Conjuring with Coca and the INCA: The Andeanization of Lima’s Afro-Peruvian Ritual Specialists, 1580-1690

Abstract

African diasporic communities throughout the Americas played important roles in creating colonial societies, providing both a population base and ways to organize everyday life as evidenced in subsistence activities, housing, language, religion, and artistic expression. In the Andes, Afro-Peruvian ritual specialists provide an example of black participation in forging a place in colonial society during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They earned both respect and fear, status and stigma, for their ability to solve a variety of problems and illnesses believed to be caused by the malice of other people or by supernatural forces. These ritualists also show how people of African descent helped invent widely-employed strategies to bridge cultures and link heterogeneous colonial populations in Andean cities.

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