By Jorge Recharte, 1993.

Chapter 2 - From Indian Ayllus to Peasant Communities

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The process of official community recognition played a central role in the historical transformation of the territorial organization of ayllus and peasant subsistence strategies in the Sandia valley. The emergence of more geographically localized communities was, in fact, the culmination of a complex historical process which involved: 1) regional demographic changes, 2) the expansion of local markets and roads, 3) the intensification of the peasants' domination by the local agrarian elites, and 4) the increasing importance of money in peasant life.

Economic and political aspects of ayllu segmentation were closely related. For example, peasants' increasing access to money and commercial foods (see Chapter 5) made possible the separation of ayllu segments that had formerly depended more completely on the mutual exchange of local products. The expansion of market relations was in part fostered by local rural elites who parasitized the Indian population living in the ayllus. Elites traded on their control of government positions of authority to benefit from peasant resources. However, the growth of commercial relations led to major changes in the subsistence strategies of peasants. These changes in turn facilitated the growth of community political independence and eventually led to the demise of Cuyo Cuyo's elites. In the following section I analyze this set of historical relations in greater detail, focusing on the history of rural elite-peasant relations. I contend that the contemporary peasant economy of Cuyo Cuyo can be better understood after close consideration of the district's recent political history.

Misti Times

Misti was the Quechua name given by Cuyo Cuyeños to local elites. Mistis described themselves as "whites," in opposition to "Indians." Most were merchants, landowners, judges, or political representatives of the Peruvian state.

The valley of Sandia has been part of a regional network of trade that linked lowland coca fields with the punas of Azángaro since early colonial times. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century commercial activities in Sandia grew vigorously. In the 1840s the extraction of cascarilla calisaya, the aromatic bark of a medicinal plant (Cinchona officinalis L.), was an important source of income for merchants from Puno and from cities on the southern coast of Perú (Basadre 1884). Later, the discovery of rich gold deposits in the District of Phara in the 1850s, and the discovery of good quality rubber trees in the 1880s, attracted the interest of national and foreign entrepreneurs (Martinez l969:76; Basadre l884). Merchants from Arequipa, Tacna, Cusco and Puno established new trading posts in Sandia. This town was also an important commercial center for coca trading. Regional merchants purchased the coca leaves to sell in the haciendas of Azángaro. They also brought in alcohol and other products to sell to the local peasantry. By l894 there were approximately twenty-three mistis in the Province of Sandia. Four lived in the Cuyo Cuyo

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District, eight in Sandia, and eleven in the other districts.²⁹ They were the founding fathers of a powerful local elite.

The merchants skillfully manipulated their commercial monopoly to force Indians to sell their lands. The puna grasslands of Ananea which are suitable for alpaca husbandry were particularly desired because the demand and price of alpaca wool increased constantly after the 1870s (Jacobsen l982). Merchants extended credits to Indians, particularly for the purchase of alcohol and other items required for the celebration of ayllu fiestas, and confiscated peasant land or other resources when debts where not honored.

Mistis also bought grasslands with the consent of the peasant owners. However, subsequent litigations concerning those transactions show that individuals often sold pastures which were the common property of extended peasant families. However fair this means of acquisition, mistis used it as a foothold to expand their land holdings. For example, in one case a man from Chuquine ayllu sold his pastures to a Sandia merchant in what appeared to be a legal transaction. He had in fact sold his share (acción), a portion of a set of pastures that were exploited collectively with his siblings. Within a few years of the purchase, the new owner was able to appropriate the whole property, incorporating the former owners as his hacienda herders. Examples of this nature are numerous.³⁰

