Andean Cosmopolitans

Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court

Bibliographic Data

ID2833172
AuthorsAdrian Masters (0000-0001-9253-3311, The University of Texas at Austin, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume99
Issue2
Pages357-359
Publication date2019-05-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-7370379
OpenAlexW2943164166
LanguageEN
Citations received5

Andean Cosmopolitans explores the ways that indigenous Peruvians of diverse social backgrounds engaged with local, viceregal, and royal Hapsburg courts in Europe in pursuit of privileges, court case resolutions, and favorable legislation and ultimately not only transformed their social status in Peru but shaped the empire itself. While this book concerns indigenous subjects throughout Peru, it focuses mainly on certain justice seekers from Lima and on how they gradually accumulated privileges and eventually discursively claimed to represent all Peru's Indians by the late 1600s and 1700s. This book's structure is simultaneously thematic and chronological. Chapter 1 outlines the book's key contributions and contents. Chapter 2 demonstrates that while judicial archives suggest top-down Spanish and Indian elite domination of Peruvian politics, indigenous communities also shaped the state through various grassroots legal efforts from the 1530s to the 1600s, which they often determined in town assemblies, funded through their sapci communal assets, and accounted for using the famous knotted cords, the khipus. The first two chapters are especially noteworthy for offering much-needed insights into how Peru's Indian town councils functioned—historiographical terra incognita.Chapter 3 explains the paradox of how, though officials frequently sought to congregate Indians into towns and prevent them from engaging in expensive litigation, indigenous individuals and groups nonetheless increasingly engaged with local, viceregal, and royal justice during the late 1500s, often through long-distance treks or through intermediaries with power of attorney. These justice seekers mastered these Spanish organizations' protocols through “broad, complex networks of representation, patronage, and communication” throughout the empire (p. 87). Chapter 4 studies how, despite a ban on internal and transatlantic Indian travel, networks of nonroyal Indians seeking justice journeyed not only to Lima but to Spain, sometimes helped by Spaniards and especially friars. There, elite and nonelite Indians alike secured various privileges, including royal offices in Lima and the rights to wear Castilian clothes, to bear arms, and to represent the “Nation of the Indians” before the crown (p. 16). In this process of “native urban ethnogenesis,” some Indians left behind often-uncertain social extractions to become important agents, serving the crown in Lima as officials while representing their fellow indigenous subjects before the court.Chapter 5 teases out how Peruvian Indian justice seekers employed various discursive strategies to persuade the king and the Council of the Indies to fund their prolonged stays. Beginning in the 1550s these travelers were formulating discursive strategies to turn royal concerns regarding their well-being and poverty to their benefit. Chapter 6 explores the slippery self-identities of privilege-seeking Indians in the late 1500s and 1600s, many of them pretenders to Inca or otherwise-elite lineage who used the court not only to win privileges but to debate and reconstruct the idea of the cacique (Indian lord) and elevate their statuses by employing pervasive Spanish discourses about ancestries untainted by commoner and non-Christian bloodlines (limpieza de sangre). This chapter focuses mainly on the forgeries of cosmopolitan don Lorenzo Zamudio el Lucayn, who deftly used written testimonies to persuade authorities and impress his peers in his quest to win privileges and live comfortably at the court—which, while largely unsuccessful, did position him to claim that he represented Peru's Indians before the crown. The closing chapter reflects on the eighteenth-century Indian elites of Lima, who probably lacked Inca pedigree but nonetheless had been empowered by their predecessors' quests for justice and could thus discursively claim representation of the indigenous peoples of Peru in this viceregal capital.In seven brief chapters, José Carlos de la Puente Luna achieves a triumph of research, analysis, and prose. Though he might have reflected more on the decrees that these Indians shaped and the ramifications of these policies, his work is superb. He makes novel use of canonical texts like Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's Nueva corónica by bringing them into dialogue with little-used sources in the regional archives of towns like Junín and Chachapoyas and with underutilized sources from major archives in Lima, Spain, and beyond. The result is both granular and sweeping, a work that offers a new account of how Indian subjects imprinted their “local experiences into global designs” and gave the emerging state a “markedly dialogical and even ‘polyphonic’ character” (p. 12). Puente Luna advances studies on Indian agency by showing how indigenous people negotiated ideas of Indianness before authorities and deepens our understanding of Indian participation in the world of writing. This book also expands our knowledge of imperial justice systems, providing a much-needed ground-up vision of these institutions from primarily indigenous vantage points. His conclusions about postconquest indigenous self-identity, agency, and imperial institutions straddle various disciplines (such as anthropology, sociology, subaltern studies, and legal studies). The text mostly shuns jargon, aside from unavoidable viceregal and Andean terms. Intrepid general readers, undergraduates, and those familiar with Peruvian history will enjoy this book's case studies and brisk pace. Experts will marvel at its simultaneously local and global scope and its profound new perspectives on the viceregal period

Economic Justice · Elite · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Tribunal · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture · Law

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