From late 1780 to early 1783, Spanish rule in South America was seriously threatened for the first time since they had conquered Cuzco, the seat of Inca power, 250 years before. What we refer to today as the Andean Rebellions were a series of linked local revolts. Although the revolts were centered around Cuzco, the Lake Titicaca Region, and La Paz, their effects were felt from modern-day Columbia to Argentina. [Show map with all of these places].
Historians estimate that during these two years 100,000 people died in the struggle. That was about 8% of the population or 1 out of every 12 people. Just these numbers show us the enormous impact that the rebellions had on society. Their effects can still be felt today.
I’m going to start off by giving you a little background information about the rebellions since your readings only really focused on one phase of the events. Then we’ll talk about why they occurred, what their effect was, and what they mean for how we see colonial society.
[Show pictures of Tupac Amaru] So these are images of Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui. Before the rebellions in began in late 1780, he was a 43 year old cacique of several towns in the highlands south of Cuzco and also worked as muleteer, transporting goods for trade. He claimed to be a descendent of the last Inca ruler, Túpac Amarau, who had been executed by the Spanish more than 200 years earlier, in 1572 [show picture]. Condorcanqui was involved in a long legal battle to have his relationship to the first Tupac Amaru legally recognized, so that he could inherit a more important position. He even adopted the name of the last Inca ruler. I'll use that chosen name, Tupac Amaru, when talking about him today since that is how he is most commonly known.
This is an image of a document written by Tupac Amaru during the rebellions. What do you notice about it? What does it tell us? [Get out the official look of it, with the seal, stamp etc, good handwriting] He was a well-educated, middle-class mestizo, who was familiar with European thought, literate, and well read. Much of the evidence historians use to reconstruct the rebellions come from his own letters and written orders to his generals.
Tupac Amaru had long been dissatisfied with the rule of Antonio de Arriaga, the local corrigedor (provincial magistrate). On November 4, 1780, he arrested Arriaga, put him on trial for corruption and abuse, and had him hung in the public gallows. This was the opening moment of a well-organized insurrection. Spreading both north and south, his troops took over most of the area between Cuzco and Arequipa in a military assault that he had been planning for two years.
By early December, they had secured the highlands to Lake Titicaca with a force of about 50,000. Many communities chose to join his troops while others fought or fled, remaining loyal to colonial authority. For seven days in late December and early January, the forces laid siege to Cuzco. However, they were eventually forced to retreat; they moved back towards the highlands. Intense fighting continued until early April when Tupac Amarau was betrayed by one of his own men and captured by loyalist troops. He was executed along with 9 key supporters and family members on May 18, 1781 in the main Plaza in Cuzco, the same place where his supposed ancestor the first Tupac Amaru was decapitated more than 200 years earlier. After Tupac Amaru's capture and death, the surviving forces continued to move southward under the command of his cousin and nephew.
They headed towards La Paz, over 400 miles away, where a separate but related rebellion was already going on. [Show map and terrain] This phase of the rebellion was being led by and indigenous man named Julian Apaza. [Show picture]. This is a modern representation of Apaza and his wife. Apaza had taken the name Túpac Katari after Tupac Amaru and the Katari brothers, who had lead a recent revolt in the Chayanta region. Before becoming Tupac Katari, Apaza was a miner and then a petty trader of coca and cloth. Thirty years old, he was an illiterate peasant, whose arms and legs were slightly twisted, probably from a childhood bout with
polio. His wife, Bartolina Sisa, later said that he had been talking about organizing a rebellion for ten years. He took advantage of the moment of panic due to Tupac Amaru's rebellion in Cusco and local conditions to proclaim himself viceroy, claiming that Tupac Amaru had authorized his position. [show viceroy picture] This is an image of an actual viceroy at the time, so you can imagine that a former miner with twisted legs probably didn't quite fit the part. Katari's rebellion quickly spread throughout the area and became a prolonged siege on La Paz beginning in March of 1781 (that is before the execution of Tupac Amaru).