Besides the alpaca haciendas, mistis also owned agricultural land within the ayllus of the Sandia valley.³¹ These plots were scattered within the ayllus following indigenous practices of land use (Chapter 5). These properties were exploited through sharecropping arrangements, with campesinos born in the community or with landless peasants who had recently immigrated to the Sandia valley.³² Cuyo Cuyo peasants say that these immigrants often were protected by the local mistis for whom they were sharecroppers. Oral tradition in Cuyo Cuyo refers these episodes of immigration as the 'starvation years,' (muchuy wata). The immigrants were peasants from the Azángaro region who came to Sandia as a result both of hacienda expansion and the cyclical droughts that affected the punas of the northern regions of the department with great severity. Although I have no clear idea of the relative importance of these two factors as causes for the emigration, land transactions recorded at the public notary of Sandia show that a large percentage of male household heads in the corn region

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came from the Azángaro and Huancané provinces.³³

Many of these immigrants only stayed in Sandia for short periods of time, but some married local women. Still others left their children behind as servants (yana) of wealthy Cuyo Cuyeño peasant or misti households when they left. These children took the family names of their foster parents and were incorporated as second class members of the household and the community.³⁴

Differential access to land among local and immigrant Indians may have favored misti exploitation of peasants. Patron-client relationships between mistis and the immigrant peasants were solidified by relationships of compadrazgo. By sponsoring the marriages of immigrants or the baptisms of their children, mistis won their loyalty (Chapter 3). Indian immigrants living within the ayllu cultivated the agricultural properties of mistis and helped to consolidate their political control over those who were native to the ayllu.

Although control of land and commercial monopoly were important elements of misti domination, a key to their power lay in their role as state representatives in the regional judiciary and political bureaucracy.³⁵ The most important office was that of the subprefect, the political head of Sandia Province and commander of a small police detachment. The subprefect was represented at the district level by the governors of the districts. Until the end of the nineteenth century the local elite was so small that these were often the only positions filled by the mistis, although from time to time mistis occupied municipal positions as well.³⁶ Mistis were also in charge of collecting the municipal taxes paid by Indian producers of coca in the montaña region of Sandia.

The priests of the region, who were appointed by the Cusco diocese, also were important figures in the social landscape of the valley at the beginning of the l900s. However, I do not have a clear picture of their position in the class structure of Sandia. Both Sandia and Cuyo Cuyo had resident priests and, while both parishes owned some hacienda land, ecclesiastical service fees were probably the most important source of

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income for the parishes. Such fees were a heavy burden for peasants.³⁷ Each minor ayllu of the valley reserved land for the benefit of the priest and the church. These lands, known by the generic name, yanasin, were cultivated by members of the ayllu. Each ayllu also had to provide servants for the church and for the priest throughout the year.

The governors of the districts also were entitled to use the community lands or yanasin.³⁸ It is possible that these were the same lands used by the ayllus from colonial times to finance the payment of taxes, until these taxes were abolished in 1864 (Morner l985). In addition, by established custom district governors were entitled to free ayllu labor for the cultivation of these fields and for their personal service.

Each ayllu was headed by an alcalde ordinario or alcalde de Indígenas, "common mayor" or "mayor of the Indians." At least in the case of Sandia, this position had disappeared by the l930s.³⁹ The representative of the governor within each ayllu was the Indian commissioner (comisario or alguacil de Indios) until the 1910s and the Indian lieutenant governor (teniente de Indios) afterwards. It was the duty of the households of the peasants holding these positions to herd the governor's sheep and pigs. The governors also were entitled to service from hilaqatas, recently married Indian couples, who fulfilled this position as part of their political career within the ayllu.⁴⁰ These young couples served in the household of the governor on a rotating basis, cooking, cutting firewood, weaving, preparing the fields or doing whatever chore was assigned to them.⁴¹

Ayllu authorities were generically known as envarados, after the staff (vara) that they carried as symbol of their authority. They were subject to the authority of the district governor. It was their duty to transmit the governor's orders to the ayllu, and they were responsible for their ayllu's compliance with the corvée ordered by district or provincial authorities. Sandia's subprefect and governors administered Indian labor for the repair of bridges and river dikes, and for the construction and

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maintenance of public buildings, among other projects.⁴² The most important and time- consuming task assigned to the Indians was the construction and maintenance of mule roads connecting their communities with the district and provincial capitals, and the latter with the montaña regions of Pukara Mayo, Valle Grande and Tambopata (seeFigure 1.7).

