Putting Things in Place: Material Culture, Built Environment, and Identity in Urban Andean Households

The seventeenth-century Potosí home of the indigenous Joana de Montoya contained silver plates, bowls and spoons; candlesticks; religious paintings; a large trunk; clothing; a chair; a platform bed; sheets and a bedspread. With a focus on indigenous and mestizo families, this paper will use material culture to interrogate the category of “urban Indians.” (Velasco Murillo, 2016) I draw primarily from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century notary records in Arequipa, Lima, Potosí and Sucre. In order to move from the anecdotal to a collective analysis about households, I use the method of prosopography as a model, that is, investigate the households’ common characteristics through a collective study of the contents of numerous spaces.

The historiography of early Latin America counts on rich studies of material culture. (Bauer 2001; Cummins 2002; Graubart 2007; Walker 2017) The existing work falls into three types: an overview of material culture, analysis of material culture in brief as part of a larger study of colonial society, or a focus on a singular object. I situate my work from a slightly different perspective. Thus, this paper offers a bottom-up, granular analysis of material culture in the urban Andes through specific individuals and their living spaces.

Passing over the threshold into a home marks a movement in space that carries with it significant meaning. How did indigenous families construct and fill households in cities? As many moved from rural areas, how did built environment or material culture mark their new homes as urban? How did belongings reflect ethnic identities within city dwellings? How might one’s sacks of chuño reveal not only a note about subsistence but about how the rural bled into the urban? This paper shows how objects related to food, dress, ritual, and occupation speak to transculturation and, specifically, reveal a markedly complex set of colonial urban identities.