Revolution in the Andes

The vast popular insurrection that shook the southern Andes in the early 1780s has long been known to historians and the broader public as the “rebellion of Túpac Amaru.” The seemingly unassuming title of Sergio Serulnikov's masterful new book subtly points to several of its crucial contributions. First, contrary to widespread assumptions, this movement was not merely an overblown tax revolt, a reaction to Bourbon fiscal impositions in the 1770s, or a nostalgic attempt to restore a legitimate colonial order. Serulnikov makes a powerful case that it constituted a radical anticolonial revolution. Second, it was not simply a revolt in Cuzco that generated peripheral repercussions elsewhere. Serulnikov shows brilliantly how the movement unfolded in multiple theaters, beginning with the region of northern Potosí and concluding with the region of La Paz, both in current-day Bolivia. Third, and linked to this point, the insurgent leadership was dispersed among Indian men and women with very different backgrounds and profiles. Thus the legendary name Túpac Amaru — the cacique community governor of noble Inca descent who led the movement in Cuzco — appears not in the book's title but in its subtitle.Serulnikov's book first appeared in Spanish in 2010 and now comes to us in English through the Latin America in Translation series of Duke University Press. Although slender in size, it is the most important synthetic account of the insurrection in any language since the mid-twentieth century. It is also the only synthesis in English other than Lillian Estelle Fisher's study of 1966. As Charles Walker observes in his foreword, Serulnikov's is a “deeply analytical work” that builds upon decades of research by other scholars (including, I should note, Walker's own groundbreaking work on Cuzco) (p. xv). Serulnikov draws on the rich literature of the 1970s and 1980s that illuminated the structural economic and ideological context for the movement. Yet reflecting more recent scholarship, his own stress is on the political dimension of this history, especially the strategic and symbolic practices of Andean insurgents.This comes across especially well in the book's creative interpretation of the movement led by Tomás Katari in northern Potosí, based on Serulnikov's earlier and outstanding regional monograph Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes (2003). In chapter 4, for example, Serulnikov uses as set pieces two confrontations between Indian forces and the despotic Spanish magistrate Joaquín Alós to provide a highly original analysis of indigenous radicalization. In these episodes of colonial political theater, insurgents demonstrated their submission to the crown at the same time that they coerced Alós against his will to obey Spanish judicial decrees favoring their interests. Imposing their own notions of justice and political legitimacy through direct action and the redeployment of Spanish legal devices, they effectively undermined local colonial domination.This destabilization of Spanish rule was in fact under way even before racially polarized warfare swept across the high plateau and valleys in late 1780. Andean peoples could envision government imminently returning to its ancient owners, and this aspiration to self-rule could take different forms. It was expressed not only in the lofty claims to restore a sovereign Inca monarch but also in the down-to-earth desires of peasant producers in Indian communities. As Tomás Katari's brother Dámaso put it, they anticipated becoming “the lords of their own lands and of the fruits they produce, in peace and tranquility” (p. 68).Against the backdrop of regional political and economic structures, Serulnikov narrates sharply and insightfully the ebb and flow of the insurrection and counterinsurgency and the overlap between different regional processes, including in the less familiar sites of Oruro and the Lake Titicaca district. The initial momentum and ultimate defeat of Túpac Amaru's forces in Cuzco are given their due, and the news of events and the promise of a restored Inca ruler did carry great symbolic weight in the southern theaters. But Túpac Amaru's Quechua forces had very limited powers of communication or command beyond their own territory. In the one site where Quechua and Aymara forces converged, in the siege of La Paz in mid-1781, a tense parallel leadership structure emerged that allowed the La Paz commander Túpac Katari autonomy from Túpac Amaru's relatives.Revolution in the Andes offers us a fluid political narrative of events that is framed in wider structural context, sensitive to local dynamics, and penetrating in its analysis. It is written accessibly to engage a nonscholarly audience and is rendered into English with uncommon skill and elegance by translator David Frye. Ultimately, Serulnikov offers a new vision of how the political thinking and mobilization of Andean insurgents “radically subverted the place of the colonized peoples in the natural order of things: in other words, the view of cultural difference as a signifier of racial inferiority and the use of racial inferiority as a legitimate claim to rule” (p. 141)

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