The montaña or yunka provided coca, a basic commodity in the commercial circuit controlled by mistis. It also produced coffee, and was a source of incense and gold. A large portion of the indigenous population of the Sandia valley owned coca fields in the montaña; therefore, road repair and maintenance was in their interest. However, mistis had larger properties and were very active in opening new lands for cultivation using Indian labor to expand the road network.

The regional system of mule paths in the Sandia valley had a main road (Camino Real de la Montaña) that connected the coca-producing yunkas with the punas of Azángaro (Figure 1.1) Each maximal ayllu was responsible for one section of the network. Ayllus were responsible for the maintenance of all trails within their territory, and for sections of the road in the coca-producing region which was used by all of the ayllus of the valley. Each minor ayllu was similarly responsible for the maintenance of certain bridges and tambos (lodgings) along the montaña road.⁴³

During the 1920s, national legislation legitimated the use of Indian corvée for the construction of rural motor roads (Morner 1985). All Peruvian citizens, ages 18 to 60 years were obliged to contribute from six to twelve days of work every six months depending on their age group, or to pay the equivalent in salary. On November 6, 1920 the mistis of Sandia formed a provincial council for road corvée as stipulated by the national legislature in Lima.⁴⁴ In Sandia, as in many other provinces of Peru, the

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work extracted under this obligation was extended beyond the legal requirement, and was imposed on Indians in addition to their traditional corvée maintenance of the old road network.

Initially, peasants were not pressured to do this road work.⁴⁵ The pressure for Indian labor, however, increased rapidly after September 1923 when construction began on the motor road from Ancoccala to Cuyo Cuyo.⁴⁶ Sandia peasants resented the abusive use of their labor and the poor working conditions.⁴⁷ In contrast, the Aymara Indians who were colonizing the Tambopata region more readily assisted in the construction of the road to Cuyo Cuyo.⁴⁸

Ayllu authorities were intermediaries between mistis and their fellow ayllu members. It was their duty to enforce the corvée. Every Sunday of the dry season, from April through October, the Indian lieutenant governors of the Sandia valley and neighboring zones were expected to meet with the subprefect in Sandia to receive instructions. They also received orders from the district governors concerning the number of people they would have to send to work on the road.

The road reached Cuyo Cuyo shortly after 1929, near the end of Leguía's regime. With the road and the trucks came intensified levels of participation in the market, an increased flow of information, the founding of the first schools, and the formation of Indian communities.

To understand the present day political economy of Cuyo Cuyo it is essential to understand the history of the mistis living there. The importance of this history is not immediately evident to the ethnographer, however. When I began fieldwork in 1985 there were few misti families left in Cuyo Cuyo and those that remained came from the less powerful branches of the older local elite. Younger comuneros know about misti timpu (time of the mistis) through the stories passed on to them by their elders but they seem to have only a fragmentary and superficial picture of that political period.

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The rapid demise of the misti elite in Cuyo Cuyo began in the 1940s, with the official recognition of Indian communities as legal corporate entities. This change in legal status helped communities stop hacienda encroachment on their lands; it also facilitated the opening of state-financed primary schools. Comuneros gradually broke away from the powerful grip of the mistis. The modernization of the national economy and formation of new middle-class economic and social opportunities in the urban centers of the region (mostly Puno and Arequipa) made life in rural Sandia less attractive to the younger generation of Cuyo Cuyo elites.⁴⁹

The threat of agrarian reform that came with the first government of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1965-1968) and the actual expropriation of haciendas during the military government of General Juan Velazco Alvarado (1968-1974) was a telling blow to the power of local elites.⁵⁰

A few families belonging to the former hacendado elite of Sandia still own small haciendas and properties in the Cuyo Cuyo District, but their lands usually are fragmented among multiple heirs who live in Puno or Arequipa. Today, these properties are gradually being purchased by peasants. By the mid-1970s the few mistis remaining in the region had lost all significant power over peasants.