To understand this siege you need to know a little about La Paz, which is a valley nestled between several mountains. [Show picture] El Alto is the flat plain that looks down on the city. By taking El Alto and several key passes, Tupac Katari was able to completely block all access to the city. His army of 10,000-40,000 was able to hold the city under siege for over 6 months. During the siege about 20,000 people died, which included only 5,000 rebels. While many died from fighting, the majority perished from disease and starvation inside the surrounded city. As Tupac Amaru's relatives moved south, they joined up with Tupac Katari's forces in the siege of La Paz. Loyalist troops had to come all the way from Buenos Aires to break the siege. At this point, Tupac Katari fled north, was betrayed, captured and executed in November of 1781. Tupac Amaru's cousin survived and continued fighting, signing an armistice in Sicuani in 1782. He was eventually executed in July of 1783, thus eliminating the final flames of the rebellions.
So these events lead us to a lot of big questions. What made such a large number of people rebel at this point in time? How did local leaders gain such large followings? Any ideas to start us off?
This is an excerpt of something Tupac Amaru wrote toward the beginning of the rebellion. Can I get one of you to read it? “The Kings of Castile have usurped my crown and my people's dominions for close to three centuries, burdening my vassals with unbearable levies, tributes, commutations, customs houses, commercial duties, monopolies, property taxes, tithes, royal fifths, viceroys, audiencias, corregidores, and other ministers, all of them equal in tyranny...” So what is he complaining about?
Starting in the 1760s, the Spanish government reorganized colonial rule with a series of laws now called the Bourbon Reforms. The Bourbon dynasty had taken over from the Habsburgs in 1700. Toward the end of the century, there were many military struggles with the British and the French, so the King needed money to support defense. So the Spanish enacted a series of reforms to make the empire more productive. The Bourbon Reforms increased the burden on most members of society. It centralized administration, had more bureaucrats, had fewer American-born officials, and increased demands on the colonial populations. Taxes went up, more people had to pay them, and they were actually collected (before the collection was quite haphazard). Increased sales tax cut into the profit of those transporting the goods, like Tupac Amaru and Tupac Katari. In Peru, at least, the reparto had also been expanded. This word was mentioned in your readings. Does anyone know what it means?
The era prior to the revolts was also a time of demographic growth after a series of epidemics in the early 1700s. The increase in people caused increased pressure for land. Many creoles, mestizos, and Indians shared a common experience of frustration with the demands of the late colonial system. But not everyone, and certainly not all Indians, joined the rebellion. If life was so hard, why didn't every one take this opportunity to throw off their colonial leaders?
First of all, as you read in the Garrett piece, a lot of the indigenous elite did not really like Tupac Amaru. His economic demands were nothing particularly out of the ordinary, but his attempt to claim Inca descent was. There was big cultural divide between the elite of Cuzco and leaders from the highlands, like Tupac Amaru. They saw him as usurping their heritage. So they did not want to join his military rebellion, preferring to work through the court system.
That explains why leaders chose to revolt or not. If they were connected to Tupac Amaru, they joined him. If they were connected to other branches of elites, they did not. However, whether a community joined their leader to fight for loyalists or rebelled to fight with Tupac Amaru depended on local experience. The indigenous population was not unaccustomed to tribute. They had been paying it for 250 years under the Spanish and for centuries before that under the Inca. However, they expected some form of reciprocity from their leaders, who would protect them in exchange for their tribute. Whether or not a community revolted, depended on two factors: their community leaders' relationship with the rebellion and their own relationship with their local leader. For example leader who went to court to fight for his community or reinvested earnings in public works, like bridges, was less likely to be the subject of rebellion or murder. We can see this localized difference in the community of Lurucache’s petition for the ouster of Santos Mamani and his replacement with a new kuraka. Can I get someone to read it? "He tries to martyr us with whips, rocks, and clubs beating widows and married women like men. He encourages his wife, mother and son to kill us…. He takes the bread from out of our mouths…. Regarding the distribution of lands, we do not know if we have land to work or not. Whoever has sufficient aguardiente is the owner of the lands,… his accountant is a boy who knows nothing… and treats older men with disrespect. To remedy this situation, we ask the great favor of Our Majesty that Don Juan Paulino de Andia be our cacique and governador in order that he put us all in peace and quietude and that we may not be like cats and dogs in one single ayllu." So what does this say to you?
