Presta Ana Maria Undressing The Coya 2010

Undressing the Coya and Dressing the
Indian Woman: Market Economy, Clothing,

and Identities in the Colonial Andes, La
Plata (Charcas), Late Sixteenth and Early
Seventeenth Centuries
Ana Mara Presta
After the invasion of the Americas by the Spanish conquistadors more than
five hundred years ago, the Europeans created the term indio (Indian) to characterize the vanquished Native American peoples. Europeans used the name to
differentiate the other from themselves, yet this cultural invention ignored
ethnic distinctions, language diversity, and multiple representations of identity.
The singular term imposed a homogenizing identity on the subjected people,
who resisted and adapted to the new colonial institutions and practices while
struggling to define and negotiate their own identities. This essay addresses
the specific indigenous identity of Indian women resettled in the urban milieu,
particularly those who were involved in the creation and development of the
colonial market.
Before the Spanish conquest, women pursued their lives in the countryside, where those portrayed in this article were born. As members of local polities (Charka, Yampara, Caranga, Pacaje), they lived in their kin-based units or
ayllus, where their occupations centered on the household. Although generation
and gender conditioned labor, marriage determined womens full participation
Research for this paper was supported by funding from Fundacin Antorchas, the
Organization of American States, CONICET, and Fundacin Carolina. Earlier versions of
this paper were presented at the Symposium on Archives and Empires: Government, Record
Keeping, and Society in Inca and Spanish Peru, held at the Center for Continuing Education
of the Univ. of Notre Dame, 2004, and at the 120th Annual Meeting of the American
Historical Association held in Philadelphia, 2006. Thanks are due to Laura Quiroga, Ken
Andrien, Donna Guy, Alan Gallay, and Neil Norman for their comments and suggestions,
as well as to the HAHR reviewers. The Ohio State Univ. Center for Historical Research was
a stimulating intellectual environment in which to produce the final version of this research.
Hispanic American Historical Review 90:1

doi 10.1215/00182168-2009-090
Copyright 2010 by Duke University Press
42
HAHR / February / Presta
in production, including agriculture, herding, and domestic and textile obligations. Gender complementarity, kinship, reciprocity, and redistribution regulated social relations and guaranteed self-sufficiency among groups that did not
participate in market exchanges. Traditional indigenous practices of reciprocity involved the exchange of labor and goods whose value was not measured in
purely economic terms. After the Spanish conquest, many Indians fled their
ayllus and resettled in the cities. There, kinship and ethnic bonds were slowly
curtailed or redefined to create social relationships based on new values that
rested upon the rapid commoditization of goods and labor.1
A first step to approach Indian womens urban identities and their immersion in the market economy is to focus on the material culture associated with
labor activities and social standing among those recently settled in the Spanish
urban milieu. Objects and places, goods and spaces can be manipulated, reappropriated, and reinterpreted by new groups on their road to history. Things
have meaning and are bound to culture and identity. In this way, indigenous
womens dress and adornment are associated with the dramatic changes brought
about by the new mercantile economy introduced by the Spaniards. Indian
women who resettled in the urban milieu and gained economic success pursuing mercantile trades adopted distinctive components of female dress. These
1. There is no consensus on kinship and inheritance norms in the Andes. For obvious
reasons, studies on Cuzco and the lineage of the Incas generated more anthropological and
historiographical contributions than in other areas subject to the Tawantinsuyu. Cf. John
H. Rowe, The Age Grades of the Inca Census, in Miscellanea Paul Rivet (Mexico City:
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1958); John H. Rowe, La supuesta Diarqua
de los Incas, Revista del Instituto Americano de Arte (Cuzco), no. 4 (1994); John H. Rowe,
La constitucin Inca del Cuzco, Histrica (Lima) 11, no. 1 (1985); R. Tom Zuidema, The
Ceque System of Cuzco, the Social Organization of the Capital of the Inca (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1964); R. Tom Zuidema, The Inka Kinship System: A New Theoretical View, in Andean
Kinship and Marriage, ed. Ralph Bolton and Enrique Mayer (Washington, DC: American
Anthropological Association, 1977), 24081; R. Tom Zuidema, Myth and History in
Ancient Peru, in The Logic of Culture: Advances in Structural Theory and Methods, ed. Ino
Rossi (New York: J. F. Bergin Publishers, 1982), 15075; Pierre Duviols, La dinasta de los
Incas: Monarqua o diarqua? Argumentos heursticos a favor de una tesis estructuralista,
Journal de la Socit des Amricanistes 66 (1979): 6773; Irene Silverblatt, Moon, Sun and
Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1987); Irene Silverblatt, Imperial Dilemmas, the Politics of Kinship, and Inca
Reconstructions of History, Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 1 (1988):
83102; David Jenkins, Temporal Processes and Synchronic Relations: Age and Rank in
the Central Andes, Ethnohistory 42, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 91131; David Jenkins, The
Inca Conical Clan, Journal of Anthropological Research 57, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 16795;
Catherine J. Julien, Reading Inca History (Iowa City: Iowa Univ. Press, 2000).
Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman
43
styles evoked both the recent Inca past and certain elements of Spanish attire
and adornment to highlight an identity associated with a specific trade, asserting a newly acquired status in the emerging colonial society.
In order to highlight clothing as a valuable item possessing symbolic and
material meaning both in pre-Hispanic and colonial times, this study compares
the findings of archaeological excavations with the images and drawings provided by the chroniclers Fray Diego de Ocaa, Guamn Poma de Ayala, and
Fray Pedro Ramirez del Aguila.2 I then contextualize the material and visual
records with the testaments and dowries of townsfolk Indian women registered
in La Platas notarial records during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries.3 The written sources portray indigenous women from diverse ethnic
and social origins who were uprooted by the Spanish conquest and resettled in
urban areas, where they entered several trades associated with the new mer2. An interpretation of Bolivian postcolonial society based on iconography was
developed by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Secuencias iconogrficas de Melchor Mara
Mercado (18411869), in El Siglo XIX, Bolivia y Amrica Latina, ed. Rossana Barragn,
Dora Cajas, and Seemin Qayum (La Paz: Muela del Diablo Editores, 1997), 14768.
Mestizos from La Paz and their occupations and associated costumes were portrayed by
Rossana Barragn in Entre polleras, lliqllas y aacas: Los mestizos y la emergencia de la
tercera repblica, in Etnicidad, economa y simbolismo en los Andes, II Congreso Internacional
de Etnohistoria, ed. S. Arze, R. Barragn, L. Escobari, and X. Medinaceli (La Paz: Hisbol /
IFEA / SBH-ASUR, 1992), 85128.
3. Testaments have been used to assess womens social behaviors, family patterns,
trades, and social practices. See Frank Salomon, Indian Women of Early Colonial Quito
as Seen through Their Testaments, The Americas 44, no. 3 (1988): 32542; Clara Lpez
Beltrn, Alianzas familiares: lite, gnero y negocios en La Paz, S. XVII (Lima: Instituto de
Estudios Peruanos, 1998); Susan Kellogg and Matthew Restall, eds., Dead Giveaways:
Indigenous Testaments of Colonial Mesoamerica and the Andes (Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah
Press, 1998); Jane E. Mangan, Prendas y pesos en el Potos colonial: Colocando las
prcticas urbanas en un contexto social, Revista Andina (Cuzco), no. 36 (Primer Semestre
2003): 10729; Jane E. Mangan, Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy
in Colonial Potos (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2005); Karen B. Graubart, With Our
Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 15501700
(Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2007); Ana Mara Presta, Doa Isabel Sisa, A
Sixteenth Century Indian Woman: Resisting Gender Inequalities, in The Human Tradition
in Colonial Latin America, ed. Kenneth J. Andrien (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources,
Inc., 2002), 3350; Ana Mara Presta, Indgenas, espaoles y mestizaje en la regin
andina, in Historia de las mujeres en Espaa y Amrica Latina, vol. 2, El mundo moderno, ed.
Margarita Ortega, Pilar Prez Cant, and Asuncin Lavrin (Madrid: Editorial Ctedra,
2005), 41944; Ana Mara Presta, Devocin cristiana, uniones consagradas y elecciones
materiales en la construccin de identidades indgenas urbanas, Charcas 15501650, Revista
Andina, no. 41 (Segundo Semestre 2005): 10930.
44
cantile economy. Participation in the market supplied Indian women with an

