david t. garret - tupac amaru

A version of this paper was presented at the Atlantic History Seminar at Harvard in August2002, and I thank Bernard Bailyn, Kenneth Andrien, and the other participants for theircomments and criticism. I gratefully acknowledge the critical and extremely helpfulresponses of Ward Stavig, Charles Walker, and the editors of HAHR. I am also greatlyindebted to Herbert Klein, Martha Howell, Terence D’Altroy, Pablo Piccato, and SinclairThomson for earlier comments and to Laura Lucas for her superb maps for this project.The Social Science Research Council, the Tinker Foundation, Columbia University, ReedCollege, and the Levine Fund generously provided the financial support for the researchand writing of this paper.

1. Quoted in Charles F. Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of RepublicanPeru, 1780–1840 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999), 35. The mita was obligatory labor byIndian tributaries provided to the mining centers of Potosí and Huancavelica. For accountsand analyses of the rebellion, see ibid., 16–54; Boleslao Lewin, Túpac Amaru el rebelde: Suépoca, sus luchas y su influencia en el continente (Buenos Aires: Claridad, 1943); Lillian E.Fisher, The Last Inca Revolt, 1780–1783 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1966); AlbertoFlores Galindo, “Túpac Amaru y la sublevación de 1780,” in Túpac Amaru II—1780, ed.Alberto Flores Galindo (Lima: Retablo de Papel, 1976), 269–323, and “Las revolucionesTupamaristas: Temas en debate,” Revista Andina 7, no. 1 (1989): 279–87; Scarlett O’PhelanGodoy, Un siglo de rebeliones anticoloniales: Perú y Bolivia, 1700–83 (Cusco: CentroBartolomé de Las Casas, 1988), 223–87; and José del Valle’s account of his campaign,Archivo General de las Indias (hereafter AGI), Cuzco, leg. 63.

Hispanic American Historical Review 84:4Copyright 2004 by Duke University Press

“His Majesty’s Most Loyal Vassals”:

The Indian Nobility and Túpac Amaru

David T. Garrett

On November 4, 1780, the cacique of Tungasuca, Don José Gabriel TúpacAmaru, seized Don Antonio de Arriaga, the Spanish governor of Tinta prov-ince (Peru), as he passed through the pueblo. For the next six days, Túpac Amaruheld Arriaga prisoner, as a huge crowd assembled in the pueblo. Proclamationswere read denouncing Arriaga’s abuses and claiming that “[t]hrough the King ithas been ordered that there no longer be sales tax, customs, or the Potosí mitaand that Don Antonio Arriaga lose his life because of his harmful behavior.”1

Túpac Amaru forced Arriaga to send for weapons and money in order to armthe cacique and his followers. On November 10, Arriaga was hanged in front of

the crowd; immediately after, the rebels headed north down the Vilcanota Val-ley toward the city of Cusco, sacking the great textile factory of Pomacanchison their way. Caciques from nearby pueblos actively joined or were caught upin the rebellion, and the forces grew dramatically.2 Within a week of Arriaga’scapture, the upper Vilcanota Valley was in open revolt.

After receiving news of Arriaga’s execution, Cusco’s city council met onNovember 12 and sent a regiment to quash the rebellion. At the forefront wereCusco’s Inca nobles, who rejected Túpac Amaru almost to a one.3 To the south,the Indian nobility of the Titicaca basin also proved staunch foes of the rebel-lion. It was not for want of appeals from Túpac Amaru: as he marched downthe Vilcanota he sent letters—alternatively cajoling and threatening—to lead-ing Inca nobles and highland caciques asking them to join him.4 Don PedroSahuaraura Tito Atauchi Ynga, the cacique of Oropesa and the commissary ofCusco’s regiment of Indian nobles, immediately forwarded the letter hereceived to the bishop, saying, “I leave marching with my people in search ofthe rebel, the infamous José Tupa Amaro, cacique of Tungasuca, who deservesan exemplary punishment for the perpetual discouragement of others.”5 Sahua-raura and his troops, along with the city’s Indian nobility, joined the royalistregiment and met Túpac Amaru’s forces at Sangarará on November 19. Theroyalists were routed, Sahuaraura was killed, and the pueblo church was torched,killing those who had sought refuge inside. Túpac Amaru proclaimed himselfInca, the legitimate heir of indigenous imperial authority. So began the GreatRebellion, which lasted for three years and constituted the largest open chal-

