A few days before Christmas 1565, in Spanish-occupied Cuzco, seven-year-old Beatriz Coya was married to an adult Spanish man, Cristóbal Maldonado. Beatriz was heir to a lucrative encomienda, and Cristóbal was the younger brother of the master of the neighboring encomienda. Just as significantly, Beatriz was heir to the prestige of Inca royalty, since her mother Kusiwarkay and her late father Sayri Tupac were recognized by the Spanish as Inca king and queen. Kusiwarkay, after some vacillation, had decided to marry her to Cristóbal in order to solidify the ties between her family and the Maldonados. The night of the marriage, Cristóbal raped the young girl, in order to legally seal the marriage. But the marriage broke numerous laws and, more significantly, it undermined the goals of the colonial administration. All the participants were arrested and Beatriz was placed in a convent; the viceroy later arranged her marriage to someone else, and she may never have seen her mother again.
On the one hand, the aborted marriage was a pragmatic, even amoral bargain between Beatriz’s mother and Cristóbal’s family, selling the girl’s inheritance to the Maldonados in exchange for an alliance that would protect and benefit Kusiwarkay. On the other hand, it also represented a point of contact between the evolving norms of the encomenderos, who aspired to become a naturalized Peruvian aristocracy, and the colonized Inca elite. Among both the Castilian aristocracy and the Inca nobility, the marriage of adults to very young children was a transgressive act which demonstrated and performed high family status. Tragic and sordid, brutal to Beatriz, dangerous to the viceregal administration, child marriage was also a shared platform on which two status-revering cultures – Incas and colonial Spanish encomenderos – tried to negotiate a common culture.
