We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency (Living in Latin America) - Softcover

University Of Wisconsin Press

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299177947 ISBN 13: 9780299177942

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

Synopsis

The great Andean insurrection has received scant attention by historians of the ""Age of Revolution"", but in this book Sinclair Thompson reveals the connections between ongoing local struggles over Indian community government and a larger anticolonial movement.

About this title

About the Author

Sinclair Thomson is assistant professor of history at New York University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

We Alone Will Rule

Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency By Sinclair Thomson

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Copyright © 2002 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-299-17794-2

Contents

Illustrations............................................................................................................viiPreface and Acknowledgments..............................................................................................ix1. Contours for a History of Power and Political Transformation in the Aymara Highlands..................................32. The Inherited Structure of Authority..................................................................................273. The Crisis of Andean Rule (I): Institutional and Intracommunity Strife................................................644. The Crisis of Andean Rule (II): The Reparto Connection and Breakdown of Mediation.....................................1065. Emancipation Projects and Dynamics of Native Insurgency (I): The Awaited Day of Andean Self-Rule......................1406. Emancipation Projects and Dynamics of Native Insurgency (II): The Storm of War under Tpaj Katari.....................1807. The Aftermath of Insurgency and Renegotiation of Power................................................................2328. Conclusions and Continuations.........................................................................................269Abbreviations............................................................................................................283Notes....................................................................................................................285Bibliography.............................................................................................................351Index....................................................................................................................373

Chapter One

Contours for a History of Power and Political Transformation in the Aymara Highlands

To some, civilization itself seemed to hang in the balance in 1781. To others, it seemed the dawning of a new day, when men and women could live freely and with dignity. In that year, the most powerful anticolonial movement in the history of Spanish rule in the Americas was sweeping across the southern Andes. For Spaniards and the colonial elite as well as for Indian insurgents, it was a decisive time matched only by the sixteenth-century conquest of the continent. Indian leaders imagined now a counterconquest, a "new conquest" of their own; colonial officials likewise saw their campaigns of repression as a "new conquest" or "reconquest" of the realm. One of the two primary theaters of the violent Andean civil war in the early 1780s was La Paz (in present-day Bolivia), a region situated around the southern rim of the Lake Titicaca basin in the heartland of the Aymara-speaking indigenous population. As an exploration of Indian community and peasant politics, this study sets out to recover and illuminate the history of the Aymara people of La Paz in the age that produced the momentous pan-Andean insurrection.

Since the 1720s and 1730s, the Andean region had been the scene of growing turmoil. Local conflicts flared up with increasing frequency throughout the countryside. The exploitative commercial practices of provincial Spanish governors not only wrought hardship among communities but also stirred trenchant opposition. Indian protests poured into the courts. Anticolonial sentiment found expression in prophecies, conspiracies, and occasional revolts. In the 1770s, after Bourbon state officials imposed a set of universally unpopular measures (including higher taxation and stricter control of trade), Andean society reached an explosive conjuncture.

In 1780, a chain of riots expressing Indian, mestizo, and creole discontent with the Bourbon reforms broke out in highland, valley, and coastal cities. In the countryside near Potos, the fabled source of Spain's wealth in silver, local community struggles turned into an armed regional insurgency led by an Aymara-speaking peasant, Toms Katari. In Cuzco, the preconquest capital of Inka territory, Jos Gabriel Condorcanqui Tpac Amaru, an Indian cacique (community governor) and nobleman stepped forth as the direct descendant of the last native sovereign who had been executed by Viceroy Toledo in the sixteenth century. Tpac Amaru called for the expulsion of all Europeans from Peruvian soil and a profound social reordering. The powerful movement that looked to him as its symbolic leader succeeded in liberating a vast expanse of the southern Andean highlands, an area that today encompasses southern Peru and Bolivia. Its repercussions were felt even more broadly, up and down the cordillera ranges from what is today Colombia in the north down to present-day Argentina in the south and from the deserts of the Pacific coast to the tropical lowlands of the Amazonian interior. When the key struggles shifted to La Paz, where the Quechua-speaking commanders from Cuzco teamed up with the Aymara peasant commander Tpaj Katari, the civil war entered its most acute and most violent phase.