576 HAHR / November / Garrett

2. Almost all caciques in the bishopric of Cusco who were implicated in the rebellionwere from neighboring parishes: Tomasa Tito Condemaita of Acos, Acomayo, andSangarará (the only Indian noble executed along with Túpac Amaru and his family);Colección documental del bicentenario de la revolucíon emancipadora de Túpac Amaru (hereafter,CDBR), ed. Luis Durand Flórez (Lima: Comisión Nacional del Bicentenario de laRebelión Emancipadora de Túpac Amaru, 1980), 3:324–65; Joséph Mamani, a cacique inTinta, CDBR, 4:515–55; Lucas Collque of Pomacanchi, CDBR, 3:935–55; FernandoUrpide and Agustín Aucagualpa of Pirque [Quispicanchis], CDBR, 4:477–513; MiguelZamalloa, of Sicuani, CDBR, 5:395– 428. For those prosecuted for the rebellion, O’PhelanGodoy, 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 Cusco’s Inca nobles were charged for support ofthe 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.

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 rebellionstarted in Upper Peru by the Cataris (a Potosino cacical family) in January1781.6

While Túpac Amaru was vilified in the remaining decades of Spanish ruleand largely ignored for the following century, since the 1940s, historians of allstripes have viewed him heroically.7 To nationalists, Túpac Amaru shines as aprotonationalist, anticolonial leader who embraced both creole and Indian fol-lowers while rejecting Spanish rule. Some see the episode as a precursor to thewars of independence.8 To Marxists and neo-Marxists, Túpac Amaru stands asa revolutionary leader at the head of an Indian peasantry that rose en masseagainst colonial exploitation.9 Scholars of a more indigenist bent have viewedthe rebellion as a rejection of both colonial and creole rule; the inevitable resultof the profound injustices of colonial society, the Great Rebellion represents thereassertion of indigenous Andean ideals of time, space, and social relations or aneighteenth-century revival of Inca identity among Andean indigenous elites.10

The Indian Nobility and Túpac Amaru 577

6. For the Catari rebellions, see Sinclair Thomson, We Alone Will Rule: Native AndeanPolitics in the Age of Insurgency (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 180–231; SergioSerulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-CenturySouth Andes (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2003), 157–214; O’Phelan Godoy, Un siglo derebeliones, 257–87; Alipio Valencia Vega, Julián Túpaj Katari (La Paz: Juventud, 1977);María Eugenia del Valle de Siles, Historia de la rebelión de Túpac Catari (La Paz: Don Bosco,1990); Oscar Cornblit, “Society and Mass Rebellion in 18th-Century Peru and Bolivia,” inLatin American Affairs (St. Anthony’s Papers, no. 22), ed. Raymond Carr (Oxford: OxfordUniv. Press, 1970), 9– 44; Leon G. Campbell, “Ideology and Factionalism during the GreatRebellion, 1780–82,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World,Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries, ed. Steve J. Stern (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press,1987), 110–39.

7. For literature reviews, see Jean Piel, “Cómo interpretar la rebelión panandina de1780–83,” in Tres levantamientos populares: Pugachóv, Túpac Amaru, Hildago, ed. Jean Meyer(Mexico: CEMCA, 1992), 71–80; and Walker, Smoldering Ashes, 17–22.

8. Lewin, Túpac Amaru, el rebelde; Jorge Cornejo Bouroncle, Túpac Amaru, la revoluciónprecursora de la emancipación contintental (Cusco: Univ. Nacional San Antonio Abad, 1947);Carlos David Valcárcel, La Rebelión de Túpac Amaru (Mexico: Fondo de CulturaEconómica, 1947) and Túpac Amaru, precursor de la Independencia (Lima: Univ. Nacional deSan Marcos, 1977); Luis Durand Flórez, Independencia e integración en el plan político de TúpacAmaru (Lima: Editorial P.L.V., 1974).

9. Jürgen Golte, Repartos y rebeliones: Túpac Amaru y las contradicciones de la economíacolonial (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1980); O’Phelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebelionesanticoloniales; Piel, “Como interpertar la rebelión panandina.”

