Making Creolized Spaniards: Native Andeans, the Frontier, and Transcultural Religious Exchange in Colonial Lima

Utilizing an innovative methodological approach, this paper explores frontier and city together to reveal new insights into the religious history of urban colonial Peru. The historiography on colonial Andean native religion has explored the myriad ways native Andeans reacted and adapted to the imposition of Catholicism. However, little is known about the extent to which Spaniards incorporated indigenous beliefs and practices. This paper argues for an understanding of the Andes as a frontier region composed of urban colonial enclaves and non-state spaces. Drawing on frontier scholarship, I define frontiers as meeting places where state power and sovereignty were weak, thereby giving rise to intense transcultural exchanges in which no side maintained clear cultural superiority. Taking the viceregal capital of Lima as a case study, this paper posits that Lima was a frontier city rife with transcultural exchanges that profoundly shaped Spanish religious and cultural identities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.This paper is divided into two parts. The first demonstrates that internal frontiers remained a central feature of the Andean landscape during the Habsburg period. The second examines the impact of Andean frontiers on Lima. I show that uncontrollable indigenous mobility collapsed space between Andean frontiers and Lima, thereby enmeshing the capital in the Andean frontier world. Through a close reading of Inquisition and extirpation records, I show that Limeño Spaniards of all classes engaged in mountain worship, chewed and conjured with coca, understood native Andean cosmologies, etc., all in combination with the Spanish baroque and aspects of African cultures. These frontier exchanges, I argue, engendered a creolized habitus that governed the religious habits of the capital. With so many Spaniards participating in and contributing to Lima’s creolized, frontier culture, I question whether a cultural hegemony cohered around the Spanish baroque in the heart of Spain’s Andean empire.