income, which allowed them to use notaries for recording small financial transactions and religious donations, as well as wills and dowries to distribute their
possessions among their heirs. I examined records from 1575 to 1620 from the
city of La Plata, seat of the High Court of Charcas (Real Audiencia de Charcas),
where the splendor of nearby Potos and the socioeconomic activity brought
about by wealthy encomenderos contributed to the grandeur of the city.
Previous historiographical contributions on the southern Andes show how
indigenous women participated in colonial markets and became influential in
the formation of urban colonial society. Initially, this concerned the degree of
womens economic independence in urban Arequipa or their participation in
the urban market with specie earned by their mitayo husbands in Potos. Other
studies have focused on rural migrants working as poorly paid domestic laborers in La Paz, or on indigenous peoples lack of opportunity to overcome the
structural challenges of colonialism.4 Using testaments as a major source, Jane
Mangan recently detailed the range of practices associated with commerce that
Indian women developed while performing and exchanging roles to build and
negotiate identities in seventeenth-century Potos. A study by Karen Graubart
based in Lima and Trujillo examines wills and other major sources to interpret
Indian womens participation in the market at different levels, while stressing
the importance of seeming and being through fashion and clothing in a fluid
society where self-representation denoted status and acculturation. Graubart
alternates between ethnicity and identity in describing peoples whose indigenous background was no doubt contested.5
Although Mangan and Graubart, like the present study, investigate the
practices of urban Indian women through testaments, this research goes deeper
to find the source of their identities in material culture. Specific luxury goods,
as traces of the past, were used and reused in different times and contexts and
4. Elinor Burkett, Indian Women and White Society: The Case of Sixteenth Century
Peru, in Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives, ed. Asuncin Lavrin (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 10128; Brooke Larson, Produccin domstica y trabajo
femenino indgena en la formacin de una economa mercantil colonial, Historia Boliviana
(Cochabamba) 3, no. 2 (1983): 17387; Luis Miguel Glave, Mujer indgena, trabajo
domstico y cambio social en el virreinato peruano del siglo XVII: La ciudad de La Paz y
el sur andino en 1684, Boletn del Instituto Francs de Estudios Andinos (Lima) 16, no. 34
(1987): 33969; Ann Zulawski, Social Differentiation, Gender, and Ethnicity: Urban
Indian Women in Colonial Bolivia, 16401725, Latin American Research Review 25, no. 2
(1990): 93113.
5. Mangan, Trading Roles; Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat.
45
usually combined with new tokens of prestige in early colonial times. This study
also expands on what Frank Salomon asserted almost two decades ago about
Indian women of early colonial Quito. Salomons inspiring essay postulated
that Spanish cities were multiethnic Indian ghettos populated in large part
by women, who used their clothing as an identity marker within the urban setting. With a complexity that placed into question concepts such as westernization, modernization, mestizaje, or cholification, Salomon concluded that
there were probably more ways to be an urban Indian than there are today.
Testaments as well allowed Salomon to delineate a variety of Andean lifestyles
of women who had grown up in societies still patterned on pre-Hispanic rules
and modes of behavior.6 It is true that certain rules and some modes of behavior
prevailed, but pre-Hispanic luxury items, such as clothing, fabrics, designs, and
adornments previously restricted to specific users, became identity markers fitting other bodies and denoting new Indian status. Conquest and commoditization erased cloth restrictions and expanded ethnic boundaries, allowing former
nonelite users to dress and wear clothing and adornment as tokens of fashion
and new social ranks. Indian women who had met with success in the market or
who were performing new trades acquired status and, to demonstrate it, adopted
ostentatious wardrobes that expressed new social differences.
In the project of examining how and why indigenous women built new
identities in La Plata, it is essential to take into account material culture in
order to observe how things, space, trades, and skills changed with the advent
of commercial capitalism. This approach draws together issues of class, ethnicity, and gender. By contributing to the recovery of one of the many Indian
womens identities in the colonial Andes, this study adds to previous historiography on how the first generation of indigenous women living under Spanish
rule were integrated and became active agents in the newly emergent market
economy.
Charcas during Late Pre-Hispanic and Early Colonial Times
Charcass urban indigenous milieu was the result of internal migrations driven
by the demographic collapse and the human restructuring of a region that was
densely populated by complex polities. These were sophisticated organizations
charged with controlling natural resources and improving the administration
of their populations. During Tupac Inka Yupanquis government (147193), the
region was incorporated into the Cuzco domain. According to the Memorial de
6. Salomon, Indian Women of Early Colonial Quito, 32527.
46
Charcas dated 1582, the Aymara polities offered the Inca the military services
of their famous warriors.7 After the Inca conquest, the Inka road (Capac am)
crossed the ethnic territories, following the aquatic axis defined by the Titicaca basin and branching into Ayaviri (Charcass starting point). This forced the
resettlement of towns and hamlets in a sort of first reduccin, altering the pattern
of dispersed settlement in the highlands and modifying the principles of symbolic organization.8 Along with changes in ethnic settlements along the Inka
road, the temperate valleys producing maize close to the eastern frontier presented noticeable alterations in their population patterns. The state intervened
in integrating colonists from different parts of the empire (mitmaqkuna), mainly
from the Cuzco area, after moving the original settlers to other places.9
Once the Spanish expanded south between 1538 and 1540, the first colonial
city was founded within Chuquisacas mesothermal valleys. Given its proximity to the silver mines of Porco, the Spaniards named it La Plata. Later known
as Charcas or Chuquisaca, today it is Sucre, the historic capital of Bolivia. The
conquest and settlement of the Spanish city accelerated the displacement of local
polities and state colonists, leading to the depopulation of rural areas and of the
encomiendas granted to the Spaniards in the surrounding valleys. This initiated
a process of ethnic disintegration and individuation which brought dramatic
consequences. While many of the former Inka colonists were employed as cargo
carriers once new territories began to be explored, others returned to their original settlements. A significant number, although impossible to measure, also
resettled in the recently founded La Plata within the citys two Indian parishes,
7. Waldemar Espinoza Soriano, El Memorial de Charcas: Crnica indita de 1582,
Cantuta: Revista de la Universidad Nacional de Educacin (Chosica, Per, 1969): 11752. For
a symbolic interpretation of Aymara polities and their organization, see Thrse BouysseCassagne, Urco and uma: Aymara concepts of space, in Anthropological History of Andean
Polities, ed. John V. Murra, Nathan Wachtel, and Jacques Revel (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1986), 20127.
8. Inka is used to refer to the sovereign of the Tawantinsuyu, while Inca(s) refers to his
ethnic group.
9. Nathan Wachtel, Los mitimas del valle de Cochabamba: La poltica de
colonizacin de Wayna Capac, Historia Boliviana (Cochabamba) 1, no. 1 (1981): 2157;
Mara de las Mercedes del Ro and Ana Mara Presta, Un estudio etnohistrico en los
corregimientos de Tomina y Amparaez: Casos de multietnicidad, Runa (Buenos Aires) 14
(1984): 22146; Ana Mara Presta, La poblacin de los valles de Tarija, Siglo XVI: Aportes
para la solucin de un enigma etnohistrico en una frontera incaica, in Espacio, etnas,
frontera: Atenuaciones polticas en el sur del Tawantinsuyu, siglos XVIXVIII, ed. Ana Mara
Presta (Sucre: Antropologos del Surandino, 2000), 23547.
47
San Sebastin and San Lzaro.10 This new spatiality or social space constructed
according to the Spaniards needs coincided with new relations of production
and, in turn, with the modification of the gender system, that is, with new roles,
practices, and representations for the social actors.11
In order to begin the reconstruction of indigenous identity through material culture, both the inherited and the new, a genealogy of objects was created.12 Objects have a life of their own and historical continuity as well. Some
are sociocultural symbols that express and contain habits and beliefs, regardless
of their origins. Things are associated with specific practices that transcend the
period of their creation or development. Some objects from the recent Andean
past found new users and human practices in the first decades of Spanish colonial rule.
Material Culture and Genealogy of Objects
Disentangling the proper meaning of objects is a task of considerable interpretive complexity. Material things must be understood beyond their economic
10. The earliest contribution to indigenous demography in the city is an article by

