David T. Garret - Tupac Amaru

His Majestys Most Loyal Vassals: The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru
David T. Garrett
On November 4, 1780, the cacique of Tungasuca, Don Jos Gabriel Tpac

Amaru, seized Don Antonio de Arriaga, the Spanish governor of Tinta province (Peru), as he passed through the pueblo. For the next six days, Tpac Amaru held Arriaga prisoner, as a huge crowd assembled in the pueblo. Proclamations were read denouncing Arriagas abuses and claiming that [t]hrough the King it has been ordered that there no longer be sales tax, customs, or the Potos mita and that Don Antonio Arriaga lose his life because of his harmful behavior.1 Tpac Amaru forced Arriaga to send for weapons and money in order to arm the cacique and his followers. On November 10, Arriaga was hanged in front of
A version of this paper was presented at the Atlantic History Seminar at Harvard in August 2002, and I thank Bernard Bailyn, Kenneth Andrien, and the other participants for their comments and criticism. I gratefully acknowledge the critical and extremely helpful responses of Ward Stavig, Charles Walker, and the editors of HAHR. I am also greatly indebted to Herbert Klein, Martha Howell, Terence DAltroy, Pablo Piccato, and Sinclair Thomson for earlier comments and to Laura Lucas for her superb maps for this project. The Social Science Research Council, the Tinker Foundation, Columbia University, Reed College, and the Levine Fund generously provided the nancial support for the research and writing of this paper. 1. Quoted in Charles F. Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780 1840 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999), 35. The mita was obligatory labor by Indian tributaries provided to the mining centers of Potos and Huancavelica. For accounts and analyses of the rebellion, see ibid., 16 54; Boleslao Lewin, Tpac Amaru el rebelde: Su poca, sus luchas y su inuencia en el continente (Buenos Aires: Claridad, 1943); Lillian E. Fisher, The Last Inca Revolt, 1780 1783 ( Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1966); Alberto Flores Galindo, Tpac Amaru y la sublevacin de 1780, in Tpac Amaru II1780, ed. Alberto Flores Galindo (Lima: Retablo de Papel, 1976), 269 323, and Las revoluciones Tupamaristas: Temas en debate, Revista Andina 7, no. 1 (1989): 279 87; Scarlett OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones anticoloniales: Per y Bolivia, 1700 83 (Cusco: Centro Bartolom de Las Casas, 1988), 223 87; and Jos del Valles account of his campaign, Archivo General de las Indias (hereafter AGI), Cuzco, leg. 63.
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the crowd; immediately after, the rebels headed north down the Vilcanota Valley toward the city of Cusco, sacking the great textile factory of Pomacanchis on their way. Caciques from nearby pueblos actively joined or were caught up in the rebellion, and the forces grew dramatically.2 Within a week of Arriagas capture, the upper Vilcanota Valley was in open revolt. After receiving news of Arriagas execution, Cuscos city council met on November 12 and sent a regiment to quash the rebellion. At the forefront were Cuscos Inca nobles, who rejected Tpac Amaru almost to a one.3 To the south, the Indian nobility of the Titicaca basin also proved staunch foes of the rebellion. It was not for want of appeals from Tpac Amaru: as he marched down the Vilcanota he sent letters alternatively cajoling and threatening to leading Inca nobles and highland caciques asking them to join him.4 Don Pedro Sahuaraura Tito Atauchi Ynga, the cacique of Oropesa and the commissary of Cuscos regiment of Indian nobles, immediately forwarded the letter he received to the bishop, saying, I leave marching with my people in search of the rebel, the infamous Jos Tupa Amaro, cacique of Tungasuca, who deserves an exemplary punishment for the perpetual discouragement of others.5 Sahuaraura and his troops, along with the citys Indian nobility, joined the royalist regiment and met Tpac Amarus forces at Sangarar on November 19. The royalists were routed, Sahuaraura was killed, and the pueblo church was torched, killing those who had sought refuge inside. Tpac Amaru proclaimed himself Inca, the legitimate heir of indigenous imperial authority. So began the Great Rebellion, which lasted for three years and constituted the largest open chal2. Almost all caciques in the bishopric of Cusco who were implicated in the rebellion were from neighboring parishes: Tomasa Tito Condemaita of Acos, Acomayo, and Sangarar (the only Indian noble executed along with Tpac Amaru and his family); Coleccin documental del bicentenario de la revolucon emancipadora de Tpac Amaru (hereafter, CDBR), ed. Luis Durand Flrez (Lima: Comisin Nacional del Bicentenario de la Rebelin Emancipadora de Tpac Amaru, 1980), 3:324 65; Josph Mamani, a cacique in Tinta, CDBR, 4:515 55; Lucas Collque of Pomacanchi, CDBR, 3:935 55; Fernando Urpide and Agustn Aucagualpa of Pirque [Quispicanchis], CDBR, 4:477 513; Miguel Zamalloa, of Sicuani, CDBR, 5:395 428. For those prosecuted for the rebellion, OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones, 308 20. 3. Almost no Inca nobles were implicated in the rebellion. Beside Tito Condemaita, the most prominent Inca executed for rebellion was Luis Poma Ynga. CDBR, 3:300 301, 448; AGI, Cuzco, leg. 63, 2. Only two of Cuscos Inca nobles were charged for support of the rebellion: one received a year of exile in Callao, while the other was absolved. CDBR, 4: 188 208; and 3:820 30, respectively. 4. CDBR, 3:122 and 127. 5. CDBR, 1:111.
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lenge to Spanish rule in the Americas between the conquest and independence, in large part because it helped to spark, and converged with, a parallel rebellion started in Upper Peru by the Cataris (a Potosino cacical family) in January 1781.6 While Tpac Amaru was vilied in the remaining decades of Spanish rule and largely ignored for the following century, since the 1940s, historians of all stripes have viewed him heroically.7 To nationalists, Tpac Amaru shines as a protonationalist, anticolonial leader who embraced both creole and Indian followers while rejecting Spanish rule. Some see the episode as a precursor to the wars of independence.8 To Marxists and neo-Marxists, Tpac Amaru stands as a revolutionary leader at the head of an Indian peasantry that rose en masse against colonial exploitation.9 Scholars of a more indigenist bent have viewed the rebellion as a rejection of both colonial and creole rule; the inevitable result of the profound injustices of colonial society, the Great Rebellion represents the reassertion of indigenous Andean ideals of time, space, and social relations or an eighteenth-century revival of Inca identity among Andean indigenous elites.10
6. For the Catari rebellions, see Sinclair Thomson, We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 180 231; Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century South Andes (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2003), 157 214; OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones, 257 87; Alipio Valencia Vega, Julin Tpaj Katari (La Paz: Juventud, 1977); Mara Eugenia del Valle de Siles, Historia de la rebelin de Tpac Catari (La Paz: Don Bosco, 1990); Oscar Cornblit, Society and Mass Rebellion in 18th-Century Peru and Bolivia, in Latin American Affairs (St. Anthonys Papers, no. 22), ed. Raymond Carr (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), 9 44; Leon G. Campbell, Ideology and Factionalism during the Great Rebellion, 1780 82, in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, Eighteenth to T wentieth Centuries, ed. Steve J. Stern (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 110 39. 7. For literature reviews, see Jean Piel, Cmo interpretar la rebelin panandina de 1780 83, in Tres levantamientos populares: Pugachv, Tpac Amaru, Hildago, ed. Jean Meyer (Mexico: CEMCA, 1992), 71 80; and Walker, Smoldering Ashes, 17 22. 8. Lewin, Tpac Amaru, el rebelde; Jorge Cornejo Bouroncle, Tpac Amaru, la revolucin precursora de la emancipacin contintental (Cusco: Univ. Nacional San Antonio Abad, 1947); Carlos David Valcrcel, La Rebelin de Tpac Amaru (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1947) and Tpac Amaru, precursor de la Independencia (Lima: Univ. Nacional de San Marcos, 1977); Luis Durand Flrez, Independencia e integracin en el plan poltico de Tpac Amaru (Lima: Editorial P.L.V., 1974). 9. Jrgen Golte, Repartos y rebeliones: Tpac Amaru y las contradicciones de la economa colonial (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1980); OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones anticoloniales; Piel, Como interpertar la rebelin panandina. 10. John H. Rowe, El movimiento nacional Inca del siglo XVIII, Revista Universitaria (Cusco) 7 (1954): 17 47, and Quechua Nationalism in the Eighteenth Century
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Others have combined these two strains to locate the rebellion in a larger Age of Andean Insurrection, in which violent rejection of the colonial order by Perus indigenous peoples was endemic.11 In this view, the Great Rebellion represents the culmination of an indigenous anticolonialism that helped to provoke, and stands in counterpoint to, the creole anticolonialism of the wars of independence.12 At the same time, scholarship over the past two decades has exposed the complexities of allegiance among the indigenous population and problematized the simple Indian-Spanish dichotomy. Scarlett OPhelan Godoy, Magnus Mrner, Efran Trelles, and Leon Campbell rst demonstrated that most of the leadership of the Peruvian stage of the rebellion was creole and that the overwhelming majority of the Indian elite (along with much of the Indian peasantry near Cusco) either actively supported the crown or did not join in the rebellion.13 Over the past decade, several works have directly addressed the role of indigenous elites in the rebellion and in so doing have expanded our understanding of the complex dynamics that drove it, as well as the hierarchies and tensions of Bourbon society more generally. Foremost has been OPhelans work, which has highlighted the benets accruing to the uppermost ranks of the cacical elite under the Bourbon reforms.14 She has posited a loyalism among
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1959); Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando un inca: Identidad y utopia en los Andes (Lima: Horizonte, 1988); Manuel Burga, Nacimiento de una utopa: Muerte y resurreccin de los incas (Lima: Instituto de Apoyo Agrario, 1988); Jan Szeminski, La utopia tupamarista (Lima: Ponticia Univ. Catlica, 1993), and Why Kill the Spaniard? New Perspectives on Andean Insurrectionary Ideology in the 18th Century, in Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, 166 92. 11. OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones; and Steve J. Stern, The Age of Andean Insurrection, in Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, 34 93; Karen Spalding, Huarochir: An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1984), 270 93. 12. See Walkers challenge to the refusal to concede the rebellions protonationalist, revolutionary nature because of its monarchic ideology. Smoldering Ashes, 50 54. 13. OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones; Magnus Mrner and Efran Trelles, The Test of Causal Interpretations of the Tpac Amaru Rebellion, in Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, 94 109; Leon G. Campbell, Social Structure of the Tpac Amaru Army in Cuzco, 1780 1, Hispanic American Historical Review 61, no. 4 ( Nov. 1981): 675 93. 14. Scarlett OPhelan Godoy, Repensando el movimiento nacional inca del siglo XVIII, in El Per en el siglo XVIII: La era borbnica, ed. Scarlett OPhelan Godoy (Lima: Ponticia Univ. Catlica, 1999), 263 77; and La Gran Rebelin en los Andes: De Tpac Amaru a Tpac Catari (Cusco: Centro Bartolom de Las Casas, 1995), especially 47 68.
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the indigenous elite that was rooted in royal recognition of claims of Inca ancestry and proprietary rights to cacicazgos, as well as the positioning of Indian nobles in the church and military. As a result, throughout the south Andes, powerful caciques who descended from the Inca emperors did not participate in the Inca Nationalist Movement of the eighteenth century.15 Luis Miguel Glave and Ward Stavig have revealed the central importance of local and provincial politics in the development of a pan-Andean rebellion. Their work has focused on the particular case of Eugenio Sinanyuca, the powerful, non-Inca loyalist cacique of Coporaque (40 miles from Tungasuca). Here they have exposed how allegiances, enmities, and relations of patronage between caciques, corregidores, and Cuscos bishop determined afliations in the rebellion, even in Tpac Amarus home province.16 Working on the bishopric of La Paz, Roberto Choque Canqui and Sinclair Thomson have also examined the pronounced loyalism of the cacical elite there; in particular, Thomson has analyzed the radicalization of the Tpac Catari rebellion in light of the socioeconomic structure of the region and its communities and the division it produced in Indian communities.17 Focusing on the loyalist Indian nobility of the bishopric of Cusco, this article seeks to contribute to this reevaluation by examining indigenous actors patterns of rebellion and royalist loyalty, locating them in the social geography of the late colonial highlands, and excavating their various strategies of negotiation with the crown. In particular, it questions the identication of self-interest as the motivating force of loyalist elites and instead examines their actions as the articulation of ideologies fashioned by their positions in colonial society and their diverse colonial histories. The conditions of indigenous actors in late colonial Cusco were varied: the rebellion engulfed a vast region of indigenous communities and societies with varied social structures and positions in the colonial economy. The widespread loyalism of the Quechua-speaking agricultural communities near Cusco contrasts dramatically with the broad support Tpac Amaru enjoyed in the Vilcanota highlands, and again with the clear class
15. OPhelan Godoy, Repensando el movimiento nacional inca, 277. 16. Luis Miguel Glave, Vida, smbolos y batallas: Creacin y recreacin de la comunidad indgena. Cusco, siglos XVIXX (Lima: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1993), 136 52; and Ward Stavig, Eugenio Sinanyuca: Militant, Nonrevolutionary Kuraka, and Community Defender, in The Human Tradition in Colonial Latin America, ed. Kenneth J. Andrien ( Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002). 17. Roberto Choque Canqui, Los caciques frente a la rebelin de Tpak Katari en La Paz, Historia y Cultura (Lima) 19 (1991): 83 93; and Thomson, We Alone Will Rule, esp. 222 31.
