Are there Indians in Cordoba? Genealogy and Alliances in the Categorization of indios and pueblos de indios in a Region of the Southern Peruvian Viceroyalty (Eighteenth Century)

TELL, SONIA

Stirling

Workshop; Workshop: Andean Studies in the United Kingdom: Work in Progress and Perspectives; 2011

The Stirling Latin American and Caribbean Research Group. Stirling University

This presentation is part of an ongoing research about pueblos de indios in the province of Cordoba (today located in central Argentina) during eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This province was part of the Governance of Tucuman (present-day central and Northwestern Argentina) which belonged to the Viceroyalty of Peru since mid sixteenth century until 1776, when it became part of the new Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata. Among the native groups who were subjected to colonial rule in the governance of Tucuman, those inhabiting the hills and plains of Cordoba were the only ones who had not been integrated into the Tawantinsuyu or forged alliances with the Inkas. However, during the colonial period those groups were organized and administrated according to a model that was inspired by some of the policies that had been previously implemented in the Andean area, but readjusted to the local power relations. The imposition of the Spanish colonial policies of government, civilization and exploitation of labor meant for the native groups in this province ?as in most of the governance- a dramatic experience of disarticulation. Very few of the pueblos de indios created in late sixteenth or seventeenth century could persist organized and recognized under that status until the end of colonial period, and even less until the late nineteenth century when the provincial government dissolved by law the common tenancy of their lands and stopped recognized them as collective subjects. My current research is an attempt to explore some of the practices, options, and circumstances that contribute to understand the divergent trajectories of the pueblos de indios in this province, and the transformations they experienced along this process. In other words, how some of them managed to reproduce and maintain the recognition by colonial and republican authorities while some other lost it or disappeared because of the dispersal of their population. In this opportunity, I will talk about the different definitions of the categories indio, pueblos de indios and community emerging in the judicial contention over lands in the second half of the eighteenth century. It will allow me to discuss the importance (or non importance) of genealogy and alliances in the construction of both categories by Spaniards and Indians, as well as the interests, local practices, and long term processes of forasterización and mestizaje on which their opposite definitions were rooted. Both the ethnohistorical studies about ethnogenesis and mestizaje, and the anthropological debates on substance, relatedness, genealogy and alliances provide us conceptual tools to understand the construction of those categories.