Catherine Julien, La visita Toledana de los yanaconas de la ciudad de la Plata, Memoria
Americana (Buenos Aires) 6 (1997): 4989.
11. Gender is part of an ideology nurtured by beliefs that integrates goods and
activities in the division of labor; it implies characteristics of personal aesthetics such as
hairstyle, clothing, colors, and ornaments, as well as interaction patterns among individuals
(service, domination, consent, violence, resistance). All of these denote the relationship
between ideology and material culture that configure key aspects of social identity,
including the place each one has in social production and reproduction. Cf. Cathy Lynne
Costin, Exploring the Relationship between Gender and Craft in Complex Societies:
Methodological and Theoretical Issues of Gender Attribution, in Gender and Archaeology,
ed. Rita P. Wright (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 11140.
12. I have borrowed the expression from the archaeologists who organize material
things under a sequence that shows their hierarchical disposition in a contextual order.
Historical archaeologists use the notion of genealogy to address material things and their
historical continuity. They study how things of different origins and histories live
together to form a way of life with some logic and coherence. Individual objects have a
genealogy, a historical trajectory, and since they have their own life, they engender and
encourage human practices. Historical sources let us know that things matter while bonded
to culture and identity. Inventories, dowries, and wills show impressive quantity of goods
which have to be appreciated in their economic and symbolic worth. See Chris Gosden,
What Do Objects Want? Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 12, no. 3 (September
2005): 193211.
48
utility, that is, within the sociocultural context of their production and reproduction, where their use and meaning can vary drastically. Household items,
clothing, land, housing, and religious spaces have their own social biography in
each context.13 People incorporate both goods and places into their daily practices, associating them directly to their own status.
Archaeological remains and early historical records offer information on
the kind and quality of goods used by Indians at the domestic level. Archeological evidence suggests the utilization of a small number of things of significant
worth used in everyday rural Andean domestic life. In a pre-Hispanic society of
remarkable social differences, the unequal access to things represented the distance between the elite and the working population. Luxury goods and necessities, rather than being items in opposition, were structural, complementary,
and functional to the society that produced them. This means that there were
things that only some could enjoy and wear while others could not, since the
Inka prohibited access to certain sumptuary items, some varieties of food, and
specific types of clothing. Archaeological method and theory shows us how
objects, even discarded ones, were manipulated in a context of various social
relations of diverse order marked by status, gender, class, age, and ethnicity.
Early colonial historical records show the perpetuation of certain indigenous
goods that, given the changes brought about by the market economy, acquired
different meanings and economic value.14
13. Igor Kopytoff, The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,
in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 6591.
14. See Mathew Johnson, An Archaeology of Capitalism (Baldwin, Cornwall: Blackwell
Publishers, 1996). Compare Johnson with Arnold J. Bauer, Goods, Power, History: Latin
Americas Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001); Arnold J. Bauer,
introduction to Material Culture and Consumption in Latin American and Spain, special
issue, The Americas 60, no. 3 (January 2004): 31723; Daniel Miller, Consumption and
Commodities, Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 14161; Norman J. G. Pounds,
La vida cotidiana: Historia de la cultura material (Barcelona: Crtica, 1992); Nstor Garca
Canclini, Ideologa, cultura y poder (Buenos Aires: Oficina de Publicaciones del CBC, 1995);
and Nstor Garca Canclini, Culturas hbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad,
new ed. (Buenos Aires: Paids, 2001). Garca Canclini focuses on material culture in its
meaning and context, although stressing consumption as a determinant of meanings. For
a vision of the social life of things and their contextual meaning I was inspired by the
following works: Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods (New York: Basic
Books, 1981); Ian Hodder, Interpretacin en arqueologa (Barcelona: Crtica, 1988); Appadurai,
The Social Life of Things; Byron Hamann, The Social Life of Pre-Sunrise Things:
Indigenous Mesoamerican Archaeology, Current Anthropology 43, no. 3 (June 2002):
35182; Ross W. Jameson, Bolts of Cloth and Shreds of Pottery: Impressions of Caste in
49
The life of material objects was quite long. Older items were kept in use
and reused. Goods were also given as gifts or transferred, particularly among
people of the same social rank. Moreover, stylistic elements of material culture changed gradually, influenced by the past, although often in social relations and economic structures that differed from the past. As Ferdinand Braudel
said, the rich anticipated the culture of the poor, who remained tied longer to
the traditional goods and practices rapidly abandoned by the ruling classes.15
Therefore, material culture is not only a reflection but an active component of
the construction of social relations. In Pierre Bourdieus terms, the house is the
social and material space where habitus is incorporated, and the same relation
exists between body and clothing.16
Prior to the Spanish conquest, Andean society functioned according to
kinship and ethnicity, the basic foundations of Andean social relations. These
social values rested upon principles of reciprocity, mutual aid, and peer cooperation. Indigenous people interacted mainly in rural, dispersed settlements in a
harsh landscape, where the articulation of those relations led to economic selfsufficiency. Reciprocity also governed the relationship between peasants and
their native lords, although it implied obligations of uneven character or symbolic equity.
Within a highly stratified society with several ethnic and rank differences,
power manifested itself through asymmetric reciprocity whereby the majority rendered labor services to the minority. According to their rank, the Inka
and his relatives had the right to use and accumulate sumptuous goods such as
textiles, the most valued item among Andeans. Textiles were a sign of wealth
and a marker of prestige and were used to pay taxes and curry political favor.
The importance of weaving had generated the development of full-time specialists who worked exclusively to meet the demands of the ruling elite. Chosen
women (acqllas) and weavers (cumbicamayos) were in charge of producing fine
cloth (cumbi) that only the Inka and his kin had the right to use. The sovereign
bestowed costumes or blankets on those who performed specific services or as a
way to secure alliances with ethnic lords.17 The design and decoration of clothes
the Material Culture of the Seventeenth Century Audiencia de Quito, The Americas 60,
no. 3 ( January 2004): 43146.
15. Ferdinand Braudel, La historia y las ciencias sociales (Madrid: Alianza, 1970).
16. Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: ditions du Minuit,
1979); Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1980).
17. John V. Murra, La funcin del tejido en varios contextos sociales y polticos,
in Formaciones econmicas y polticas del mundo andino (1958; Lima: Instituto de Estudios
50
expressed identity and social status, denoting the bearers gender and ethnicity.
The historical importance of textiles appeared in myths, where the gods and the
founding brothers wore fine clothes that differentiated them from humans.
According to the available sources, the household items of the Andean
peasant were limited. Archaeology has shown the scarcity of working tools,
the availability of only a small amount of rough cloth for wearing and keeping
warm, pottery for eating and cooking, baskets and fiber sacks to store grain, and
implements for spinning and weaving. Only members of the elite owned luxury
objects such as cumbi cloth with rows of complex geometric motifs (tocapus) and
embroidery; ornaments, brooches, and fine metal items; decorated keros (beakers); silver cocos (drinking vessels) for chicha (corn beer) libations; or the mullu
(spondylus or thorny oyster), the offering and food of the gods, whose shell was
used to make necklaces, breastplates, and mortuary objects.
Current historiography posits that Andean societies prior to the Spanish
conquest lacked markets. Although goods did not have a price, they possessed
meanings associated with prestige and determined by ritual and the social rank
of the user. The state imposed customs and accumulated and distributed goods.
It also defined who could use specific things and when. Consequently, goods
became enmeshed in the social performance of power relationships. The relationship between goods and their meaning is dynamic, and it varies depending
on how material items are deployed in creating the distinction between self
and other. This process accelerated after the Spanish conquest.
Conquest implies the imposition of a certain material culture and the
introduction of civilizing goods accompanied by a civilizing process (the
buena polica or good customs). Certain indigenous clothing items were considered inappropriate or scandalous; this led to their forced abandonment and the
imposition of new forms of attire. In the Spanish cities, those who abandoned
Indian styles began wearing pants, shoes, sandals or alpargatas (espadrilles), and
shirts or blouses. They also adopted wheat bread, added meat to their diet of
potatoes, and if they were able, acquired mules, iron ploughs, and horses, incorporating what Arnold Bauer calls the new civilizing goods.18 In contrast to the
Peruanos, 1973), 14570; Anne Pollard Rowe, Inca Weaving and Costume, Textile
Museum Journal 3435 (199596): 911; Cathy Lynne Costin, Housewives, Chosen
Women, Skilled Men: Cloth Production and Social Identity in the Late Prehispanic
Andes, in Craft and Social Identity, ed. Cathy Lynne Costin and Rita P. Wright
(Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association, 1998), 12341; Teresa Gisbert,
Silvia Arze, and Martha Cajas, Arte textil y mundo andino (La Paz: Gisbert y Ca.,
1987), 1922.
18. Bauer, Goods, Power, History, chaps. 34.
51
indigenous elites that navigated between the Spanish and indigenous worlds,
the yanaconas (Indians serving Spaniards) and those who had abandoned their
groups of origin for an urban life, ayllu peasants were less affected by these
changes, even in the face of coercive economic demands imposed by the new
colonial system.
The past rural upbringing and experience with material culture of women
who left their kin groups and resettled in Spanish cities influenced their personal
representation and the construction of their new colonial identity. Through
the features of their newly acquired clothing, they evoked other social ranks and
other goods. In early colonial times, the visible consumption of certain goods
belonging to Tawantinsuyu contributed to the defining of new bonds and social
relationships that allowed ordinary people to imitate their social betters. Ambiguities, mediations, and negotiations surely existed among those who forged a
new and better life, ascending the social ladder in the Spanish colonial society.
According to Graubart, status was revealed through appearance.19
The very presence in the colonial cities of indigenous women buying,
selling, and consuming Castilian things indicates how the conquest thwarted
the organic development of indigenous material culture and how the market
economy undermined the foundations of community life. The Spaniards
need of specific goods for daily consumption increased the demands imposed
on the indigenous population. Transatlantic commerce was too slow to supply the emergent colonial markets with food and cloth. Obtaining scarce items
rested upon the Indians capacity to cultivate and produce them. An example of
indigenous production of Spanish goods may be found in the initial censuses
of encomienda Indians. The surveys produced by Pedro de la Gasca, president
of the Royal Court of Lima (1549), and the viceroy don Andrs Hurtado de
Mendoza, Marqus de Caete (1560), show tribute obligations in maize, dried
potatoes, lamb, stewed sheep necks, partridges, pigs, freeze-dried sheep meat,
salt, tallow, butter, cloth, aprons, horse blankets, sacks, and wool, among other
items.20 These new goods were incorporated into the preferences, tastes, and
culinary habits of the Indians, who, depending on their wealth and access to
marketable items, started on their way to consumption.
Between the 1550s and 1570s, the Spaniards took control of valuable human
and economic resources. Estates and ranches supplied the cities using Indian
19. Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat, 128.
20. Ana Mara Presta, Encomienda, familia y negocios en Charcas colonial: Los encomenderos
de La Plata, 15501600 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos / Banco Central de la Reserva
del Per, 2000), 155.
52
and slave labor. The circulation and the regional specialization of production
grew at the height of mining exploitation, when profound changes in the landscape took root. The foundation of new cities and the Toledan Indian towns
(reducciones) are good examples of how the colonial market economy reoriented peasant labor and agricultural and mining resources. The government
of Viceroy Toledo (156981) was much more than a period of reforms. Political
stability, economic development, and social organization were supported by a
set of institutions and regulations that contributed to the expansion of urban
settlements. The viceroy was concerned with good government and addressed
officers and institutions to better administer the resources and justice. Some of
Toledos Ordinances even dealt with Indians dying intestate. Toledo wanted to
protect their assets from the greed of those who were near to the deceased but
not their rightful heirs. Ordinance 26 encouraged Indians to produce written
wills witnessed by their mayors (alcaldes). The model of how a last will was to be
constructed was also included in Toledos Ordinances.21 Indian womens wills
and transactions increased considerably after the Toledan period. Testaments
allow an examination of both Castilian and indigenous goods intertwined in the
tastes and preferences of the Indians inhabiting the city.
While the genealogy of objects was being constructed, some material
remains of the recent past as well as new things came to light. Textiles were
highly valued in both the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods. In the words of
a textile specialist, since the Andean peoples had no written language (strictly
defined), garments are documents of their aesthetics, religious, social, and
material values. Inca and early colonial clothing provide unique insights
into the mind-set of the Andean peoples and their indigenous tradition.22
This means that clothing of high-ranking women, as well as a few other preHispanic goods, could be reused by new wearers who, exhibiting something
as visible as clothes, wished not only to cover their bodies but also to be recognized as performers of specific occupations. Prestigious costumes served as
identity markers in the new social environment. As the sources demonstrate,
21. Relaciones de los virreyes y audiencias que han gobernado el Peru, vol. 1, Memorial y
ordenanzas de d. Francisco de Toledo (Lima: Imprenta del Estado por J. E. del Campo, 1867),
16872. I thank Catherine J. Julien, who generously mentioned the Toledan Ordinances as a
cause for the increase in indigenous testaments after the 1570s.
22. Elena Phipps, Garments and Identity in the Colonial Andes, in The Colonial
Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 15301830, ed. Elena Phipps, Johanna Hecht, and Cristina
Esteras Martn (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Arts / New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
2004), 17.
53
luxurious Indian clothing entered new wardrobes to dress Indian women who
were far from being members of the preconquest nobility. Trades and economic
success demonstrated participation in the market in a variety of occupations,
and it also showed the ways that Indians distanced themselves from their ayllus
of origin. Both of these trends added other key aspects to the identity of these
class climbers in early colonial La Plata. In order to substantiate this argument,
a brief account of the history of female attire is needed. Archaeological remains
combined with Spanish and indigenous chronicles, archival sources, and ethnography offer excellent information to support these assumptions.
Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Womens Clothing
In a classic study, Ann Pollard Rowe reconstructed archaeological Andean