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differentiation (elite indigenous loyalism versus popular rebellion) seen around Lake Titicaca. Such divisions reected numerous fault lines in the colonial highlands. Highland cities and their immediate hinterlands, bastions of Spanish settlement and privileged through the ow of rent and tribute, generally remained loyal to the crown. So too did Quechua-speaking Indians, whose communities were less internally stratied, suffered less burdensome colonial demands, and had more complex and personalized ties to Spanish society than did Aymara-speaking communities. The diverse histories of indigenous communities in the region also greatly informed both their sociopolitical organization and their allegiances in the rebellion. Cuscos history as the Inca capital left the city and its environs with a large population of Indian nobles, whose privileged position in colonial society was acknowledged and defended by the royal courts. For the entire length of Spanish rule, this Inca nobility used the courts to negotiate the demands of colonial rule and to assert its own rank and authority in the Repblica de Indios. As concerned with indigenous pretensions to limit or rival Inca authority as with the demands of creole Peru and the crown, this Inca nobility (and the villages it dominated) had more shared interests and history with creole Cusco than with the provincial, non-Inca populations of the upper Vilcanota Valley. Tpac Amarus claims to the mantle of Inca authority threatened the very hierarchies that the Incas of Cusco and the great cacical dynasties of the Titicaca basin so carefully maintained. Moreover, Tpac Amarus violent rejection of royal authority (after his own legal efforts failed) was profoundly at odds with the Indian noble tradition of negotiating and contesting Spanish hegemony through the courts.18 Colonial Cusco did not divide simply into Spanish and Indian. Tpac Amaru and his foes among the Indian nobility occupied particular positions. The actions of the latter should not be understood as simple creole collaborationism; rather, they manifest a distinct understanding of both how colonial society ought to be structured and how colonial authority ought to be negotiated.
The Indian Nobility in Late Colonial Society
The Spanish policy of indirect rule in the Andes required an indigenous elite to preside over the Indian villages that were home to 80 percent of the highland
18. For Tpac Amarus legal battles with the Betancurs during the 1770s, see esp. David Cahill, Primus inter pares: La bsqueda del marquesado de Oropesa en camino a la gran rebellin (17411780), Revista Andina 37 (2003): 9 52.
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Figure 1. Areas that supported the Tpac Amaru rebellion. Map courtesy of David Garrett.
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population. Under the Toledan reforms of the 1570s, the basic material relationship of the indigenous population to the crown was dened as one of tribute, with adult Indian men owing a sum of money twice a year.19 To collect tribute from each pueblo, Spanish bureaucrats turned to local Andean lords (curacas, later denominated caciques). These caciques undertook extensive commercial dealings in the complex market economy that revolved around the mining cities of the Bolivian altiplano, thereby converting the surplus of their largely selfsufcient communities into cash.20 Many of them further extended their control over local economies by controlling factors of production that required investment, and building up networks of debt.21 Philip IIIs 1614 decree that cacicazgos should be hereditary through the male line further consolidated the authority of elite indigenous families.22 That decree reected a broader commitment to the hidalgua of indigenous elites. The formal recognition of Indian nobility had a profound effect on the organization of colonial Cusco. The patents of hereditary nobility that Charles V issued to Inca nobles in the 1540s left, by the eighteenth century, more than a thousand Indians in Cusco and its environs exempt from tribute and personal service.23 And although viceroy Francisco de Toledos order for
19. For tribute and tributary categories, see Catherine J. Julien, Kristina Angelis, and Annette Hauschild, eds., T oledo y Los Lupaqas: Las T asas de 1574 y 1579 (Bonn: BAS, 1993); Herbert S. Klein, Haciendas and Ayllus: Rural Society in the Bolivian Andes in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993); Ann Wightman, Indigenous Migration and Social Change: The Forasteros of Cuzco, 1520 1720 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1990), 82 88 and 128 32; Spalding, Huarochir, 159 93. 20. John Murra, Formaciones econmicas y polticas del mundo andino (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1975); Franklin Pease, Curacas, reciprocidad y riqueza (Lima: Ponticia Univ. Catlica, 1992); Carlos Sempat Assadourian, El sistema de la economa colonial: El mercado interior, regiones y espacio econmico (Mexico: Nueva Imagen, 1983); Laura Escobari de Querejazu, Produccin y comercio en el espacio sur andino en el siglo XVII: Cuzco-Potos, 1650 1700 (La Paz: Publicacin auspiciada por la Embajada de Espaa, 1985). 21. David T. Garrett, Descendants of the Natural Lords Who Were: The Indian Nobility of Cusco and the Collao under the Bourbons (Ph.D. diss., Columbia Univ., 2002), 243 76. These included agricultural tools, draft and pack animals, small textile factories, and manufacturies. For the role of Tpac Amarus neighboring caciques in their local economies, see the wills of Doa Catalina Salas y Pachacutic of Layo and Yanaoca and Don Gabriel Cama Condorsayna of Macari. For Salas y Pachacutic, see Archivo Regional del Cusco, Per (hereafter ARC), Andres de Zamora, leg. 294, 402ff, 21 Oct. 1785; and Carlos Rodrguez de Ledezma, leg. 248, 153ff, 4 July 1796. For Cama Condorsayna, see ARC, Judiciales Civiles, leg. 18 (1830), in a dispute over his sons estate. 22. Carlos J. Daz Rementera, El cacique en el virreinato del Per: Estudio histricojurdico (Seville: Univ. de Sevilla, 1977), 218. 23. For sixteenth-century patents of nobility, see ARC, Corregimiento, Causas Ordinarias, leg. 49, exp. 1122; leg. 50, exp. 1147; leg. 47, exp. 1036; and Jean-Jacques
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the execution of Tpac Amaru I in 1572 was an attempt to end the dynastic line of Inca monarchs, he also institutionalized the predominance of Cuscos Incas in the citys indigenous politics.24 This Inca nobility made up less than onetenth of the Indian population of Cusco and its immediate hinterland, but they were of great importance in the region for three reasons. First, Inca nobles occupied the overwhelming majority of cacicazgos in the nine parishes of Cusco city and in the 20 or so pueblos within a 30-mile radius.25 Second, while only a fraction of the Inca nobility held cacicazgos, their privileges left them well situated in Cuscos urban economy.26 As merchants and skilled craftsmen, Inca nobles ranked among the citys respectable classes, while those in the surrounding agricultural villages constituted a small yeoman class. Finally, the Inca nobility had a strong sense of their history as the descendants of the natural lords who were of these kingdoms of Peru in their gentility.27 Cuscos creole population, too, cherished its Inca past (and nursed a grievance against the predominance of Lima) and generally recognized the Incas preeminence in Indian Cusco.28 The size of Cuscos Indian nobility, and their possession of formal patents of nobility, were unique in the Andes; indeed, the proportion of nobles in Cuscos indigenous population rivaled that of nobles in Spain.29 But colonial
Decoster, La sangre que mancha: La iglesia colonial temprana frente a indios, mestizos e ilegtimos, in Incas e indios cristianos: Elites indgenas e identidades cristianas en los Andes coloniales, ed. Jean-Jacques Decoster (Cusco: Centro Bartolom de Las Casas, 2002), 285 87. 24. Most importantly, Toledo established an Inca cabildo consisting of 24 electors drawn from the male Inca nobility, who chose an Inca noble to carry the royal standard in the annual procession of Santiago, the citys patron. The practice continued until independence. Donato Amado Gonzales, El Alfrez Real de los Incas: Resistencia, cambios y continuidad de la identidad indgena, in Decoster, Incas e indios cristianos, 221 50; J. Uriel Garcia, El alferazgo real de indios, Revista Universitaria (Cuzco) 26 (1937): 193 208. 25. David T. Garrett, Los Incas borbnicos: La lite indgena cusquea en vsperas de Tpac Amaru, Revista Andina 36 (2003): 9 51. 26. Victor Angles Vargas, Historia del Cusco (Cusco colonial) (Lima: Industrial Grca, 1983), 2:657 60; Indios de sangre real, Revista del Archivo Histrico del Cusco 1, no. 1 (1950): 204 30. 27. In the 1562 petition by various Inca noblemen against Martn de Olmos, included in a 1796 petition by Doa Mara Nieves Puma Ynga; ARC, Intendencia, Real Hacienda, leg. 202 (1796). 28. See Ignacio Castros comments on the installation of the Cusco Audiencia; Relacin del Cuzco, ed. Carlos Daniel Valcrcel (Lima: Univ. Nacional de San Marcos, 1978), 67. 29. M. L. Bush, Rich Noble, Poor Noble (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1983), 79.
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Indian communities in general were stratied in ways that were recognized by Spanish ofcials and courts and that translated into the language and privileges of nobility.30 Since the basic privileges of Indian nobility exemption from tribute and personal service and access to royal courts were also enjoyed by caciques, the distinction between those who derived their privileges through blood and those who derived them through cacical ofce was uid. Referred to in documents as principales, members of an Indian communitys upper ranks often enjoyed the honoric Don, a linguistic marker of their status and of the deference they expected and generally received.31 In 1762, the scal of the Audiencia of Chuquisaca declared that Don Lorenzo Mango Turpa of Azngaro, in recognition of his status, was a principal Indian, and in consequence exempt from the obligation to [perform] lowly services in conformity with the [royal] ordinance which so orders.32 In some cases, these local elites were clearly the descendants of preconquest elites among them, the Inca nobility of Cusco and the cacical dynasties of the Titicaca basin. Others were noble in the eyes of their communities. Whatever their standing in the eyes of crown ofcials, these were the de facto local Indian elites. If indigenous elites were ubiquitous in Andean pueblos, however, their organization, identity, and relation to their communities varied dramatically. Indeed, even between pueblos or within parishes the extent of Spanish settlement, the stability of indigenous communities, and the penetration of Spanish properties varied dramatically.33 Still, within this diversity, broad patterns
30. See, for example, Guaman Pomas discussion of Indian nobility and its recognition by Charles V. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva cornica y buen gobierno [161?], ed. John V. Murra and Rolena Adorno (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1988), 2:719. 31. Major caciques, Inca nobles, the alcaldes of large pueblos, or those who were held in high regard in the surrounding area, were usually marked off from the Indian commoners by the honoric title; they are a small fraction of those who appear in court cases. Because the use of Don was regulated by custom and not law, its attribution by others gives insight into social stratication within Indian society. For the analogous, and informative, use of honorics and social distinctions among the colonial Nahuas, see James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992), 130 40. 32. Archivo Nacional de Bolivia (hereafter ANB), Expedientes Coloniales, 1762 18. 33. In 1689 Accha Urinsaya had 37 Spanish-owned haciendas, while neighboring Accha Anansaya had just 4. Horacio Villanueva Urteaga, ed., Cuzco 1689: Informes de los prrocos al Obispo Mollinedo: Economa y sociedad en el sur andino (Cusco: Centro Bartolom de Las Casas, 1982), 471 80. For Spanish landowning and settlement in the bishopric of Cusco, see Magnus Mrner, Perl de la sociedad rural del Cuzco a nes de la colonia (Lima: Univ. del Pacco, 1978), 32; and Villanueva Urteaga, Cuzco 1689, passim.
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do emerge. Cusco itself was a bastion of Spanish settlement and home to a complex trading, artisanal, and industrial economy dominated by creoles and Indian nobles. The agricultural valleys around the city contained scores of well-established Indian communities dominated by the Inca nobility, but they also contained sizable Spanish colonies and many Spanish properties. Economic colonization had created both haciendas and textile factories, some employing hundreds of workers. More than anywhere else in the southern highlands, this area saw the intermixing of Spanish and Indian. Up the Vilcanota, things changed dramatically. The provinces of Tinta, Chumbivilcas, Cotabambas, and Aymaraes were the most Indian in the region: in 1689, 59 out of every 60 inhabitants in Tinta were Indians; a century later the ratio was still 7 out of 8.34 Outside the heartland from which the Incas had expanded in the 1400s, the pastoral highlands as a region did not fall under the sway of the Inca nobility during the viceregal era, although some pueblos were ruled by lineages who claimed Inca ancestry. These provinces were both peripheral to the Spanish economy of Cusco and central to the larger colonial economy.35 Subject to the distant mining mitas in Potos and Huancavelica, they had suffered enormously from the burdens of colonial rule and had high rates of migration, although Indian elites and the few Spanish settlers proted from eeting the colonial trade.36 Finally, indigenous societies further south in the Titicaca basin descended from the Aymara kingdoms that had been incorporated into the Inca realms in the fteenth century. With a mixed pastoralagricultural economy, this region was a pillar of the Potos mita and saw little Spanish settlement.37 Far from urban markets, these large pueblos entered the colonial economy through the sale of livestock, agricultural goods, basic manufactures, and labor.38 This variegated regional economy produced a variegated Indian elite. The cacical families of small Inca agricultural pueblos near Cusco and of the great Titicaca basin towns like Azngaro and Copacabana all claimed descent from
34. Villanueva Urteaga, Cuzco 1689, passim.; Unanue, Gua del Per, 89 93. 35. In 1689 Canas y Canchis (later Tinta), covering ve thousand square miles and with a population of 13,000, had just a dozen Spanish-owned properties. Villanueva Urteaga, Cuzco 1689, 236 53. 36. Wightman, Indigenous Migration, passim; for Tinta, 133 42. 37. Jeffrey A. Cole, The Potos Mita: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1985), 73 76. 38. See Biblioteca Nacional del Per (hereafter BNP), Manuscritos, exps. D-10474 (Caravaya); D-9555 (Huancan); and D-10473 (Lampa), for 1807 accounts of production for export in three overwhelmingly Indian highland provinces.