10. John H. Rowe, “El movimiento nacional Inca del siglo XVIII,” RevistaUniversitaria (Cusco) 7 (1954): 17– 47, and Quechua Nationalism in the Eighteenth Century

Others have combined these two strains to locate the rebellion in a larger “Ageof Andean Insurrection,” in which violent rejection of the colonial order byPeru’s indigenous peoples was endemic.11 In this view, the Great Rebellion rep-resents the culmination of an indigenous anticolonialism that helped to pro-voke, and stands in counterpoint to, the creole anticolonialism of the wars ofindependence.12

At the same time, scholarship over the past two decades has exposed thecomplexities of allegiance among the indigenous population and problema-tized the simple Indian-Spanish dichotomy. Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy, MagnusMörner, Efraïn Trelles, and Leon Campbell first demonstrated that most ofthe leadership of the Peruvian stage of the rebellion was creole and that theoverwhelming majority of the Indian elite (along with much of the Indianpeasantry near Cusco) either actively supported the crown or did not join inthe rebellion.13 Over the past decade, several works have directly addressed therole of indigenous elites in the rebellion and in so doing have expanded ourunderstanding of the complex dynamics that drove it, as well as the hierarchiesand tensions of Bourbon society more generally. Foremost has been O’Phelan’swork, which has highlighted the benefits accruing to the uppermost ranks ofthe 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 unautopía: Muerte y resurrección de los incas (Lima: Instituto de Apoyo Agrario, 1988); JanSzeminski, La utopia tupamarista (Lima: Pontificia Univ. Católica, 1993), and “Why Kill theSpaniard? New Perspectives on Andean Insurrectionary Ideology in the 18th Century,” inStern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, 166–92.

11. O’Phelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones; and Steve J. Stern, “The Age of AndeanInsurrection,” in Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, 34–93; Karen Spalding,Huarochirí: An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,1984), 270–93.

12. See Walker’s challenge to the refusal to concede the rebellion’s protonationalist,revolutionary nature because of its monarchic ideology. Smoldering Ashes, 50–54.

13. O’Phelan Godoy, “Un siglo de rebeliones”; Magnus Mörner and Efraïn Trelles,“The Test of Causal Interpretations of the Túpac Amaru Rebellion,” in Stern, Resistance,Rebellion, and Consciousness, 94–109; Leon G. Campbell, “Social Structure of the TúpacAmaru Army in Cuzco, 1780–1,” Hispanic American Historical Review 61, no. 4 (Nov. 1981):675–93.

14. Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy, “Repensando el movimiento nacional inca del sigloXVIII,” in El Perú en el siglo XVIII: La era borbónica, ed. Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy (Lima:Pontificia Univ. Católica, 1999), 263–77; and La Gran Rebelión en los Andes: De TúpacAmaru a Túpac Catari (Cusco: Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas, 1995), especially 47–68.

the indigenous elite that was rooted in royal recognition of claims of Incaancestry and proprietary rights to cacicazgos, as well as the positioning ofIndian nobles in the church and military. As a result, throughout the southAndes, powerful caciques who descended from the Inca emperors “did not par-ticipate in the Inca Nationalist Movement of the eighteenth century.”15 LuisMiguel Glave and Ward Stavig have revealed the central importance of localand provincial politics in the development of a “pan-Andean” rebellion. Theirwork has focused on the particular case of Eugenio Sinanyuca, the powerful,non-Inca loyalist cacique of Coporaque (40 miles from Tungasuca). Here theyhave exposed how allegiances, enmities, and relations of patronage betweencaciques, corregidores, and Cusco’s bishop determined affiliations in the rebel-lion, even in Túpac Amaru’s home province.16 Working on the bishopric of LaPaz, Roberto Choque Canqui and Sinclair Thomson have also examined thepronounced loyalism of the cacical elite there; in particular, Thomson has ana-lyzed the radicalization of the Túpac Catari rebellion in light of the socioeco-nomic structure of the region and its communities and the division it producedin Indian communities.17

Focusing on the loyalist Indian nobility of the bishopric of Cusco, thisarticle seeks to contribute to this reevaluation by examining indigenous actors’patterns of rebellion and royalist loyalty, locating them in the social geographyof the late colonial highlands, and excavating their various strategies of negoti-ation with the crown. In particular, it questions the identification of “self-interest”as the motivating force of loyalist elites and instead examines their actions asthe articulation of ideologies fashioned by their positions in colonial societyand their diverse colonial histories. The conditions of indigenous actors in latecolonial Cusco were varied: the rebellion engulfed a vast region of indigenouscommunities and societies with varied social structures and positions in thecolonial economy. The widespread loyalism of the Quechua-speaking agricul-tural communities near Cusco contrasts dramatically with the broad supportTúpac Amaru enjoyed in the Vilcanota highlands, and again with the clear class


