Cacicas: The Indigenous Women Leaders of Spanish America, 1492–1825

Abstract

From the time of Christopher Columbus, Spaniards developed the notion of Indians as a sweeping cultural category, and their empire soon evolved a system of law and governance based on the theory of parallel Indian and Spanish republics. This system incorporated Native leaders whom Spaniards termed caciques. The word itself was borrowed from Caribbean Tainos, but Spaniards applied it liberally to Native leaders throughout the empire. Cacicas (female caciques) are surprisingly common in the documentary record, though they have not always received adequate attention from historians. This excellent edited volume addresses the omission. In nine chapters by leading historians in the field, several general findings emerge: Cacicas exerted considerable influence in colonial systems through their control of property, their feudal privileges, and their occasional appointment to political offices more typically held by men. Many invoked their status to great advantage in legal conflicts and local politics.The position of cacicas was most stable and enduring in the core areas of Spanish viceroyalties where colonial institutions were built on a foundation of preconquest empires. Bradley Benton's chapter on cacicas from central Mexico describes the formation and preservation of complex alliances among the elite families of Texcoco and Teotihuacan. The descendants operated as both local leaders and imperial clients who survived as a permanent elite under Spanish rule. Despite diminishing political power, male and female members of these families retained considerable influence and social standing even in the late eighteenth century. Sara Vicuña Guengerich gives us a portrait of Teresa Choquehuanca, a Peruvian cacica in the era of late colonial Andean rebellions. Choquehuanca was a descendant of Inca lords, a governor, and an influential loyalist. She struggled to simultaneously advance her own interests and those of the colonial regime in her capacities as a landowner, businesswoman, and regional official charged with the extraction of tribute and labor from the peasantry. A chapter by Liliana Pérez Miguel and Renzo Honores and another by Karen Graubart describe the persistence of powerful cacicas in lowland Peru, where capullanas (female chiefs) had existed at the time of first contact. In both cases, litigation records reveal an era in which Native titles and privileges were hotly contested. At the same time, this legal and political climate offered a path to power for elite Native women who operated as clients of the viceroyalty.The book is also attentive to women's leadership in frontier spaces where the position of cacicas was more loosely defined. Peter Villella's chapter on the Tapias of Querétaro describes a family of Indigenous soldiers on a mining frontier who transformed themselves into a new regional nobility. In this case women's leadership was rooted not in a preconquest hereditary nobility but in the mechanisms of alliance, conquest, and cocolonization that permitted rising families to become civic founders and long-term elites. A chapter by Florencia Roulet also addresses hybrid elites in frontier spaces—in this case, the pampas region on the southern Río de la Plata frontier. The area's inhabitants were considered barbarians by the Spanish, but barbarians led by a recognizable group of caciques. Cacicas rose to prominence at this moment not so much through their ties to an ancestral aristocracy but through their roles as diplomats and translators, which gave them influence among Spaniards and Native peoples alike.The women studied by this book occupied a wide range of positions on the continuum of status in colonial society. Some were wealthy and powerful descendants of incas and tlatoque, and several were significant regional rulers in their own right. Others were more humble community elites. A chapter by Margarita Ochoa on Mexico City and one by Catherine Komisaruk on cases from the Kingdom of Guatemala provide intimate portraits of women who, though they invoked the language and history of nobility, were people of middling means, fighting to hold on to property and status among their neighbors.Cacicas leaves a few loose ends. Chantal Caillavet's chapter on the northern Andes is something of a prospectus for future research, but one that offers emerging researchers a helpful blueprint for the use of testaments in the reconstruction of social history. An appendix by the late Patrick Werner, though not a chapter in the strictest sense, is a valuable resource. He has left future researchers of cacicazgos in Nicaragua a guide to the Colección Somoza, a database of underutilized colonial sources from the Archivo General de Indias.Unlike most edited volumes, this one is suitable for use in the classroom. Though the book is based on new research from experts in the field, the prologue (by Ida Altman), the introduction (by the editors), and the conclusion (by Mónica Díaz) offer student-readers an excellent introduction to the subject of cacicas, to the relevant historiography, and to the broader field of Native elites under Spanish rule.