The Feast-day of Nuestra Señora de Loreto, 1692

On 22 August 1692 a remarkable ceremony took place in and from the Chapel of Our Lady of Loreto. It was the occasion of the customary annual fiesta and procession of the Virgin, whose cofradía was located in the chapel, adjacent to La Compañía on Cuzco's Plaza de Armas. There was nothing extraordinary about a religious procession wending its way through the old Inca capital. Apart from the great religious festivals such as Corpus Christi and Semana Santa, such processions were a regular feature of daily life in colonial times. A glance through Diego Esquivel y Navia's Noticias cronológicas de la gran ciudad del Cuzco (c. 1749) indicates that such processions – whether confraternity santo celebrations, rosaries, friars’ devotions, good news from the court, earthquakes, inclement weather, and so forth – were abundant in colonial life. What was most singular about the Loreto fiesta and procession is that it appears to have been celebrated principally by the Inca nobles of Cuzco. The apparent reason why a description of this ceremony has come down to us is that the father of the ‘alcalde mayor . . . de los Ingas nobles’, one Don Juan Sicos Inga, arranged for a notary to record the proceedings. This bureaucratic twist relates to the perennial need for noble families to possess legal documentation of their noble status, the better to guard against sporadic official attempts to classify such families as non-noble, thereby rendering them liable for tribute and labour service. Of perhaps even more moment, any such re-classification as a tributary would have devastating ramifications for social status in a society in which inherited status and honour often overrode wealth in calibrating an individual's place and prestige in the social order. It is due entirely to such prosaic circumstances that we have an account of this ceremony, which provides a unique window on to colonial Incaic ritual praxis and the construction of a distinct colonial Incaic identity.

The procession commenced with the removal of the standard of ‘Nuestra Señora de Loreto’ from the chapel, in which the the Virgin's cofradía ‘is founded’.