Abstract

From the European invasion of the Andes in 1532 and the establishment of colonial society, there was an intense struggle over memories: between the memories collected and rewritten by Europeans and those that the Andean populations sought to preserve. In the former, androcentric bias rendered women and the spaces they had occupied in pre-Hispanic Andean societies invisible. The latter, on the other hand, struggled to construct narratives that restored the protagonism women had once held. This was possible because Andean men and women managed to retain a certain degree of enunciative autonomy, despite colonial restraints, and because they used their own recording systems, such as the qeros, to inscribe their own stories and memories, thereby escaping colonial control. From a sample of 37 sixteenth-century qeros we were able to rescue visual narratives depicting female subjects, sometimes alone or sometimes accompanied by male figures. We identified three new sets of visual signifiers corresponding to colonial-era Andean memories in which female subjects play a significant role. Drawing on colonial lexicons, we propose that the enunciative category of Andean memories was the concept of runa, which referred equally to men or women, and women and men, and that it was Spanish chroniclers and authorities who masculinized the term, thereby rendering the female subjects invisible or erasing them entirely from these narratives chroniclers and authorities who masculinized the term, making the female subjects invisible or erasing them from these accounts.