The Plebeian Republic

This book contributes substantially to our understanding of peasant political participation in state formation in Latin America. Cecilia Méndez studies a period marked by war, from the conflicts between monarchist and patriot militias (1810 – 30) to the decades of harsh confrontation between liberal and conservative caudillos over the definition of the character of the republican state (1830 – 50). It provides a detailed account of the impact of war in Huanta, a region at the crossroads of important commercial networks, where haciendas were gradually losing ground to growing peasant control over commercial agriculture and the coca-leaf economy.Méndez adds to recent scholarship that sees war as a factor that opens up opportunities for subordinated actors to engage in politics, that fosters organization, and that renews popular leadership. War, she shows, is embedded in existing social networks, while also leading to substantial innovations. To uphold her thesis, Méndez presents historical sources that show that the apparently conservative identification of south- central highlands peasants and petty merchants with the monarchist ideal was a strategy to achieve recognition at a moment of state foundation. These monarchist militias eventually transformed into a guerrilla group that was able to negotiate with liberal caudillos the conditions for their integration into the new body politic.In fact, the dynamics of military organization pushed even creole hacendados to assume new political responsibilities. A growing plebeian peasantry without political representation, together with the long crisis of indigenous leadership and the contradictions of the late colonial period, was addressed by a new plebeian leadership that replaced the ethnic nobility, introducing a vision that included racial equality and interclass alliances. Creole elites were integrated into this popular movement and had to agree to establish better labor conditions on the haciendas.In this context, the formation of Antonio Huachaca as a leader is remarkable. Méndez explores his social origins as a muleteer in detail, reconstructing his relations with hacienda peasants, his experience on the margins of mestizaje, and the decisions he made in constructing regional hegemony. The book delves into Machaca’s speeches, letters, and testimonies and explores his political strategies, such as the confiscation of tithes and the use of the coca-leaf economy to finance rebellion. Huachaca and the rebels began as monarchist militias fighting against the enforcement of tithes and later negotiated demands for decolonization and citizenship. Machaca successfully pressured the caudillos to recognize the political legitimacy of the militias as members of the national army and established the foundation of popular liberalism in Peru.Méndez’s approach to rural caudillismo refreshes a literature that has emphasized the urban side of politics. More than a coercive integration of the population into a structured military apparatus, the author describes a dialogue between peasant guerillas — who proved versatile, autonomous, and able to develop their own agendas — and a state that needed popular support and integrated popular demands while formatting a national military. As the author argues, the state didn’t suppress insurgency, but rather rechanneled it.In this context, Méndez discusses the opposition of Huachaca’s troops to caudillos such as Bolivar and Gamarra, who represented a state that reserved the right to impose colonial tributes over peasant society. Alternatively, peasants supported Luis José Obregoso (1834) and the project of the Peru-Bolivia confederation conceived by caudillo Andrés de Santa Cruz (1834 – 35). Santa Cruz had gained peasant support because he promised to facilitate the integration of the highland province’s internal market.This book challenges a historiographical narrative about Peru that suggests that the peasant population was demobilized and excluded from politics after the failure of the great Indian insurrection of the 1780s. It can be read in dialogue with other attempts to trace the relation between the internal crisis of the cacicazgo and the empowerment of the community that supported the formation of new forms of leadership: for instance, Sinclair Thomson’s study of Túpac Katari in La Paz. Yet the characteristics of Huanta make this book particularly relevant for comparisons to the northern Andes, Quito, and New Granada, where mobility and mestizaje transformed the ethnic identification of the lower classes, and plebeian leadership proved crucial both in the age of revolution and in the later popular alliances with political liberalism.The book definitively contributes to a new political history of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it should be read as a complement, and not as simply a rejoinder, to the dominant historiography that has emphasized the difficulties of constructing hegemony and overcoming regional and racial exclusion in Peru. Méndez successfully shows the existence of a liberal foundation of the Peruvian state. Yet it is also true that the weakness of the central state with respect to the dominant regional classes eventually resulted in the formation of more-authoritarian alliances, particularly during the formation of the oligarchic state after the 1850s guano boom.Nevertheless, Méndez’s focus on this early period of state formation, and her historical reconstruction of the Peruvian liberal tradition, provide elements for a more dynamic reading of the political system, one in which the oligarchic state no longer appears as the natural result of the lack of participation of other classes but as an effect of an unequal competition. In fact, the formation of democratic tendencies in the 1930s, the particular character of the Peruvian military, the relevance of indigenista ideology, and the resistance of this region’s peasantry to Senderista violence can also be better understood after reading this book

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