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Inca emperors, but their roles in the economy, and relation to their pueblos, differed greatly. Urban Cusco loomed large in the Inca noble economy, as successful merchants and manufacturers amassed fortunes of thousands of pesos.39 In contrast, even the dominant Inca families in nearby agricultural communities were rarely worth more than three thousand pesos.40 Inca-dominated pueblos tended to be small, with Indian populations under ve hundred. Since caciques wealth depended largely on their role as tribute collectors and intermediaries between the village economy and the Andean market, the opportunities for accumulating wealth were correspondingly small. Moreover, the large concentration of Inca nobles around Cusco produced an Indian yeomanry with small freeholdings and a strong sense of their privilege that limited cacical dominance of local economies. Indeed, many Inca pueblos did not have established cacical dynasties, and the ofce instead passed between a number of Inca noble lineages.41 Finally, the large Spanish population of the area and their extensive agricultural holdings prevented the Inca nobility from dominating the regional economy. Much agricultural production and employment took place on properties removed from the Repblica de Indios; the great and wealthy of Cusco were creole, not Inca.42 In contrast, the cacical elite of the southern highlands, and especially the Titicaca basin, were among the richest Indian families in the viceroyalty. In general, the pastoral pueblos of Tinta did not produce vast fortunes; while in the absence of markets and Spanish settlements caciques did dominate local economies, these pueblos were again small and many did not have strongly entrenched cacical dynasties. In contrast, dozens of communities around Lake Titicaca had ruling families who had held power for more than a century, and often since before the conquest. The greatest of these like the Choquehuanca of Azngaro Anansaya and the Quispe Cavana of Cavanilla had for-
39. In her will, Doa Antonia Loyola Cusitito Atauyupanqui listed property (mostly urban real estate) worth 7,500 pesos. ARC, Juan de Dios Quintanilla, leg. 237, 260ff, 30 May 1759. 40. Don Josph Tamboguacso, cacique of Taray, left 3,500 pesos in land and houses. ARC, Pedro Josph de Gamarra, leg. 169, 672ff, 3 June 1761. Don Vicente Choquecahua, cacique of Andaguaylillas, owned 2,000 pesos of land in his pueblo. ARC, Toms Gamarra, leg. 180, 329ff, 15 June 1782. 41. Garrett, Los Incas borbnicos. 42. In 1755 the assets of Cuscos Marquise of Casa Xara were valued at more than 215,000 pesos; although, as with most creole fortunes, the debts were equally impressive, leaving a net estate of 50,000 pesos. ARC, Corregimiento, Causas Orindarias, leg. 41, exp. 871.
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tunes of well over 10,000 pesos, at times approaching 20,000.43 While these fortunes paled next to those of creole aristocrats in the cities, they were by far the largest in their provinces. This wealth, coupled with tribute collection, the right to exercise corporal punishment, and generations of authority, made the cacical nobility the dominant force around Titicaca.
The Bourbon Reforms and Highland Unrest
In its organization, initial success, and scope, the Tpac Amaru Rebellion stands apart from all other riots and rebellions in eighteenth-century Peru, and certainly by late November when Tpac Amarus forces defeated the loyalist Indians and Spaniards of Cusco the enormity of the uprising was apparent. But in its initial stages the rebellion followed a pattern increasingly common in the bishopric during the previous two decades. Arriaga was not the rst corregidor in the bishopric of Cusco to have lost his life to an angry crowd of his subjects. Three years earlier, the Indians of Velille (Chumbivilcas) had killed the corregidor when he jailed the pueblos cacique; in the same year a riot broke out against the corregidor in Maras (Urubamba). And in 1771 an angry mob had burned the house of Arriagas predecessor.44 OPhelan has counted more than one hundred riots and rebellions in the viceroyalty of Peru between 1700 and 1780.45 The vast majority of these well t the pattern of village riots described by Taylor in eighteenth-century Mexico: directed against specic grievances and particular ofcials but not intended, or understood by the crown, as challenges to Spanish rule.46 Corregidores and their assistants were the most frequent targets: a sign of widespread anger at the general abusiveness of these royal agents and more particularly at the expansion of the reparto and aggressive efforts to increase tribute rolls in the 1760s and 1770s.47 In the 1770s, the division of the viceroyalty of Peru into
43. For Choquehuanca, Archivo Departmental del Puno, Intendencia, exps. 46 and 51; for Quispe Cavana, who estimated the income of his sheep ranches at one thousand pesos a year, ANB, Expedientes Coloniales, 1785 23. 44. OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones, 296 305. 45. Ibid. 46. William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1979), 113 70. 47. The reparto was the forced sale of goods at inated prices by provincial governors to the subjects under their rule. See Alfredo Moreno Cebrin, El Corregidor de Indios y la economa peruana del siglo XVIII: Los repartos forzosos de mercancias (Madrid: Instituto G. Fernndez de Oviedo, 1977); Javier Tord Nicolini, El corregidor de indios del Per: Comercio y tributos, Historia y Cultura (Lima) 8 (1974): 173 210; Golte, Repartos y
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Lower and Upper Peru (with a land border at Titicaca) and the imposition of new internal customs levies provoked widespread unrest in highland cities hit hard by the taxes. These riots and local rebellions were fundamentally reformist, decrying perceived abuses of power by royal ofcials but doing so through appeals (however violent) to the crown to redress grievances. Insofar as the Tpac Amaru rebellion was a local riot spun out of control, these earlier uprisings are its forebears. Moreover, whatever its Andean aspirations, Tpac Amarus rebellion caught re due to the particular frustrations of the highlands south of Cusco. The provinces at the core of the rebellion Tinta, Quispicanchis, and Chumbivilcas were ill served by the Bourbon reforms. All three contributed to distant mining mitas. Indeed, the Great Rebellion was, above all, a mass rising of the area subject to the Potos mita and began in the areas farthest from the mines, where the costs of transit made the burden heaviest. Adding in the reparto and tribute (which Tpac Amaru proposed reducing but not abolishing), the colonial burdens on these provinces were unusually heavy. Chumbivilcas and Tinta had also witnessed disproportionate population growth in the eighteenth century, with the Indian population doubling and the Spanish population increasing 30-fold.48 The division of the viceroyalties hurt the trade passing through the upper Vilcanota and the access to the altiplano market that provided some compensation for the annual migrations to Potos. The rebellion drew heavily from the ranks of muleteers.49 While the third quarter of the eighteenth century saw an increase of open discontent in the viceroyalty, the Vilcanota and Apurmac highlands were a focal point. With the exception of the 1777 riots in Urubamba and the Silversmiths Conspiracy of 1780, all the disturbances in the bishopric of Cusco from 1768 to 1780 took place in these three provinces: each had witnessed one substantial riot directed at the corregidor and colonial burdens following 1770.50
rebeliones; John R. Fisher, Government and Society in Colonial Peru: The Intendant System, 1784 1814 (London: Univ. of London, Athlone Press, 1970), 13 14, 20 23; Spalding, Huarochir, 188 90 and 200 204. 48. Villanueva Urteaga, Cuzco 1689, 226 52 and 292 335; Unanue, Gua del Per, 91 92. 49. Of 73 people accused of involvement in the Cusco phase of the rebellion, 64 provided information about their professions during their trials. Nine were described as muleteers; only small farmers were more common, with 21. OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones, 308 17. 50. Conict was also building within communities. See Ward Stavig, Eugenio Sinanyuca, in The World of Tpac Amaru: Conict, Community, and Identity in Colonial Peru
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Despite their clear roots in the local and regional grievances of the southern highlands, the interrelated phases of the Great Rebellion were also the culmination of an indigenous anticolonialism manifested in ideologically driven conspiracies and movements that developed in the mideighteenth century. Sterns assertion that from 1742 until 1782 colonial authorities contended with the more immediate threat or reality of full-scale civil war, war that challenged the wider structure of colonial rule and privilege exaggerates the situation, but in the half-century before 1780, opposition to the colonial order was increasingly conceived on the extralocal level.51 Only one such insurgency met with any success. From the 1730s into the 1750s, Juan Santos Atahuallpa, claiming descent from the eponymous Inca emperor, established a raiding kingdom in the central sierra, along the semitropical eastern slopes of Tarma and Xauxa.52 This insurgency did have a discernible anticolonial ideology, articulated through an anti-Spanish, Andean (and Inca) messianism. At the same time, Santos Atahuallpa established a territory outside Spanish hegemony by moving to the fringes of Spanish rule, not by overthrowing Spanish authority in the colonized territories of the Andes. And this took place hundreds of miles from Cusco, with little impact on the southern highlands. But two conspiracies in Cusco, which took place in the years just before Tpac Amaru seized Arriaga, suggest threats to the colonial order closer to home. The rst, in 1776 and 1777, appears to have been more the intersection of Inca messianism and a local riot against the corregidor in Urubamba than a full-edged conspiracy.53 As 1777 approached, there was widespread talk in the highlands of a prophecy by Santa Rosa that in the year of the three sevens an Inca would be crowned as king of Peru. In 1776 Don Domingo Navarro Cachaguallpa (a member of a prominent Inca noble family in urban Cusco) was arrested, along with Juan de Dios Espinoza Orcoguaranca, for plotting rebellion. In turn, they said that one named Sierra had told them that [in] the year of . . . 1777, the next to come . . . all of the Indians of this kingdom must
(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1999), 222 23, 240, 252 24; and Glave, Vida, smbolos y batallas, 117 52, for conict in Coporaque (Tinta). 51. Stern, The Age of Andean Insurrection, 35. 52. Francisco A. Loayza, ed., Juan Santos, el invencible (Lima: [Editorial Miranda], 1942); and Stern, The Age of Andean Insurrection. 53. For prophecy and Inca messianism in the 1770s, see Ramn Mujica Pinilla, Rosa limensis: Mstica, poltica e iconografa en torno a la patrona de Amrica (Lima: IFEA / FCE / BCRP, 2002), 335 60; Scarlett OPhelan Godoy, La Gran Rebelin en los Andes, 21 45; and Szeminski, La Utopia T upamarista.
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rise against the Spaniards and kill them, beginning with the corregidores, alcaldes, and other people of white faces and blond hair, that there is no doubt since the Indians of Cusco have named a king who will govern them.54 This plot came to nothing, however, and it is not even clear that Navarro Cachaguallpa and Orcoguaranca were punished.55 In the following year, Don Josf Gran Quipsi Tupa Ynga of Quito wrote to the captains of the Indian militia in Urubamba, advising them that he had to crown himself [king] because the time in which the prophecies of Santa Rosa and San Francisco Solano would come true was arriving.56 In a reminder of the complexity of Inca identity even in its millenarian form he continued that, if the English invaded Quito, it was essential to contradict and oppose whomever who wanted to crown himself, because there they had known Atahuallpa as their king, and he was not the legitimate descendant of the Inca emperors and on that account, [Josf Quispi Tupa] being a descendant of Guayna Cpac and Viracocha Ynga, the kingdom belonged to him.57 The effect of Josf Quispe Tupas appeal is unclear. That a riot against the corregidor of Urubamba began in the Inca stronghold of Maras in November 1777 is certain, and remarkable, since such riots were almost unheard of in Inca pueblos.58 In Marass jail, Josf Quispe Tupa confessed to a massive plot, and certainly letters had been sent far and wide in an attempt to build support for his claims.59 However, the actual tumult did not spread beyond the tiny province of Urubamba, and in its events and trajectory it resembled other local uprisings the corregidors house and furniture were burned, along with grain that he had collected from the province. The Spanish population participated alongside the Indian, and the riots did not draw much support from the Inca nobility.60 Despite widespread talk of an apocalyptic return of Inca authority in
54. CDBR, 2:229. 55. In 1783 Navarro Cachaguallpa was described as an indio principal de la parroquia de Hospital when involved in a lawsuit over family land. ARC, Junta de Temporalidades, leg. 89 (1770 1815), 35. 56. CDBR, 2:242. 57. CDBR, 2:243. 58. For the riot, see OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones, 188 95; also CDBR, 2:235 42. 59. See especially Mujica Pinilla, Rosa limensis, 344 60; and AGI, Lima, leg. 1044. 60. Only the Cusipaucar family was implicated. OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones, 188 95.
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1777, the Inca nobility of Cusco appear to have been uninterested in fostering the prophecys fulllment. The Silversmiths Conspiracy of 1780 drew from a more elite segment of society and was overwhelmingly urban and creole, but it did have an Inca at its head and clearly manifested a creole-Inca political identity.61 Spearheaded by members of the silversmiths guild (hit hard by a 1776 royal decree that they work only with minted silver), the conspiracy was betrayed by a conspirator in confession to his priest.62 Alongside the prominent Cusco creoles hung for their role in the conspiracy was Don Bernardo Tamboguacso Pomayalli, the 24-year-old Inca cacique of Pisac (Calca y Lares), who was married to Doa Francisca Ynquiltupa, daughter of an Inca nobleman and former standard bearer of the Indian cabildo.63 What provoked Tamboguacso to participate in the conspiracy is unclear. In December 1779, he had been jailed, at the request of the church, for a matter involving his wife.64 More generally, like all whose interests were tied to Cuscos grain, coca, and sugar trade, he suffered from the introduction of the La Paz customs and the increase in the alcabala. Tamboguacso himself stated that these created common cause between creole and Indian and led him to conspire, if not against the crown, at least against the reformed Bourbon order in Cusco.65 Tpac Amarus rebellion thus built on traditions of protest that were well established in the 1700s: local riots against abusive ofcials and an anticolonial
61. Vctor Angles Vargas, El Cacique T ambohuacso: Historia de un proyectado levantamiento contra la dominacin espaola (Lima: Industrial Grca, 1975). For the grievances of the plotters and their relation to the Bourbon reforms, see OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones, 207 17. 62. Workers in silver mines were traditionally paid, in part, by informal takings from the mine; this silver was not minted and taxed and found its way into silver wares. The order that the silversmiths work only with taxed silver raised the price of their raw material. 63. Angles Vargas, El Cacique T ambohuacso, 158 75. For Doa Francisca, see ARC, Juan Bautista Gammarra, leg. 133, [ ], 24 Sept. 1777. Her father was alfrez real in 1757; ARC, Corregimiento, Causas Civiles, leg. 29, exp. 620. 64. He was quickly released, since, as the protector of Indians observed, according to the testimony presented in the Reales Cdulas, those of his class enjoy greater privileges than tributary Indians, and seeing as they enjoy all the prerogatives granted to the hidalgos of Castille, these should be conceded to them with the greatest justice; according to which these nobles should not be held prisoner except for serious crimes with ample evidence. ARC, Corregimiento, Causas Ordinarias, leg. 59, exp. 1346. Contributing to his rapid release was the need to collect the crowns Christmas tribute (a point made by the protector). 65. OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones, 212.
