Inca Tailors, Stolen Fabrics, and Unfit Men of the Cloth in 18th-Century Cusco

This paper analyzes a 1722 reclamación by an Inca-descended master tailor who took it upon himself to employ Church doctrine to demand the excommunication of a priest of the neighboring parish of Cana for allegedly robbing him and Cusco’s faithful community of two pricey swaths of imported fabrics intended for the Cathedral’s adornment. The tailor swore the priest stole two lengths of white “Seville” fabric trimmed with golden embroidery and a yellow, silk damask from China he needed to fashion an altar cloth depicting the Immaculate Conception. The pilfered textiles were resold and later stylistically identified as the work of the tailor’s hand, demonstrating public recognition of Indigenous authorship in textiles that have until now been treated as anonymous products in eighteenth-century Peru. I assign an identity to one of the many Indigenous artists who wove the lion’s share of liturgical cloth, or “church clothing” that dressed the interiors of Cusco’s sacred spaces. The severity of this well-known tailor’s call for the priest’s excommunication after countless larcenies indicates that the sin of theft may be endured up to the point of plagiarizing one’s holy compositions. Whether by accident or by design, this tailor used his role as an agent of the city’s religious devotion to denounce the thief and expunge the Indigenous community of Cana of its unfit shepherd. Here the power of cloth ultimately intersected with Indigenous placemaking within the Church as the means to mend the frayed social fabric of colonial Cusco.