The Spanish conquest implied the capture of the Andean imaginario by the new overlords, an open-ended and variegated process still in train today. This capture is not merely an appropriation, however, but rather a continuing dialectic which is sometimes uneven, sometimes reciprocal. Multiple processes of acculturation have generated various degrees of hybridity, sometimes resulting in a true synthesis. This process reaches beyond mutual borrowings, appropriations and impositions; it is often creative, so much so that the resultant hybridities sometimes border on the fantastic, such that were they fiction, they would easily fit under the rubric of ‘magical realism’. And these outcomes either represent or at least involve the creation of new imaginarios – perhaps as good a definition of syncretism as any – which in turn evolve in new directions. In such encounters, Europeans gazed calmly from without, mulling over the stream of reports of the fabulous that impinged upon their consciousness, while the Andean Other scrambled furiously to construct an identity that would be acceptable to their new masters, and which might preserve some vestige of the erstwhile fealty accorded the former Incan elite by their native Andean subjects. It was a tall order to sell the notion of a post-colonial Incan aristocratic caste to conquerers and conquered alike, both of whom, it may be surmised, held this anachronistic nobility in some contempt, for different reasons but in roughly equal measure.

Memories are cheap, but all that the surviving Incas had to sell was their past. They were imagining a community, but it was a past community. The success with which they drew on this memory and cobbled it to borrowings from the newly hegemonic culture would determine their place, their survival, within the new Spanish order. Their future was a ‘future past’. Save for a scattering of nobles who had materially assisted the conquest, either before or after the fall of the city of Cuzco, their claim to noble status was based principally on lineage and kinship. Claims based on Incaic lineage were on the whole paltry and insufficient in Spanish eyes, for all that kinship and inheritance were themselves pillars of Spanish society and thus colonialism. Indeed, these qualities were at the heart of occidental notions of the aristocratic.