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Inca messianism. And he spectacularly succeeded in moving from local uprising to widespread rebellion, challenging not simply particular ofcials but colonial rule generally, and not from the margins of colonial Peru but from its very heart. This success, in turn, gave Tpac Amaru the opportunity to articulate his larger political ideology, something that, in their failure, the earlier insurgencies in the bishopric had been unable to do. But the extraordinary success of Tpac Amaru also exposed ssures in indigenous society that had remained hidden with the failure of earlier movements. Strikingly, one of those who exposed the Silversmiths Conspiracy was Pedro Sahuaraura, a reminder that Cuscos Inca nobility by no means united behind the goals of Inca messianism or restoration.66 In general, though, people did not have to take sides in uprisings that failed to materialize. In November 1780, the populations of Cusco creole, Indian noble, and commoner were forced to choose their allegiance; in their overwhelming rejection of Tpac Amaru, the Inca nobility and cacical elite of the bishopric performed their own, complex colonial ideology.
The Indian Nobility and the Great Rebellion
At Sangarar, Indian forces dealt Spanish rule its most signicant defeat since the 1530s and shook Cuscos colonial society correspondingly. After this victory, Tpac Amaru turned south and west, and by early December the rebellion had engulfed the highlands all the way to Lake Titicaca. Success brought recruits: by the end of the year the rebel forces numbered perhaps 50,000.67 A handful of Indian nobles joined Tpac Amaru.68 Don Juan Pablo Huaman Sullca of Crusero (Caravaya) wrote to Tpac Amaru on December 9, 1780, advising him to beware of Spaniards and sending a book that showed the Spaniards had killed Tpac Amaru I.69 From an Aymara-Inca cacical lineage, Huaman Sullca claimed descent from the penultimate Inca emperor; he asked that Tpac Amaru give me some title in the militia, since I enjoy such privileges as a descendant of Tpac Yupanqui. He also requested guns for his followers. Intriguingly, these he wanted so that they might make war against the
66. Angles Vargas, El Cacique T ambohuacso, 169 70. 67. Walker, Smoldering Ashes, 40. For accounts of the rebellion from which the information in the following paragraphs is drawn, see above, n. 1. 68. In Asillo the cacical family, the Guagua Condori, supported the rebels; in Muani, Pedro Vilca Apasa (long a foe of the Choquehuanca) became a rebel commander. CDBR, 3:591; L. E. Fisher, Last Inca Revolt, 244. 69. Presumably Inca Garcilasos Historia general del Per ? CDBR, 3:51 52.
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indel Chunchos in the pueblo of Inabari, not against the Spaniards of the highlands.70 But Huaman Sullca was the exception. Few others heeded Tpac Amarus calls, and, like the Incas of Cusco, the cacical elite of the Titicaca basin remained overwhelmingly loyal to the crown.71 As news of the battle of Sangarar reached Lampa, the provinces caciques presented themselves in its capital with armies of tributaries to defend the crown: Quispe Cavana of Cavanilla brought seven hundred and Succacahua of Umachire brought eight hundred; the Choquehuancas would soon arrive from Azngaro with some two thousand.72 In Lampa, Succacahua, Cama Condorsaina, Pachari, Mamani Tapara, Cagua Apasa, Calisaya, Quispe Cavana; in Huancan, Calisaya, Viamonte, Cornejo, Ticona, Machicado y Mendoza; in Azngaro, Choquehuanca, Mango Turpa, Chuquicallata, Uisa Apasa; in Chucuito, Fernndez Cutimbo, Catacora, Chuqui Ynga Charaxa, Llaclla Garcia Paca; and so onall remained loyal to the crown.73 With their families and often with large contingents of loyal tributaries, the powerful caciques around Titicaca ed west toward Arequipa or east of the lake toward Sorata, later to return with loyalist troops.74 The southern campaign slowed the drive toward Cusco and the Inca heartland: not until late December did Tpac Amarus army again turn north. By then, while his armies remained dominant in the southern reaches of the bishopric, he was losing his support among the caciques in Tinta and Quispicanchis. In late November, Don Antonio Solis Quivimasa Ynga, from the dominant family in Quiquijana (Quispicanchis), ed to Cusco.75 There he said that he had only complied with the rebels orders earlier out of fear.76 His son-in70. The term chuncho was used generically in the agricultural and pastoral societies of the altiplano and the higher valleys to refer to the peoples who inhabited the low, eastern slopes of the Andes. For conict between highland Indians and chunchos of the Yungas who lived outside Spanish authority (and the coding of the latter as bandits by the former), see Stavig, World of Tpac Amaru, 63 64. 71. Indeed, other Guaman Sullcas and Cotacallapas from Caravaya fought for the crown. ARC, Diezmos, leg. 36 (1787 88); Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Per [hereafter RR.EE.], Puno, Real Audiencia, exp. 461 (1797). 72. See the testimony of Don Ramn Moscoso, in CDBR, 1:337. 73. See n. 106 below for various requests for premios; also, OPhelan Godoy, La Gran Rebelin, 63 67. 74. In his letter to the king, Jos Rafael Sahuaraura Ramos Tito Atauchi described in detail the more important loyalist caciques especially Sahuaraura, Pumacahua, and Chuquimia of Copacabana. Published as Estado del Per, ed. Francisco Loayza (Lima: [Editorial Miranda], 1944). See RR.EE., Puno Real Audiencia, exp. 505 (1798) for Apasa. 75. He was later captured and killed by the rebels. AGI, Cuzco, leg. 80. 76. CDBR, 3:122.
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law, Don Francisco Succacahua, stayed in Quiquijana and tried to stave off Tpac Amaru, asking that he not seize Quivimasas property.77 However, on December 10, Micaela Bastidas Tpac Amarus wife and coleader of the rebellion ordered his arrest for refusing to comply with orders.78 Nor was Succacahua the only Indian leader to withdraw support: in their defense at later trials, those who supported Tpac Amaru in November generally insisted that they had done so only under duress and tried to ee as soon as possible. Such self-serving testimony is, of course, suspect; however, when she wrote to Tpac Amaru of Succacahuas arrest, Micaela Bastidas lamented that Sucacagua has betrayed us, and the rest, as the attached will impress on you, and so I am not myself because we have very few people.79 On December 28, the rebels began a siege of Cusco itself. Cuscos militias including that of Indian nobles went into battle, joined by loyalist caciques leading their own tributaries. Mateo Pumacahua of Chincheros stopped the rebel forces at Calca, keeping them from the Cusco-Urubamba road and, more importantly, from moving onto the Anta plain. Troops started arriving from Lima, while the rebel forces ill trained, poorly armed, and losing momentum began to drift away. By January 10, the siege of Cusco ended. Tpac Amarus cousin, Diego Cristbal Tpac Amaru, led a campaign to the Paucartambo Valley, causing considerable destruction in the agricultural regions of Calca y Lares, Quispicanchis, and Paucartambo, but by February the focus of the rebellion had again moved south to Tinta. On February 24, marciscal Jos del Valle arrived from Lima with his army; on March 19 they marched against Tpac Amaru and his command at Tinta.80 Del Valles forces laid siege to the town and on April 6 captured Tpac Amaru and his family. They were tried, sentenced, and on May 18 executed in Cuscos main plaza; they were then dismembered and portions of their bodies sent for public display to pueblos that had rebelled.81 The execution of Tpac Amaru did not bring an end to the rebellion, although the arena of action shifted south to Titicaca and the altiplano. The events of November in Tungasuca had had a parallel hundreds of miles to the
77. CDBR, 3:50 51. 78. CDBR, 4:23. Succacahua later testied that he and his brother-in-law, the priest Pedro Solis Quivimasa Ynga, had plotted (unsuccessfully) to kill Tpac Amaru and Bastidas. Ibid., 5:171. 79. Ibid., 4:23. 80. For his account of the campaign, see AGI, Cuzco, leg. 63 (Cartas de Jos del Valle). 81. Angles Vargas, Histora del Cusco, 2:1091 98.
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south, in Macha (Chayanta), near Potos.82 There Toms Catari, a claimant to the cacicazgo, had been battling the corregidor since 1779, appealing to the Chuquisaca Audiencia. In August 1780, Catari and his followers seized the corregidor, although he was soon released. But in January, Catari was killed, and his brothers launched a rebellion that, under the leadership of Julian Apasa (who took the name Tpac Catari) swept northward toward La Paz. In February the one urban uprising in the larger rebellion took place in Oruro.83 The Catarista troops then laid siege to La Paz from late March until the end of June, when the city was relieved by troops from Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, the area from Tinta to La Paz had seen almost continuous ghting since December. Puno was attacked in March, but the rebels were repelled. The next two weeks saw open war in Chucuito; Juli was sacked by rebel troops, and on March 24, 1781, rebels massacred a number of Indian nobles and Spaniards in Julis San Pedro church.84 After Tpac Amarus execution, Diego Tpac Amaru moved southward. His troops laid siege again to Puno, which was abandoned by the royalists in late May. Another cousin, Andres Tpac Amaru, led a campaign down the eastern shore of Titicaca. Sorata, where royalists had taken refuge, fell on August 4, 1781, and the ensuing massacre left many of the regions creoles and Indian nobles dead.85 How82. Chayanta province, and the Macha, have long been focal points of rural unrest. Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority; Disputed Images of Colonialism: Spanish Rule and Indian Subversion in Northern Potos, 1777 1780, Hispanic American Historical Review 76, no. 2 (May 1996): 189 226; and Customs and Rules: Bourbon Rationalizing Projects and Social Conicts in Northern Potos during the 1770s, Colonial Latin American Review 8, no. 2 (Dec. 1999): 245 74; Tristan Platt, The Andean Experience of Bolivian Liberalism, 1825 1900: Roots of Rebellion in 19th-Century Chayanta (Potos), in Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, 280 323; and Erick Langer, Andean Rituals of Revolt: The Chayanta Rebellion of 1927, Ethnohistory 37, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 227 53. 83. Cornblitt, Power and Violence, 137 72. 84. Among those killed were Doa Mara Ygnacia Chique Ynga Charaja of Pomata (wife of Ambrocio Quispe Cavana) and Doa Ysabel Ybaa Paca Nina Chambilla and Don Fermn Garcia Llaglla, one of Julis cacical couples. ARC, Real Audiencia, Causas Ordinarias, legs. 30 (1798) and 33 (1799). 85. Most of the cacical family of Carabuco (the Siani) were killed at Sorata; along with their son-in-law, Don Blas Choquehuanca (ANB, Expedientes Coloniales, 1786 85); Blass Spanish brother-in-law was also killed (ARC, Pedro Joaquin de Gamarra, leg. 79, 10ff, 15 Jan. 1808). So were Don Diego Viamonte of Conima [Huancan] and his son (ARC, Real Audiencia, Causas Ordinarias, leg. 33, 1799); many Cornexos of Huancan (RR.EE., Puno Superior Gobierno, exp. 256); one of the Chuquicallatas of Taraco (ibid., exp. 115); and Ygnacio Mendoza Tatara of Moho (ARC, Real Audiencia, Administrativo, leg. 158, 1799).
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ever, by then the tide had turned. Royalist reinforcements from the coast and the Rio de la Plata made their ways east and north and gradually reasserted royal authority. In December 1781, Diego entered into negotiations with del Valle, and, with part of his forces (including Pedro Vilca Apasa), he surrendered in February 1782. Vilca Apasa then sought to rekindle the rebellion around the lake; he was captured in March, executed, and dismembered. The surviving Tpac Amarus were taken to Cusco. In March 1783, a plot allegedly backed by them was discovered; Diego, his mother, and others were executed on July 19, 1783.86 Their execution marks the end of the Great Rebellion, although with Diego Tpac Amarus surrender in early 1782 it had largely run its course. Given the nature of the rebellion in which the organized campaigns of the Tpac Amarus and Cataris sparked, and in turn were fueled by, countless pueblo jacqueries throughout the southern highlands pockets of rebellion continued into 1783, and tensions remained extremely high until the next great wave of unrest in the 1810s and 1820s.
Identity, Social Structure, and Allegiance during the Rebellion
Many factors explain the trajectory and ultimate defeat of the rebellion, from the provincial politics of Tinta to the far greater military power and organization of the royalist forces.87 But at two critical junctures, the internal politics and conicts of Indian society struck crippling blows to the uprising. First, the Incas blocked the rebellion to the north, preventing Tpac Amarus troops both from seizing Cusco and from moving into the central highlands.88 The failure to capture Cusco is generally attributed to the reluctance of its creole population to side with Tpac Amaru for while the creoles of Cusco did, early on, consider treating with Tpac Amaru, its royal ofcials would not.