From their camps in El Alto, on the rim of the Andean altiplano, or upland plateau, tens of thousands of Aymara peasant warriors looked out over an impressive scene. Below them opened up a wide basin created by the drainage, over tens of thousands of years, of an ancient sea whose waters had flowed down from the highland elevation of thirteen thousand feet (four thousand meters) through highland valleys and lowland foothills out onto the continental floor of the Amazon. Eerily beautiful limestone badlands, in ashen gray, ochre, and reddish earth tones, formed steep walls around the basin. Across the basin and above it, thrusting up into the brilliant Andean skies, the insurgents gazed upon the massive glacial peaks of Mount Illimani (twenty-one thousand feet high, or sixty-four hundred meters), which they worshiped as an awesome ancestral divinity. Beneath its towering tutelary presence, successive waves of settlers over thousands of years had occupied this basin, farming its hillsides, mining its soils for gold, and pasturing native camelids. When the members of the first Spanish expedition arrived in the sixteenth century, they were unaware of the landscape's numinous powers and the layers of human history it had sustained. A Spanish township named La Paz was founded in 1548, in the location that diverse native ethnic groups speaking Aymara, Quechua, and Pukina languages called Choqueyapu.

La Paz served thereafter as the most important commercial nexus between Cuzco and Potos. It was also the main point of Spanish settlement and colonial political control in a highland expanse overwhelmingly occupied by people the Spaniards called "Indians." Yet now, after two and one-half centuries of colonial rule, the city was under full siege and Spanish power was on the verge of destruction.

The Aymara camp was the scene of constant hustle and bustle. Spies brought reports on developments within the city, and messengers conveyed news and letters from northern and southern provinces. The combatants, coming and going from communities around the altiplano, were organized in twenty-four political assemblies (cabildos). At their head, exercising political, military, and spiritual authority, was the fearsome Tpaj Katari, whose name signified "resplendent serpent" in Aymara. Under a vast canopy, Katari presided over the meetings of his military tribunal and celebrated daily mass conducted by captive Spanish clergy. The corpses of enemies and traitors hung from gallows over the city as a terrifying sign of justice.

Streams of Indians wound up and down the ascending walls of the basin, some with mules or llamas bearing weapons and supplies. From the heights of El Alto, the Spanish city far below was a puny cluster of adobe rooftops, rectangular streets, and barricaded walls within which the Spaniards had taken refuge. Outside the walls, all Spanish haciendas had been abandoned. The surrounding Indian parishes had become burnt-out battlefields in which the opposing armies skirmished.

Within the walls of the city, a dwindling population of Europeans, creoles, mestizos, and their Indian dependents held out against attack, hunger, disease, and demoralization. At night Indians stirred up a steady din to keep their enemy on edge. Families were reduced to eating horses, mules, dogs, cats, even animal skins and praying to the Virgin for succor. Church bells tolled in steady mourning.

The siege of La Paz, in its two phases, lasted a total of 184 days. Only in late 1781, and with difficulty, did royalist counterinsurgency troops sent from Buenos Aires finally manage to lift the siege and subdue the main insurgent forces. Katari was captured and quartered in a brutal ceremony, held in the name of God and the king, before a massive assembly of stunned Indians from around the lake district. Subsequent campaigns of pacification swept the La Paz countryside in 1782, wherever pockets of resistance held out. Colonial forces also continued to crack down on new signs of rebel activity elsewhere in the Peruvian realm. In the aftermath of the war, there were ongoing local demands, threats, and mobilizations and a test of strength as communities, local elites, and the Bourbon state sought to redefine colonial power relations.

Approaching Indian and Peasant Politics

The late eighteenth century was a time of deep political upheaval in distant territories of the Atlantic world. In Europe and the Americas, established political regimes and structures of colonial rule were under attack, and revolutionaries espoused and fought for alternative visions of social order. Andean communities rose up almost coincidentally with insurgents in North America and shortly before the sans culottes in France and "black Jacobins" in Saint Domingue (Haiti). Three decades later, creole Spaniards launched the wars that finally achieved independence from Iberian political authority. Given the simultaneity of these movements, it is interesting to note that the pan-Andean insurrection has received scarce mention in the conventional Western historiography of the Age of Revolution. Is this accidental, a case of historiographic oversight? Is it a more significant exclusion? Was insurgency in the Andes, while coincidental in its timing, categorically different from other revolutionary movements of the day?

One possible explanation for the scarce attention is that Iberia and Iberian America are often seen as peripheral to the northern Atlantic axis of power emergent in this period. The empires of Spain and Portugal were indeed straining to reorganize themselves in the late eighteenth century and to compete against their more dynamic imperial neighbors and rivals. It is also the case that France, North America, and England, rather than Spain and Portugal, were the originary sites for the liberal political culture and capitalist political economy that are normally taken as paradigmatic in the revolutionary Atlantic world.

