Customs apart: rethinking inheritance and competing land claims among Native commoner women in colonial Andean villages

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, I interrogate a handful of rare village records to probe more deeply the participation of rural Native women in conflicts over inheritance in the central Andes during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I focus on the wielding of written land titles, such as wills, certified lists of fields, fragments of land inspections, and writs of protection and possession, by these women as they claimed control over plots, homes, tracts, groves, and other household and extended-family assets within the commons. Their cases suggest that, rather than undermining women’s rights to dispose of property, titling and the establishment of municipal courts and the expansion of the legal possibilities for claiming land within this jurisdiction created new opportunities for some of them to defend and enact those rights. More importantly, their cases strongly suggest that gender relations were as much constitutive of kinship, community, and ownership relations as they were mediated by them, warning us of the risks of isolating gendered forms of expressing power (and the inheritance practices that they could underscore) from other power relations operating at the village level.