an religious error through the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries (Mills, 1994; Mills, 1997).
Spanish churchmen who were commissioned as inspec-
tors of “idolatry” in the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-
century archdiocese of Lima sometimes found precisely what
an earlier Santillán or Acosta might have guessed they would
find among so persistently credulous a people. They found
the latest, elastic work of the devil. Did it ever seem too easy
to these inspectors when Indian witnesses who appeared be-
fore them sometimes confessed that they ministered to fig-
ures whom they called the devil? Part of what the devil repre-
sented in this emerging religious reality was evidence of self-
Christianization, that unpredictable by-product of uneven
Spanish evangelization. After all, diabolic explanations for
the huaca complex of beliefs and practices in pre-Hispanic
and emerging colonial Andean religious life had, for genera-
tions, been broadcast in Quechua in schools for the sons of
regional nobles, during confession, and from the pulpits in
Andean churches. Not surprisingly, the huaca-like appear-
ance, nature, and competences of these reported “devils”
were unmistakable and continued to change (Mills, 1997).
While the wild omnipresence of these Andean devils only
served to confirm many Spanish churchmen in their under-
standing of who had spoken through the huacas and made
them seem so powerful to indigenous people all along, it
should signal rather more to us.
What remains pertinent is the fact that the devil was an
originally Spanish Christian idea that, through persistence of
association and gradual processes of selective appropriation
and reinvention, had been reconstituted and internalized by
Indians. If reconfigured Andean “devils” had lodged inside
a transforming huaca complex, what other originally foreign,
extraordinary things encouraged by Spanish Christian ef-
forts, and simultaneously attractive and useful to native An-
deans, had also been brought within the ordinary?
A NATURALIZATION OF IMAGES AND INSTITUTIONS. Some
of the ways in which colonial Catholic Christianity was lived
in the Andes recalled older indigenous forms and purpose,
and thus encouraged a gradual transformative process. For
example, when new population centers and administrative
districts coincided or approximated older territorial under-
standings, this integrative process began with the settling of
extended kin groups (ayllus) in new towns (reducciones de in-
dios). It is impossible to generalize about the consequences.
Proximity to huacas, and the bodies of mallquis too, com-
bined with a sporadic or unevenly demanding Catholic cleri-
cal presence, encouraged everything from survivals through
coexistence to innovative fusions (Mills, 1994, 1997; Gose,
2003). Even when such “new” communities failed in the
wake of the late sixteenth-century epidemics, or were aban-
doned because of excessive tribute exactions or Spanish and
mestizo interlopers, the more remote places and hamlets into
which Indian families settled reflected changes. The churches
and chapels that went up in very small and remote places
suggested more than a hankering for “annex” or secondary
parish status. “Arguments in stone,” or at least in adobe
blocks, could be made by native Andean Christians as well
as by hopeful church officials (Brown, 2003, pp. 29–32).Sacred images and the voluntary lay religious associa-
tions (cofradías, confraternities) around them sometimes
coaxed new religious allegiance directly out of older ones, as
in the cases in which confraternities of Indians took over the
herds and lands dedicated to the kin groups’ huacas and mal-
lquis. Like Andean people at the sacrament of baptism, and
like Indian towns themselves, members of the lay associa-
tions took on a saint as an advocate and protector, and these
became new markers of identity and difference. But if the
rise of an image-centered, confraternity Christianity was en-
couraged by a striking convergence of Andean needs with the
arriving European institution (Celestino and Meyers, 1981;
Garland Ponce, 1994), the reimagination of what came to-
gether, and the answers cofradías proferred to colonial lives,
were just as crucial. The cofradías facilitated new kinds of be-
longing especially for displaced individuals and kin groups
in parts of the colonial world where older kinship ties had
fragmented or where resettlements and work regimes kept
people far from their home territories. In these conditions,
new generations were born. A parish and, even more, a co-
fradía, appears to have offered spaces in which members
might come together for each other and themselves. Indian
cofradías emerged in such great numbers by the late sixteenth
century that churchmen worried openly about their lack of
supervision. Prelates from at least the time of the Third Pro-
vincial Council of Lima (1582–1583) attempted to discour-
age new foundations among Indians (Vargas Ugarte, 1951–
1954, vol. 1, p. 360). The discouragement was not always
observed by churchmen, let alone by indigenous cofrades, nor
did thriving lay associations of Indians fall obediently into
decay. According to the Jesuit provincial Rodrigo de Cabre-
do, the principal Jesuit-sponsored confraternity of Indians in
Potosí, that of San Salvador (sometimes called Santa Fe),
boasted “more than 1,000 Indian men and women” in 1602.
Contemporary observers wrote admiringly of the religious
leadership of female confraternity members in particular and
of the care they gave the image of the Baby Jesus in the Jesuit
church (“Carta anua del año de 1602,” [1603] 1986,
pp. 231–233; Ocaña, c. 1599–1608, fol. 181r).Catholic Christianity’s convergence, through the saints,
with structures that had guided the operations of an older
huaca complex do not offer straight and easy answers or a
singular “way” in which change occurred. In the middle of
the seventeenth century, the indigenous parishioners in the
town of San Pedro de Hacas, Cajatambo, revealed something
of the complexity of the colonial religiosity and culture at
hand. In testimonies before an investigator of their “errors”
between 1656 and 1658, they explained how their local
huaca, Vicho Rinri, was annually consulted on the eve of the
Catholic festival of the town’s eponymous patron. What was
more, their celebrations had come to feature sacred dances,
indigenous ritual confessions, and Andean offerings to SaintSOUTH AMERICAN INDIANS: INDIANS OF THE COLONIAL ANDES 8609