1. Without the pioneering work of scholars in Andean social history, particularly those who laid the foundations of Andean ethnohistory and whose interdisciplinary studies grounded our views about the contribution of Andeans to colonial society, the study of cultural mediation would not have been possible. A few such titles include Rostworowski, María, History of the Inca Realm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Rostworowski, , Curacas y sucesiones. Costa Norte (Lima, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005)Google Scholar; Pease, Franklin, Curacas, reciprocidad y riqueza (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1992)Google Scholar; Galindo, Alberto Flores, Buscando un Inca. Identidad y utopía en los Andes (Lima: Sur. Casa de Estudios del Socialismo, 2008)Google Scholar; Salomon, Frank, Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ramírez, Susan, El mundo al revés. Contactos y conflictos transculturales en el Perú del siglo XVI (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2002)Google Scholar; Ramirez, , To Feed and Be Fed: The Cosmological Bases of Authority and Identity in the Andes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Spalding, Karen, Huarochirí, An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Stern, Steve J., Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Poloni-Simard, Jacques, El mosaico indígena (Quito: Abya-Yala, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Adorno, Rolena, “Images of Indios Ladinos in Early Colonial Peru,” in Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century, Andrien, Kenneth J. and Adorno, Rolena, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar. As is well known, a sizeable portion of Adorno's scholarship from the 1980s and 1990s focuses on don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. She develops a careful textual analysis of this work, reconstructs the history of the work's production, and analyses crucial issues of the author's multiple identities, transculturation, and various roles as cultural translator within and outside the Andean world. See among others Guaman Poma. Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (Austin: Texas University Press, 1986); and From Oral to Written Expression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period. (Syracuse: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, 1982).

3. Encomenderos were usually former conquistadors or their children, who had been granted Indian labor grants or encomiendas. Corregidores were Spanish provincial magistrates.

4. Titles include, among others, Poloni-Simard, Jacques, “Los indios ante la justicia. El pleito como parte de la consolidación de la sociedad colonial,” in Máscaras, tretas y rodeos del discurso colonial en los Andes, Lavallé, Bernard, ed. (Lima: IFEA/PUCP, 2005), pp. 177–188 Google Scholar; Graubart, Karen, “De Qadis y Caciques,” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d'Études Andines 37:1 (2008), pp. 83–96 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; José Carlos de la Puente Luna, “Into the Heart of the Empire. Indian Journeys to the Habsburg Royal Court” (PhD diss.: Texas Christian University, 2010); De la Puente Luna “The Many Tongues of the King: Indigenous Language Interpreters and the Making of the Spanish Empire”; Mumford, Jeremy M. “Litigation as Ethnography in Sixteenth-Century Peru: Polo de Ondegardo and the Mitimaes,” Hispanic American Historical Review 88:1 (2008), pp. 5–40 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Charles, John D., Allies at Odds: The Andean Church and Its Indigenous Agents, 1583–1671 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Charles, “Felipe Guaman Poma en los foros de la justicia eclesiástica,” in Los indios, el derecho canónico y la justicia eclesiástica en la América virreinal, Ana de Zaballa Beascoechea, ed. (Madrid; Frankfurt:Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2011), pp. 203–222; Charles, , “‘More Ladino than Necessary’: Indigenous Litigants and the Language Policy Debate in Mid-Colonial Peru,” Colonial Latin American Review 16:1 (2007), pages 23–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Renzo Honores, “La asistencia jurídica privada a los señores indígenas ante la Real Audiencia de Lima, 1552–1570,” paper delivered at the annual conference of the Latin American Studies Association (Dallas, 2003); and Honores, “Caciques as Legal Benefactors: Cacical Legal Offensive in the Andes, 1550–1572,” paper delivered at the 123rd Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (New York, 2009). For colonial Mexico, see the seminal works of Borah, Woodrow Wilson, Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court in Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half Real (Los Angeles: University of Calidornia Press, 1983)Google Scholar.; Kellogg, Susan, Law and Transformation of the Aztec Society, 1500–1700 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Owensby, Brian P., Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; and Yannakakis, Yanna, The Art of Being in-Between.Natives Intermediaries, Indian Identity and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