We cannot see the indigenous population as a faceless mass that mechanically joined the rebellion because their lives were hard and they wanted to overthrow the Spanish. Each community had its own relationship with neighboring communities, its leaders, and the state. People joined the rebellion if they thought that it might improve their daily lives. Many Indians fought on the side of loyalist troops while others revolted.
So the economic changes of the Bourbon reforms that we talked about earlier had been going on for a long time. There had also been many local revolts all over Peru starting in the 1740s. Arriaga was certainly not the first corregidor to get killed by angry leaders or crowds. Ultimately reformist, these revolts were all sparked by specific instances of the abuse of authority or the high burden of colonial demands rather than being pre-planned rebellions.
Both Amaru and Apaza's rebellions responded to these same economic and administrative concerns. But these revolts were different from previous ones because they spread so widely and continued for so long. Why this is true is not fully known, but it probably had to do with Tupac Amaru himself. His rebellion was pre-planned rather than a spontaneous revolt. He also called on a larger ideology of indigenous roots that spoke to many people.
Part of Indian mythology of the time included a messianic belief in the return of the Inca. I know that you've seen images like this one before. Can anyone tell me about it?
It's Guaman Poma's representation of the first Tupac Amaru's decapitation in 1572. Legend told that he would be regenerated from his head, reconquer his land, and bring a more harmonious rule. This myth fits well with pre-Colombian indigenous notions of cyclical time. In other words, when the Inca returned, the time of the Spanish would be over and a previous cycle would be reborn. [Show image from Doc History book] You saw this image in your readings. Can anyone tell me what it is? What does it mean for how people like Tupac Amaru are seeing the first Tupac Amaru in the 18th century?
For years prior to the rebellions, indigenous elites had been using "Inca" clothing as a status symbol. Many read Garcilaso's accounts. Are you familiar with them? They had a romanticized notion of the Inca past. [Images of Corpus Christi and of man dressed in Inca garb] These are both paintings made around the time of the revolts. Take a few minutes to talk to in small groups. Groups on the right side of the room, why don't you look closely at the color image while groups on the left look at the black and white one. What specific symbols do you seen in them? What cultures do they reflect? What can they tell us about Tupac Amaru and the myth of the Inca's return?
Tupac Amaru, who you will remember was once Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, was an educated mestizo and normally wore Hispanic clothes. He slowly adopted the identity of an Inca King, commissioning a portrait of himself and his wife in Inca clothing and adding Inca symbols to his daily dress. This quotation is a description of him from an Arequipa newspaper in January of 1781. Can I get someone to read it?
"riding a white horse, with embroidered and embossed trappings, a pair of large blunderbusses, pistols and sword, all dressed in blue velvet with gold braids on the front, his three-cornered hat… and around his neck a gold chain and hanging from it a sun of the same metal, insignia of the princes, his ancestors."
So we see the same things here that you pointed out in the images. Tupac Amaru is evoking the Inca with the sun chain, but the rest of the description, from the horse, to his weapons, to the velvet are thoroughly Spanish. As this description shows, the rebellion was clearly not a simple return to an Inca past. 250 years of Spanish rule made it impossible to go back; Spanish political and religious ideas and systems were an integral part of their culture. Returning to the Inca past was rhetoric; at that point no one had any idea of what the Inca past might have looked like, so it was free as a symbol to be a constructed utopia.
