Inca Ancestry and Colonial Privilege

Descendants of Hanan and Hurin Cuzco remained privileged for the duration of Spanish rule. Throughout the Andes, descendants of Huayna Capac and Tupa Inca Yupanqui held hereditary control over important cacicazgos, and they dominated the Indian republic in the Inca heartland around Cuzco. The ayllus of Hurin Cuzco remained among the most powerful groups in the Huatanay Valley. For both, legal and economic privileges depended on Inca ancestry, making genealogical claims a central feature of the Inca archive; to what extent the understandings of kinship and descent portrayed in these documents reflected those of Cuzco’s ayllus and Inca lineages is unclear. Cuzco’s Inca emphasized a hierarchy based on pure descent from the “Inca kings,” but outside their small domain others did—and continue to—assert genealogical and symbolic claims to Inca descent.