clothing styles after studying the few collections of costumes kept in museums.
Rowe compared them to the information recorded by early Spanish chronicles
and with the gold, silver, and spondylus figurines found at high-altitude burial
grounds, as well as the results of Max Uhles excavations at Pachacamac, an Inca
shrine near Lima. The quality of the raw material, the refinement of spinning
and dyeing, and the superior weaving technique defined cumbi, which in turn
denoted the status of the wearer. In Tawantinsuyu, cumbi cloth, the mark of
nobility, was made of the finest selected camelid wool. An entire group of specialists was dedicated to producing fine cloth for the Inka and his kin. According
to Bernab Cobo, common people covered their bodies with coarse and thick
clothes called abasca (woven cloth). In contrast to the fine and precious cumbi,
abasca was usually plain and undecorated, devoid of technical embellishment,
and available in few colors.23
Female clothing consisted of a rectangular or square sleeveless wrapped
dress called an axu, which covered the body from neck to toe, fastened at the
shoulders with metal pins or tupus and held secure at the waist by a belt or chumpi
of varying size. Belts ended in braids or fringes to be tied at the waist. A large
shawl (lliqlla) was placed over the wrapped dress, hanging in some cases down
to the legs and fastened with another pin to the chest. Bone and shell cords
in assorted colors could also hold and adorn the shawl. Additionally, women
wore a headband (wincha) to keep the hair in place. Figurines and drawings show
female hair parted in the middle and worn loosely or braided. Noble women
23. Rowe, Inca Weaving and Costume, 911; Gisbert et al., Arte textil y mundo
andino, 5868; Phipps, Garments and Identity, 23.
54
Figure 1. La otava Coia.

Mama Iunto Caian. From
Felipe Guamn Poma de
Ayala, Nueva cornica i
buen gobierno (Mexico City:
Siglo Veintiuno Editores,
1992), 112.
used a small covering cloth on the head called aaca made of fine cumbi, usually matching the shawl.24 The dresses of sacrificed women found at Pachacamac are simple and undyed, of natural colors like dark brown, white, tan, or
black with stripes, sewn at both sides; six of them were made of camelid fiber and
seven of cotton. Early historical sources show how indigenous womens clothing, fabrics, and designs do not differ from the archaeological records; but class,
instead of rank or community-based definitions of ethnicity, restricted attire in
early colonial times.
Guamn Pomas drawings depict Inca womens dresses with horizontal
bands, identical to the pottery representing them. As figure 1 shows, the artist includes a vertical line along the sides to show how the folds of the cloth
were adjusted. Bands of tocapu designs frequently decorate shoulder mantles
24. Hereinafter, especially when describing clothing as in archival sources, axu will be
translated as dress or tunic, lliqlla as shawl or shoulder mantle, tupu as pin, chumpi as belt,
and aaca as headdress.
55
and dresses in a symmetrical pattern. The archaeological figurines present a

type of shawl folded in half. Pollard Rowe claims that archaeological shawls
show a narrow band of vertically alternating colors, similar to the ones found at
Pachacamac, while those drawn by Guamn Poma seem to be longer, with horizontal stripes in thirds and only the central stripe decorated. The colors of both
dress and shawl matched, although the hems are more colorful. Archaeological
shawls show signs of pin holes in the breast of the garments.25
The shoulder pins and those holding the shawl are similar, although the
pins found at Pachacamac differ in size. Both have a disc or half disc head with
a hole near the pin probably to hang a cord. Both shoulder and chest pins were
comprised of alloys that at times included gold, silver, or copper. Pins were also
made of bone and wood, but the leather cords that secured them from top to
bottom have not survived. Cords were replaced by silver or copper chains during colonial times. The pins or tipqui (tipoque in the wills) adorning the shoulder
mantles of noble women are shorter in the drawings.26 Rowe says that shawl
pins lacked additional decoration, which varied in colonial times. As additional
adornment, Father Bernab Cobo and Guamn Poma described spondylus shells
suspended in the center of the shawl hanging from leather cords (see figure 2).
During Tawantinsuyu, clothing was closely associated with status, and a
system of fixed costumes prevailed. Each ethnic group and social stratum
wore a uniquely identifiable costume. After the downfall of the Inca Empire,
the life of the fixed costume ended. Fashion extended beyond the nobility once
the social structure became more flexible and the restrictions imposed by the
Inka broke down.27
25. Rowe, Inca Weaving and Costume, 821.
26. Hereinafter, tipoque will be translated as small metal pins.
27. Cf. Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios Reales, L.VI Cap. XXXV: Este Pachacutec
prohibi que ninguno sino los prncipes y sus hijos pudiesen traer oro ni plata, ni piedras
preciosas, ni plumas de aves de diversos colores, ni vestir lana de vicua que se teje con
admirable artificio. Concedi que los primeros das de la luna, y otros de sus fiestas y
solemnidades se adornasen moderadamente; la cual ley guardan hasta ahora los indios
tributarios que se contenan con el vestido comn y ordinario, y as excusan mucha
corruptela que los vestidos galanos y soberbios suelen causar. P. Jos de Acosta, Historia
natural y moral de las Indias, Biblioteca de Autores Espaoles LXXIII (Madrid: Ediciones
Atlas, 1954), 197: Y era ley inviolable no mudar cada uno el traje y hbito de su provincia,
aunque se mudase a otro, y para el buen gobierno lo tena el Inga por muy importante,
y lo es hoy da, aunque no hay tanto cuidado como sola. Bernab Cobo, Historia del Nuevo
Mundo, II:xxvi:17: El que mudaba el traje y divisa de la provincia de donde era natural,
cometa muy grande delito contra el Inca, contra su nacin y contra la provincia cuyo traje
tomaba; y as, era acusado de todos y castigado con rigor.
56
Figure 2. La novena Coia.

Mama Anavarqve. From
Felipe Guamn Poma de
Ayala, Nueva cornica i
buen gobierno (Mexico City:
Siglo Veintiuno Editores,
1992), 114.
The conquest, the displacement of local polities, the redefining of prestige

