Karen B. Graubart is Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and a faculty fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. She is the author of With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550–1700 (Stanford University Press, 2007), as well as numerous articles. Her new project, provisionally titled “Neighbors and Others: Space, Peoples, and Jurisdictions in the Iberian Atlantic,” examines the worlds that created and responded to social differentiation of various kinds in fifteenth-century Seville and sixteenth-century Lima; it has been generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
The political jurisdiction of the colonial cacique, or ethnic lord, is often understood to have been truncated or undermined by Spanish political administration. But the role of the cacique was also key to enabling Spanish administrators to extract wealth from native communities. What exactly that role was is undocumented in Spanish-language archival materials. By examining recent literature on the Iberian qadi, or judge of the Islamic community under Christian rule, this study argues that the cacique, like the qadi, maintained his or her local authority and jurisdiction. Evidence for this hidden jurisdiction is found in a sixteenth-century case that was set aside by the Real Audiencia because it fell outside that body's jurisdiction and within the dominion of the cacique.