The epilogue caps off the book’s argument by examining two formative Catholic religious devotions that structured narratives about identity, community, and citizenship in both Old and New Granada. The narratives provided by the Virgin of Chiquinquirá (New Kingdom) and the Lead Books and relics of Sacromonte (Granada) reconstituted these two “kingdoms” as Christian spaces whose inhabitants, despite whatever pre-miracle ethnic markers they might have carried, were re-branded as native Christians. Those devotion-driven Christian identities made them constituents of a wider, circum-Atlantic community, even as the inclusion of native meanings and symbols molded and transformed Christianity in order to adapt it to fit local exigencies.

Chapter six opens onto a tense confrontation that led the Spanish colonies in the New Kingdom the edge of civil war. As the colonial ideal of two ethnically-pure “republics” for Spaniards and for Indians had already begun to fracture, two indigenous communities identified the mestizo (mixed-ethnicity) sons of indigenous noblewomen as rightful successors to their outgoing caciques (indigenous chieftains). This decision inadvertently set off a chain of events that led to two decades of legal and political challenges. Through analysis of a cluster of legal cases involving aspiring caciques who were legitimate mestizo inheritors according to indigenous custom, this chapter explores the different bodies of law that informed Crown magistrates and administrators as they divided human communities and assigned their human subjects to categories and spaces. Here I also pay close attention to the legal implications of the rhetoric employed by different social factions as the legal cases in the colonies made their way to the Council of the Indies in Spain.