“Por los Derechos de Su Persona y Sangre”: Cacicas in Colonial Peru

The seventeenth century Spanish jurist, Juan de Solórzano y Pereyra, established on his critical commentary, Política Indiana, that colonial administrators should not intervene in the selection of a cacique by asserting that the Indians had the right to determine succession by right of blood. He acknowledged that the in the pre-Hispanic coastal Peruvian regions women governed as cacicas in the absence of male heirs. These cacicas' bloodline; thus, also served to legitimate the right of their descendants. While claims to cacicazgos made by men and women took the shape of traditional Spanish genealogical narratives in the Spanish courts, we must not forget that these narratives were the outcome of the internal negotiation among these caciques, their community and their legal advocates. Cacicas, long conceived as figureheads or placeholders for men's political authority were part of these internal negotiations. They could either be the primary or secondary authorities (primera o segunda persona) of a cacicazgo. But who decided that? and what did it mean to be a primary rather than a secondary authority? The order is not always self-explanatory.

This paper explores the copious collection of late seventeenth and eighteenth century cacicazgo records of northern Peru paying attention to the context in which cacicas appear as either primary or secondary authorities of the cacicazgos. It also analyzes the degree of involvement of cacicas in the determination of their place in the cacicazgo. A close examination of these records allows bringing to the surface the internal mechanisms that governed these decisions and the negotiations of which these women participated.