“Ynuvaciones malas e rreprouadas”

Abstract

Graubart’s essay explores the ways indigenous litigants in and near Lima sought to preserve notions of justice amid the novelty of Spanish law and the pressures of Spanish colonization. She argues that customary practices, rooted in precontact legality, became interdependent with Spanish law, leading Indian leaders to become skilled at managing a zone of legal “entanglement” that was anything but fixed and certain. Graubart uses wills, as well as Native regulation of agricultural leases, urban residences, and wage labor, to discuss labor, property, and resource management to reveal how Spanish law became intelligible to Andean litigants, who operated through mixed legal languages that allowed them to maintain ideas of justice under colonial rule.