Beyond Ethnolinguistic Homogeneity in 16th-Century Arequipa, Peru

In January 1586, a gathering of Spanish officials and Indigenous leaders produced a text describing the geography and history of the province called Colca, near the city of Arequipa, in southern Peru. Part of their text describes Colca as neatly geographically divided: eastern Colca was inhabited by Aymara-speaking people of one Indigenous ethnicity, while western Colca was inhabited by Quechua-speaking people of another. In this telling, Colca conformed to Iberian colonial expectations in which each ethnically and linguistically unified “people” inhabited their own contiguous territory.

What intersections, beyond a homogeneous “ethnicity,” may have been present in pre-Hispanic and early colonial Colca? Recent archaeological studies of Colca have investigated complexities at the intersection of ethnicity, status, and gender. In this paper, close re-reading of the 1586 text also finds tensions at the intersections of ethnicity, migration, and language. I pursue these tensions into linguistic data contained in sixteenth-century tribute records, which I use to identify noncontiguous areas of western Colca in which not only Quechua, but also an otherwise undocumented Indigenous language, was spoken. However the speakers of Quechua and the undocumented language related to each other, western Colca was not ethnolinguistically homogeneous. These results underscore the need to approach colonial Latin American texts’ descriptions of Indigenous “ethnicities” with caution.