Despite the present day absence of mistis in Cuyo Cuyo, crucial aspects of social life in the district are illuminated by knowledge of mistis social history, even if this history is sketchy. Only older people, like señora Sabina, whom I quote below, have "fresh" memories of the misti timpu:

More than one hundred years ago, when I was a child, there were no mistis here [in Cuyo Cuyo]. Only Gobernador Espinoza. I am seeing him now. He had one foot made of iron. Kuh, kuh, kuh, he walked in the plaza. He had a wide-brimmed hat, like this... [Then she said to me] are you going to take my sheep, ingeniero?...Mamichay sent me with the sheep to the hills and then a misti lord came and took my sheep...[And turned to me again] are you going to take my sheep, ingeniero?.

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Cuyo Cuyeño peasants use the expression misti timpu to refer to these not-too-far-away times. Their stories make it clear that misti timpu refers not only to a certain historical period, but also to a social world characterized by power relations vastly different from those of the present. Older people express with wonder the magnitude of the political changes they have witnessed in their lifetimes. Stories of misti timpu reveal that misti domination was grounded in cultural and political power, as well as economic might. The following description is typical:

We, the people] were not "civilized", the señores autoridades had all the power: the lords governor, judge, mayor, priest; [these were] the mistis... Pascual Guillén, Honorato Andrade.... Things changed only later. Here in Ura Ayllu [the lord] was Pascual Guillén. The lord governor managed the yanasin -- the land that now belongs to the school -- [it] used to be the governor's. Peasants were not "civilized" yet, and had Alcaltis, Segundas. They worshiped [the governor] like a second God.

The segmentation of ayllus and the emergence of present day peasant communities was closely related to the process of peasant resistance to misti domination (see next section). As part of their struggle to escape the low status associated with "ayllu" and "Indian," and to become communities of "peasants," Cuyo Cuyeños enthusiastically sponsored the opening of primary schools in their communities. The first school was founded in Puna Ayllu (according to Puna Ayllu accounts) in the first decade of this century by members of a Protestant organization based in the city of Puno. The rest of the communities followed suit during the next three decades. Men's abandonment of indigenous, locally-made clothing for factory-made apparel, their increasing command of Spanish, and their seasonal migration in search of cash also changed their willingness to adopt habits of deference towards mistis.⁵²

The Emergence of Peasant Communities

Peru's constitution of 1920 recognized the need to give special legal protection to Indian community lands. Complementary legislation in 1925 stipulated the legal procedures for community registration with the recently created Bureau of Indian Affairs in Lima.⁵³ Three years later, the first community of northeastern Puno, the ayllu of Carabaya in the

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District of Ituata, was recognized as an "Indian Community." The boundaries of the new community were traced over those of the former maximal ayllu of Carabaya, including the discontinuous "island" territories of its four minor ayllus. However, a few years later, recognition of the ayllu of Carabaya was reversed, and its segments separated into politically independent communities (ACCP, Carabaya; Ituata). This event anticipated what would soon become a pervasive phenomenon: the break-up and division of maximal ayllus which was conducted under the guise of "pro-indigenous" legislation and the modernizing efforts of President Augusto B. Leguía (1919-1930).⁵⁴

The process of the official recognition of communities initiated conflicts at multiple levels: 1) disputes within ayllus, 2) between ayllus and mistis and 3) among ayllus.

1) Within the communities, the recognition process itself was used for political ends by individuals, small groups of allied families and whole residential groups. The following quotation, while unusual in its explicitness, represents a problem that is found in the legal documents of many communities. In Llaqta Ayllu (District of Quiaca), Lorenzo Condori, the first personero⁵⁵ of the community wrote to inform the Bureau of Indian Affairs to inform that Mr. Morales, the personero who replaced him, had taken control of the community:

by allying with a group of comuneros who are close to him. Some [of them] have godparenthood [relationships] with him, others are his godchildren ... These [new] authorities have fooled the community, placing their own people in order to manipulate it (ACCP, Llaqta Ayllu 1946, f. 30v).

