorder) in Early Colonial Moquegua, Peru

“…Both were structured according to Spanish-and earlier Romantown standards: a grid centered on an open plaza and with wide, straight streets dividing the community into blocks, each with four building lots (Crouch 1991;Crouch, et al 1982;Gade and Escobar 1982;Low 1995;Nuttall 1921;Stanislawski 1947;Zéndegui 1977). This grid organization was "a visual manifestation of the divine order of Augustine's City of God," with "places of the secular and religious power of the colonial order"-the all-important church, municipal buildings, and residents of the elites-arranged around the plaza (Cummins 2002, pp.…”