Spanish forms also played a key role in the rebellions. They were organized in the Spanish military style and incorporated Christian as well as Inca religious symbols. Tupac Amaru claimed he was the returned Inca and that he was working on behalf of the Christian God and Spanish King to wipe out corruption. At least at the beginning, he only planned to reduce economic burdens, not abolishing taxes. As you read about in the reading on Arequipa, one of the major slogans was "Long live the King and death to bad government." How can we make sense of this?
This combined symbolic power won him many followers. The participation of Christian priests in his rebellion gave him religious legitimacy with many followers. Both Tupac Amaru and Tupac Katari presented themselves as the true Christians who were wiping out the corrupt. Tupac Katari spoke of excommunicating or exorcizing demons of those he killed. During his rebellion, he held mass daily and demanded proper reference to the saints.
Reflecting this combined ideology, Tupac Amaru called for an alliance of creoles, who were American born people of European descent, mestizos, and Indians to expel all Europeans from the land. Of the 42 military leaders of Tupac Amaru’s rebellion, 19 were creoles, and 29 were mestizo. However, the cross ethnic bridges that he perhaps hoped to would create an American alliance quickly fell apart. The alliance quickly fell as rebels brutally slaughtered Spaniards, crying out "the time of mercy is finished, there are no Sacraments nor God with any power." His cross-ethnic coalition quickly collapsed.
This racial animosity came out more clearly in the Tupac Katari phase of the rebellion. Katari also associated himself with the returned Inca, by borrowing Amaru's name. He used violence as a form of military discipline and waged an all out race war, which would drive those of European descent from the area and have indigenous rule. He wrote, "I will send all the Europeans on their way, so they move to their lands," and his wife added, "We will be left as the ultimate owners of this place and of its wealth. We alone will rule."
The threat to Spanish rule and the specter of race war organized under the symbol of the Inca had long term effects, profoundly changing racial relations. Both Tupac Amaru and Tupac Katari were ritually executed through dismemberment, with different parts of their bodies being displayed throughout the area to warn future rebels. The image above is a drawing recreating how they were drawn and quartered. On the right, two men are pointing out the place in Likitaca where one of Tupac Amaru's legs was sent to warn others not to revolt. His head, body, arms, and legs all went to different locations.
After the revolts, the Spanish prohibited the use of Inca style clothing or cultural symbols. Previous pride in Inca descent was suppressed, with painting, art, and family trees being burned, the refusal to educate the children of the Indian elite, the attempt at prohibiting the Quechua language, Garcilaso’s writings were censored. They also eliminated the kuraka lineages that had rebelled, installing loyal leaders. Authorities silenced the event after its occurrence, refusing to talk about it because of a pervasive fear of its reoccurrence.
The rebellions profoundly affected the shape that South American Independence would take and eliminated the chance of real Indian participation in the new republic. As the elite still had nightmares of the majority indigenous population rising up to kill them in their sleep, they were reluctant to include them in the new republics in any meaningful way.
Can anyone think of any examples from recent history, either in the US or Latin America that shows the influence of Tupac Amaru, Tupac Katari, or the rebellions?
The 1781 rebellions still resonate in Andean society today, as the government, indigenous rights groups, and guerrilla groups have appropriated their names and symbols. In the 60s and 70s, the rebellions were re-imagined as a call for indigenous leadership and self determination. During Peru's land reform, the government invoked Tupac Amaru to show their sympathy for social and economic justice and directly quoted his cousin saying, "no longer shall the landlord feast on your property." The Tupamaro rebels in Uruguay derive their name from Tupac Amaru, as did the rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur. The Shining Path in Peru made its first appearance on the 199th anniversary of Tupac Amaru's execution. Bolivia saw the Katarista guerrilla movement of the 1970s and invoked Tupac Katari's siege of La Paz during the Aymara movement's 2003 siege that again closed off the city and forced the president to resign.
Why do you think these events keep getting resurrected? Why are they powerful today?
