The Family of Pedro Yaya (Peru, 1631)

There is a remarkable range and variety of ways people have described degrees of consanguinity–or the allowed relations between those who could marry. These include legal and religious treatises; many of what we see for the early Americas are from Europeans and/ or Christians who were seeking to convert and then to police the practices of Indigenous people. This genealogy of Pedro Yaya is meant to show relations in his family; it accompanies the (long) text written by Juan Pérez Bocanegra and published in Lima in 1631 titled Ritual formulario, e institucion de curas, para administrar a los naturales de este reyno, los santos sacramentos del baptismo, confirmacion, eucaristia, y viatico, penitencia, extremauncion, y matrimonio (that’s the short title!). It describes/ prescribes ritual practices including for marriage. Bocanegra worked in Indigenous languages including Quechua, and by using the illustration of individuals in Indigenous dress, Emily Lloyd argues, he “visually incorporate[s] the native population into the orderly familial structures of Catholic society….it imposes early modern patriarchal Catholic family structures onto its Indigenous constituents.”