ABSTRACT
In this essay, I will examine the making of a Christian indigenous elite in Cuzco through the history of a little-studied institution, the beaterio, and the practice of cloistered Catholic religious life by Cuzco’s beatas. The archival paper trail left by such communities of women in colonial Peru is hard to find, since beaterios on the whole were far less prosperous, solid institutions than their more prestigious counterparts, cloistered convents. We have tended to marginalize beatas and beaterios from the histories we write.2 I myself left them on the margins of the research I did on Cuzco’s cloistered nuns and the city’s broader spiritual economy (Burns, 1999). I was trying to understand the intricate practices that ‘married’ the city’s creole aristocracy, through its daughters, to cloistered convents, sources of credit and spiritual benefits. From this perspective, Cuzco’s convents were at the heart of a complex network of relationships and investments that created and reproduced Spanish hegemony – a world of interests shaped by considerations of honour and dominated by aristocratic clans. Beaterios, relatively poor and undocumented, were (for my purposes) decidedly off to one side.
