Space Management in the Indian Pueblo: Indigenous Officeholders and Their Legal Practice

 This essay examines the ways in which the native officers from El Cercado approached the town land allocations, an issue that pertains to the ongoing formation of Indian towns in the eighteenth century. This provides an instructive window onto the study of indigenous participation in the structuring of the justice system in the Andes, a crucial aspect of Spanish empire building from an ethnohistorical perspective. On the surface, land allocations seem to have been routine and customary activities of the cabildos, eliciting little interest among historians of colonial Latin America. The writing generated during the process of assigning solares (urban plots) to native residents and the council’s decisions, however, provide illuminating avenues for discerning both the complexities and subtleties of Indian pueblo governance. Moreover, they shed light on the role of the indigenous officialdom in the production of local justice and government through a transcultural legal practice in the late colonial period in Peru.  I propose that indigenous cabildo officers creatively intertwined Spanish law and rituals of ancient Roman origin while also making use of their literacy, bureaucratic skills, and legal knowledge to adjudicate town land petitions. In so doing, they performed rituals of possession in a manner that partook from traditional practices by town councils in early modern Spain and at the same time articulated them through pre-Columbian practices of land allocation. The native letrados shaped the demographic dynamics of the late colonial pueblo El Cercado through land allocations, a legal practice that modified the use of Spanish law according to local realities and design. They strove to control the ethnic makeup of the Indian town as a way to strengthen the governing council’s ethnic autonomy at a time when the number of non-Indian residents was increasing significantly.