Since the publication of Rolando Mellafe's groundbreaking study on the importance of migration in the Viceroyalty of Peru, demographers have emphasized the significance of the city as a factor in colonial Latin American migration patterns. The city has figured prominently in various efforts to characterize general population trends and migrants have been important subgroups in analyses of the censuses of specific cities. Rather than emphasizing the role of the city in migration patterns, this study attempts to address the role of the migrant within the colonial city by utilizing a different data source: the conciertos de trabajo, or labor contracts, governing indigenous workers in seventeenth-century Cuzco. These conciertos yield a variety of data on job descriptions and distributions, periodic crises in the labor market, regional economic patterns, changing family relationships, and growing occupational identification. The detailed information from these valuable notarial documents adds a new and important dimension to the analysis of indigenous migration in colonial Peru.

Although this study emphasizes migrations to the city of Cuzco, such migration did not take place in a vacuum. The city was also an important source for an urban-to-rural population outflow, as urban natives moved into depopulated lands in the countryside. Moreover, broader patterns of indigenous migration affected the provinces surrounding Cuzco. Migration within the bishopric of Cuzco varied dramatically according to regional labor trends and mita obligations, but much of that population movement involved short-scale relocation by individuals who remained within rural society.

These various interrelated patterns of migration had a profound impact on the indigenous communities and played a major role in the formation of colonial society.