Beyond Colonial Binaries: Mapping Subterranean Space in Spanish Peru

In contemporary scholarship, colonial and imperial ventures tend to be closely associated with ‘horizontal’ spatialities – the movement of people, goods and knowledges across oceans and dry land, the projection of territorial features onto cartographic grids, and the material transformation of surface landscapes. Frequently, however, colonial and imperial ventures also possessed a strongly ‘vertical’ axis that reflected colonizers’ interests in the exploitation of subterranean resources such as precious metals and gems and, more recently, oil and gas. The impulse to exploit the underground was especially evident in the Andean regions of colonial Latin America, where large-scale mining came to be a primary focus of the colonial economy.

The exploitation of the underground constituted a sphere of colonial life in which the violence that is integral to colonialism was expressed with particular force. Colonial records, however, reveal widespread Spanish ambivalence about the morality and social benefits of mineral extraction. Moreover, in histories and chronicles written by Peruvian-born Spaniards in the 17^th century, detailed descriptions of Peru’s subterranean riches and its wealthy mines become a vehicle for expressing pride in a distinct American identity as well as for conveying indignation at the perceived injustices suffered by Peru and its criollo populations at the hands of European Spaniards. This paper explores the detailed textual mappings of the subterranean in 17^th century Peru. It contends that the Peruvian underground, in addition to being a focus of material struggles and contestation between colonizers and colonized, provided an important focus for the articulation of criollo consciousness. In doing so, the paper proposes that new insights into the complexities of colonial identities and relations in the Andes (and elsewhere in colonial Latin America) may be gained by paying closer critical attention to subterranean spaces and the varied discursive and material practices that converged on them.