goods and their transformation into commodities, the exodus from the native
towns, and the process of individuation disrupted barriers to social rank, making social differences easier to overcome. A group of indigenous women established in the Spanish city began appropriating the features and external status
symbols of the pre-Hispanic nobility and also incorporated European goods.
In a way still unknown, prestige goods, whether new or old, began to circulate
beyond the sphere of their traditional wearers and reached other owners. Those
who admired and emulated the Inka and his kin began wearing their clothing.
Thus a way to track the identity of the urban Indian woman involves examining
her costume as a tangible manifestation of what she emulated and the symbol of
superior social status based on economic success.28 Goods like clothing acquired
new meanings while being reused to fulfill new ends. Unattainable textiles and
28. J. C. Flugel, Psicologa del vestido (Buenos Aires: Paids, 1964).
57
prestige goods from the recent past could now be bought, exchanged, or pawned
and used by new owners.
If the Industrial Revolution produced a revolution of consumption first in
Europe and later in the Americas, the advent of colonization spread an initial
revolution in consumption to the Andes. In an attempt to explain and define the
indigenous practices resulting from contact with the Spanish and participation
in the market economy, Steve Stern identified patterns of behavior that he called
colonial Andean.29 These patterns included indigenous precolonial habits
combined with Spanish practices. Given those combinations and ambivalences,
this research extends Sterns patterns of behavior to the world of material goods:
individual preferences, clothing, household utensils, and the cultural aspects of
the indigenous daily life in the urban settlements. Indians had more opportunities in cities to appropriate Spanish practices and consumption habits than
when they had lived under norms of reciprocal exchange of goods and services.
The development of the market economy imposed a monetary value on goods
and labor, provoking a qualitative change in social relations. Some indigenous
people, by developing independent activities linked to commerce and performing certain trades within the Spanish urban milieu, were able to buy goods that
in the recent past had restricted circulation and limited use.
As Indian women migrated from their rural kin groups, they embraced
new activities, and their success in the urban milieu led them to experience dramatic cultural changes. At the same time that they started to wear symbols of
the recent past, they adopted tastes, clothing, and practices emanating from the
Spanish society. Family forms also changed to follow laws and religious norms
that prohibited polygamy, supported marriage consecrated by the Catholic
Church, and recognized inheritance rules favoring legitimate descent. Indigenous women who had relocated to the city acted as cultural mediators caught
between two societies, the European and the indigenous. In sum, gender roles
changed along with the social and sexual division of labor. These factors contributed to a redefinition of identity in an alien environment that offered both
possibilities of economic success and of social advancement.
As stated previously, refined textiles had symbolic value and were the most
appreciated prestige goods that the Inka and his relatives wore, exchanged, and
gave as gifts. Textiles and fine costumes remained identity markers, although in
29. Steve J. Stern, La variedad y la ambigedad de la intervencin indgena andina en
los mercados coloniales europeos: Apuntes metodolgicos, in La participacin indgena en los
mercados surandinos: Estrategias y reproduccin social siglos XVI a XX, ed. Olivia Harris, Brooke
Larson, and Enrique Tandeter (La Paz: Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Econmica y
Social, 1987), 281312.
58
the mercantile system their circulation was not restricted to members of the old
nobility. The costumes worn by a group of successful Indian women relocated
in the urban milieu are reminiscent of those of the coyas, the wives of the Inka,
the female ideal whose appearance was to be emulated.30
Clothing of indigenous women who settled in La Plata, seen through their
testaments gathered from the notarial records of the Bolivian National Archive,
have notable similarities with the drawings and descriptions of Guamn Poma.
Testatrices had stored both ordinary and luxurious clothing in their wardrobes.
The luxury clothes symbolize the new status reached by the wearers and their
success in their new trades. In addition, the Dominican Diego de Ocaa, who
traveled along the region between 1600 and 1601 to introduce the cult of the
Virgin of Guadalupe, thoroughly described both the land and the indigenous
peoples. Ocaa illustrated his chronicle with invaluable drawings portraying
urban Indian women with their colorful costumes.31 Moreover, the Noticias
polticas de Indias written in 1639 by Licenciado Pedro Ramrez del Aguila, rector of the Cathedral of La Plata, offers another brief description of indigenous
30. Guamn Poma de Ayala, Nueva cornica y buen gobierno, ed. John V. Murra and
Rolena Adorno (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1980). Previous studies focused on Inca
costumes to stress the importance of textiles in the Andean world and their symbolic
meaning within the Inca society. R. Tom Zuidema visualizes in clothing the symbols and
marks of prestige worn by the Inca elite, detaching also patterns and designs as means of
communication. R. Tom Zuidema, Guaman Poma and the Art of Empire: Toward an
Iconography of Inca Royal Dress, in Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the
Sixteenth Century, ed. Kenneth J. Andrien and Rolena Adorno (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1991), 151202, and Guaman Poma between the Arts of Europe and the Andes,
Colonial Latin American Review 3, no. 1 (1994): 3785. Raquel Chang-Rodriguez describes
the role of the coyas within the Inca Empire through the drawings of Mura and Guamn
Poma, stressing the importance of their clothing, a symbol of their rank and a sign Andean
complementarity. Raquel Chang-Rodriguez, Las coyas incaicas y la complementariedad
andina en la Historia (c. 1616) de Martn de Mura, Studi Ispanici (1999): 1127.
31. Talking about Cuzco and the costumes of the Indians, Fray Ocaa describes the
outfit of Indian women as painted in previous pages. Ocaa wrote: Estas traen ahora
camisa de lienzo y faldelln, y encima, ceida al cuerpo, una como tunicela sin mangas
la cual se llama az [axu/dress]; y encima aquella manta sobre los hombros que se llama
llquida [lliqlla/shawl] y sobre la cabeza otra manta pequeita que se llama llanaca [aaca/
headdress]. Aquel vaso que tiene en la mano se llama cuero [kero/vase], con que se dan
a beber la chicha a los indios. Y ellas en los bailes usan de aquel tamborino, traen ojotas
o sandalias en los pies, y de ordinario descalzas, aunque ahora en estos tiempos usan de
botines y chinelas o pantuflos. Fray Diego de Ocaa, Un viaje fascinante por la Amrica
Hispana del Siglo XVI (Madrid: Studium Ediciones, 1969), 259.
59
Figure 3. From Pedro Ramrez del Aguila, Noticias polticas de indias y relacin
descriptiva de la ciudad de La Plata (Sucre: Imprenta Universitaria, 1978), 13031.
clothing, along with an illustration that coincides with data drawn from the
archival sources (figure 3).32
The indigenous women from colonial La Plata who dictated their wills in
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were not members of the Inka
nobility, although some testaments of indigenous women related to local lords
32. Las indias traen axo [dress] por saya y corpio de una pieza, que se prende en los
hombros con unos topos, como alfileres o punzones grandes y de plata, y se cie con una
faja que llaman chumbi [belt], una lliclla [shawl], que sirve de ropa, de cuatro esquinas, ms
larga que ancha, que se prende al pecho con otro topo, una aaca [headdress]que sirve de
manto, una vincha [headband] con que atan la cabeza, como se podr ver en las figuras, que
aqu van pintadas en este papl, que le pint de un indio ciego buen taedor de arpa, que por
ser al vivo del original le puse aqu. Licenciado Pedro Ramrez del Aguila, Noticias polticas
de indias y relacin descriptiva de la ciudad de La Plata, trans. Jaime Urioste Arana (Sucre:
Imprenta Universitaria, 1978), 13031.
60
(curacas) were found.33 Most of those who made use of legal documents were
ordinary Indian women who became petty merchants, store owners (pulperas),
market vendors, moneylenders, creditors, pawnbrokers, or simply inhabitants of
the Indian parishes, wives of yanaconas, and spouses of urban artisans, sometimes single or widowed.34 All the testators had ample wardrobes consisting of
new or tattered costumes appraised at specific values, surely to be used on different occasions. The set of clothing included dresses, shawls, and headdresses
made of ordinary wool and cumbi. As previously described, dresses, shawls, and
headdresses as well as cumbi cloth were pre-Hispanic goods. However, while
undecorated and ordinary dresses and shawls were commonly used by ordinary
Indian women, cumbi, due to its exceptional quality of raw material and finest weaving technique, was exclusively worn by high-ranking women. Cumbi
and other status symbols, like gold and silver pins, had been restricted to noble
women the testatrices wanted to emulate. These types of luxury clothing and
accessories could not have been owned by these social climbers 50 years before.
Indian Womens Clothing and Trades as Seen
through Their Testaments
I gathered 92 testaments dictated by Indians between the 1570s and 1620s. Of

these, 76 belonged to women, 15 to men, and 1 was a joint last will.35 Clearly,
these women demonstrated their concern for their assets, community property,
and the destiny of their souls. The testaments discussed below are those that
most thoroughly describe the costumes, fabrics, ornaments, and belongings of
the testators.
Ins Huayco, a pulpera, described herself as the legitimate daughter of don
Juan Cuno, former curaca of Sicoyane, and Ana Viloma, both deceased, and as
wife of Juan Toms Guallas, the mayor of the indigenous parish of San Lzaro.36
Ins exhibited a wardrobe worthy of one of Guamn Pomas coyas. She had a
dozen different cumbi dresses and several matching shoulder mantles, and also
33. Cf. Zulawski, Social Differentiation, Gender, and Ethnicity, 93.
34. Kellogg and Restall assert that because of the widespread access to what they call
legal literacy, the voices of illiterate nonelites become available. Kellogg and Restall, Dead
Giveaways, 4.
35. Archivo Nacional de Bolivia, Escrituras Pblicas (hereinafter cited as ANB, EP).
36. Neither Ins nor her mother enjoyed the title of doa. Her mother was probably
an ordinary Indian. There is no information on the matter or additional genealogical data
that could allow the testator to be considered a noble woman. Sicoyane could be Sicuani
(southern Cuzco).
61
half a dozen headdresses. Most of the garments were new, although the few
tattered pieces confirmed the pattern of reusing prestige goods to stress newly
acquired status. This also evidences the existence of a second-hand market for
womens clothes and channels of circulation for new clothes woven according
to former patterns. Second-hand clothes do not represent a lack of choice but
the opportunity for new wearers to choose and consume former luxury items.37
This is clear from Inss claim to have bought a new cumbi shawl striped in red
for 20 pesos corrientes, a new cumbi dress appraised at 65 pesos corrientes, and a
tattered one for 30.38
Throughout her testament, which clearly indicated she was a moneylender,
in other words a well-to-do urban Indian woman, Ins described among her
assorted wardrobe three types of shawls: a caari, a Pacaje, and a frailesca.39 This
is reminiscent of the coyas cumbi dresses and long shawls with ethnic designs of
different origins and colors described by Guamn Poma. The Inka wives wore
shoulder mantles from different regions (Paraguaysuyu, Lari, Cuzco, Maras),
surely to stress the relations between Cuzco and its loyal realms through clothing. In the case of Ins, this indicated that fashion was now based on exhibiting clothing from different ethnic groups, which emerged as people discarded
the custom of wearing only fixed costumes. Her fine dresses are striped in
brown, red, and black, and her headdresses are made of vicua wool, matching
her outfits. One is striped and refined, made in Cuzco, and the others are ordinary (abasca). Inss clothing clearly did not exhibit an absolute Andean style
regarding fabric, design, or ornamentation, since some European elements were
incorporated in her clothing.40 Ins had dresses and shawls of coarse black cloth
37. Daniel Miller, introduction to Clothing as Material Culture, ed. Susanne Kchler
and Daniel Miller (New York: Berg, 2005), 9.
38. Peso corriente: currency used for ordinary transactions, equivalent to 8 reales or
272 maravedes. Emphasizing the mentioned values, it is worth noting that, at that time, one
earthen jug (botija) of oil cost 9 pesos, one pound of pepper 4 pesos, one pound of cinnamon
14 pesos, one pound of soap 1 peso, one sword 12 pesos, one large caldern (pot) 5 pesos, an
earthen jug of red wine 25 pesos, one vara (33 inches) of velvet 14 pesos, one vara of taffeta
from Mxico 3 pesos, one vara of ruan 1 pesos, one vara of coarse cloth 1 peso, one vara
of taffeta from China 2 pesos and 2 reales. ANB, EP, vol. 68, Andrs Gonzlez Cavia, La
Plata, 17.III.1609, 52629v; ANB, EP, vol. 23, Juan Bravo,
La Plata, 24.XI.1570, 46971; ANB, EP, vol. 23, Juan Bravo, La Plata, 18.X.1570, 46061.
39. Frailesca: belonging to the friars. Regularly used to refer to the mixture of blue,
black, and white colors, like the ones used by the Franciscan fathers.
40. Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat, 13337; Graubart speaks of transculturating
wardrobes and assesses that elite indigenous women enacted their own version of the
Inca-hidalgo performance with their personal wardrobes (137).
62
(raja) probably to be worn during times of mourning.41 Moreover, her wardrobe

