ABSTRACT
Spanish chroniclers helped reshape memory in the early modern Catholic world while also negotiating between local contexts and universal concerns. In one particularly well-documented instance, an actual wooden cross was discovered in Carabuco, an indigenous community on the shores of Lake Titicaca in the Andean highlands of colonial Peru, at the turn of the seventeenth century. The story thereafter travelled with Spanish and Portuguese clerics to the Southern Cone, from Brazil to Paraguay and the Andes, where, in the hands of seventeenth-century chroniclers, it was to receive its most enthusiastic and prolific treatment. While seventeenth-century chroniclers would soon make much hay out of these traces and hints of an Andean apostolic relic, our source is rather reticent on this count. While the tale of an apostle to the Andes seems to have been overlaid upon the pre-existing story of a figure named Tunupa who would return someday, the Cross of Carabuco was only created by native Andeans.