15. O’Phelan Godoy, “Repensando el movimiento nacional inca,” 277.16. Luis Miguel Glave, Vida, símbolos y batallas: Creación y recreación de la comunidad

indígena. Cusco, siglos XVI–XX (Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 136–52; andWard Stavig, “Eugenio Sinanyuca: Militant, Nonrevolutionary Kuraka, and CommunityDefender,” 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 rebelión de Túpak Katari enLa Paz,” Historia y Cultura (Lima) 19 (1991): 83–93; and Thomson, We Alone Will Rule, esp.222–31.

differentiation (elite indigenous loyalism versus popular rebellion) seen aroundLake Titicaca. Such divisions reflected numerous fault lines in the colonialhighlands. Highland cities and their immediate hinterlands, bastions of Span-ish settlement and privileged through the flow of rent and tribute, generallyremained loyal to the crown. So too did Quechua-speaking Indians, whosecommunities were less internally stratified, suffered less burdensome colonialdemands, and had more complex and personalized ties to Spanish society thandid Aymara-speaking communities.

The diverse histories of indigenous communities in the region also greatlyinformed both their sociopolitical organization and their allegiances in the re-bellion. Cusco’s history as the Inca capital left the city and its environs with alarge population of Indian nobles, whose privileged position in colonial societywas acknowledged and defended by the royal courts. For the entire length ofSpanish rule, this Inca nobility used the courts to negotiate the demands ofcolonial rule and to assert its own rank and authority in the República de Indios.As concerned with indigenous pretensions to limit or rival Inca authority aswith the demands of creole Peru and the crown, this Inca nobility (and the vil-lages it dominated) had more shared interests and history with creole Cuscothan with the provincial, non-Inca populations of the upper Vilcanota Valley.Túpac Amaru’s claims to the mantle of Inca authority threatened the very hier-archies that the Incas of Cusco and the great cacical dynasties of the Titicacabasin so carefully maintained. Moreover, Túpac Amaru’s violent rejection ofroyal authority (after his own legal efforts failed) was profoundly at odds withthe Indian noble tradition of negotiating and contesting Spanish hegemonythrough the courts.18 Colonial Cusco did not divide simply into “Spanish” and“Indian.” Túpac Amaru—and his foes among the Indian nobility—occupiedparticular positions. The actions of the latter should not be understood as sim-ple creole collaborationism; rather, they manifest a distinct understanding ofboth how colonial society ought to be structured and how colonial authorityought to be negotiated.

The Indian Nobility in Late Colonial Society

The Spanish policy of indirect rule in the Andes required an indigenous elite topreside over the Indian villages that were home to 80 percent of the highland


18. For Túpac Amaru’s legal battles with the Betancurs during the 1770s, see esp.David Cahill, “Primus inter pares: La búsqueda del marquesado de Oropesa en camino a lagran rebellión (1741–1780),” Revista Andina 37 (2003): 9–52.


Figure 1. Areas that supported the Túpac Amaru rebellion.

Map courtesy of David Garrett.

population. Under the Toledan reforms of the 1570s, the basic material rela-tionship of the indigenous population to the crown was defined as one of trib-ute, with adult Indian men owing a sum of money twice a year.19 To collect trib-ute from each pueblo, Spanish bureaucrats turned to local Andean lords (curacas,later denominated caciques). These caciques undertook extensive commercialdealings in the complex market economy that revolved around the mining citiesof the Bolivian altiplano, thereby converting the surplus of their largely self-sufficient communities into cash.20 Many of them further extended their controlover local economies by controlling factors of production that required invest-ment, and building up networks of debt.21 Philip III’s 1614 decree that cacicaz-gos should be hereditary through the male line further consolidated the author-ity of elite indigenous families.22

That decree reflected a broader commitment to the hidalguía of indige-nous elites. The formal recognition of Indian nobility had a profound effect onthe organization of colonial Cusco. The patents of hereditary nobility thatCharles 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 tributeand personal service.23 And although viceroy Francisco de Toledo’s order for


19. For tribute and tributary categories, see Catherine J. Julien, Kristina Angelis, andAnnette Hauschild, eds., Toledo y Los Lupaqas: Las Tasas de 1574 y 1579 (Bonn: BAS, 1993);Herbert S. Klein, Haciendas and Ayllus: Rural Society in the Bolivian Andes in the Eighteenthand Nineteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993); Ann Wightman, IndigenousMigration and Social Change: The Forasteros of Cuzco, 1520–1720 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press,1990), 82–88 and 128–32; Spalding, Huarochirí, 159–93.

