Land and Tenure in Early Colonial Peru: Individualizing the Sapci, “That Which is Common to All”

Abstract

By taking away said [native] lands and giving them to Spaniards and forcing the very same Indians to work the same lands that they lost[,] so that they [the Spaniards or Spanish authorities] say that they confiscate the lands because they [the natives] cannot cultivate them; and then they force the same individuals to till them[;] then what can an Indian feel when they take away his land and they deprive him of his freedom to have it worked for him and they force him to work it for the person who confiscated it[?] THIS ARTICLE OUTLINES the transition from indigenous customs regarding land possession and use to European property law as gradually imposed and implemented by the Spanish colonial state in the Viceroyalty of Peru in the sixteenth century. The iconic confrontation between Francisco Pizarro and the Inca ruler Atahualpa on the plaza of Cajamarca in 1532, and its aftermath, has been examined from many different angles over the years. The military advantages of that face-off quickly took center stage. The quest for gold and silver focused many. The attendant evangelization efforts interested multiple researchers. General studies of the negotiation that marked the permanent establishment of Spanish administration in the Andes have yielded insightful perspectives on the process of settlement and reorganization. But one of the least studied aspects of this story is the history of land and tenure in this mostly agrarian, peasant society. The anthropologist John V. Murra pioneered studies of native tenure by combing the Spanish chronicles for and listing different categories of native holdings. The ethnohistorian María Rostworowski found, commented on, and published several sixteenth-century manuscripts dealing with land holdings, without questioning the European filters inherent in these recorded proceedings. Silences in the sources led me to wonder about the native perspective on land holding, which I eventually began to investigate in the mid-1990s. This essay builds and elaborates on this research, incorporating data from further investigations in the archives of Spain (Madrid and Seville), Bolivia (Sucre and La Paz), and Peru (Cuzco, Puno, and Lima), giving it a wider Andean perspec-tive.

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