Customs Apart: Rethinking Inheritance and Competing Land Claims among Commoner Women in Colonial Andean Villages

In this paper, I interrogate a handful of local, village-level records to shed light on inheritance norms and practices within indigenous municipalities of the central Andes. A survey of sixteenth- and early-seventeenth colonial ordinances pertaining to pueblos de naturales reveals that, while some legislators seemed obsessed with regulating myriad aspects of life in these indigenous republics, they were generally silent about inheritance norms. While strict rules were set to prevent the disentailment of a colonial village’s core holdings, intracommunal quarrels regarding the transfer of family lands (chacaras, heredades, labores) were left in the hands of indigenous lineages, ayllus (kinship groups), and municipal authorities of the cabildo.

My main interest lies in the introduction of written titles to land, such as wills, certified lists of plots, fragments of land inspections, and writs of protection and possession, and their deployment by indigenous wives, widows, sisters, and daughters within the jurisdiction of the otherwise male-dominated municipal council. This essay probes the ways in which the incorporation of writs impacted these women’s land inheritance rights in relation to the family, kin, and village members upon whose collaboration their livelihoods depended. The documents entered the municipal jurisdiction when conflicts over inheritance arose. From within this judicial space, which overlapped with the complex rules and mechanisms of the ayllu and the community, women could try to enforce, negotiate, or contest customary norms. Land titles could limit some women’s ability to freely dispose of their own share while guaranteeing other women access to family assets, mainly through inheritance, adoption, or marriage. In both scenarios, a change of status could prompt women to call upon colonial courts and judges, either to uphold, modify, or supersede customary rules regarding the inheritance of family plots and other resources with the aid of written documents.