Spanish- Incan Relationships

Spanish-indigenous relationships by nature were coercive. In all circumstances this may not be the case, and especially when pertaining to nobility and the elite in the Incan community; however in the situation of the largest proportion of the population and the sheer nature of all relationships coercion was used in some form. In the case of nobility mixed marriages and arrangements may have been at times beneficial for a temporal period, yet even those arrangements often went sour and resulted in mistreatment of the females in question.

The forced transition in religious doctrine proved to be particularly harmful to women and lead to many coercive and exploitive relationships.  In the church priests would extort tithes from the native population and from the women sexual favors with the fabrication that the act would remove sin or pay the fees. Furthermore, the power that Spaniards held over the population as a whole significantly reduced the power women held previously in society as religious leaders and prominent social figures. Religion to the Incas was more than a part of society, meaning that there was no separation from religion in their lives; their lives were formed by their religion. Women were a part of that, as seen in Guaman Poma de Ayala’s work El Primer Nuevi Crinica y Buen Gobiero, the Sun god and his wives were and integral part of society and no one ever desecrated the sacred notion of the marriage. Moreover, women whom were married to the king, or even his concubines, were treated with much respect and honor for their dedication.   

Irene Silverblatt concludes her piece, entitled In Women and Colonization: Anthological Perspectives, “The women in the puna are living in the ways our ancestors lived years ago, they are defending our customs, they are defending our culture”.  In her work she promotes the notion that the indigenous population had no connection to the brutish Spaniards. The Spanish are ruining their way of life and restructuring their entire civilization. This can be seen in the changing status of women as sacred, to merely objects to be sold and traded. This can be illustrated by the actions taken by the male members of the common class when faced with the possibility of forced mining labor. These men would trade or barter their female relatives to the Spanish in order to avoid the back breaking labor. Previously, this would have been unacceptable behavior.   

These relationships, sexual and social, were by nature coercive because the Spanish though of women as objects to be bought, traded and sold as they saw fit. The Spanish sought to conquer the Incan civilization in every aspect of their lives, including the sexually. The relations in most cases were nothing more than carnal reincarnations and representations of their views on Incan society. The forced changes in politics and economic system exacerbated the decline of women’s status in the Incan Empire. It cannot be speculated that in every single case of sexual relations between a Spaniard and an Incan woman compulsion was used, however the nature of the interactions were, without question acts of conquest rather than consent and desire as the traditional Incan norm.