Catholicism and Contested Geographies in the 16th-Century Andes

In the sixteenth century, both Franciscan and diocesan Catholic priests were assigned to missions in the province of Colca, Arequipa, Peru. During the Spanish colonization of the Americas, church and imperial policies preferred assigning the missions in a province to a single type of priests. In the 1580s, when the Franciscans left upper Colca, the province should have transitioned to unified diocesan control. Instead, backlash from the area’s Indigenous inhabitants and some members of the Franciscan order won the Franciscans’ return to upper Colca, where they worked into the eighteenth century. This paper compares arguments for Franciscan return made by different participants in the case. The Indigenous leaders of upper Colca argued that their area, called Collaguas, shared a language (Aymara), a history of Franciscan evangelization, and “common waters and fields,” features that meant they should continue to have Franciscan priests. Their Franciscan allies and viceregal and royal judgements in their favor, by contrast, emphasized the presence of Aymara, the history of evangelization, and visible, affective, cues about Collagua peoples’ preferences. The conclusion in favor of the Franciscans, based on their history in upper Colca, Christianized the landscape and made its evangelization an intrinsic part of its geographic definition. In the Andes, however, communal grazing lands and the channeled water that makes agriculture possible are the result of, and are fundamentally associated with, collective labor. The European Catholic readings of this case made invisible the labor through which Colca’s residents defined and constituted their environment.