The year 2024 marks an important double anniversary for the journal The Americas. On the one hand, it marks 80 years of publication, with the first issue dated July 1944. On the other, it marks the quincentenary of the arrival of the first Franciscans to North America, when the first group of missionary friars landed in what is now Mexico. The history of the journal is rooted in the Franciscan Order. In April 1944 Franciscan historians from throughout North America met in Washington, DC, and founded the Academy of American Franciscan History. The goal of the Academy, as articulated in the records of that inaugural meeting is to “discover and assemble documents and books of Franciscan interest, to compile a complete bibliographical index of American Franciscana, to edit and publish documents, and to issue original historical works.”1 The Academy additionally pledged to publish a journal, a quarterly review of inter-American cultural history: The Americas.

When the future Brazilian independence hero José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva turned 20 years old in 1783, he left Brazil to study at the University of Coimbra, as his generation’s privileged sons did. Upon graduating, he embarked on a lengthy government-sponsored trip to study mineralogy across Europe. From 1790, he immersed himself in the latest scientific doctrines and mining techniques in France, Denmark, Sweden, northern Italy, and most importantly German territories. After 10 years of traveling, he began teaching at Coimbra and Portugal’s Mint and then took over a new Intendancy of Mines tailor-made for his new qualifications. He returned to Brazil only in 1819 after 36 years away.

This essay presents the first comprehensive analysis of a series of land deeds prepared by the Laraos of Yauyos, Peru, during the First General Land Inspection to secure title to farm- and pasturelands. Scholars have shown the centrality of this first general inspection for the country’s agrarian history, but almost invariably reducing it to the appropriation of native lands and the formation of colonial rural estates. Many works have explored the mechanisms by which Spanish actors secured title to formerly indigenous lands during the Inspection, the start of a process that has been recently termed “the great dispossession.” Much less attention has been placed, however, on the strategies of native Andean commoner groups that not only used the Land Inspection to protect their holdings but also relied on it to break away from their original villages, acquire new lands, establish new settlements, and accrue recognition as independent communities. Through the analysis of the Laraos primordial titles, I show that, key in this process was the collection of narratives and the performance of walkabouts that, when committed to writing in the form of title-maps and witness testimonies, gave communities-in-the-making the necessary tools to succeed in these self-directed projects of commoner colonization.