The People Are King : The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics

"The People Are King traces the transformation of Andean communities under Inca and Spanish rule. The sixteenth-century Spanish resettlement policy known as reducción was pivotal to this transformation. Modeled on the Spanish ideal of república (self-government within planned towns) and shared sovereignty with their monarch, Spaniards in the Viceroyalty of Peru forced Andeans into resettlement towns. Andeans turned the tables on forced resettlement by making the towns their own and the center of their social, political, and religious lives. Andeans made a coherent life for themselves in a complex process of ethnogenesis that blended preconquest ways of life (the ayllu) with the imposed institutions of town life and Christian religious practices. Within these towns, Andeans claimed the right to self-government, and increasingly regarded their native lords, the caciques, as tyrants. A series of microhistorical accounts in these repúblicas reveals that Andeans believed that commoner people, collectively called the común, could rule themselves. With both Andean and Spanish antecedents, this political philosophy of radical democracy was key to the Great Rebellion of the late eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on well-known leaders such as Tupac Amaru, this book demonstrates through commoner rebels' holographic letters that it was commoner Andean people who made the late eighteenth-century a revolutionary moment by asserting their rights to self-government. In the final chapter the book follows the commoner-lead towns of the Andes from the era of independence into the present day of the Plurinational State of Bolivia." -- Oxford Scholarship Online "The People Are King traces the transformation of Andean communities under Inca and Spanish rule. The sixteenth century Spanish resettlement policy, known as Reducción was pivotal to this transformation. Modeled on the Spanish ideal of República (self-government within planned towns) and shared sovereignty with their monarch, Spaniards in the Viceroyalty of Peru forced Andeans into resettlement towns. Andeans turned the tables on forced resettlement by making the towns their own, and the center of their social, political, and religious lives. Andeans made a coherent life for themselves in a complex process of ethnogenesis that blended preconquest ways of life (the ayllu) with the imposed institutions of town life and Christian religious practices. Within these towns, Andeans claimed the right to self-government, and increasingly regarded their native lords, the caciques, as tyrants. A series of microhistorical accounts in these repúblicas reveals that Andeans believed that commoner people, collectively called the común, could rule themselves. With both Andean and Spanish antecedents, this political philosophy of radical democracy was key to the Great Rebellion of the late eighteenth-century. Rather than focusing on well-known leaders such as Tupac Amaru, the book demonstrates through commoner rebels' holographic letters that it was commoner Andean people who made the late eighteenth-century a revolutionary moment by asserting their rights to self-government. In the final chapter the book follows the commoner-lead towns of the Andes from the era of independence into the present day of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. Ayllu, Reducción, ethnogenesis, Peru, Bolivia, cacique, Tupac Amaru, comunero, revolution, microhistory"-- Provided by publisher In the sixteenth century, in what is now modern-day Peru and Bolivia, Andean communities were forcibly removed from their traditional villages by Spanish colonizers and resettled in planned, self-governed towns modeled after those in Spain. But rather than merely conforming to Spanish cultural and political norms, indigenous Andeans adopted and gradually refashioned the religious practices dedicated to Christian saints and political institutions imposed on them, laying claim to their own rights and the sovereignty of the collective. The People Are King shows how common Andean people produced a new kind of civil society over three centuries of colonialism, merging their traditional understanding of collective life with the Spanish notion of the común to demand participatory democracy. S. Elizabeth Penry explores how this hybrid concept of self-rule spurred the indigenous rebellions that erupted across Latin America in the eighteenth century, not only against Spanish rulers, but against native hereditary nobility, for acting against the will of the comuneros. Through the letters and documents of the Andean people themselves, The People Are King gives voice to a vision of community-based democracy that played a central role in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions and continues to galvanize indigenous movements in Bolivia today. Cover 1 The People Are King 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 A Note on Terminology 14 Introduction: The Genesis of an Andean Christianity and Politics 18 Part I Inca and Early Spanish Peru 42 1 Inca and Asanaqi in Qullasuyu 46 2 Spanish República and Inca Tyranny 60 3 Resettlement: Spaniards Found New Towns for “Indians” 70 Part II The Andeanization of Spanish Institutions and Christianity 92 4 Andeans Found Their Own Towns: The Andeanization of Reducción 96 5 Cofradía and Cabildo in the Eighteenth Century: The Merger of Andean Religiosity and Town Leadership 118 6 Rational Bourbons and Radical Comuneros: Civil Practices That Shape Towns 141 Part III The Revolutionary Común 160 7 Comunero Politics and the King’s Justice: The Común Takes Moral Action 162 8 A Lettered Revolution: A Brotherhood of Communities 184 Conclusion The Resilience of the Común and Its Legacy 217 Notes 238 Bibliography 278 Index 298 The People are King is the first ethnohistorical study of the transformation of Andean communities over three centuries, from the Inca era into the nineteenth century, which traces the movement of indigenous people toward self-government. 'The People are King' is an ethnohistorical study of the transformation of Andean communities over three centuries, from the Inca era into the nineteenth century, which traces the movement of indigenous people toward self-government