To be a personero, or legal representative of the community, it was necessary to be literate. This skill, as well as command of the Spanish language, became a powerful resource in the political context of the 1920s,

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and it remains so today (Lehman 1982). Peasant leadership based on these skills emerged decades before the process of community recognition had begun.

2) The most common argument for official recognition cited by most ayllus was the defense of their lands from hacienda encroachment. Although written sources rarely give details on the behavior of mistis towards Indians, oral tradition makes it clear that peasants deeply resented the abusive use of power by mistis. Santos, a sixty-five year old man from Puna Ayllu who participated actively in the battle for legal recognition of his community, illustrates this point as follows:

The reason [we had] to organize into a community was that mistis exploited us too much; they abused us. For instance, our llamas, they use to grab them to move their loads. They did not say 'please loan it to me,' they simply took them quietly. We could complain to no one. They themselves were the judge, the mayor, the governor. Who could we complain to? When we went down to Sandia, the subprefect, [and] the justices of the peace were their relatives, too. Well, who could we complain to? The same [problem] occurred with the horses, [as with] the llamas. We had some sheep. Mistis took the best, the castrated sheep, they took them from our corrals. The [misti] authority came with a worker, 'that one, get me that one.' He did not even say 'I am going to pay you so much.' Then, when we went to complain [we received] kicks, insults, punches. . .

Don Santos, like many others, notes that communities used the process of legal recognition to transform their subordinate relationship with mistis, and to stop the alienation of their land and abusive taxation of

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peasant labor and resources.⁵⁷

3) Quarreling among ayllus over boundaries and rights to resources that had traditionally been shared was a common outcome of the process of community recognition. When a minor ayllu presented its written document of landmarks or a map, it sometimes included territories that were simultaneously used by other minor ayllus. In such cases, conflict inevitably arose on several fronts. First, claims were opposed by the other groups that shared the resource, and second, the Bureau of Indian Affairs never seemed to understand that a community could be composed of discontinuous territories. For example, the fact that Hanaq Ayllu's⁵⁸ territorial map claimed, in addition to their central territories, two other separate pockets of land, made no sense to the topographers of the Bureau of Indian Affairs who rejected this indigenous map as nonsense:

It cannot be admitted that a single property be divided into two maps which by logic and law are a unit and should be in a single [continuous] map (ACCP, Hanaq Ayllo, f. 83).

As a consequence, only one of the segments of the maximal ayllu, usually the one that bordered on the formerly shared territory, ended up as its sole owner. The others lost total or partial access to it. Some of these discontinuous territories or "annexes" became independent communities.

Given the complexity of conflicting interests within and between communities, as well as across rural social classes, it is easy to understand why the legal battles for community recognition often lasted for decades. Sandinos placed a high value on the official recognition of their ayllus as Indigenous Communities. They had to persist in forwarding their claims and pay the legal costs of financing their leaders.⁵⁹ By the late 1960s the majority of former minor ayllus had been recognized as Indigenous Communities. Figure 2.3 maps the 18 communities of Sandia that emerged from the maximal ayllus of the region (Figure 2.1). Although comuneros continued to control agricultural resources outside their communities of residence, this direct production strategy lost its significance. Through this historical process, the maximal ayllu of Cuyo Cuyo became the peasant

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communities of Ura ayllu, Puna Ayllu, Pampa Cojene-Rotojoni, and Llaqta Ayllu. Similarly, Puna Laqueque and Laqueque were communities that formerly had been integrated as the maximal ayllu of Laqueque. Similarly, Aricato, Mororia, Ñacoreque, Huancasayani, Kallpapata and several groups that now belong to an alpaca herding cooperative composed of former hacienda lands (SAIS Churura), had formerly belonged to the maximal ayllu of Hururo (figure 2.1 and 2.2).