20. John Murra, Formaciones económicas y políticas del mundo andino (Lima: Instituto deEstudios Peruanos, 1975); Franklin Pease, Curacas, reciprocidad y riqueza (Lima: PontificiaUniv. Católica, 1992); Carlos Sempat Assadourian, El sistema de la economía colonial: Elmercado interior, regiones y espacio económico (Mexico: Nueva Imagen, 1983); Laura Escobaride Querejazu, Producción y comercio en el espacio sur andino en el siglo XVII: Cuzco-Potosí,1650–1700 (La Paz: Publicación auspiciada por la Embajada de España, 1985).

21. David T. Garrett, “Descendants of the Natural Lords Who Were: The IndianNobility 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 textilefactories, and manufacturies. For the role of Túpac Amaru’s neighboring caciques in theirlocal economies, see the wills of Doña Catalina Salas y Pachacutic of Layo and Yanaocaand Don Gabriel Cama Condorsayna of Macari. For Salas y Pachacutic, see ArchivoRegional del Cusco, Perú (hereafter ARC), Andres de Zamora, leg. 294, 402ff, 21 Oct.1785; and Carlos Rodríguez de Ledezma, leg. 248, 153ff, 4 July 1796. For CamaCondorsayna, see ARC, Judiciales Civiles, leg. 18 (1830), in a dispute over his son’s estate.

22. Carlos J. Díaz Rementería, El cacique en el virreinato del Perú: Estudio histórico-jurídico (Seville: Univ. de Sevilla, 1977), 218.

23. For sixteenth-century patents of nobility, see ARC, Corregimiento, CausasOrdinarias, leg. 49, exp. 1122; leg. 50, exp. 1147; leg. 47, exp. 1036; and Jean-Jacques

the execution of Túpac Amaru I in 1572 was an attempt to end the dynastic lineof Inca monarchs, he also institutionalized the predominance of Cusco’s Incasin the city’s indigenous politics.24 This Inca nobility made up less than one-tenth of the Indian population of Cusco and its immediate hinterland, but theywere of great importance in the region for three reasons. First, Inca noblesoccupied the overwhelming majority of cacicazgos in the nine parishes ofCusco city and in the 20 or so pueblos within a 30-mile radius.25 Second, whileonly a fraction of the Inca nobility held cacicazgos, their privileges left themwell situated in Cusco’s urban economy.26 As merchants and skilled craftsmen,Inca nobles ranked among the city’s respectable classes, while those in the sur-rounding agricultural villages constituted a small yeoman class. Finally, theInca nobility had a strong sense of their history as “the descendants of the nat-ural lords who were of these kingdoms of Peru in their gentility.”27 Cusco’s cre-ole population, too, cherished its Inca past (and nursed a grievance against thepredominance of Lima) and generally recognized the Incas’ preeminence inIndian Cusco.28

The size of Cusco’s Indian nobility, and their possession of formal patentsof nobility, were unique in the Andes; indeed, the proportion of nobles inCusco’s indigenous population rivaled that of nobles in Spain.29 But colonial


Decoster, “La sangre que mancha: La iglesia colonial temprana frente a indios, mestizos eilegítimos,” in Incas e indios cristianos: Elites indígenas e identidades cristianas en los Andescoloniales, ed. Jean-Jacques Decoster (Cusco: Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas, 2002),285–87.

24. Most importantly, Toledo established an Inca cabildo consisting of 24 electorsdrawn from the male Inca nobility, who chose an Inca noble to carry the royal standard inthe annual procession of Santiago, the city’s patron. The practice continued untilindependence. Donato Amado Gonzales, “El Alférez Real de los Incas: Resistencia,cambios y continuidad de la identidad indígena,” 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 borbónicos: La élite indígena cusqueña en vísperasde Túpac Amaru,” Revista Andina 36 (2003): 9–51.

26. Victor Angles Vargas, Historia del Cusco (Cusco colonial) (Lima: Industrial Gráfica,1983), 2:657–60; “Indios de sangre real,” Revista del Archivo Histórico del Cusco 1, no. 1(1950): 204–30.

