Prologue: cacicas in the early Spanish Caribbean / Ida Altman
Introduction / Sara Vicuña Guengerich and Margarita R. Ochoa
Part I: North and Central America. The cacicas of Teotihuacan: early colonial female power and wealth / Bradley Benton
Founding mothers: the tapias of Querétaro, 1571-1663 / Peter B. Villella
Doña Marcela and the cacicas of bourbon Mexico City: family, community, and indigenous rule / Margarita R. Ochoa
Sinking fortunes: two female caciques and an ex-gobernadora in the kingdom of Guatemala, 1700-1821 / Catherine Komisaruk
Part II: South America. "Women were governing before the Spanish entered in this kingdom": the institutionalization of the cacica from the north coast of Peru / Karen B. Graubart
Public voice and political authority: native female leadership in the sixteenth-century northern Andes / Chantal Caillavet
Cacicas, land, and litigation in seventeenth-century Chincha, Peru / Liliana Pérez Miguel and Renzo Honores
A royalist cacica: Doña Teresa Choquehuanca and the postrebellion natives of the Peruvian highlands / Sara Vicuña Guengerich
Peacemaker cacicas in the Río de la Plata southern frontier / Florencia Roulet
Conclusion: to be cacica in colonial times
the rhetoric of "Pureza" / Mónica Díaz
Appendix: Cacicas in Nicaragua, 1522-1550 / Patrick S. Werner