Incas and Yanaconas in the New Kingdom of Granada: A Curious Legacy

In pre-Hispanic times, the Quechua term yanacona was used to refer to personal retainers of Andean lords in the Inca Empire. But after the Spanish invasion and conquest, the use of the term became more flexible and came to be applied to people with a range of statuses, from bonded servants to upwardly-mobile autonomous natives divorced from their original home communities. Even as the nomenclature came to be applied more expansively, it has only ever been associated with the lands formerly under Inca rule. This paper, however, highlights a community of yanaconas in the Muisca lands of the New Kingdom of Granada. While one might guess that well-traveled Spaniards adopted the Quechua word from Peru and merely applied it to retainers in their new north Andean home, such is not the case. Trial records and notarial records in the cities of Santafé de Bogotá and Tunja make clear that yanaconas there were transplants from the Inca Empire to the south. These same documents suggest that some, and perhaps all, came as indios conquistadores in the 1530s. Throughout subsequent decades and, indeed, well into the seventeenth century, Peruvian yanaconas remained an urban feature in Spanish colonial cities in the New Kingdom. Alongside the yanaconas were a handful of other individuals memorialized as Incas and purported to be descendants of the royal line in Cuzco. The coexistence of these transplants with Spaniards and local Muiscas highlights the complexity of post-conquest society.