86. Jos Gabriels teenage half-brother was sentenced to exile in Spain; he returned to Buenos Aires in the 1820s. Juan Bautista Tpac Amaru, Cuarenta aos de cautiverio, ed. Francisco A. Loayza (1822; Lima: [Editorial Miranda], 1941). 87. For the military superiority of the crowns forces, see Leon G. Campbell, The Military and Society in Colonial Peru, 1750 1810 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978), 99 153. 88. Stern sees the inability of the rebellion to spread to the central highlands as crucial to its eventual failure. However, he locates this failure in the Spanish militarization of the central sierra after the Santos Atahuallpa insurgency, not in the rejection of the rebellion by much of the indigenous population of Cusco. Age of Andean Insurrection, 63 76.
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However, not only creoles remained loyal to the crown: the surrounding Indian pueblos also rejected Tpac Amarus calls.89 In Paruro, along the Vilcanota north of Urcos, and on the Anta plain that is, precisely the area under the rule of the Inca nobility Indian tributaries as well as nobles refused to rebel and often joined the royalist forces.90 Second, in the Titicaca basin the rebellion became a civil war. In the Vilcanota highlands, most pueblos and their elites joined the rebellion. Around Cusco, both communities and their leaders remained loyal. In the Titicaca basin, the Indian nobility and Spaniards overwhelmingly took the side of the crown, while most communities rose against them. To be sure, when Tpac Amarus troops rst marched toward Titicaca in December 1780, many watched at a distance. An Indian noblewoman in Cavanilla (Lampa) who supported Tpac Amaru wrote to him saying she had ordered all the Indians in this community to appear before you, and those who have remained here are en route; but the rest have removed themselves from this pueblo to a distance of three or four leagues.91 Others joined their caciques in loyalist armies. But as the rebellion dragged on for months, the loyalist caciques lost their hold over their tributaries. Diego Choquehuanca and his son Josf brought two thousand tributaries to the royalist forces in December 1780. However, by the summer of 1781 Diego was forced to abandon Carabuco, since his laborious efforts and ardent zeal were incapable . . . of keeping the Indians that were in his charge in the obedience of Your Majesty.92 While he ed the area, much of his family descendants of Guayna Cpac and among the most powerful Indian nobles in Peru took refuge in Sorata, where they were massacred. The open class conict around Titicaca prevented Tpac Amarus forces from uniting with those of the Catari: had Choquehuanca and the many other loyalist caciques sided with Tpac Amaru, the Titicaca region could have bound the two rebellions together; instead, it formed a massive battleeld that drained both. Thus, the Indian elites of the bishopric the sizable Inca nobility around Cusco and the powerful cacical dynasties around Titicaca served as a check to the rebellion. The obvious explanation of the nobilitys loyalty is self-interest: as privileged members of a subject group, Indian elites accepted and supported colonial rule for the benets that accrued to them. Moreover, not all had suf89. Garrett, Los Incas borbnicos. 90. Mrner and Trelles, The Test of Causal Interpretations, 94 109. 91. Doa Juana Quispe Yupanqui, CDBR, 3:56. 92. AGI, Charcas, leg. 537.
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fered under the Bourbon reforms. The reparto rendered cacical ofce economically threatening but also potentially more rewarding. And, anecdotally, resignations by caciques seem more common in the 1740s and 1750s than in the two decades before the rebellion.93 As tribute and reparto burdens increased in the 1760s and 1770s, so did the highland population, making cacicazgos more lucrative. Certainly, a number of Indian caciques were prospering in the 1760s and 1770s.94 Those dependent on the portage of goods from Cusco to Alto Peru were hit hard by the division of the viceroyalties in 1776. However, with the exception of a few muleteers like Tpac Amaru himself, long-distance trade was, by then, the domain of creoles.95 While the caciques around Titicaca marketed local produce and manufactures in altiplano markets, these were exempt from the alcabala anyway. In addition, as OPhelan has well shown, scal measures were only a part of the Bourbon reforms to affect the Indian nobility.96 In the mid-1700s, the crown began a slow retreat from the ethnic division of Andean society that had been the hallmark of Habsburg rule. Two modest innovations in particular affected the Indian elites of the bishopric of Cusco. The rst was the increasingly frequent appointment of Spaniards to vacant cacicazgos.97 However, in 1780 this had not yet eroded the cacical authority of the Incas around Cusco or of the major dynasties of the Titicaca basin. More important to the upper reaches of the Inca nobility and the highland cacical elite was the opening of universities, military posts, and, above all, the church to the Indian nobility.98
93. For examples, ANB, Expedientes Coloniales, 1793 11 (Chucuito); ARC, Real Audiencia, Administrativo, leg. 167 (1808 9) (uoa). 94. Bernardo Succacahua of Umachire and his brother Francisco (of Quiquijana, above) were active tithe farmers in the 1760s, entering into contracts of one thousand pesos. Archivo Arzobispal del Cusco [hereafter AAC], XIII.3.59. Vicente Choquecahua of Andaguaylillas also prospered in the 1770s, purchasing 32 topos of land for 2,070 pesos in cash earned in the lamb trade. ARC, Juan Bautista Gamarra, leg. 146, 432ff, 1 Oct. 1778. 95. Stavig, The World of Tpac Amaru, 155 56. 96. OPhelan Godoy, Repensando el movimiento nacional Inca. 97. OPhelan Godoy views this phenomenon as fairly widespread; Kurakas sin sucesiones: Del cacique al alcalde de indios, Per y Bolivia 1570 1835 (Cusco: Centro Bartolom de Las Casas, 1997), 17 28. Stavig (The World of Tpac Amaru, 126) and Garrett (Descendants of the Natural Lords, 585 701, passim) argue that it did not become so until after the rebellion. 98. In 1697 Charles II decreed that Indians be able to ascend to Ecclesiastic posts. For the debate and petitions leading up to the decree, see Antonio Muro Orejn, La igualdad entre indios y espaoles: La real cdula de 1697, in Estudios sobre la poltica indigenista espaola en Amrica (Valladolid: n.p., 1975), 1:365 86; although the decree was not widely honored in Cusco until the mid-1700s.
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With that, the Indian nobility gained access to the most powerful institution in the Andes, and its valuable ofces. Indeed, the decades before the rebellion saw the rst Indian priests in the bishopric; by 1780 most of the major Inca and Titicaca basin families had sons in the church.99 Thus, in 1780 it appeared that the blurring of the boundary between the Indian nobility and its creole peers could result in a strengthening of the former, rather than its eclipse by the latter. Ultimately, however, purely materialist explanations of the nobilitys loyalty are unsatisfying. First, they fail to account for Tpac Amarus exceptionalism. More importantly, they implicitly reject the possibility that loyalist Indian nobles acted on a set of political ideals a motivation reserved for Tpac Amaru and his followers. But just as the hanging of Arriaga and the storming of the obraje at Pomachanchis were political actions by the tributary masses of the Vilcanota highlands violent but extremely articulate rejections of particular material and political relations in late colonial Peruvian society so too did the Inca nobility perform a political act when they marched to Sangarar to battle the rebels. Recent work has been more interested in recovering the ideals and motivations of those who chose rebellion than of those who rejected it, and the case of Tpac Amaru is no exception. This section thus attempts to recover the political ideology of the loyalist Indian nobility and to locate it in relation to that espoused by Tpac Amaru. Tpac Amaru and Micaela Bastidas were captured just ve months after they had seized Arriaga. In those months, the couple sent numerous letters throughout the highlands and made several proclamations that outline their goals and suggest a coherent ideology, most clearly seen in a letter sent to the Cusco cabildo halfway through the siege of the city.100 Most of his demands (my desires) were not out of the political mainstream among Peruvian elites. He called for the abolition of the reparto and of the corregidor and the replacement of the latter by a salaried Alcalde Mayor of the same Indian nation and other persons of good conscience, with no more jurisdiction than the administration of justice, the Christian education of the Indians and other individuals. He insisted on the creation of an Audiencia in Cusco with its own viceroy and the resumption of free commerce between Lower and Upper Peru. Tpac Amaru had also been waging a decade-long battle to be recognized as
99. OPhelan Godoy, La Gran Rebelin, 47 68; and David T. Garrett, La Iglesia y el poder social de la nobleza indgena cuzquea, siglo XVIII, in Decoster, Incas e indios cristianos, 30 36. 100. Quoted at length in Angles Vargas, Historica del Cusco, 2:1039 41.
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the closest living relative to usta Beatriz, and in the letter he made explicit his claim to preeminence as an Inca royal, describing himself as the only person that has remained of the royal blood of the Inca kings; he nonetheless recognized the sovereignty of the king of Spain. In itself, Tpac Amarus letter contains little that would have shocked the sensibilities of Perus elites, beyond its tone. The abolition of the corregidor and the reparto were already under consideration and would shortly begin.101 Central to the Bourbon reforms was the division of unwieldy jurisdictions, and just seven years after Tpac Amarus letter Cusco did receive its own Audiencia, albeit under the viceroy in Lima. The proposal to appoint an Indian ofcial in place of the corregidor was a bit further from the mainstream of Peruvian political discourse, although, strikingly, the Inca nobility of Cusco had themselves proposed something similar just two years earlier. That the new provincial ofcial would receive an adequate salary, and therefore not rely on extortion and forced sales, was a central (if unrealized) goal of the intendant system soon to be implemented in Spanish America. Finally, repeal of increases in sales taxes and internal duties had been basic demands of all urban riots and conspiracies in Arequipa, Cusco, La Paz, and Cochabamba during the preceding decade.102 More problematic, both for the Incas of Cusco and for the ideology of Spanish rule, was Tpac Amarus claim both of leadership among the Inca elite and therefore of legitimate authority, as a result of his self-proclaimed role as Inca, in colonial society. Tpac Amarus ideal of political authority was monarchic, hierarchical, and pro-Castilian in its imperial vision. However, it was also anticolonial, rejecting the marginalization of Indian elites within the colonial order, asserting a larger sphere for Indian (Inca) authority within the Spanish Empire, and reafrming that Indian nobles were the appropriate rulers of the Indian commons. At the same time, he expressly courted the creoles of Cusco and of the countryside, acknowledging them as countrymen and as fellow sufferers under the tyranny of the corregidores. Why, then, did his peers did not join him in a program for reform that was consistent with soon-to-be-implemented royal reforms and the goals of Cuscos Inca nobility? Events unfolded so quickly between November 1780
101. The system of corregidores was replaced in the southern highlands by the intendant system; the reparto was abolished and replaced by the (suspiciously similar) socorro. For the intendant system generally, see John Fisher, Government and Society. 102. Cochabamba in 1775, La Paz in 1777, Cusco, Arequipa, and La Paz in 1780. OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones, 304 5.
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and January 1781 that we have few explicit accounts of the beliefs and goals that motivated the actors, particularly among the Indians who remained loyal to the crown. Nor were Indian nobles prolic writers: the few postrebellion accounts of their actions are formulaic assertions of loyalty as part of appeals for royal favors.103 Thus, to explore their motivations we must investigate their actions as much as their statements. Attempts to recover the political beliefs of indigenous Andeans have focused heavily on their actions during the rebellion, implicitly privileging the political nature of actions taken in explicit defense or rejection of the colonial order. In fact, the Inca nobility of Cusco and the Indian elites of the countryside were constantly involved in political battles among themselves, with priests and corregidores, and with their communities. They conducted these battles largely in the colonial courts, where as participants they articulated and sought to bring about their conceptions of the proper order of society. Throughout the 1770s, both the Inca nobility of Cusco and Tpac Amaru were involved in two lengthy legal battles that suggest the political beliefs of the participants and directly inuenced the trajectory of the rebellion. The rst was between the Inca nobility and the alcalde mayor de las ocho parroquias of Cusco, Don Bernardo Gngora; the second was between Tpac Amaru and Don Diego Betancur Tpac Amaru over a vacant mayorazgo. Both were causes clbres in Cusco huge lawsuits in which the power of Spanish ofceholders, the extent of Inca privilege and exceptionalism, and the ancestral and ethnic claims of different sectors of the bishoprics elite were rehearsed and challenged before royal judges. If the Bourbon reforms and Inca utopianism are the Andean context of the rebellion, then these lawsuits are the local context. From 1775 to 1778, Cuscos Inca nobility waged a legal war against the citys alcalde mayor. Gngoras relation to the Indians of Cusco Cercado appears to have been like that of a rural corregidor to his subjects.104 Charged with col103. The lengthiest indigenous account of the rebellion is Sahuarauras Estado del Per. For petitions to the crown asking for rewards, see ARC, Real Audiencia, Administrativo, leg. 148 (1787 89) (Diego Choquehuanca); Archivo General de la Nacin (Argentina) [hereafter AGN-A], IX-31-4-6, exp. 431, 1782 (Domingo Mango Turpa); RR.EE., Puno, Superior Gobierno, exp. 503, 1796 (the Chuquicallatas); ARC, Real Audiencia, Causas Ordinarias, leg. 11 (1792) (Mateo Pumacahua); ARC, Audencia, Administrativo, leg. 149 (1789 90) and Archivo General de la Nacin (Per) [hereafter AGN], Derechos Indgenas, exp. 472, 1792 (Diego Cusiguaman); AGN, Derechos Indgenas, exp. 643 (1784) and exp. 845 (1799) (the Sahuarauras). 104. The Cercado of Cusco included the city itself (the Cathedral and four other parishes), two suburban parishes, and two outlying agricultural parishes (San Gernimo and San Sebastin) that in the eighteenth century were the stronghold of the Inca nobility.
