here also repays closer inspection. The image’s creator, the
Jeronymite Diego de Ocaña, claimed to have rendered the
image with the Indians’ self-identification and affections
foremost in mind: “Since I painted her a little dark, and the
Indians are like that, they said that That Lady was more
beautiful than the other images, and [that] they loved her a
lot because she was of their colour.” Among other aspects of
his orchestration of new devotions around this image in Po-
tosí, Ocaña quickly mobilized the Franciscan preacher Luis
Jerónimo de Oré to preach to the Indians in their tongue
about the history of the original Virgin of Guadalupe and
about the transfer of this celestial advocate’s powers through
the new image to their place. (Ocaña, c. 1599–1608, fols.
159r, 163v; Mills, 2003). A miraculous narrative tradition
was being added to and reshaped in Potosí as new Andean
stories were being spun.
AN ANDEAN CHRISTIAN INTERCULTURE. The cult of the
saints offers an aspect of the Catholic Christian system that
appealed to colonial native Andeans as much for its familiari-
ty as for its access to new local powers. In highly interactive
regions such as the Andean zones on which Spanish Chris-
tians began to impinge in the 1530s, that which was foreign
was not unexpected. The foreign and novel might—like a
new huaca, like the concept of the devil—require under-
standing initially in terms that would allow definition within
emerging systems of meaning and practice. But the allure
and utility of unfamiliar expressions of sacred power were
tied to their perceived ability to summon valuable powers
from “outside” (Helms, 1993). In time, visual expressions of
Christ, the Virgin Mary, and other saints appear to have of-
fered this kind of power for many native Andeans. Closer
studies need to be made of a variety of divine personalities
and sacred territories over time to understand whether the
associations and competences of particular huacas are related
in any way to the specializations of saints as advocates and
if a tendency away from highly localised and specificist saints
and toward generalist advocates such as the Virgin and
Christ proposed by William Christian (1981) for contempo-
rary rural Castile plays out in cultic developments in the co-
lonial Spanish Americas. But what is clear is that the saints
became principal inhabitants and powers within what
Thomas Cummins has called a contested but mutual “cul-
tural area between Catholic intention and Andean reception”
(Cummins, 1995; 2002, p. 159).
Discovering how the thoughts of contemporaries can
inform us on such matters—and, more often than not, inter-
preting their silences—offers a constant challenge. This is as
true of representations of saints and their developing do-
mains as it is of renderings of the huacas’ pre-Hispanic na-
tures and what had been their catchment areas. Yet even tri-
umphant declarations about the saints that seem to skate
over difficulties and ignore complex possibilities hold prom-
ise for our project. For instance, when considering the fact
that the seventeenth-century Augustinian Creole Antonio de
la Calancha carved up Peru into three devotional zones
watched over by miraculous images of Mary that just so hap-
pened to be nurtured and championed by his religious order,
it can be tempting to throw in the towel. It was, he wrote,
as if the Virgin of Guadalupe in the north coastal valley of
Pacasmayo, the Virgin of Copacabana in Chucuito, and the
Virgin of Pucarani (toward La Paz) were divinely linked and
spread apart so as “to bless [beatificar] the different territories
in which they are venerated, and so as not to tire travelers
and pilgrims when they go in search of them” (Calancha,
[1638] 1974–1982, p. 1362). Yet we must view this as more
than Augustinian pride and claim-making against the en-
croachments of other religious, and more, too, than simply
a solemn register of God’s designs in these friars’ favor. Ca-
lancha’s appeal is arguably also to native Andean devotees
who he knows from experience had once moved across these
very territories according to earlier divine markers and
divisions.
The representations of the Jesuit provincial Rodrigo de
Cabredo in 1600 as he described the work of padres from the
Jesuit college at Cuzco in towns and villages in the region
of Huamanga (modern Ayacucho) in 1599 offer an even
more illuminating example for our purposes. In one place
(probably San Francisco de Atunrucana), the Jesuits had set
to building a new church to replace one struck by lightning
and burned to the ground. In the presence of many people,
including the kuraka, sacred images of the town’s patrons
San Francisco and the Baby Jesus had been enshrined and
a sermon was given in commemorative thanks that local peo-
ple had been freed from their blindness and the clutches of
the devil. According to Cabredo:
One of the principal fruits of this mission was teaching
the Indians about the veneration (adoración) of images,
telling them [first] not to worship (adorar) them as In-
dians do their huacas, and [second] that Christians do
not think that virtue and divinity resides in them [the
images] themselves but, rather, look to what they repre-
sent.... [Teaching] this [matter] is of the utmost im-
portance, because a bad Christian with little fear of God
had sowed a very pernicious and scandalous doctrine in
this pueblo, saying many things against the honor and
reverence that the images deserve.
Cabredo’s emphasis falls ultimately on what was needed to
“remedy the poison the Devil had sown through his minis-
ter” (“Carta anua,” [1600] 1981, pp. 73–76). The notion of
a wandering “bad Christian” as the devil’s instrument, lead-
ing Indians astray with “pernicious and scandalous” confu-
sions about images and huacas, does not fail to raise questions
and suggest complications. For even if this “bad Christian”
did exist, he or she appears to have found a ready audience
for comparative thoughts about saints’ images and huacas, an
audience of Indians at the dawn of the seventeenth century
about whom the Jesuits in Huamanga and well beyond had
grown concerned.
Cross-cultural thinkers and mobilizers—contemporary
people who conceptualized, influenced, and reflected reli-
gious in-betweens in the colonial Andes—offer perhaps the
most remarkable indications of why and how the cult of theSOUTH AMERICAN INDIANS: INDIANS OF THE COLONIAL ANDES 8611