Peter in the home of his standard’s honorary bearer. While
the officiating Spanish judge and his notary insisted that the
huaca was being asked permission (as the devil might wish)
and that the activities of the saint’s guardians and the inti-
mate sacrifices before the representation were the height of
irreverence, our interpretative options should not close so
readily. It seems more likely that for at least some of the pa-
rishioners of Hacas, Saint Peter had been brought within an
emerging system in ways that altered but did not interrupt
older religious allegiances and understandings (Mills, 1994).
Reproducibility offers another critical theme to consid-
er. Just as important huacas developed multiple personalities
and specializations, generating expressions of themselves in
other places, so too was it common for saints to transcend
their original forms, functions, and places through networks
of image “copies” and shrines. In this sense, the local reli-
gious enthusiasms of Spanish Christianity for images, newly
defended and refortified at the Council of Trent (Christian,
1981a, 1981b) were planted in most fortuitous soil. In some
cases, huacas themselves were Christianized, morphing into
saintly personages as their places became sacred shrines in the
Catholic system (Sallnow, 1987, p. 54). Like ambitious hua-
cas who, through their ministers and often out of necessity,
tied their fortunes to Inca rulers or speculated through “chil-
dren” in widening locations, Christ, Mary, and the other
saints were amenable to being co-opted, copied, and reener-
gized in new environments. Many sacred images, either
brought originally from Europe or made in the Andes but
based upon Old World models, both capitalized on their cu-
rious novelty and shed their identity as foreigners, becoming
“localized and... renewed” in the Andes, as elsewhere
(Dean, 1996, p. 174; Gruzinski, 1990). Whether “new” ex-
pressions or faithful copies, saints became local originals, fa-
voring a horizontal approach to religious matters similar to
that which Santillán, the Dominicans, and others had so
worried over among the Yunga. William B. Taylor’s words
on the character and development of “devotional landscapes”
in colonial Mexico apply just as usefully to our understand-
ing of how saints appealed to and worked for the colonial
descendants of the Yunga and their Andean neighbors: “Peo-
ple were likely to be interested in more than one shrine or
saint,” Taylor writes, “and felt a more intense devotion to
one or another at a particular time, as the array of saints’ im-
ages available in most churches suggests; and devotees may
never have actually visited the shrine of a favourite image or
relic” (Taylor, 2004).
The working of saints’ images and their copies can be
partly explained through the “familiar” language and associa-
tions used most often to elucidate divine connections and ex-
pansion. Spanish, Indian, and mestizo descriptions of huacas
as ancestors, husbands, wives, and progeny, and of them-
selves as the children of these beings, abound. Idioms of kin-
ship and marriage that had symbolized interrelationships and
subtle hierarchies between huacas and their peoples offered
affectionate titles and also a vocabulary for characterizing as-
sociations between the images of saints and Christ and their
colonial groupings of people. Early-seventeenth-century Ay-
mara speakers on the shores of Lake Titicaca, for instance,
were said to have bestowed the title of mamanchic (maman-
cheq), “mother of all,” upon Francisco Tito Yupanqui’s
sculpture of the Virgin of the Candlemas at Copacabana
(Ramos Gavilán, [1621] 1988; Salles Reese, 1997, p. 162).
Similarly, their contemporaries, indigenous mineworkers
and their wives and families in Potosí, flocked to a miracu-
lous painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe from Extremadura
in the church of San Francisco whom they called the señora
chapetona, “the new lady in the land” (Ocaña, c. 1599–1608,
fols. 159r). Such familiar and localizing designations abound
for images of Mary (Dean, 2002, pp. 181–182), but they
were not confined to her. As Thierry Saignes has found, the
inhabitants of main Andean towns sometimes included (and
subordinated) the sacred images of annex hamlets in a re-
markably similar fashion: “the crosses and statues that deco-
rated the village chapels were considered the ‘sons-in-law’ of
those belonging to the church in town” (Saignes, 1999,
p. 103).
The Marian images featured above are, of course, only
two of many. They offer illustrative examples of the signifi-
cance of multiplication and circulation and of a wider range
of devotional networks across the Andean zone and early
modern world. It is to ponder only an inviting surface to
note that Tito Yupanqui’s Our Lady of Copacabana from the
early 1580s both was and was not an Andean “original.” Her
Indian maker famously modeled his Virgin of the Candlemas
on a statue of Our Lady of the Rosary brought from Seville
to the Dominican convent and church in Potosí, an image
that had caught his eye and fired his devotion when he was
learning his art in the silver-mining center (Mills et al., 2003,
pp. 167–172). The miraculous image at Copacabana herself
quickly spawned many sculpted and portrait “copies” that
were enshrined in chapels across the Andes. These local cop-
ies grew more compelling to devotees by signaling their con-
nection to the divine presence of their originals. Some began
to sweat, others moved, and many were judged responsible
for interceding with God to produce miracles, the narratives
of which spread in the street and were broadcast from the
pulpits and pages of clerical promoters and patrons. In the
case of a copy of the Virgin of Copacabana among a group
of disgruntled, resettled Indians in Lima’s Cercado, the
image reportedly cried for attention and devotion, prompt-
ing decades of contest not only over the purported miracles
but over her rightful place and constituency. The intersect-
ing roles of different Indian groups, African slaves, prelates,
secular clergy, and Jesuits in this case defy simple expla-
nations.The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe de Extremadura
painted by Ocaña in Potosí can seem a more straightforward
case, that of an official purveyor’s painstakingly faithful ex-
pression of a Spanish original being transplanted in the
Andes. Yet the localization and rooting of a new expression8610 SOUTH AMERICAN INDIANS: INDIANS OF THE COLONIAL ANDES