The Crisis of Community in the New Kingdom of Granada

At the beginning of the seventeenth century traditional indigenous communities in the central highlands of the New Kingdom of Granada were in crisis, as the consolidating colonial state — after multiple false starts — implemented substantial social, cultural, and economic reforms that undermined them. Programs of mass resettlement relocated thousands of people into new gridded towns of single-family dwellings, while policies of land registration and redistribution were rapidly transforming land tenure and access to resources. The demands of christianization were eroding the delicate ritual economy that had bound communities under the leadership of caciques, who now petitioned Spanish authorities in droves for help in maintaining their positions of power and the integrity of their communities. All the while, Christian ideals of marriage and European models of inheritance continued to threaten traditional kinship structures. These reforms all sought to better govern, evangelize, and tax indigenous communities as Spaniards understood them: as cacicazgos, political communities grounded in notions of natural law, conceived of as legitimate and constant, to which all indigenous people implicitly belonged, and which is a unit of analysis that has had a long afterlife in scholarship. And yet, these same reforms unwittingly threatened to turn them, for many individuals, into little more than paper realities, while creating new avenues, such as confraternities, through which people could come together in new and different ways to pursue their interests. This paper explores the experience of indigenous people across in this region who found new ways to organize themselves beyond the cacicazgo. It pays special attention to the indigenous confraternities that proliferated in indigenous towns and Spanish cities in this period, but also reflects on the relative invisibility of other important collectivities not as easily intelligible to the colonial state and in its records.