5. Such a discussion started in the 1980s with some scholars maintaining that, while granting momentary legal victories, litigation furthered internal tensions and social differentiation in Andean communities while strengthening Spanish hegemony in the long run. See Spalding, Huarochirí, pp. 135, 57–58, 223–229; and Stern, Peru's Indian Peoples, chapt. 5. See a rebuttal to this assumption in José Carlos de la Puente Luna, “Into the Heart of the Empire: Indian Journeys to the Habsburg Royal Court.” Karen Graubart also discusses the actual degree of caciques’ authority in the república de indios in response to diverging opinions by some scholars (Susan Ramírez, David Cahill). Even though Andean communities’ rights were respected and redefined by Spanish law, Graubart maintains in “Qadis and Caciques” that caciques still managed to retain authority in the domestic affairs of their communities. Dueñas's essay in this issue agrees that the greater prominence of indigenous cabildos in litigation and other higher legal pursuits in the late colonial years suggests that these governing councils became the locus of Indian authority, as the Bourbons were interested in undermining the traditional rule of the caciques.

6. Rama, Ángel, La ciudad letrada (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1984)Google Scholar. According to Rama, the order of the Spanish monarchy in America was largely wielded in the colonial city halls of the escribanos, administrative offices, the courts, and the church by a specialized elite of lettered men or letrados imbued with a sense of sacred mission to protect and execute the orders of the supreme metropolitan authority. These men built the discursive edifice of law and religion through their exclusive ownership of writing, which produced the hegemony of Spain's empire in America. Rama's concept of ‘Lettered City’ made scholars aware of the importance of writing and law for the consolidation of Spanish control in America. In a painstaking juridical analysis of primary documents about the formation of a colonial hacienda, Jorge Armando Guevara Gil fleshes out the ways in which writing and law were mutually reinforcing in the creation and concentration of private land ownership in the Andes, which in turn gave birth to the colonial hacienda system. Gil, Guevara, Propiedad agraria y derecho colonial. Los documentos de la hacienda Santotis. Cuzco (1543–1822), (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial, 1993)Google Scholar.

7. Dueñas, Alcira, Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City´´: Reshaping Justice, Social Hierarchy, and Political Culture in Colonial Peru (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rappaport, Joanne and Cummins, Tom, Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2012)Google Scholar. For Mexico, see among others McDonough, Kelly S. “Indigenous Intellectuals in Early Colonial Mexico: The Case of Antonio del Rincón, Nahua Grammarian and Priest,” Colonial Latin American Review 20 (2011), pp. 145–165 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yanna Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between; and Ramos, Gabriela and Yannakakis, Yanna, Indigneous Intellectuals, Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These studies draw on the analytical tools of law and legal history, anthropology, literary studies, art history, and ethnohistory to peer into the mental world of Andeans and their cultural practices in colonial interstitial spaces.

8. For a review of scholarship on the legal history of indigenous actors in royal courts in colonial Mexico and colonial Peru from a comparative perspective, see Yannakakis, Yanna, “Indigenous Peoples and Legal Culture,” History Compass 11:11 (2013), pp. 931–947 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Yannakakis sees the colonial courts as conflict resolution spaces that allowed for the intercultural exchange of Andean and Spanish legal knowledge and reformulation of legal culture. Among other comprehensive studies on indigenous legal culture for colonial Mexico, see Baber, Jovita, “Native Litigiousness, Cultural Change and the Spanish Legal System in Tlaxcala, New Spain (1580–1640),” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 24:2 (2001) pages 94–106 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

The studies on ethnolegal history for colonial Mexico also benefitted from antecedents grounded in the New Philology school of ethnohistorical research, which were based on sources written in the various Mesoamerican native languages. See among others Lockhart, James, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Restall, Matthew, The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550–1850 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Terraciano, Kevin, The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui History, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Mesoamerican Voices: Native-Language Writings from Colonial Mexico, Oaxaca, Yucatan, and Guatemala, Matthew Restall, Lisa Sousa, and Kevin Terraciano, eds. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