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lecting tribute from the ayllu caciques of the Cercado, he took advantage of this responsibility to introduce repartos and to force people to work on his hacienda and in his obraje. At the same time, like many Spanish ofcials, he both intervened in, and was drawn into, disputes within the Indian republic. Gngora had served as the alcalde mayor for two decades, during which his main foe was Don Cayetano Tupa Guamanrimachi, the powerful cacique principal in the parish of San Sebastin (the bastion of the Inca nobility): their mutual lawsuits over land, water, and general abuses date to the mid-1750s.105 Tupa Guamanrimachi himself was disliked by many of his Inca peers, and Gngora forged an alliance with the anti-Cayetano faction in the 1760s.106 In 1766 he joined a lawsuit, initiated by almost two dozen Inca nobles from the citys various parishes, that denounced Tupa Guamanrimachis abuse of ofce and made the usual aspersions against his ancestry. In 1770 Gngora succeeded in having Tupa Guamanrimachi jailed, but he was soon released. Tupa Guamanrimachi had the support of both the corregidor and another faction of the Inca nobility, and Gngora never succeeded in toppling him from San Sebastins cacicazgo. By the middle of the 1770s, the dynamics of intra-Inca politics had clearly changed, so that the focus of Inca animus was no longer Tupa Guamanrimachi, but rather Gngora. In May 1775, the ayllu caciques and nobles of San Sebastin complained that Gngora had done a reparto of pigs in the parish.107 At the time, seven other caciques from the parish joined Tupa Guamanrimachi in a complaint against Gngora; these included some of Tupa Guamanrimachis staunchest foes in the parish. Complaints against Gngora grew rapidly: in early June, the citys advocate for Indians accused Gngora of having orchestrated the unlawful arrest of Tupa Guamanrimachi in 1770, of having hit Doa Catalina Tisoc Sayritupa (a cacical heiress in Santiago parish) and causing her to abort in 1774, and of conducting the illegal reparto, claiming that it was at the behest of the corregidor (who then joined the complaint against Gngora).108 Gngoras property was embargoed and an order was issued for his
105. For example, two complaints from 1754: ARC, Cabildo, Pedimentos, leg. 112 (1733 59); ARC, Corregimiento, Pedimientos, leg. 90 (1753 65). 106. AGN, Derechos Indgenas, exp. 336; ADC, Corregimiento, leg. 47, exp. 1043. 107. ARC, Corregimiento, Provincias, Causas Criminales, leg. 85 (1773 75). 108. The accusation that an abusive ofcial had caused a woman to abort was a common feature of litigation against colonial authorities: Gngora was also accused in two other instances. Further showing the complexity of Inca politics, at the same time Catalina Tisoc Sayritupa and her husband joined Cayetano Tupa Guamanrimachi in denouncing Gngora, the couple entered into a separate suit against Catalinas sister and her husband,
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arrest. The case dragged on until 1778, joined by Inca nobles from the citys other parishes.109 The goal of the Inca nobility was clearly to have Gngora removed from ofce. To that end, in November 1777, two dozen Inca nobles complained about Gngoras abuses to the Royal Treasury in Cusco and made a remarkable proposal: [S]ince in order to liberate us from the extortions that we suffer it is necessary to appeal for remedy, we make present to Your Lordship for our alleviation, that we have at hand a subject of ability and fortune and distinction among those of our nation, who is Don Ambrocio Garces Chillitupa, such that he might administer the collection of tributes, while certainly with zeal and exactitude in favor of the Royal Estate, at the same time with love and leniency.110 It was an Inca response to the Bourbon reforms. Under the Habsburgs, the alcalde mayor had been an Inca noble, but by the 1750s the ofce had passed to the citys creole elite.111 In proposing Chillitupaan Inca elector, former alfrez real, and cacique in neighboring Oropesa the Inca nobles sought to reassert one aspect of the earlier, Habsburg order of the city. Initially, the attorney for the Royal Treasury in Cusco supported Gngoras removal but opposed Chillitupas appointment, suggesting that the crowns ofcers were not sympathetic to a return of such Inca authority. But in the end, the Royal Treasury rejected the attorneys suggestion, arguing that the charges against Gngora had not been proven, and he kept the ofce pending further investigation. While the treasurys refusal to remove Gngora might be expected to alienate the citys Incas from the crown and hence lead them to support the Silversmiths Conspiracy early in 1780, the opposite was the case. The 24 electors of Inca cabildo, along with caciques and other Indian nobles, remained loyal to the crown; it was Pedro Sahuaraura who detained the rst conspirators when they were exposed.112 For the appeal by the Indian nobility had been rejected by ofcials in Cusco, not the crown court in Lima. The Indian nobility of the bishopric held its position of loyalty to the crown in far higher regard than did the crown itself; nonetheless, they had faith that brought to the attention of the king and viceroy their loyalty would be rewarded.
Don Josf Manuel Tupa Guamanrimachi Cayetanos son over a cacicazgo in Santiago parish. ARC, Intendencia, Gobierno, leg. 139 (1787). 109. See the additions to the suit in ARC, Cajas Reales, leg. 8 (1777 81). See also the related complaint against Gngora in AGN, Superior Gobierno, exp. 403 (1776). 110. ARC, Cajas Reales, leg. 8 (1777 81). 111. Amado Gonzales, El alfrez real de los Incas, 228 31. 112. Angles Vargas, El Cacique T ambohuacso, 169 70.
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Nor was this belief ill founded. The Incas history of petitioning the crown courts dated to rst decade of conquest. Again and again over the next two centuries, the Inca nobility of Cusco appealed to Lima, and even Madrid, to win restitution of the noble privileges and civic prerogatives of the cabildo when these were threatened by local ofcials. This tradition was still strong in the mideighteenth century. In the late 1760s, an appeal to Lima had won restitution of the noble exemptions of San Sebastin.113 More generally, in 1756 the Inca cabildo gave power of attorney to Don Juan Bustamente Carlos Ynga one of the citys creole-Inca elite who had taken up residence in Madrid to petition the king for rewards and recognition of their quality, merits, and services to the crown.114 Bustamente Carlos Ynga also received numerous powers of attorney from Cuscos creoles, equally eager to draw the kings attention to their loyal service and thereby win some favor.115 For the relatively poor provincial nobles of Cusco creole as well as Indian this was a difcult task: appeals to Lima were expensive, and chances to petition the royal court in Spain were rare indeed. Ferdinand VIs reception of Bustamente Carlos Ynga could only have strengthened the Incas faith that Madrids royalty was far more kindly disposed to them than were the ofcials of Cusco. Bishop Moscosos October 1781 letter to Diego and Mariano Tpac Amaru urged them to surrender and specically referred to what must have been common lore in the city: You well know the recent example of Don Carlos Bustamente, who with the name of Carlos Ynca was treated in the splendid and magnicent court of the King with such distinction that not only was it the fulllment of his claims, but greater than whatever he could have hoped, the Monarch making such a spectacle of him among the most outstanding people that it was the wonder of those who knew him in his earlier base fortune.116 Few Incas nobles harbored hopes of meeting the king.117 But the success
113. For papers of nobility presented in 1766 68 in response to efforts by the corregidor, Don Diego Manrique y Lara, to strip the Inca nobility of their privileges, see ARC, Corregimiento, Causas Civiles, leg. 46 (exp. 1023); leg. 47 (exps. 1036, 1037, 1038); leg. 49 (exps. 1098, 1109, 1122, 1123, 1124, 1125, 1126, 1127); leg. 50 (exp. 1147); and ARC, Corregimiento, Administrativo, leg. 94 (1767 84). 114. ARC, Ambrocio Arias de Lira, leg. 32, [ ], 16 Dec. 1756. 115. Including one by Don Diego Betancur Tupa Amaro, to pursue his claim to the usta Beatriz mayorazgo (ARC, Alejo Gonzalez Pealosa, leg. 190, [ ], 10 Dec. 1753). 116. CDBR, 2:649. Bustamente Carlos Ynga won mercedes for his own family: together his widow and nieces received more than six hundred pesos a year. See the 1785 Royal Hacienda accounts, ARC, Intendencia, Real Hazienda, leg. 167 (1785). 117. Joseph Joaqun Tamboguacso, the son of Joseph Tamboguacso (cacique of Taray) and Agustina Chacona, left Cusco for Spain at some point in the 1750s or 1760s; he was never heard from again. ARC, Juan Bautista Gamarra, leg. 133, 22, 20 Feb. 1781.
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of Bustamente Carlos Ynga in Madrid was a strong reminder that appeals to Lima and Madrid had a good chance of being heard favorably. Indeed, the continued survival of Inca noble privilege was the result of two centuries of intervention by the Lima Audiencia against attempts by corregidores and other Cusco ofcials to collect tribute from the Indian nobility and interfere in cacical succession. The Inca nobility of Cusco had another reason for not joining the silversmiths: the conspiracy was exposed before any action took place, and even those who sympathized would hardly support it after its exposure. But the lengthy lawsuits of the 1770s underscore that the Inca nobility had their own mechanisms and ideology for challenging those aspects of the colonial order that threatened them. Just as the pueblo riots against the corregidor functioned, and were generally understood to function, as complex negotiations between the communities involved and the government, so too were the lawsuits of the Inca nobility. These lawsuits often yielded benecial results, particularly as they worked their way higher through the court system, where the local ofcials (like Gngora) had less inuence. As a result, an integral part of the Inca nobilitys political consciousness was a belief that challenges to local authority and relations of power were best conducted through the royal courts. Not all Incas took this stance: Tamboguacsos participation in the Silversmiths Conspiracy and the Cusipaucars role in the Urubamba riots show the political diversity of the Inca nobility. But again, in both instances the local elites implicated were overwhelmingly creoles, not Incas. In general, the Inca nobility remained loyal to the crown in moments of open crisis, placing their faith in the royal courts rather than in the delicate negotiations of the local riot. Certainly, this owed much to their own privileged position in the colonial order: unrest and turmoil were generally not in their interest. But it was precisely this privilege that informed their understanding of colonial politics. Spanish hegemony was neither unied nor coherent. In the particularities that constituted life in late colonial Cusco, the relations and order of Spanish colonial rule were open to constant challenge and negotiation, and the particular position of the Incas guided the form of their challenges. Thus, while many aspects of Tpac Amarus program were widely accepted by the Inca nobility (and, indeed, were implicitly or explicitly advocated in their lawsuits against Gngora), the manner of his challenge contradicted their own political ideology. Moreover, Tpac Amarus letter to the Cusco cabildo came less than ten months after the Incas strategy of public loyalty and legal challenge met with resounding success. On May 19, 1780, their loyalty after the exposure of the Silversmiths Conspiracy reaped its reward: after years of frustrated appeals,
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Viceroy Guirior nally ruled in their favor and against Gngora. By ofcial decree, the viceroy ordered the corregidor of Cusco to call together the electors and caciques and give them due thanks for the faithfulness and zeal they have shown in the current situation, making them see that very soon all this will be presented to the King Our Lord. . . . [W]ith respect that [they] complain of the tribute collector B[ernar]do Gngora, let it be arranged that, [Gngora] not having title of cacique conceded by this Royal Audiencia, or in propriety by this Superior Government, the Corregidor separate him from the ofce of Collector. . . . [A]nd as to the excesses [by] . . . Gngora, it is ordered that the said corregidor inform me punctually about his conduct.118 In appealing to the courts and remaining loyal to the crown in the tense days of March, the Incas had worked within the logic of Spanish colonialism to assert their position and contest certain relations of Bourbon Cusco; their acts had been consummately political and had been understood as such. So, too, in early November 1780 had the people of Tungasuca, under the leadership of Tpac Amaru, engaged in political acts understood as such, but they were articulated in a vernacular foreign to that of the Inca nobility. That the Inca nobility contested aspects of the colonial order through petitions and lawsuits rather than through riot and rebellion was hardly the only reason they failed to support Tpac Amaru. Their historic loyalty to the crown was greatly reinforced by the suspicion with which they viewed Tpac Amarus claims. While the more political demands made by Tpac Amaru were not particularly outrageous to Cuscos Incas, his insistence that he was the sole claimant to Inca blood alienated them completely. During the years that the Incas were active participants in the conict with Gngora, they had been interested bystanders in one of the more intriguing disputes of colonial Cusco: the legal battle between Jos Gabriel Tpac Amaru and Diego Betancur Tpac Amaru. In the 1760s, Jos Gabriel had discarded his paternal surname (Condorcanqui) and adopted that of the last monarch of Vilcabamba as part of his claim to the mayorazgo brought by usta Beatriz to the Marquises of Alcaices y Santiago de Oropesa.119 That grandee family had died out in 1744,
118. ARC, Corregimiento, Administrativos, leg. 94 (1767 84). 119. usta Beatriz was the daughter of Sayri Tpac, Manco Incas brother, who succeeded him as the leader of the rump Inca state at Vilcabamba. In the 1550s, Sayri Tpac acknowledged Spanish rule and converted to Christianity; in return he was granted the Inca pueblos of Yucay, Maras, Guayllabamba, and Urubamba in encomienda. He then
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leaving the valuable mayorazgo vacant.120 According to Jos Gabriel, when Felipe Tpac Amaru the last Inca sovereign was executed in 1572, he had left an illegitimate daughter, Juana Pilcohuaco, who would have been Beatrizs cousin. Jos Gabriel alleged that Juana, in turn, had married Don Diego Felipe Condorcanqui (from a non-Inca ruling lineage in the southern highlands). The couple ruled as caciques of Surimana, leaving only one surviving child, Don Blas Tpac Amaru. He married Doa Francisca Torres; in 1687 their children presented this information to the corregidor of Canas y Canchis (later Tinta), who declared them the descendants of Juana and therefore of Felipe Tpac Amaru. Blas and Franciscas son Sebastin succeeded them as cacique of Surimana.121 He married Doa Catalina del Camino; their son, Miguel, married Doa Rosa Noguera. Miguel died young, and Rosas brother served as interim cacique until Rosa and Miguels son, Jos Gabriel, was of age. Arguing that the mayorazgo should revert to the line of Juana Pilcohuaco, as Beatrizs closest relative, Jos Gabriel launched a claim that would span the 1770s and bring him into conict with the Inca and creole nobility of Cusco. Jos Gabriel was not the only claimant. Opposing him was Don Diego Felipe Betancur Tpac Amaru of Cusco.122 The son of Don Bernardo Betancur y Arvieto and Doa Manuela Tpac Amaru, Diego Felipe had been born in the late seventeenth century, the product of an alliance between Cuscos creole and Inca nobilities. The Betancur claim argued that Felipe Tpac Amaru had left not a daughter, but a son, Don Juan Tito Tpac Amaru. His grandson, Don Lucas Tpac Amaru, had married a creole woman, Doa Gabriela Arze; their daughter was Diego Betancurs mother.123 Diego had married Doa Lucia de Bargas y Urbina, a Spaniard of well-known nobility.124 Based on this genealogy, Diego Betancur spent the three decades before his death trying to
retired to Yucay, where he died a few years later. Through Beatrizs marriage to Martn de Loyola (the nephew of St. Ignatius), the encomienda passed to the Marquises of Alcaices. Angles Vargas, Historia del Cusco, 1:397. For Beatrizs will, ARC, Betancur, 3:145 54. 120. The mayorazgo was declared vacant by royal decree on 16 Oct. 1744. ARC, Toms Gamarra, leg. 176, 497ff, 3 Dec. 1778. 121. Francisco A. Loayza, ed., Genealoga de Tpac Amaru por Jose Gabriel Tpac Amaru (documentos inditos del ao 1777) (Lima: [Editorial Miranda] 1946). 122. For the Betancur claim, see the 13-volume collection compiled in the nineteenth century by Vicente Jos Garcia and extant in the ARC as the Coleccin Betancur, esp. vol. 1, for genealogical information. Also Diego Betancurs will, in ARC, Toms Gamarra, leg. 176, 497ff, 3 Dec. 1778. 123. ARC, Toms Gamarra, leg. 173, 497ff, 3 Dec. 1778. 124. ARC, Betancur, 1:117.