27. In the 1562 petition by various Inca noblemen against Martín de Olmos, includedin a 1796 petition by Doña María Nieves Puma Ynga; ARC, Intendencia, Real Hacienda,leg. 202 (1796).

28. See Ignacio Castro’s comments on the installation of the Cusco Audiencia;Relación del Cuzco, ed. Carlos Daniel Valcárcel (Lima: Univ. Nacional de San Marcos,1978), 67.

29. M. L. Bush, Rich Noble, Poor Noble (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1983), 7–9.

Indian communities in general were stratified in ways that were recognized bySpanish officials and courts and that translated into the language and privilegesof nobility.30 Since the basic privileges of Indian nobility—exemption fromtribute and personal service and access to royal courts—were also enjoyed bycaciques, the distinction between those who derived their privileges throughblood and those who derived them through cacical office was fluid. Referred toin documents as principales, members of an Indian community’s upper ranksoften enjoyed the honorific “Don,” a linguistic marker of their status and of thedeference they expected and generally received.31 In 1762, the fiscal of theAudiencia of Chuquisaca declared that Don Lorenzo Mango Turpa of Azán-garo, in recognition of his status, was “a principal Indian, and in consequenceexempt from the obligation to [perform] lowly services in conformity with the[royal] ordinance which so orders.”32 In some cases, these local elites wereclearly the descendants of preconquest elites—among them, the Inca nobilityof Cusco and the cacical dynasties of the Titicaca basin. Others were noble inthe eyes of their communities. Whatever their standing in the eyes of crownofficials, these were the de facto local Indian elites.

If indigenous elites were ubiquitous in Andean pueblos, however, theirorganization, identity, and relation to their communities varied dramatically.Indeed, even between pueblos—or within parishes—the extent of Spanish set-tlement, the stability of indigenous communities, and the penetration of Span-ish properties varied dramatically.33 Still, within this diversity, broad patterns


30. See, for example, Guaman Poma’s discussion of Indian nobility and its recognitionby Charles V. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica 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 heldin high regard in the surrounding area, were usually marked off from the Indian commonersby the honorific title; they are a small fraction of those who appear in court cases. Becausethe use of “Don” was regulated by custom and not law, its attribution by others givesinsight into social stratification within Indian society. For the analogous, and informative,use of honorifics 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 lospárrocos al Obispo Mollinedo: Economía y sociedad en el sur andino (Cusco: Centro Bartolomé deLas Casas, 1982), 471–80. For Spanish landowning and settlement in the bishopric ofCusco, see Magnus Mörner, Perfil de la sociedad rural del Cuzco a fines de la colonia (Lima:Univ. del Pacífico, 1978), 32; and Villanueva Urteaga, Cuzco 1689, passim.

do emerge. Cusco itself was a bastion of Spanish settlement and home to acomplex trading, artisanal, and industrial economy dominated by creoles andIndian nobles. The agricultural valleys around the city contained scores ofwell-established Indian communities dominated by the Inca nobility, but theyalso contained sizable Spanish colonies and many Spanish properties. Eco-nomic colonization had created both haciendas and textile factories, someemploying hundreds of workers. More than anywhere else in the southernhighlands, 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 re-gion: in 1689, 59 out of every 60 inhabitants in Tinta were Indians; a centurylater the ratio was still 7 out of 8.34 Outside the heartland from which the Incashad expanded in the 1400s, the pastoral highlands as a region did not fall underthe sway of the Inca nobility during the viceregal era, although some puebloswere ruled by lineages who claimed Inca ancestry. These provinces were bothperipheral to the Spanish economy of Cusco and central to the larger colonialeconomy.35 Subject to the distant mining mitas in Potosí and Huancavelica,they had suffered enormously from the burdens of colonial rule and had highrates of migration, although Indian elites and the few Spanish settlers profitedfrom fleeting the colonial trade.36 Finally, indigenous societies further south inthe Titicaca basin descended from the Aymara kingdoms that had been incor-porated into the Inca realms in the fifteenth century. With a mixed pastoral-agricultural economy, this region was a pillar of the Potosí mita and saw littleSpanish settlement.37 Far from urban markets, these large pueblos entered thecolonial economy through the sale of livestock, agricultural goods, basic man-ufactures, and labor.38

This variegated regional economy produced a variegated Indian elite. Thecacical families of small Inca agricultural pueblos near Cusco and of the greatTiticaca basin towns like Azángaro and Copacabana all claimed descent from


34. Villanueva Urteaga, Cuzco 1689, passim.; Unanue, Guía del Perú, 89–93.35. In 1689 Canas y Canchis (later Tinta), covering five thousand square miles and

with a population of 13,000, had just a dozen Spanish-owned properties. VillanuevaUrteaga, Cuzco 1689, 236–53.

