Indecent Living: Indigenous Women and the Politics of Representation in Early Colonial Peru
The main period of consolidation and reform of the early Peruvian colony—the 1560s through the 1580s—also marked the beginning of the invention of the economic and social character of the colony in the Spanish empire. This new role was constructed and normalized in part via a reimagination of the pre-Hispanic past, of which the colony could be seen as both an outgrowth and a corrective. Within the context of the contemporary political and economic crises in which colonial Viceroys and other functionaries found themselves during these decades—crises of  nancial realization, demographic collapse, civil rebellions and indigenous uprisings—the authors of of cial political narratives envisioned an ef cient state that would have legitimacy among both colonizers and colonized. The narratives and reports that grew out of this legitimating project developed a narrow, Cuscocentric vision as they emphasized pre-Hispanic institutions that indicated the preferred direction of the colonial state, including the Inca legal system and rules for political succession. One of the most interesting institutions thus held up for admiration and consideration was the acllahuasi , a Quechua word used by these Spaniards to refer to what was probably an array of social institutions involving groups of con ned women called acllas or mamaconas. The changing and narrowing representations of the acllas—as a harem, as productive and tradeable commodities, as “vestal virgins” or beatas, and  nally as idealized wives of the state—indicated the shifting agendas of the authors and patrons of these narratives towards a discourse that celebrated centralization, hierarchy and separation between classes and ethnic groups. While the historical narratives that emerged during and from this political debate were not necessarily instrumentalist , I argue here that the construction of this discursive terrain was a by-product that had its own effects upon, at least, our knowledge of colonial Peru. My argument is organized around some key texts written during this central period of constitution of the political economy of colonial Peru, and demonstrates how the development of a more centralized vision of the colony by its administrators and elites contributed to the construction and acceptance of a historical narrative, the terms of which were commonly deployed by those in power as well as their critics. I begin with the chronicles of conquest, written within a few years of contact by the conquistadores themselves. These reveal the spontaneous and indetermi-
Indigenous Andean Women in Colonial Textual Discourses
Latin American and Iberian Institute Ph.D. Fellowship, University of New Mexico. 
Elka Klein Travel Grant, University of Judaism. 
Research Travel Project, University of New Mexico. 
Tinker Foundation & Latin American and Iberian Institute, University of New Mexico 
Feminist Research Institute, University of New Mexico.
Economic Factors and Stratification in Colonial Spanish America with Special Regard to Elites
D URING the past fifteen years, research in colonial Latin American social history has increased dramatically. Since this author's 1967 publication of a short, impressionistic survey of race mixture and acculturation in Latin America, the increase in the use of empirical data to study the evolution of Spanish American social history in particular has been impressive.' Still, historical areas and eras, and a good deal of relevant data, remain untapped. Analytical and theoretical studies have advanced much more slowly than have those employing quantitative data. Marxist and non-Marxist students who have tried to apply crude "feudal," "semifeudal," and "capitalist" models to complex social realities have obstructed rather than facilitated analysis.2 My own study, which said that the regimen de castas resulted from the transfer and imposition of the "hierarchic, estate-based, corporative society of medieval Castile ... upon a multiracial, colonial situation," was criticized by anthropologist John K. Chance and historian William B. Taylor for being simplistic and for underrating the importance of economic factors. In their case study of Oaxaca in 1792, they advocated