9. See among others Mignolo, Walter and Boone, Elizabeth, Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Thomas. B. Cummins, “We Are the Other: Peruvian Portraits of Colonial Kurakakuna, in Transatlantic Encounters, Andrien and Adorno, eds., pp. 203–231. Cummins uses colonial portraits of kurakas to ponder whether kurakakuna continued to draw chiefly authority after the conquest, and to attempt to discern changes in the kuraka's governance. R. Tom Zuidema, “Guaman Poma and the Art of Empire: Toward an Iconography of Inca Royal Dress,” in Transatlantic Encounters, Andrien and Adorno, section III, pp. 151–202. For a critical approach to the issue of cultural translation in the visual domain, see Cummins, Thomas. B., “From Lies to Truth: Colonial Ekphrasis and the Act of Crosscultural Translation,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, Farago, Claire, ed. (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 152–174 Google Scholar.

10. Dean, Carolyn, Inca Bodies and the Body of Christ. Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

11. Ramos, Gabriela, “Nuestra Señora de Copacabana, ¿Devoción india o intemediaria cultural?” in Passeurs: mediadores culturales y agentes de la primera globalización en el mundo ibérico, siglos XIV–XIX, O'Phelan, Scarlett, ed. (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú; Instituto Riva Agüero; Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2005), pp. 163–179 Google Scholar; Stanfield-Mazzi, Maya, “The Possessor's Agency: Private Art Collecting in the Colonial Andes,” Colonial Latin American Review 18:1 (2009), pp. 339–364 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Webster, Susan V., Quito, ciudad de maestros: arquitectos, edificios y urbanismo en el largo siglo XVII (Quito: Abya-Yala; Universidad Central del Ecuador; Fulbright Ecuador, 2012)Google Scholar.

13. The Información was also consistent with the role Toledo had mandated for the escribanos of the indigenous cabildos: to produce written records by ‘reducing’ khipus to written documents. Guillermo Lohmann and María Viejo, Justina Saravia, Francisco de Toledo. Disposiciones gubernativas para el virreinato del Perú 1575–1580, vol. 2 (Seville: EEHA CSIC Monte de Piedad y Caja de Ahorros de Sevilla, 1989, pp. 237–238 Google Scholar. Such an undertaking of linguistic and cultural transformation speaks to Toledo's overall political strategy of colonial consolidation for the viceroyalty of Peru. The Información was itself a piece within his broader strategy to peer deeply into Andean customs, which Jeremy Mumford examined and perceptively designated “colonial ethnography.” See Mumford, Jeremy, Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. In researching the history of document making, Kathryn Burns looks at the production of notarial records as narrative assemblages largely informed by the social and cultural context of the parties involved, and the interests and personal histories of the colonial escribanos or notarial record keepers as well. Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

15. Such a history dated in the Andes from at least 1697, when Andean legal intermediaries crossed the Atlantic to propose and negotiate the 1697 Cédula de Honores. See Alcira Dueñas, Indians and Mestizos in the ‘Lettered City.’

16. Visual literacy and its role in evangelization are widely treated in Rappaport and Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City.

17. Important studies have hitherto focused on each of them as discrete groups. See Martín, José Ramón Jouve, Esclavos de la ciudad letrada. Esclavitud, escritura y colonialismo en Lima (1650–1700), (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005)Google Scholar; O'Toole, Rachel Sara, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McKinley, Michelle, “Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, Law and History Review 28:3 (2010), pp. 749–790 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McKinley, , “Cultural Culprits,” 24 Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice 91 (2009), pp. 91–165 Google Scholar; Graubart, Karen, With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550–1700 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Sara Vicuña Guengerich, “Capac Women and the Politics of Marriage in Early Colonial Peru,” Colonial Latin American Review (forthcoming, 2014); Guengerich, “Indigenous Andean Women in Textual Discourses” (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2009); Premo, Bianca, “Before the Law: Women's Petitions in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire,” Comparative Studies of Society 53:2 (2011), pp. 261–289 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Felipa Braid: Gendered Legal Culture in Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca,” Ethnohistory 61:3 (2014), pp. 497–523; Black, Chad Thomas, Women, the Law, and Political Crisis in Quito, 1765–1830 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and Gauderman, Kimberly, Women's Lives in Colonial Quito: Gender, Law, and Economy in Spanish America (Austin: Texas University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.