This essay presents the first comprehensive analysis of a series of land deeds prepared by the Laraos of Yauyos, Peru, during the First General Land Inspection to secure title to farm- and pasturelands. Scholars have shown the centrality of this first general inspection for the country’s agrarian history, but almost invariably reducing it to the appropriation of native lands and the formation of colonial rural estates. Many works have explored the mechanisms by which Spanish actors secured title to formerly indigenous lands during the Inspection, the start of a process that has been recently termed “the great dispossession.” Much less attention has been placed, however, on the strategies of native Andean commoner groups that not only used the Land Inspection to protect their holdings but also relied on it to break away from their original villages, acquire new lands, establish new settlements, and accrue recognition as independent communities. Through the analysis of the Laraos primordial titles, I show that, key in this process was the collection of narratives and the performance of walkabouts that, when committed to writing in the form of title-maps and witness testimonies, gave communities-in-the-making the necessary tools to succeed in these self-directed projects of commoner colonization.