focuses on commonly overlooked institutional and social mechanisms which enabled Indians to assert themselves as a separate people in the very heart of Spain's New World Empire, the city of Lima and its hinterland. Despite being substantially outnumbered by non-Indians throughout the colonial period, the valley's Indians developed an ethnic consciousness by the skillful appropriation of aspects of Spanish culture and by salvaging some elements of the indigenous past. Paradoxically, the Indians made Spanish transplants like the religious confraternity, will-making, godparenthood, their own, which consequently provided them the means for controlling their daily lives.