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claim the mayorazgo for his family and waging an endless legal battle against an Indian from Pampamarca, Don Josph Condorcanqui Noguera Balenzuela Camino y Torres, that he not call himself Tpac Amaru.125 Given the enormous importance of Jos Gabriel Tpac Amaru in Peruvian history, the relative merits of his claims versus those of the Betancurs have excited much academic interest.126 The reaction of Cuscos nobility, however, is more relevant to this work than the question of which, if either, had the better claim. That a highland cacique, whose last proclaimed link to the Incas was his great-great-grandmother, would title himself the heir to Manco Inca (and potentially the encomendero of four Inca pueblos) was not well received in Cusco. Moreover, Tpac Amarus wife, mother, and grandmother were provincial Spaniards, who (in Cusqueo eyes) ranked far below both the Inca nobility and the notoriously noble creole families related to Betancur. In an extraordinary move that suggests the Inca nobilitys position, in 1778 Diego Betancur was appointed an elector for the Inca cabildos 12th house, that of Guayna Cpac: the only creole so elected.127 For many reasons Betancurs pretensions were preferable, to the Incas, to those of Tpac Amaru. The Betancurs were closely linked to Cuscos creole elite, with whom the Inca nobility had strong ties and whom they valued as allies far more than the dominant family from a pastoral pueblo far up the Vilcanota. Indeed, Betancur was much more the peer of the Inca nobility than was the cacique of Surimana. For more than two centuries, the Incas had lived and dealt with the descendants of the conquistadors, and each group acknowledged the social standing of the other. In contrast, to acknowledge, as Beatrizs heir, the claims of someone with almost no ties of kinship to the surviving Inca nobility would undermine the basic premise of the colonial Incas: that it was constant intermarriage that maintained Inca nobility and that the bastardized
125. ARC, Toms Gamarra, leg. 176, 497ff, 3 Dec. 1778. Betancur also sued Don Gaspar Tpac Amaru Ynga, or Balderrama, of Oruro over his use of the Inca name. ARC, Betancur, III. 126. See especially Cahills recent analysis of the competing claims, the history of the Marquesado, and their treatment in the historiography in Primus inter pares. See also John H. Rowe, Genealoga y rebelin en el siglo XVIII: Algunos antecedentes de la sublevacin de Jos Gabriel Thupa Amaro, Histrica (Lima) 6, no. 1 ( July 1982): 65 86; Carlos Daniel Valcrcel, Documentos sobre las gestiones del cacique Tpac Amaru ante la Audiencia de Lima (1777), Letras (Lima) 36, no. 3 (1946): 452 66, and La familia del cacique Tpac Amaru, Letras (Lima) 37, no. 1 (1947): 44 89; and Fisher, The Last Inca Revolt, 33 37. 127. The election took place on 25 Feb. 1778. ARC, Betancur, vol. 1.
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Inca lines of the former empire had no role in Cuscos ceremonial and political life. At heart, the issue was whether the Incas had ceased to exist as a group in the sixteenth century (so that those who could trace descent from the preconquest rulers could claim to be Inca themselves), or whether the Incas were an ongoing ethnic nobility, zealously preserving their purity of blood (with allowances for judicious marriages to other Indian nobles and creoles of good family).128 And in that debate, the Incas of Cusco and Jos Gabriel Condorcanqui, or Tpac Amaru, were necessarily on different sides. The conict over the mayorzago paralleled, or spilled over into, cacical politics in Tpac Amarus own parish. Following his father and uncle, Tpac Amaru had been conrmed as cacique of the small pueblos of Tungasuca, Pampamarca, and Surimana in 1766, at the age of 28. However, disputes with the corregidores of Tinta and other claimants led to his removal from 1769 to 1771; he was reinstated, but (as often happened) the dispute smoldered on. Early in 1780, a number of caciques and Indian nobles from the vicinity of Pampamarca gave testimony about Tpac Amarus ancestry. The particular allegations are the stuff of any eighteenth-century succession battle and should not be taken at face value: there had been no Doa Juana Picohuaco; or if there had been she was not the matriarch of the Condorcanqui line; Jos Gabriel and his in-laws, the Nogueras, had stolen all of their documents from the true claimants; other of his papers were forged; and so on.129 The most powerful cacique of the area, Doa Tomasa Tito Condemayta (who later supported the rebellion), testied that Tpac Amarus father, Miguel, was always a poor, destitute man, and without any right whatsoever to the name of Tpac Amaru and that the above-mentioned took the name Tpac Amaru just as the Indians take that which seems appealing to them . . . and the said Don Miguel was an ordinary Indian without any privileges.130 Whatever their truth, the challenges to ancestral authority that were always at the heart of intraelite politics surrounded Tpac Amarus pretensions, and not only in Cusco.131 These legal battles suggest two tenets of the Inca nobilitys political ideology that put them at odds with Tpac Amaru. First, while Inca nobles were far from passive in challenging those aspects of Spanish rule that they opposed, they were
128. For eighteenth-century Inca marriage patterns, see Garrett, Los Incas borbnicos. 129. ARC, Betancur, 2:309 50. 130. ARC, Betancur, 2:345. 131. For the local and provincial politics surrounding Tpac Amaru, see esp. Stavig, Eugenio Sinanyuca; and Glave, Vida, smbolos y batallas, 117 78.
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committed to doing so through petitions to the crown and appeals to the courts. In this, they both supported Spains colonial hegemony and demonstrated how elements of that hegemony were open to challenge and revision through sanctioned mechanisms. That the Inca nobility, and the cacical elite to the south, asserted and lived up to their claims to be the most loyal vassals of the crown in no way required that they accept all aspects of the colonial order. Their form of rejection, however, was distinct from that advanced by Tpac Amaru. Second, while they shared with Tpac Amaru a strong commitment to a colonial order that recognized Inca authority, their denition of that authority, and who should exercise it, differed radically from his. His claim to be the sole successor to Tpac Amaru I (and thus Guayna Cpac) certainly resonated throughout the Vilcanota highlands, but it fell at in Cusco. That a mestizo highlander descended from an illegitimate child of Tpac Amaru and an Aymara cacique would claim precedence over the numerous descendants of Paullu Inca was unthinkable.132 Indeed, one of these descendantsPedro Sahuarauraled the Indian regiment against Tpac Amaru at Sangarar. It is an ironic, and telling, indication of the complexity of colonial Andean society and ideology that Tpac Amaru himself adopted a very Spanish understanding of hereditary authority and succession, treating the Inca mantle as a mayorazgo.133 To the Incas of Cusco, it was a far more complex, and vibrant, elite identity; whether intentionally or not, Tpac Amarus claims necessarily represented a threat to colonial Inca privilege as it was understood and constructed in Cusco. Thus, both the nature of Tpac Amarus call for reform, and his dynastic claims, alienated Cuscos Inca nobility. Just as importantly, on the ground the rebellion developed in ways at odds with Tpac Amarus own pronouncements, and both the actions of his followers and the constitution of the movements leadership reinforced the ideological divide between Tpac Amaru and both the Cusco nobility and the Titicaca cacical elite. Notwithstanding Tpac Amarus pan-Andean rhetoric and his implicit insistence that Inca blood should translate
132. Paullu Ynga, a son of Guayna Cpac, remained loyal to the Spanish after his brother, Manco, rebelled in 1535. He converted to Christianity in the 1540s. Descendants of Paullus 15 or so sons by different women ranked at the top of the colonial Inca nobility. See Ella Temple Dunbar, Un linaje incico durante la dominacin espaola: Los Sahuaraura, Revista Histrica (Lima) 18, no. 1 (1949): 49 53. 133. And that historians have concurred with Tpac Amarus understanding of just succession; see above, n. 132. Equally telling, Diego Betancur and Jos Gabriel Tpac Amaru had almost identical ethnic ancestries: both were three-quarters Spanish and onequarter Indian noble. That Betancur is (and was) considered creole and Tpac Amaru is (and was) considered Indian says much about both the uidity of ethnic classications in the eighteenth-century Andes and the politics of twentieth-century attributions.
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into political authority in the Andes, the leadership of the rebellion from November 1780 to March 1781 was overwhelmingly drawn from Tinta and southern Quispicanchis, and it came more from the rural Spanish population than from the Indian nobility.134 That Tpac Amarus principal ofcers and supporters came from his extended family and the nearby elite is hardly surprising. By 1780, that elite was a mix of old Inca and Aymara lineages and rural Spaniards, and the muleteer professionof which Tpac Amaru was part and which provided many of his allieswas dominated by the latter. However, Tpac Amarus failure to recruit before the rebellion, or win over in the rst two months of success, the dominant Indian families north of Quiquijana or south of Sicuani exposes the narrow geographic boundaries of the provincial nobilities of the southern highlands. In their own eyes, Cuscos Inca nobles were not tied to Tpac Amaru by marriage, blood, or common cause. Nor did the great dynasties of the Titicaca basin have bonds with Tpac Amarus clan and allies. Rather, kin solidarities formed limits to political consciousness in the late colonial highlands. While Tpac Amaru could articulate a political vision that rivaled (and paralleled) the viceroyalty in its scope, in the end he could not transcend the local and regional afliations that structured the Indian elite. To the Incas of Cusco, Tpac Amaru was not their leader or liberator, but rather an arrogant mestizo cacique from a small puna pueblo whose pretensions threatened their own understanding of colonial Inca authority. While Tpac Amaru failed to attract the support of elites more than 30 or 40 miles from his pueblo, the rebellion was singularly successful in breaking past regional boundaries and mobilizing large swaths of the tributary population, crossing the cultural divide between the pastoral communities of the upper Vilcanota and the Aymara societies around Titicaca. As it did so, it quickly moved beyond the limited, reformist ideology that he had espoused. Perhaps Tpac Amaru had always intended the radical turn that the rebellion took, and his letter to the Cusco cabildo offered a mild reformist program in the hopes of deceiving them into surrendering. Or perhaps Tpac Amaru was radicalized by Cuscos intransigence and the rejection of his leadership by the Incas and the caciques around Titicaca.135 Alternatively, the more aggressive actions of the rebels may have reected a peasant, anticolonial consciousness that took
134. Campbell, Social Structure of the Tpac Amaru Army; OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones, 308 17. 135. That his pretensions were rebuffed by the Lima Audiencia as well as by Cuscos Inca nobility only strengthened his commitment to them: following the victory at Sangarar, he and Micaela Bastidas commissioned portraits of themselves as Inca and Coya. Walker, Smoldering Ashes, 39.
