The shimmering silver of Potosí radically remade global networks of economic, intellectual, and artistic exchange throughout the early modern world. But in the shadow of the Cerro Rico, a much smaller mining industry emerged in the colonial Andes: the extraction of wak’as, or sacred spaces where believers buried textiles and metallic goods to facilitate connections with ancestors. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish colonial officials and Catholic authorities went back and forth on whether and how to sanction and tax the mining of these holy underground deposits. Owners of wak’a mining firms thus navigated a complex and shifting administrative landscape in order to secure licenses for their work – one that produced a rich documentary record of an extractive industry that was otherwise wrapped in secrecy. By comparing the legal strategies that Black, Indigenous, and Spanish business owners used to secure licenses, this talk uses an understudied notarial corpus to suggest how subjects from different racial, ethnic, and artisan classes positioned themselves in relationship to the state, to sacred Andean space, and to new forms of colonial community.
Originally published at romancelanguages.nd.edu.