36. Wightman, Indigenous Migration, passim; for Tinta, 133– 42.37. Jeffrey A. Cole, The Potosí Mita: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes (Stanford:

Stanford Univ. Press, 1985), 73–76.38. See Biblioteca Nacional del Perú (hereafter BNP), Manuscritos, exps. D-10474

(Caravaya); D-9555 (Huancané); and D-10473 (Lampa), for 1807 accounts of productionfor export in three overwhelmingly Indian highland provinces.

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 suc-cessful merchants and manufacturers amassed fortunes of thousands of pesos.39

In contrast, even the dominant Inca families in nearby agricultural communi-ties were rarely worth more than three thousand pesos.40 Inca-dominatedpueblos tended to be small, with Indian populations under five hundred. Sincecaciques’ wealth depended largely on their role as tribute collectors and inter-mediaries between the village economy and the Andean market, the opportu-nities for accumulating wealth were correspondingly small. Moreover, thelarge concentration of Inca nobles around Cusco produced an Indian yeo-manry—with small freeholdings and a strong sense of their privilege—thatlimited cacical dominance of local economies. Indeed, many Inca pueblos didnot have established cacical dynasties, and the office instead passed between anumber of Inca noble lineages.41 Finally, the large Spanish population of thearea and their extensive agricultural holdings prevented the Inca nobility fromdominating the regional economy. Much agricultural production and employ-ment took place on properties removed from the República de Indios; thegreat and wealthy of Cusco were creole, not Inca.42

In contrast, the cacical elite of the southern highlands, and especially theTiticaca basin, were among the richest Indian families in the viceroyalty. Ingeneral, the pastoral pueblos of Tinta did not produce vast fortunes; while inthe absence of markets and Spanish settlements caciques did dominate localeconomies, these pueblos were again small and many did not have stronglyentrenched cacical dynasties. In contrast, dozens of communities around LakeTiticaca had ruling families who had held power for more than a century, andoften since before the conquest. The greatest of these—like the Choque-huanca of Azángaro Anansaya and the Quispe Cavana of Cavanilla—had for-


39. In her will, Doña Antonia Loyola Cusitito Atauyupanqui listed property (mostlyurban real estate) worth 7,500 pesos. ARC, Juan de Dios Quintanilla, leg. 237, 260ff, 30May 1759.

40. Don Joséph Tamboguacso, cacique of Taray, left 3,500 pesos in land and houses.ARC, Pedro Joséph de Gamarra, leg. 169, 672ff, 3 June 1761. Don Vicente Choquecahua,cacique of Andaguaylillas, owned 2,000 pesos of land in his pueblo. ARC, Tomás Gamarra,leg. 180, 329ff, 15 June 1782.

41. Garrett, “Los Incas borbónicos.”42. In 1755 the assets of Cusco’s 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.

tunes of well over 10,000 pesos, at times approaching 20,000.43 While thesefortunes paled next to those of creole aristocrats in the cities, they were by farthe largest in their provinces. This wealth, coupled with tribute collection, theright to exercise corporal punishment, and generations of authority, made thecacical nobility the dominant force around Titicaca.

The Bourbon Reforms and Highland Unrest

In its organization, initial success, and scope, the Túpac Amaru Rebellionstands apart from all other riots and rebellions in eighteenth-century Peru, andcertainly by late November—when Túpac Amaru’s forces defeated the loyalistIndians and Spaniards of Cusco—the enormity of the uprising was apparent.But in its initial stages the rebellion followed a pattern increasingly common inthe bishopric during the previous two decades. Arriaga was not the first cor-regidor in the bishopric of Cusco to have lost his life to an angry crowd of hissubjects. Three years earlier, the Indians of Velille (Chumbivilcas) had killedthe corregidor when he jailed the pueblo’s cacique; in the same year a riotbroke out against the corregidor in Maras (Urubamba). And in 1771 an angrymob had burned the house of Arriaga’s predecessor.44

