Yet it might be argued that the paradoxes, ironies, exemptions and privileges which Inca nobles had to negotiate were innate to the colonial condition, wherein the identities and status of colonised indigenous elites were rendered at best contingent and at worst anachronistic, and which might even disappear overnight should a colonial official high-handedly decide not to accept documentary proof of noble status. A descendant of Inca emperors might, as a result of such a stroke of the quill, be consigned to the ranks of the tributaries, and neither he nor his descendants might ever be able to climb back to noble ranks. Such social death was contingent upon the vagaries of State census categories and fiscal imperatives, but even so, downward mobility often took place by degrees, through an inter-generational erosion of family fortunes, which were usually meagre in the case of the colonial Inca noblility. This could hardly apply to elites who were an integral part of a ruling class. Indeed, there was clearly a disjunction between the colonial Inca nobility's very lack of power, and the status and prestige to which it laid claim. If on one level they sought to present, in the institution of the Twenty-four Electors of the Alférez Real, a united front to the world, the existence of countervailing claims to noble privilege by elite groups such as the Ayarmaca can only have diluted the Electors’ claim to represent the indigenous nobility. Clearly, there were multiple indigenous nobilities, de facto and de jure: besides the Ayarmaca, there were the inveterate post-conquest enemies of the Incas, the Cañaris, and even the numerous erstwhile ‘incas de privilegio’ in provinces such as Paruro. Beyond these lay a regional network of many hundreds of caciques who often outstripped the Inca nobles in wealth, authority and power, for all that there was some overlap between the two groups.

The fault-lines in this uppermost stratum of indigenous society are most manifest in the ceremonial context, for it is there that annual decisions had to be made concerning precedence and protocol, above all in the election of the indigenous alférez real.