was complemented with false velvet sleeves decorated with gold and silver silk
passementerie.42 False sleeves and folded skirts ( faldellines) were Spanish clothing styles that Indian women wore in combination with their own tunics. Spanish skirts and coyas headdresses were rapidly adopted, contrary to the literature
that assigned their use to a later period.43 The archival sources used to support this essay indicate that both garments, whose use marked the inception
of a change of traditional identity, entered the Indian womens wardrobe in the
urban environs in the second half of the sixteenth century.
Among Ins Huaycos belongings there were also indigenous belts and ruan
blouses, several pairs of large and medium-sized silver pins with small bells to
hold her shoulder mantles.44 Among her household utensils, she possessed silver cocos and aquillas (vases), Andean vessels used by the former elites to drink
chicha, and also glasses, plates, escudillas (bowls), spoons, cubiletes (tumblers),
and potosies (cups), all made in silver.45 The incorporation of both pre-Hispanic
noble womens clothing and jewelry and some Castilian dresses, fabrics, and
adornment show how ambiguous and contradictory the composition of body
and identity became for women like Ins, who sought to match economic success with race and appearance.
Ins is linked to Indians associated with textile activities. Pedro Inga, her
tailor and executor, was bequeathed by Ins a mourning costume made of bayeta
(ordinary woolen fabric) to be worn at her funeral. The wife of a certain Nicols,
an Indian embroiderer, still owed her five pesos corrientes from a basket of coca
Ins had sold her. In sum, her will also illustrated the existence of skilled Indian
urban artisans who produced and decorated clothing. As a result of Inss activity as a moneylender, several items relating to clothing were pawned at her store,
demonstrating that textiles were useful collateral in retail transactions.46
41. Raja: from Latin rascia, thick cloth of very low quality worn in the past.
42. Pasamano: passementerie, trimming used to ornament dresses.
43. Cf. Mary Money, Los obrajes, el traje y el comercio de ropa en la Audiencia de Charcas
(La Paz: Instituto de Estudios Bolivianos, 1983).
44. Ruan: decorated, colored cloth made of cotton yarn, originally from Rouen,
France.
45. Aquilla: kind of vase used to drink chicha (corn beer); coco: tumbler shape with a
similar function.
46. ANB, EP, vol. 68, Andrs Gonzlez de Cavia, La Plata, 30.XII.1606, 30412.
A thorough description on how credit and petty loans were common to obtain cash from
pulperos or market vendors in Potos is found in Mangan, Trading Roles, 11033. Out of
pawned items, clothing represented 29%, only after silver (34%) in Mangans list of Popular
Pawn Items Mentioned in Notarial Records, 15701700. Mangan, Trading Roles, 122.
63
Magdalena Ucho, a Yauyo native, was the widow of the Indian Pedro Talavanca and the daughter of Catalina Chamoc. Magdalena claimed that her fathers
name was unknown. Among her belongings, she counted an ordinary blue dress
with its shawl; a tattered cumbi dress; three more shoulder mantles: one yellow
cumbi, a black one from the Pacajes, and another called de tasa, which was fabricated as currency to pay taxes, and a cumbi headdress. Her limited but eclectic
wardrobe was combined with a silk belt and blue silk sleeves, demonstrating
the influence of Spanish fabrics and styles in the urban indigenous wardrobe.
Magdalena accessorized her costumes with silver pins of different sizes assorted
with hanging chains that replaced both the typical spondylus shells and leather
or bone cords, such as those described by Bernab Cobo and drawn by Guamn
Poma. Although she did not mention her trade, it is clear she was a small-scale
moneylender. By lending small sums of money, Magdalena had in her possession collateral like silver tumblers and cazolejas (casseroles), ruan undershirts,
and old cumbi dresses and shawls. Included in the inheritance she bequeathed
her daughter was an ordinary blue woolen dress with a matching shawl, and to
her Indian maid, who had served her for years, went a brown cumbi dress and a
black shoulder mantle with red stripes, denoting the importance of used clothing and its symbolic and sentimental value.47
Ana Paucar, a palla from Cuzco, daughter of Francisca and a father whose
name she does not remember, seems to have participated in small-scale commerce.48 Consequently, some Indians were indebted to her. At the moment Ana
47. ANB, EP, vol. 102, Agustn de Herrera, La Plata, 28.I.1612, 1618v.
48. According to Gonzlez Holgun, palla means mujer noble adamada galana (noble
woman, lady, elegant), features related to an Indian womans appearance. Diego Gonzlez
Holgun, Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Peru llamada lengua qquichua o del Inca
(Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1989), 273. Guamn Poma follows
Gonzlez Holguns definition (Guamn Poma, Nueva coronica, 6, 142, 182, 255). Given the
polysemy verified in colonial times, authors argue about the meaning of palla. It is possible
the name meant more than noble woman. Palla could refer to an adult or mature woman
( paya) rather than an Indian of noble status, as interpreted by Ximena Medinaceli, Y la
noche carece de gnero: Las indias viejas: Una categora cultural en transicin, Anuario
del Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia (Sucre) (2001): 18687. In some cases, Palla
was simply a last name (Mangan, Trading Roles, 106); on occasions, palla denotes a clear
manipulation of status through symbols of Inca nobility (Graubart, With Our Labor and
Sweat, 13637). Among the wealthy Indians living in Potos, Ocaa mentioned indias
y pallas. According to Ocaa, palla denoted an Indian woman who enjoyed wealth and
status. As an additional comment, the Dominican friar says that given their economic
success, some pallas supported soldados (Spaniards looking for a living) while being their
concubines. Ocaa, Un viaje fascinante, 199.
64
dictated her will, she owned the traditional Indian female outfit, what she called
a piece of cloth or a combination of dress and shawl, two made of the finest
wool and technique and the others woven with thicker fibers. Additionally she
described two narrow belts, one wide belt, and three pairs of silver pins worn
to decorate her shawl. Among her household goods were two cedar boxes, three
chuces (native rugs), two indigenous blankets, and pairs of wooden and silver
indigenous vases. Pitchers and cooking pots and other small items completed
her wares kept in the house she had built and where she pursued her trade.49
Catalina Soto, a Caranga native settled in La Plata, was the illegitimate
daughter of the Indians Pedro Choque and Magdalena Chucho. Fray Ocaa
could have been inspired by Catalinas clothing to draw his painting of a palla,
since she declared owning 11 cumbi dresses of assorted colors, some new and
others tattered, to which she added 3 shoulder mantles from Pacajes, 7 fine
headdresses and 3 small shawls, all of cumbi (see figure 4). She also described
another black woolen cloth dress, two pairs of assorted dresses (tunic and shawl)
of black woolen cloth, another tattered, thick woolen dress, plus other dresses
she bequeathed to her old Indian maid. Her fondness for jewelry was represented by many pairs of silver and gold pins of different sizes. Catalina was a
successful moneylender; her debtors were members of the Spanish elite who had
pawned to her gold and silver jewels, pearls, and other valuable goods.50
While making out her will, Elvira Poco Ynquilla, a palla from Cuzco and
the widow of Domingo Tuta Gualpa, did not mention her parents name or origin. She left money to charities, indigenous sodalities, and the Indian hospital,
to the four city convents, the poor, and the city jail. She belonged to several
religious sodalities: Santa Luca, San Nicols de Tolentino, Nuestra Seora de
la Gracia, and Nuestra Seora de la Consolacin, all founded at the Convent of
Saint Augustine, where she wished to be buried in her sons grave and where the
remains of her husband were to be moved.51 Among her clothing she mentioned
an old shoulder mantle of blue woolen cloth; a tattered black cumbi headdress;
49. ANB, EP, vol. 102, Agustn de Herrera, La Plata, 28.III.1599, 20812v. Chusi or
chuce is the name given by Father Bernab Cobo to a certain thick cloth, appropriate to
make blankets or rugs decorated with hummingbird feathers or gold or silver beads used by
the nobility. I think this is not the cloth mentioned in the will, instead that was the kind of
ordinary chuce used as a rug or carpet on which urban Indians used to lay for rest or sleep.
50. ANB, EP, vol. 102, Agustn de Herrera, La Plata, 8.IX.1613, 35666. Cf. Mangan,
Trading Roles, chap. 4.
51. Mangan, asserts that the cofrada was a place in which urban Andean women
pooled their wealth, a place that also contributed to identity formation, an identity linked
to money and material goods. The cofradas dressed ostentatiously, since clothing was an
unmistakable part of their identity; Trading Roles, 155, 154.
65
two old ordinary shawls; a cumbi dress and another ordinary dress, both old and
tattered; and a small tattered cumbi shawl, a white shawl from the Guanca, and
another tattered brown shawl that she combined with a red belt and sleeves of
colored woolen cloth. Completing her wardrobe there were several silver pins,
two of which she wore while dictating her will.
Among her belongings was a habit of Saint Augustine, as an expression of
her Christian devotion, along with two shirts, socks, and linen cloth that she
wished to wear as a shroud for her burial. Among her household utensils were
indigenous silver vessels, small bowls, and silver tumblers, hand cloths, a mattress, blankets, and the rug where she slept.52
Francisca Curimollo was an Indian from Pulque, near La Plata, although
she was raised in the city. She was the legitimate daughter of Pedro Guanca, a
native of the Guancas, and Beatriz Coca Palla from Cuzco. Franciscas testament showed plenty of economic transactions with Spaniards and Indians, and
she instructed her executors to claim any pending payments and pawns from her
debtors. Dedicated to petty commerce and money lending, Francisca, among
other requests, expected her executors to collect nine pesos corrientes from a
certain Catalina Sanchez in payment for a finely made shawl (de hechura), suggesting that by that time, tailors, weavers, and embroiderers made dresses and
shawls, perhaps copying indigenous designs.
Franciscas description of her clothing shows how pre-Hispanic attire was
combined with European fabrics and styles. She listed a thick black dress to
which she added a velvet headdress, and a cumbi dress with its matching shawl
of black woolen cloth with its passementerie, which she used with a cumbi headdress. She described another little headdress of colored cumbi valued at 30
pesos corrientes, and a dress from Xauxa and a cumbi shawl with its matching
headdress. Moreover, she owned silk belts and a coarse wool dress ( faldelln de
tamenete), illustrating how she combined Andean with Spanish clothing styles.53
Francisca was very fond of jewels and accessories. She had pearl bracelets (mani
llas) and others of abalorio (beads), and a pearl and bead choker. Francisca left
instructions to make her shroud with one of her ruan sheets.54
After reading these testaments, some questions arise as to who was in charge
of weaving and where cloth and costumes were made for the new owners. Indian
tailors surely existed, probably designers and small workshops run by special52. ANB, EP, vol. 101, Agustn de Herrera, La Plata, 25.VII.1608, 44854v.
53. It should be faldelln de estamenete, a dress made of coarse and simple wool.
Estamenete comes from Lat. staminea, Sp. estambre, Eng. stamen, warp-faced cloth.
54. ANB, EP, vol. 68, Andrs Gonzlez Cavia, La Plata, 28 IV.1611, 82732.
66
ists.55 Additionally, from the will of Juana usta, an Indian from Guata near La
Plata married to Juan Escudero, mestizo and tailor, we learn that some Indians
commuted their criminal punishments by weaving cloth. Juana declared that
the Indian Domingo Mamani had been living at her place for over a year since
the authorities had him handed over to pay the 100 pesos he had stolen from her.
After Mamani had woven two shirts for Juanas relatives, she considered his debt
paid and ordered that his shackles be removed and he be set free.56
Juana possessed numerous garments made in several different places. She
declared a woolen cloth skirt ( faldelln de pao); a similar skirt, but tattered and
decorated with gold passementerie; three pairs of fine red (grana) false sleeves
and a dusty wide skirt (saya entrapada); a new black cotton Indian dress and two
black shawls ornamented with satin and velvet; and another shoulder mantle of
fine Florence cloth (raja de Florencia) decorated with gold and silver passementerie.57 Additionally, she possessed three new ordinary Pacajes shawls; another
tattered shawl made of blue woolen cloth (pao); a mixed Castile cloth (mezcla de
Castilla) dress ornamented with green velvet; another used, black cumbi dress
with red stripes; two black dresses (one of abasca and an old one of cumbi); a new
abasca dress with a white stripe; a purple cumbi dress and its matching shawl, a
tattered black cumbi dress with red stripes; two other black cumbi dresses, one
new and one used; three tattered headdresses of cumbi and one coarse frailesca
with colored stripes. Juanas clothing, with colorful stripes and ornaments, is
reminiscent of Fray Ocaas drawing of a palla (figure 4).
Juanas ostentatious clothing demonstrated her wealth and pride, both
associated with her keen knowledge of how to utilize different fabrics and
55. Available sources do not help to find workshops, stores, or individuals related to
weaving and design of Indian garments with old patterns in La Plata. Gabriela Ramos
suggests that the old Inca nobility participated in the exchange of cumbi cloth, as well
as intermediaries and the weavers that produced it, given the Indians and Spaniards
demands. Since cumbi is a living testimony, as Phipps asserts, there were specialists who,
perpetuating memory, could reproduce old designs along the colonial period, according to
Ramoss research. Gabriela Ramos, Los smbolos de poder inca durante el virreinato, in
Los Incas, reyes del Per, ed. Thomas Cummins et al. (Lima: Banco de Crdito, 2005),
5760. Graubart mentions a large number of tailors in colonial cities; With Our Labor
and Sweat, 134.
56. Neus Escandell-Tur states that abasca and cumbi cloth continued to be produced
in households units. Neus Escandell-Tur, Produccin y comercio de tejidos coloniales: Los obrajes y
chorrillos del Cuzco (15701820) (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Bartolom de Las Casas, 1997).
57. Grana: fine red cloth used to make party clothes; saya entrapado/a: to be full of dust,
applied to cloth and other woolen textiles that retain dust easily and are difficult to keep
clean; raja (or pao) de Florencia: very fine cloth from Florence, Italy.
67
Figure 4. Picture of a palla.

