Riots, Water, and Walking Images: Performing Possession and Dispossession in Late Colonial Andean Pueblos

Close readings of the colonial indigenous records from Andean municipalities reveal previously unnoticed resignifications of land possession through performance and symbolic language manipulation. In the context of protracted disputes over communal lands between Andean communities and the Spanish beneficiaries of royal grace, through land grants or composiciones de tierras, this essay examines native performances of land possession and boundary marking in the Andean towns of Imantad (Otavalo) Machachi (Quito) and El Cercado (Lima). The varied repertoire of performances and images of land possession in these towns highlight the possessors’ own symbolic choices. Beyond representations of possession in the perfunctory style dictated by colonial officials, and customarily encapsulated in formulaic text in the trial records, Andeans selected unique performative actions and materiality. They signaled their possession understandings in court as visual statements that became textual and legal arguments. Furthermore, Andeans were also willing to disrupt ceremonies when they considered illegitimate the land possession of their communal land given away to Spaniards. They openly rioted and sabotaged the sanctioning of such possession allocations altogether, while elsewhere they chose to weave Andean cultural beliefs on nature into the Spanish notion of “contradiction” to possession through community walkabouts with Catholic undertones. Overall, Andean choices for these legal rituals shaped the local formation of the colonial legal order of land ownership and the relationship between community, territory, and the colonial state. Their singular legal rituals shed light on the overall formative process of the Spanish empire’s hacienda system project and the decisive role Andeans played in it.