Indigenous Peoples of the Andean Region during the Colonial Period

The Andean region of western South America was invaded by Spanish adventurers beginning in the 1530s. Despite swift and brutal conquests from present-day Colombia to Chile, Indigenous peoples contested and survived nearly three centuries of colonial rule. Historians, art historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, and literary scholars have long sought to recover Native histories and mentalities as they changed over the course of this long period. Yet the task of making sense of Indigenous responses to colonialism is still challenging, not only because the written records of this period are fragmentary but also because a handful of them cannot be considered either contemporary or firsthand accounts. Even after the Spanish arrival, Indigenous scribes did not produce documents in the main Andean languages, using Spanish alphabetic script, as Native peoples did in Mesoamerica. The few works produced by Indigenous authors such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui, and the anonymous Huarochirí Manuscript (cited under Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous Intellectuals) only appeared in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries and have caused conflicting interpretations of the pre-Hispanic past and of colonial history. Landmark studies on the history of colonial Peru, such as James Lockhart’s Spanish Peru, 1532–1560 (1968, 1994), spearheaded the use of notarial records and related documentation as indispensable sources for the study of this period. While he only dedicates a chapter to the Indigenous population, this book has been a model for the research produced afterward. Art historians, archeologists, and anthropologists have even gone beyond these textual sources to include textiles, paintings, ceramics, structural remains, and even waste materials to add a nuanced vision of the survival, resilience, and agency of Native Andeans after 1532. For the sake of brevity, this entry will cite the most representative monographs and a few focused anthologies rather than articles or book chapters on the subject. Even so, the task of gathering and summarizing such works is incomplete at best. In the progression of scholarly production, academics first evaluated the trauma, dislocation, and collapse of Indigenous societies under Spanish rule. Then, a look at the diverse experiences of Native people from cosmopolitan centers to provincial and rural areas coupled with the differences between Native and commoner elites provided fresh and enriching interpretations of this heterogeneous colonial past. Understanding the internal structures of Indigenous societies has been key to bring forth this bottom-up history of the conquest, assessing their struggles and highlighting their strategies to subvert domination.