From Fray Diego de Ocaa,
Un viaje fascinante por
la Amrica Hispana del
Siglo XVI (Madrid: Studium
Ediciones, 1969).
styles linked to new trades and fashions. This is particularly notable when she
described her accessories: several belts, a broad one and three red ones from
Cuzco, two pairs of velvet sandals, and a patterned velvet bag decorated with silk
and silver that surely replaced the indigenous chuspa (bag) in which she kept her
coca leaves, some coins, and other small personal belongings. As a status symbol
she wore two crescent-shaped silver pins, and she described three large, carved
silver pairs made with bells, small chains, and metal. Her jewelry also included
metal (alzfar) chokers with black beads and coral and some loose pearls.58
In addition to all these personal belongings, Juana described her household
goods, a set of eclectic commodities including canopies, a Mexican cotton cloth,
a bed, mattresses and blankets, silver vases and boxes, and two pairs of carved
wooden vases from Cuzco that she brought to her marriage. She left her Indian
maid an ordinary dress and her male servant some money and two shirts that
58. Alzfar: tin in Arabic.
68
were being woven for him; this denotes the importance of clothing as gifts or
endowments.59 Both her heterogeneous wardrobe and household belongings
speak of her consumption habits and show the pleasure Juana felt in displaying
ostentatiously the wealth that she had attained in her new occupation.
In order to appreciate the worth of the attire described above, dowries give
examples of current prices to address a large set of commodities. Some of them
reflect back to the vivid drawings of Guamn Poma, Ramrez del Aguila, and
Ocaa, while others show a combination of fine and expensive Spanish and
Andean fabrics and sophisticated designs. Guamn Poma clearly explained
and depicted how the wives of Andean authorities should dress according to
their ancestry and husbands position. The case of doa Ana Paico, whose costume resembles that of the wife of a curaca of one thousand Indians, returns
us to the views of Guamn Poma on the dangers of interethnic marriages and
the inappropriate use of cloth and prestige goods, which only the old nobility
should wear in order to strengthen status and rank and to guarantee social order
and good government.60
The widow doa Ana married the cacique of Arabate, a town near La Plata.
Her impressive dowry included houses, estates, animals, linen, and other valuable items she had probably inherited from her first husband, another local lord.
She described five pairs of silver Andean vases of different designs valued at 100
pesos, five pairs of silver pins at 40 pesos, a fine red Spanish skirt with its gold
passementerie and velvet trimming appraised at 100 pesos, a purple cumbi set
(dress and shawl) adorned with gold and silver passementerie with its matching
purple velvet headdress at 100 pesos, and another black set made of Spanish
fine wool adorned with passementerie and a fine but tattered velvet headdress
lined in black taffeta at 80 pesos.61 Among other dresses and jewels, doa Ana
described an old lion-colored cumbi headdress decorated with fine conga, which
stressed even more her sophisticated wardrobe.62 Furthermore, doa Ana had
another brown cumbi three-piece set (dress, shawl, and headdress) described as
59. ANB, EP, vol. 65, Lucas Prieto de Porras, En las casas de la otorgante en la ciudad
de La Plata, viernes 27.VII.1601, 9196.
60. Guamn Poma stressed the honor and pride that should emanate from curacas
wives, whose outfits should match their rank. Following the rules of the Inca Empire, the
chronicler still assumed that noblewomen married their male peers and dressed and behaved
according to their status, losing it if they married Spaniards, mestizos, or ordinary Indians.
Guamn Poma, Nueva cornica, 709.
61. ANB, EP, vol. 70, Andrs Gonzlez de Cavia, La Plata, 25.II.1620, 135760v.
62. Conga: Sp. huta, a kind of rodent, ash-colored or reddish. Within the Andean
context it could be, as a reader suggested, a viscacha, a rodent closely related to the
chinchilla, appreciated for its soft fur.
69
Figure 5. Seoras, curaca

varmi maiva, que son
muger de la uaranga y pisca
pachaca / prensesas y
seoras del rreyno de las
Yndias . . . From Felipe
Guamn Poma de Ayala,
Nueva cornica i buen
gobierno (Mexico City: Siglo
Veintiuno Editores, 1992),
708.
unusual (curioso) and valued at 60 pesos; a curioso headdress which they called
tocapo, appraised at 40 pesos; and another curioso three-piece set with tocapu
designs and api at 40 pesos.63 The term curioso as a synonym of tocapu expresses
that the drawing, communication code, or message involved in the design was
undecipherable for the testator, her relatives, and the notary. Doa Anas dowry
contained more goods than these but, for the purposes of this study, the range
of clothing highlights the construction of an indigenous urban identity that
combined production and consumption, and private, bodily, intimate sensation, sexuality, and fantasy with public self-presentation.64
63. Curioso: what causes curiosity, worthy of being investigated. Tocapu is a woolen
tapestry containing geometric or abstract patterns with uncountable repeated drawings
and colors specially designed for the Inka or high rank individuals. Like quipus, tocapus
constitute a code or system of communication. I could not determine the meaning of api.
64. ANB, EP, vol. 70, Andrs Gonzlez de Cavia, La Plata, 25.II.1620, 135760;
Carole Turbin, Refashioning the Concept of Public/Private: Lessons from Dress Studies,
Journal of Womens History 15, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 44.
70
As Guamn Poma bitterly complained, the rules that prevented marriage

