The Virgin and the land surveyor: Andean pueblo boundary making in the Highlands of late colonial Ecuador

On 10 October 1768, a group of 26 Machachi Indians, Spanish o ffi cials, landowners and other witnesses climbed together an Andean foothill to participate in a vista de ojos , a colonial walkabout ritual that intended to verify and rectify Andean-Spanish boundaries to settle a land dispute. This walkabout was especially signi fi cant because it followed tumultuous events in which the Machachi ‘ llactaios ’ rioted against judicial o ffi cials, shouted Quechua admonitions, and, ultimately, sabotaged legal procedures. 1 The llactaios intuited the land survey taking place would harm the community, since Joseph de Carcelén, the Spanish landowner behind it, claimed a portion of their lands as his. The Machachi land dispute brings to the forefront of cultural and legal history the manipulation of symbolic representations, images and maps, by Spanish and Andean claimants alike in an under-studied region. I argue that vistas de ojos, land surveys or mensuras and the use of legal cartography instituted a colonial mediation between Indians and the space of the pueblos de indios that accelerated the privatization of Andean communal space. Although Spanish and Andean claimants shared a variety of ways to prove possession, the Machachi Indians shaped such mediation with their own ritualization of possession, which they positioned in dialogue with Spanish law. Andeans created ‘ legal arguments ’ out of deploying religious symbols of land possession in the landscape, mobilizing images and displacing themselves across the disputed space. They also intended to contour Spanish land maps with their own cartographical discussions and demands for rectifying the legal procedures that constructed and de-con-structed their communal space. This case broadens our understanding of the co-creation of colonial legality by Andeans and Spaniards, particularly in the transforma-tional process of privatization of communal lands and in locations peripheral to the centers of Spanish power. This co-creation also speaks to the pluralistic and complex structure of Spanish imperial law (legal sources and expressions of possession). 2 Andeanists have largely approached the change of indigenous land tenure practices