Between Father Spain and Mother Peru: The Power Dynamics of Family and Kinship in the Early Colonial Andes

Recent scholarship has redefined the purported social frameworks that segregated society into distinct “republics” of españoles and indios as historiographical constructs. The fluidity of ethnic categories in Spanish America has been established to the point where mestizos “disappear” into Spanish colonial and Native Andean society. While this research has made great strides in detaching modern concepts of race from the narrative, it often fails to account for the “negotiated” processes, both external and internal, of colonial social structures. This paper examines the role of existing as well as newly constructed notions of family, kinship, and paternalism to exhibit the ways power was conveyed both within Andean and Spanish contexts. Mestizos used familial and kinship networks to their advantage to improve their status or escape Spanish imposition. At the same time, the Spanish employed frameworks surrounding kinship and family to establish hegemony in the region. Examined collectively, this research will highlight the ways in which competing notions of kinship and family provided avenues of both resistance and control within the power dynamics of early colonial society in Peru.