In 1969, the military junta headed by General Juan Velazco Alvarado enacted legislation that ordered the use of the expression "peasant" instead of "Indian" in all state legal documentation (Morner 1985: 288). It also promulgated the peasant community legislation which currently is used by the comuneros of Sandia as the blueprint for their system of political authorities. This concern of the state with the semantics of its relationship with highland peasants was the culmination of a long-term nationwide project of "modernization" that had its origins in the second half of the nineteenth century, the time in which mistis first came to the valley of Sandia.

Conclusions

The break up of maximal ayllus and the emergence of independent, often antagonistic, peasant communities was a process repeated throughout Peru.⁶⁰ Golte (1967: 29) describes a case of community "disintegration" in his study of a highland community near Lima. Ayllu segmentation was reflected in an intense process of district-level realignment. In Puno, for instance, the Department had 28 districts in 1876 and more than double that number (58) by 1972 (Appleby 1978: 137).⁶¹

(page 57: Figure 2.3)

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The process of district division must be placed in the context of the development of substantial differentiation of regional markets (Appleby 1978). District and maximal ayllu borders coincided in many regions of rural nineteenth century Peru.⁶² The capitals of rural districts were ritual and administrative centers for the minor segments of maximal ayllus (Instituto Indigenista Peruano 1968: 602), a role that continued the political function of colonial reducciones. Misti monopolistic control of political offices at the district level and their residence in the district capitals placed them in a position to control ayllu resources successfully. In the valley of Sandia, the struggle for corporate legal recognition was part of the peasant strategy to resist misti domination. The actual emergence of peasant communities, however, was due to a highly complex set of historic processes.

There are many anthropological references to the process of ayllu segmentation and community emergence, but they usually emphasize one or another dimension of this problem. Some concur that community recognition was a means to obtain access to schools and other resources from the state.⁶³ Guillet (1978: 96) underscores the relationship between territorial organization, population increase and "the need to more effectively organize (collective forms of) labor." Orlove and Custred (1980c: 50) and Bradby (1982) note that ayllus located in the puna were among the first to separate from maximal political units because they were among the first to have access to cash through the sale of alpaca and sheep wool. Since the nineteenth century, wool was the most valuable commodity available to peasants (Piel 1970: 125; Bonilla 1974).

Cash gradually replaced barter and "verticality" as the means of regional articulation. Money provided access to a diversified set of subsistence products and thus undermined the need for religious forms of political articulation among population segments occupying complementary ecological zones within a given region. Lewellen's (1978: 85) study of economic and political change in the ayllu of Soq'a in Puno notes that the separation of its six segments coincided with the abolition of religious fiestas. Also at this time, the market economy was expanding rapidly in the region. Lewellen holds that the adoption of Protestantism was the cause of this chain reaction.

This chapter on the history of the Sandia region has revealed that the transformation of ayllus into peasant communities was related to events and processes similar to those reported for other regions of rural Peru. Massive immigration of Azangareños who settled in the corn producing ayllus throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a factor that affected the minor ayllus' direct access to complementary production zones. These immigrants may have altered former patterns of marriage within the valley, and were in many case strong allies of mistis. Moreover, the increasing importance of cash in the regional economy, starting in the late

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nineteenth century (see Chapter 5) contributed to the economic independence of ayllu segments, and over time, to peasant freedom from misti despotism. Similarly, access to schools and other "modernization" resources offered by the Peruvian state, provided strong motivations for the quest for official recognition of peasant communities.⁶⁴ Access to schools was a means to resist misti despotism. Schools provided the knowledge of the Spanish language that was essential for successful involvement in seasonal labor markets and for the new economic roles of men as providers of cash for peasant households. Each minor ayllu (and often each annex) insisted on having an independent school building and teacher. The official recognition by the state of the present-day peasant communities of Sandia was the political culmination of long-term change in the peasant economy of this region.