between those of different birth and rank were no longer respected, nor were
prohibitions against wearing the costumes of the nobility. Although married to
a local curaca, doa Ana did not belong to a lineage that allowed her to possess
the ostentatious wardrobe described in her dowry. According to what we can
read into her silence on her ancestry, she was a true social climber whose parents
seemed to be ordinary Indians. A luxurious and prestigious dress from the recent
Inca past was now worn by a wealthy and well-connected, but not well-born,
Indian woman; this contradicted what Guamn Poma believed would keep the
realm well organized and better governed. This particular case illustrates the
peculiar relation between clothing, memory, and emulation. The possession of
such a luxurious outfit endowed doa Ana Paico with the memory and symbolic
genealogy of the Inca nobility. By means of clothing, status and identity were
transferred to doa Ana, the new wearer of a resignified prestige good.
Marriage to a local lord did not prevent doa Ana from pursuing profitable
trades in the urban setting. She was a pulpera and a successful landlady who
rented several stores built beside her residence to other retailers. Additionally,
she was socially well connected. She had been married twice to local caciques,
and according to several economic transactions, the notaries Augustn and Juan
de Herrera were her brothers, which could have endowed her with wide interethnic social networks.65
The clothing of doa Ana could have rivaled only that of doa Constanza
Pilco Sisa. Born in Cuzco before the conquest by the union of Cusi Hualpa and
Chuqui Llancho, doa Constanza was the wife of don Francisco Guaynamaqui,
curaca of Tarabuco and Presto, the most populated interethnic Indian towns
near La Plata. Her status and clothing matched her position in society and her
desire to be recognized by others, in this case by the neighbors of La Plata, who
had renamed doa Constanza as la coya.66
For purposes of comparison, we may refer to doa Maria Yuyo Ocllos
dowry, an Indian born in La Plata whose ancestors are not mentioned. Upon
marrying the mestizo Alonso Rodrigo, she was endowed with several dresses
appraised by Mateo Perez, a tailor, and other specialists. The dresses included
65. ANB, EP, vol. 105, Agustn de Herrera, La Plata, 28.II.1617, 151 and 20.IV.1617,
259; vol. 70, Andrs Gonzlez de Cavia, La Plata, 6.II.1623, 216971v. Several transactions
show how close the siblings were. Unfortunately, there is no information about who their
parents were or their ethnicity. The notaries Agustn and Juan de Herrera were bilingual
and served as interpreters, as shown in their notarial records.
66. ANB, EP, vol. 73, Juan de Loarte, La Plata, 17.II.1604, 8190.
71
a black velvet three-piece set (dress, shawl, and headdress), the dress had two
stripes and three gold clasps (servillanetas), and the headdress lined in lioncolored taffeta had one stripe and two gold clasps. The shawl was decorated
with a wide gold stripe embroidered on black velvet with two trims lined in
lion-colored taffeta. The ensemble was appraised at 400 pesos. Another set was
made of fine bluish cloth from Florencethe color of rosemary blossomsand
decorated with a broad gold passementerie and two embroidered trimmings on
blue velvet, all appraised at 250 pesos. In addition, there was a blue velvet headdress ornamented with gold stripes and lined in iridescent taffeta at 50 pesos,
another black dress and shawl of black Spanish cloth, the dress decorated with
five stripes of velvet embroidered in gold on one side and three stripes on the
other. The shawl, worth 100 pesos, had a broad passementerie of velvety silk
lined with a satin sash. The dowry included another wrapped set made of green
cloth from Castile decorated with four green velvet stripes, three narrow silver
passementerie lines on one side, and two stripes and a silver passementerie in the
middle on the other side. The set was appraised at 80 pesos. Doa Maria was
endowed with other noteworthy clothing: velvet sleeves with gold embroidery,
velvet sandals and bags, and satin headbands embroidered with pearls. Her pins
and silver ornaments and household goods were even more European than her
clothing. She was endowed with chamber pots and cupping glasses, a mop board
(rodapis), and 30 papers with illustrated stories.67 Doa Maria Yuyo Ocllo certainly was an Indian of high status given her ample and sophisticated wardrobe,
accessories, household goods, and the quality of her eclectic belongings, which
also included images of saints and cloth from Flanders, India, and Castile.68
Other Indian women whose dowries were registered in the notarial records
of La Plata mentioned dresses but did not describe them or specify the amount
of goods they brought into matrimony. At this point, it is worth noting that
Indian womens testaments far outnumber the dowries notarized in La Plata.
Nevertheless, both dowries and wills provide evidence for the conclusions
drawn from this research.
Conclusions
The Spanish conquest undermined the status and power of the vanquished
indigenous elite. This was most noticeable in the urban milieu. Moreover, the
67. Rodapis: wooden stand, cloth or other material used to cover beds ends, tables, and
other furniture.
68. ANB, EP, vol. 98, Agustn de Herrera, La Plata, 3.VI.1599, 25257v.
72
conquest liberated certain native groups from their specific duties, giving
them the opportunity to overcome the burdens of coerced labor and taxation
by emigrating from their ayllus. Indigenous women in Spanish urban areas
appear in notary documents as playing a leading role in the market, excelling as
pulperas, urban vendors, moneylenders, and retailers. Over time these women
became urban mediators in the new colonial society. The Indian women portrayed here represent a middle sector of the new colonial society involved in the
development of the new system.69
The new relations of production ostensibly transformed Andeans into an
undifferentiated mass of people who received from the new masters of the land
a fictitious identity concentrated in the name Indian. At the same time, other
identities were maintained or re-created through a process of constant social
change, negotiation, and ethnogenesis.70 This changing cultural milieu affected
all social ranks and social obligations and brought about access to things formerly
restricted to the nobility. Individuation within the urban milieu was accompanied by the desire to consume luxury items, particularly clothing that differentiated and highlighted the status of the wearers, though fashion remained
somewhat tied to ingrained aesthetic ideas. The commoditization process gave
more well-off Indians the opportunity to become consumers. Certain prestige
goods and luxurious sumptuary clothing whose use was restricted in the recent
past could be chosen, copied, worn, and consumed by those successful Indian
women associated with different trades in the urban market, who accrued wealth
instead of ancestry. The new indigenous city dwellers probably took advantage
of old circulation networks based on kinship and traditional reciprocal bonds,
which existed outside the colonial market. Those networks surely facilitated
the circulation of formerly prestigious goods, such as cumbi and tocapu, which
now acquired new societal meanings when they received economic value in the
colonial marketplace. Thus, the change in consumption habits mirrors other
changes, such as the urbanization of Indians no longer affiliated with their rural
kin groups, and the methods of exchangedue to the development of a largescale market economyassociated with production, circulation, and distribution of products locally, regionally, and also in broader spaces. Among the dra-
69. Cf. Steve J. Stern, Perus Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest:
Huamanga to 1640 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1982), chap. 7.
70. Ethnogenesis is the process by which distinct ethnic cultures are continually
re-created over time, especially cultures that have experienced colonization. See Karen
Vieira Powers, Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito
(Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1995).
73
matic changes suffered by indigenous local polities after the Spanish conquest,
migration to the city, among other factors, led to population loss in the rural
areas. Among those who migrated were Indian women who entered new productive tasks associated with the urban market. Their occupations and modes of
interaction with Spanish people and beliefs drove them to incorporate Spanish
norms and religious practices while choosing a new personal appearance.
The mercantile economy brought about new rules, imposing a new order
among people and things. Clothing expressed social rank; if clothing did not
vary, the individual expression of fashion, taste, and style apart from rank would
be hardly noticeable. Thus, changes in clothing were tied to the social order
of things, as common people developed a new system of self representation
through emulation of the old Inca nobility.
Clothing and fashion matched ones office and constituted identity markers of self representation readily recognized by the urban dwellers. In the cases
studied, the model to be imitated was the coya, the Inkas wife, although the new
wardrobes included textiles and dresses evoking Castilian styles. This combination, which I interpret as a cultural mixture or hybrid self-presentation of identity, was purposely created to cause a desired effect: recognition as well-to-do
urban Indian women. In the life of the new Spanish city, gender, ethnicity, and
class representation can be seen through costumesthe visual expression of
identity, occupation, and degree of economic insertion in the new urban milieu.
The abundant wardrobe coincided with the ancient Andean appreciation of textiles as the very essence of status and wealth.
Market exchanges required money, pricing for objects, a relationship
between supply and demand, and the legalization of social and contractual relations in writing. Access to writing, to notaries, and to the written word built
new statuses within the colonial society. Stores appeared in small areas, as did
business agents, small-scale commerce, spaces for trading in rural areas, and
the development of an urban craftsmanship dedicated to the production of garments and textiles, which may have employed some of the thousands of male and
female weavers trained in the former imperial tradition. The emergent Spanish colonial market cast aside former prohibitions regarding the use of certain
objects and costumes and allowed for the creation of new clothing trends and
material culture. Attire like luxurious wrapped dresses, tunic, shawl, and headdress were assigned a new significance. They were now reused and accessible to
those who enjoyed improved socioeconomic standing, and, in turn, the items
acquired an adjusted monetary value.
Through testimonies left by indigenous women separated from their original kin groups and resettled in La Plata, we can detect a gap between the con-
74
text of production of goods and services, and the physical and social context
of domestic relations. Through the information found in the wills of Indian
women, I was able to measure changes and continuities in the social life of
things, and consequently to detect new representations and identities, visible
beyond the voices from the archives, which evoke the Inca Empire and introduce the Spanish rule. A multifunctional and polysemic source like last wills
and testaments can thus help us discover the attitudes, things, life itineraries,
professions, and management of personal public appearance that allow us to
start building the identity of urban Andean women in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries.
Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman: Market Economy, Clothing, and
Identities in the Colonial Andes, La Plata (Charcas), Late Sixteenth and Early
Seventeenth Centuries
Ana Mara Presta
Universidad de Buenos Aires CONICET-PROHAL
This essay addresses the specific indigenous identity of Indian women resettled in
colonial La Plata, particularly those associated with mercantile trades and consequently
involved in the creation of colonial markets. The search for Indian womens urban
identities rests upon the material culture associated with labor activities and social
standing among those recently settled in the Spanish urban milieu. Objects and places,
goods and spaces can be manipulated, reappropriated, and reinterpreted by new social
actors on their road to history. Things have meaning and are bound to culture and
identity. In this way, indigenous womens dress and adornment are associated with the
dramatic changes brought about by the new mercantile economy introduced by the
Spaniards. Indian women who resettled in the city and gained economic success
pursuing mercantile trades adopted distinctive components of female dress. These styles
evoked both the recent Inca past and certain elements of Spanish attire and adornment
that forged a specific identity associated with a specific trade, asserting a newly
acquired status in the emerging colonial society
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Undressing the Coya and Dressing the

Indian Woman: Market Economy, Clothing,

Hispanic American Historical Review 90:1

HAHR / February / Presta

Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

HAHR / February / Presta

cantile economy. Participation in the market supplied Indian women with an

Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

HAHR / February / Presta

Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

10. The earliest contribution to indigenous demography in the city is an article by

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Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

HAHR / February / Presta

Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

HAHR / February / Presta

Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

In a classic study, Ann Pollard Rowe reconstructed archaeological Andean

HAHR / February / Presta

Figure 1. La otava Coia.

Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

and dresses in a symmetrical pattern. The archaeological figurines present a

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Figure 2. La novena Coia.

The conquest, the displacement of local polities, the redefining of prestige

28. J. C. Flugel, Psicologa del vestido (Buenos Aires: Paids, 1964).

Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

HAHR / February / Presta

Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

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I gathered 92 testaments dictated by Indians between the 1570s and 1620s. Of

Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

HAHR / February / Presta

(raja) probably to be worn during times of mourning.41 Moreover, her wardrobe

Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

HAHR / February / Presta

Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

HAHR / February / Presta

Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

Figure 4. Picture of a palla.

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Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

Figure 5. Seoras, curaca

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As Guamn Poma bitterly complained, the rules that prevented marriage

Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

HAHR / February / Presta

Undressing the Coya and Dressing the Indian Woman

HAHR / February / Presta

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