Competing Colonial Discourses on the Inka Past in the Pampas River Basin, Peru

In litigation and petitions filed throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, communities from the Pampas River region of modern-day Ayacucho, Peru claimed descent from ethnically diverse populations of “mitimaes” first settled in the region during Inka rule. While the Inka strategy of relocating mitimae populations throughout the territories of Tawantinsuyu has featured centrally in scholarly debates regarding the nature of Inka imperial expansion, power, and political life, less attention has been paid to tracing the afterlives of Inka resettlement practices during the Spanish colonial period.

In this paper, I examine how different players in early colonial Peru used and engaged these contested visions of the Inka past to shape their present. I will examine how and in what contexts the category of mitimae was invoked, in litigation and disputes both between Andean communities and colonial authorities and between Andean communities themselves. How did Spanish colonial and ethnically diverse Andean actors conceptualize the Inka past, and to what ends were these divergent visions mobilized? How did the Inka sociopolitical category of mitimae factor into intercommunal disputes over land and water resources? And how did divergent visions of the Inka past mediate relations between communities descended from mitimaes (who traced their presence in the region to the Inka period) and communities composed of “originarios” (who invoked deeper histories of occupation in the region)? In addressing these questions, this paper aims to contribute to ongoing discussions on the material and ideological legacies of Inka imperialism and their implications for the analysis of Spanish colonial rule in the Andes.