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charge of the rebellion and placed it beyond Tpac Amarus control. This unanswerable question remains a topic of debate.136 Nevertheless, that the rebellion radicalized as it progressed is beyond doubt.137 It began with the violent, but rather routine, capture and execution of a corregidor by an angry pueblo. For Cuscos Inca nobility and creole elite, the action was both comprehensible and ultimately unthreatening. The exactions of corregidores violated the moral economy of the highlands, cutting across class and ethnic boundaries: here was one aspect of colonial rule rejected by most of colonial society.138 The destruction of the obraje at Pomacanchis was a more direct challenge to urban Cusco. The obraje was a xture of the bishoprics social landscape: a huge complex just off the royal road on the shores of a highland lake, it had hundreds of workers and had been operating for more than a century.139 To the surrounding pueblos, it was a constant indication of the oppressive relations of colonial rule: a vast, creole-owned property in which those who could not pay tribute, or had committed some crime, or offended local authorities were conned; which no doubt demanded more than its share of water and land; and whose prots owed to the city of Cusco. To the citizens of Cusco Indian and creole the obraje was instead an economic colony in the Indian highlands that produced some of the citys wealth; indeed, it was the foundation of the Count de Lagunas fortunes. While no Indian nobles owned anything remotely resembling that obraje in scale, the popular strike against elite property in the remote rural highlands must also have raised concerns about the fate of their own small factories, their private ranches, and their large houses lled with their families movable wealth. Now the anticolonial actions of the rebels were not directed simply against abusive,
136. Piel, Cmo interpretar la rebelin, 74 76; Walker, Smoldering Ashes, 50 54. 137. Campbell, Ideology and Factionalism; OPhelan Godoy, La Gran Rebelin, 105 85. 138. For the elaboration of moral economy, see E. P. Thompson, The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, Past and Present 50 (Feb. 1971): 76 136. For moral economy (and rebellion) in colonial Spanish America, see Kevin Gosner, Soldiers of the Virgin: The Moral Economy of a Colonial Maya Rebellion (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1992); Serulnikov, Customs and Rules; and Ward Stavig, Ethnic Conict, Moral Economy, and Population in Rural Cuzco on the Eve of the Thupa Amaro II Rebellion, Hispanic American Historical Review 68, no. 4 ( Nov. 1988): 737 70. 139. For the obraje in 1689, see Villanueva Urteaga, Cuzco 1689, 173 74; for its ownership from 1660 through independence, see Neus Escandell-Tur, Produccin y comercio de tejidos coloniales: Los obrajes y chorrillos del Cusco, 1750 1820 (Cusco: Centro Bartolom de Las Casas, 1997), 433 34.
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middling royal ofcials but against the very structures of colonial society on which the fortunes of both rural elites and the city of Cusco depended. The massacre at the church of Sangarar can only have exacerbated the opposition of Indian elites to the rebellion.140 The church was both the symbol of colonial rule in the rural pueblo and the symbol of the pueblo itself. Generally, Andean elites (Indian and Spanish) were reasonably orthodox in their Catholic practice and accepted the basic Catholic pantheon of saints and the Trinity. The symbolism of these massacres is striking: the Indian elites and the creoles of pueblos in rebellion sought sanctuary in their churches, no doubt because they were the strongest buildings in town but also because the right of sanctuary was well entrenched.141 The assault on these temples, and those seeking refuge in them, represented a profound rejection of the church as a corrupt, colonial institution. Colonial elites criticized aspects of the colonial order, but they generally embraced colonial society, which here the rebels struck at its heart. As the rebellion moved south into the Titicaca basin, it became an open assault on all aspects of colonial authority. Tributaries there expressed a strong resentment of the rural elite, and the crowds that assembled in the plazas of highland pueblos directed their wrath against Indian nobles and creoles alike. Indeed, such might have been the pattern even in the earliest stages of the rebellion: three of the caciques who were tried with Tpac Amaru testied that they had been forced to join the rebellion by the mobs.142 Such self-serving claims contain a grain of truth: in those pueblos close to the epicenter of the rebellion, caciques were forced to make rapid decisions as rebels converged on their villages. To the south, whether provoked by their caciques refusal to join the rebellion, or never giving them the chance, rebels and pueblos rose against the cacical elite. In Azngaro, the wife and daughters of the cacique of Urinsaya were hanged in the main plaza by women from the pueblo, and the hereditary cacique of Verenguelillo suffered the same fate.143
140. Interestingly, in Cusco the rebels killed almost no priests. A Relacin de los sucesos desgraciados que han sufridos los curas made clear that many had had their lives threatened and property destroyed, but only a Dominican friar in Pupuja had been killed. AGI, Cuzco, leg. 63, exp. 5. 141. For sanctuary during the wars of independence, see the case against Col. Manuel Choquehuanca of Azngaro, AAC, IV-8-147 and XXXVIII-1-15. 142. OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones, 308 17. 143. For Azngaro, see Gilberto Salas Perea, Monografa sinttica de Azngaro (Puno: Los Andes, 1966), 22. For Verenguelillo, see Ticona Sancho Laricos suit over the cacicazgo, ARC, Intendencia, Causas Ordinarias, Provincias, leg. 99 (1802 3). For others,
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That the rebellion became so much more radical in the Titicaca basin owed much to the social structure of the region.144 Spanish rule had solidied the preeminence of a handful of cacical lineages around Titicaca, so that an intermarried nobility dominated the areas tributaries. These caciques amassed great wealth and formed a closed ruling class. When Tpac Amarus rebellion against colonial exactions and corrupt ofcials spread from the pastoral and potato-growing pueblos of Tinta to the agricultural communities around the lake separated by more than one hundred miles and centuries of cultural and economic difference its dynamics changed. The massacre of the caciques at Julis San Pedro church was every bit as much an anticolonial action as the hanging of Arriaga in Tungasuca.145 In the Titicaca basin, the conjunctures of Andean history and the Spanish tributary/mining economy had produced the largest, richest, and most stratied Indian societies of colonial South America. Those who bore its burdens directed their destructive fury inward, toward the social order of the colonial pueblo.
Conclusions
The Tpac Amaru Rebellion was a complex, contradictory social explosion; indeed, it achieved such initial success and spread so rapidly precisely because it united, however briey, the reformist demands of rural elites with the subaltern anticolonialism of the pueblos. Tpac Amarus demands challenged certain relations in the colonial order particularly the authority of corregidores. They drew on widespread antagonism toward the reparto, increases in tribute, and the division of the viceroyalty in 1776. They also drew on the well-established and growing tradition of the riot as a means of articulating this antagonism and calling for reform. Overall, though, Tpac Amaru upheld fundamental relations of colonial society in the bishopric: property, tribute, the rule of the king,
BNP, Manuscritos, exp. C-1705; Thomson, We Alone Will Rule, 209 31; and Roger Rasnake, Domination and Cultural Resistance: Authority and Power among an Andean People (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1988), 144 47. 144. Thomson, We Alone Will Rule; OPhelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones; Campbell, Ideology and Factionalism; Garrett, Descendants of the Natural Lords. 145. [L]a masacre de los caciques, as it was called by Mariano Ynojosa y Cutimbo. ARC, Real Audiencia, Causas Ordinarias, leg. 33 (1799). Those killed in the church were then deled, with Indian nobles a particular focus of postmortem violence. Two of the pueblos caciques were found hung from gallows with their hearts cut out, while the body of one caciques wife had been drained of blood, reputedly drunk by the rebels. Szeminski, Why Kill the Spaniard? 171.
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the role of local elites, and Inca privilege. By challenging certain existing social relations that had been dictated by royal decree, his demands were, in a narrow sense, anticolonial. However, people in the colonial highlands did this all the time: they simply articulated their challenges differently, using the institutions of colonial rule to contest and rene local social relations while performing their humility before a distant king. Overall, Tpac Amarus own political goals were similar to those of other members of the Indian elite; indeed, much of his platform either paralleled specic goals of the Inca nobility or was already under consideration by ofcials in Lima and Madrid. Nonetheless, the Inca nobility and the cacical aristocracy rejected Tpac Amarus rebellion, and his leadership, out of hand, for three reasons. First, their own strategy, and history, of negotiating the demands of colonial rule was through petition and the courts. These venues were tried and true, and the route of riot and rebellion though equally part of the colonial Andean political lexicon had always been rejected by the Incas. Second, Tpac Amarus Inca pretensions seem almost intended to alienate the Inca nobility. He had few blood ties to Cuscos Inca nobility, and his claims implicitly rejected their own complex understanding of Inca identity and privilege. The leadership of the rebellion also served as a challenge to Cuscos creole elite and the great cacical dynasties of the Titicaca basin. Both groups cherished their ancestries and had a strong sense of their rightful position in the bishopric, which placed them far above a mestizo cacique and his provincial Spanish kin. Finally, by late December 1780 (when the siege of Cusco began), it was clear to all that the rebellion itself represented a far more serious threat to the social order of the region than did Tpac Amarus relatively modest demands. Thus, to the Inca and creole elites of Cusco and the cacical dynasties of the Titicaca basin, the rebel armies that had taken over the Vilcanota, Apurmac, and Ayavire highlands did not represent the promise of liberation and the restoration of Inca rule. Rather, they were an invading army of Indian peasants and espaoles de la tierra under the leadership of a mestizo cacique whose claims of royal ancestry Cuscos nobles had long disputed. The past three decades have produced a wealth of literature establishing that mobs are political, not the irrational actors condemned by elites and historians. Certainly, the forces in the Tpac Amaru rebellion demonstrate this; their actions also show a much more aggressively anticolonial stance than that of their (short-lived) leader from the rural elite. Indeed, that they proved so radical was the downfall of the rebellion; precisely because they were acting out a subaltern anticolonial assault on the social order, they met resistance from those whose interests lay in challenging particular relations within the colonial
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order but not the society as a whole. To the Indian nobility, the rebels were mobs, tearing away at the foundations of society. The rebels rejected not only Spanish rule, the corregidor, and tribute: they also rejected private property, Indian noble privilege, and the sanctity of the church. These were central to the social ideology of the Indian nobility, and they acted on those beliefs. Ultimately, the rebels ran up against the colonial consciousness of the Inca nobility and southern caciques, who accepted the fundamental idea of Spanish hegemony precisely because this hegemony was uid, complex, and contestable. Indian elites had a centuries-long history of challenging colonial rule through its own institutions. The Great Rebellion was, in many ways, a civil war within Indian society, and as such it was profoundly political. To suggest that the loyalists were somehow backward-looking defenders of the ancien rgime, and the rebels precursors to a nationalist future, imposes a problematic teleology on colonial political consciousness. The trajectory of the rebellion exposes the interrelated divisions that constituted highland society in the late eighteenth century. The rebellion was supported by the tributary societies in the catchment basin of the Potos mita, which corresponded with the old Aymara seorios.146 The rebellion spread only eetingly to the traditionally Quechua areas surrounding these highlands and failed absolutely to cross the Apurmac gorge to the Quechua societies of central Peru. The distinction was not strictly linguistic: the cradle of the rebellion was, by the 1700s, Quechua-speaking, as part of the bishopric of Cusco.147 But economically and culturally, the divide between the pastoral and potatogrowing highlands and the temperate, agricultural lands of the valleys was as pronounced then as under Inca rule. The initial surge of Tpac Amarus forces down the Vilcanota was as much an invasion by highland herders of the agricultural heartland of the Incas as it was an Indian rebellion against Spanish rule. Or so it must have seemed to the farmers whose crops were trampled and especially to the village notables who, despite their proud descent from the Incas, saw themselves threatened and humiliated by Indian plebes from the south. The rebellion also revealed the uneven border between creole and Indian.
146. Tellingly, its one success in spreading past this was in jumping across the upper Apurmac Valley to pueblos in Chumbivilcas that contributed to the Huancavelica mita. 147. Parts of the bishopric in the Titicaca basin did remain Aymara-speaking. Certainly Asillo did: descriptions of the 1790 riot make explicit that the protector de naturales addressed the community in Aymara, not Quechua. AGN-A, Sala IX, 7-4-3, exp. 4.
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The Tpac Amaru and the Catari rebellions were rural uprisings. With the exception of Oruro, highland cities remained royalist strongholds. The burguesa and aristocracy fretted about the loyalties of the urban underclasses, but the urban-rural divide was pronounced in the colonial Andes, and city dwellers of both repblicas rejected the rebels call. Spanish rule favored the cities, which, as centers of creole settlement and Spanish institutions, were net beneciaries of the tributary economy. Tpac Amarus program threatened the Spanish dominance embodied in the cities and sought to destroy the economy of tribute and extraction on which the comfortable life of city dwellers depended. Less than three decades later, cities across Spanish South America would themselves lead the rejection of European rule, using the invasion of Spain to assert their de facto independence. Like the rebellions of 1780 83, these were anticolonial revolutions, but ones that reected the interests of the cities and rejected the authority of the Audiencia, the viceroyalty, and the Council of Indies, not that of the corregidor, the cacique, and the property owner. Finally, the Indian elite remained overwhelmingly loyal to the crown. Their colonial consciousness proved as deeply rooted as the anticolonial consciousness of the rebels. Around Cusco, the tributary population generally joined the Inca nobility in repulsing the rebels; in the Titicaca basin, many joined the rebels to attack the cacical elite. Ironically, the Inca-dominated communities around Cusco were the most aggressive in asserting a historical consciousness that treated the Spanish Conquest as a dening moment of rupture, and they constantly rehearsed their primordial privilege and pre-Hispanic precedence; yet it was in precisely this area of heavy Spanish settlement, urbanization, strong regional markets, and colonial Inca privilege that the institutions and ideals of colonial rule had taken deepest root. For large segments of society in the temperate stretches of the Vilcanota Valley, on the Anta plain, in Paruro, and in Cusco itself, the sweeping anticolonial program of the rebels was self-destructive. But in the heavily burdened pueblos of the mita basin, the rejection of the corregidor, cacical power and wealth, and the demands of the colonial state proved enormously appealing.

David T. Garret - Tupac Amaru

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His Majestys Most Loyal Vassals: The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

On November 4, 1780, the cacique of Tungasuca, Don Jos Gabriel Tpac

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

HAHR / November / Garrett

The Indian Nobility and Tpac Amaru

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