Landscapes of Property Available to Purchase

Chapter 7 uses a legal landscape painting from 1614 to explore the dispossession of Indigenous lands and the policing of Indigenous bodies of the Andean highlands. Two measures were especially important: the sale of lands (composiciones de tierras) and the installment of an administrator of the Indians (corregidor de naturales). The first provided guidelines to bound and limit Indigenous lands to the extent strictly necessary for their survival, so that imperial officials could sell the rest to Spanish settlers. The second was a new administrative post that governed the daily life of Indigenous peoples and sold their labor to Spanish settlers. The chapter argues that encroachment on Indigenous lands and the installation of a system of forced wage labor undermined the already decimated economic independence and ethnic autonomy the Indigenous communities of the Andes had struggled to maintain.