One of the classic assumptions about revolution in this era is that the ideals and examples of liberation swept like a tide from France and North America throughout the rest of the Atlantic world. And yet there is next to no evidence that the pan-Andean insurrection was inspired by French philosophes or prompted by the successes of North American creoles. Nor was it provoked by British secret agents hostile to the Spanish Crown. Unlike the Haitian revolution, which developed in close connection with multilateral political dynamics in the Americas and Europe, the Andean case here again falls outside the conventional paradigm for the revolutionary Atlantic.

Another possible explanation is simply that "enormous condescension of posterity," (E. P. Thompson's memorable phrase) that history shows toward those whose struggles were not victorious and whose aspirations were not in line with what subsequent thinking deems "modern." It is true that the successful revolutionary war waged by slaves in Haiti-which led to the first independent nation in Latin America and the Caribbean and the first to abolish slavery anywhere in the Americas-has met with similar condescension. Yet if the significance of the Haitian revolution has long been displaced from Western historical narratives, the same problems of "silencing" and trivialization have affected, even more acutely, treatments of the pan-Andean insurrection.

Where it has been addressed, the character of the Andean movement is often measured, and found wanting, by dominant liberal and national norms for what constitutes viable, legitimate modern political projects. Tpac Amaru and his followers did not spurn monarchical sovereignty for republican ideals. The ethnic leaders and institutions controlling power staked their political claims on ancestral hereditary, communal, and territorial rights rather than on abstract and ostensibly timeless notions of human rights and individual citizenship. Democracy was present neither as a novel political philosophy nor a system in which a detached stratum of special intermediaries administered public affairs, but as lived forms of communal, decentralized, and participatory political practice. Some writers have miscast the movement as backward looking, seeking to restore a preconquest social order or an early colonial pact with the Spanish Crown. Others have treated it as a typical millenarian, messianic, or utopian nativist revolt-an irrational or doomed expression of the desperation of the downtrodden rather than a political phenomenon worthy of study on its own terms.

Exploration of anticolonial insurgency in the eighteenth-century Andes offers one way to reconsider revolutionary political culture and political organization in a wider light. It allows for a shift away from the standard Western models of the birth of democracy, nation-state formation, and capitalist "modernity," which privilege the northern Atlantic region and bourgeois or creole political agents. It reveals a broader array of revolutionary subjects and emancipatory projects in circulation at the time and the way in which these were produced locally, rather than as a reflection of northern Atlantic experience and consciousness.

The revolutionary Atlantic was less a single oceanic tide than multiple currents flowing simultaneously, with some converging and others following a more separate course. The Andean highlands did not lie outside of a discretely delimited revolutionary world in the eighteenth century, nor is it a site that begs for inclusion within a Western geography of modernity. Like other revolutionary struggles of the time, the Andean insurrection of 1780-1781 was a liberation movement that sought to, and temporarily did, overturn the preexisting regime of domination and place formerly subaltern subjects at the head of the political order. Unlike the others, it was a movement against colonial rule and for self-determination in which native American political subjects made up the fighting corps, held positions of leadership, and defined the terms of struggle. The specific ways in which they envisioned liberty and self-rule and the specific local and regional dynamics out of which their political visions and practices emerged are the primary themes of this book.

In the Andean region itself, the distinctiveness of the great insurrection and its importance are not in question. It has received abundant attention, in proportion to its enormous impact. The events of 1780-1781 affected not only colonial society and imperial reform in the late-eighteenth-century Andes but also the nature of the independence process and subsequent nation-state formation in the nineteenth century. Two centuries later, the insurrection has acquired potent symbolic significance in national political culture and popular movements. In Peru, for example, both the reformist military regime of Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975) and the conservative regime of Morales Bermdez (1975-1978) invoked the insurgent leader from Cuzco while instituting new agrarian and social policy. In Bolivia, the figures of Tpaj Katari, his consort Bartolina Sisa, and his sister Gregoria Apaza have become sources of inspiration for Aymara intellectuals and political and trade-union organizations in the contemporary phase of ethnic mobilization since the 1970s.

In historical scholarship-only one dimension of the broader public memory in the Andes-the insurrection has inspired magisterial and impassioned work, keen controversy, and ongoing cycles of specialized research. This study has been shaped by the rich scholarship even as it attempts to bring to light certain realms of history that have remained in the shadows. The historiography will be treated more carefully in the following chapters; however, there are questions of approach that I do wish to address here at the start.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from We Alone Will Ruleby Sinclair Thomson Copyright © 2002 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299177947
• ISBN 13: 9780299177942
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 414