Indigenous Collectives and Church Jurisdiction in the Colonial Andes

A practical aspect of the evangelising endeavour involved the organisation of the indigenous population and the territory in dioceses and parishes or doctrinas de indios. The historiography suggests that it was a top-down process: church authorities, colonial officers, visitadores or inspectors made decisions on how to draw the boundaries of large ecclesiastical jurisdictions and also figured out the reach of a rural or urban parish by assigning a fixed number of people to the care of a priest. The form by which this process was conducted remains unclear for Andean historians. The documentary evidence suggests that in several cases such decisions must have been founded on various degrees of interaction with the indigenous population. Early documents that attest to the drawing of diocesan boundaries mention a considerable number of ‘ethnic’ groups whose ‘location’ served to indicate the reach of the bishop´s territorial authority. At the parish level, instructions from the early church councils indicated that the residence of a main ethnic authority would be used as a guidance on where to establish the main parish church. This paper explores the interaction between indigenous people with Catholic church and colonial officers leading to the setting of parish and diocese boundaries. Although the beginnings of both types of ecclesiastical jurisdictions are opaque, the study of disputes over parish boundaries and of sources concerning the creation of new dioceses can help throw a light on the history of how ecclesiastical boundaries were formed. The paper focuses on the role that indigenous collectives played in the process.