O’Phelan has counted more than one hundred riots and rebellions in theviceroyalty of Peru between 1700 and 1780.45 The vast majority of these wellfit the pattern of village riots described by Taylor in eighteenth-century Mex-ico: directed against specific grievances and particular officials but not intended,or understood by the crown, as challenges to Spanish rule.46 Corregidores andtheir assistants were the most frequent targets: a sign of widespread anger atthe general abusiveness of these royal agents and more particularly at theexpansion of the reparto and aggressive efforts to increase tribute rolls in the1760s and 1770s.47 In the 1770s, the division of the viceroyalty of Peru into


43. For Choquehuanca, Archivo Departmental del Puno, Intendencia, exps. 46 and51; for Quispe Cavana, who estimated the income of his sheep ranches at one thousandpesos a year, ANB, Expedientes Coloniales, 1785–23.

44. O’Phelan 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 inflated prices by provincial governors

to the subjects under their rule. See Alfredo Moreno Cebrián, El Corregidor de Indios y laeconomía peruana del siglo XVIII: Los repartos forzosos de mercancias (Madrid: Instituto G.Fernández de Oviedo, 1977); Javier Tord Nicolini, “El corregidor de indios del Perú:Comercio y tributos,” Historia y Cultura (Lima) 8 (1974): 173–210; Golte, Repartos y

Lower and Upper Peru (with a land border at Titicaca) and the imposition ofnew internal customs levies provoked widespread unrest in highland cities hithard by the taxes. These riots and local rebellions were fundamentally re-formist, decrying perceived abuses of power by royal officials but doing sothrough appeals (however violent) to the crown to redress grievances. Insofaras the Túpac Amaru rebellion was a local riot spun out of control, these earlieruprisings are its forebears.

Moreover, whatever its Andean aspirations, Túpac Amaru’s rebellion caughtfire due to the particular frustrations of the highlands south of Cusco. Theprovinces at the core of the rebellion—Tinta, Quispicanchis, and Chumbivil-cas—were ill served by the Bourbon reforms. All three contributed to distantmining mitas. Indeed, the Great Rebellion was, above all, a mass rising of thearea subject to the Potosí mita and began in the areas farthest from the mines,where the costs of transit made the burden heaviest. Adding in the reparto andtribute (which Túpac Amaru proposed reducing but not abolishing), the colo-nial burdens on these provinces were unusually heavy. Chumbivilcas and Tintahad also witnessed disproportionate population growth in the eighteenth cen-tury, with the Indian population doubling and the Spanish population increas-ing 30-fold.48 The division of the viceroyalties hurt the trade passing throughthe upper Vilcanota and the access to the altiplano market that provided somecompensation for the annual migrations to Potosí. The rebellion drew heavilyfrom the ranks of muleteers.49 While the third quarter of the eighteenth centurysaw an increase of open discontent in the viceroyalty, the Vilcanota and Apurí-mac highlands were a focal point. With the exception of the 1777 riots in Uru-bamba and the Silversmiths’ Conspiracy of 1780, all the disturbances in thebishopric of Cusco from 1768 to 1780 took place in these three provinces: eachhad witnessed one substantial riot directed at the corregidor and colonial bur-dens 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,Huarochirí, 188–90 and 200–204.

48. Villanueva Urteaga, Cuzco 1689, 226–52 and 292–335; Unanue, Guía del Perú,91–92.

49. Of 73 people accused of involvement in the Cusco phase of the rebellion, 64provided information about their professions during their trials. Nine were described asmuleteers; only small farmers were more common, with 21. O’Phelan Godoy, Un siglo derebeliones, 308–17.

50. Conflict was also building within communities. See Ward Stavig, “EugenioSinanyuca,” in The World of Túpac Amaru: Conflict, Community, and Identity in Colonial Peru

Despite their clear roots in the local and regional grievances of the south-ern highlands, the interrelated phases of the Great Rebellion were also the cul-mination of an indigenous anticolonialism manifested in ideologically drivenconspiracies and movements that developed in the mid–eighteenth century.Stern’s assertion that from 1742 until 1782 colonial authorities “contendedwith the more immediate threat or reality of full-scale civil war, war that chal-lenged the wider structure of colonial rule and privilege” exaggerates the situ-ation, but in the half-century before 1780, opposition to the colonial order wasincreasingly conceived on the extralocal level.51 Only one such insurgency metwith any success. From the 1730s into the 1750s, Juan Santos Atahuallpa, claim-ing descent from the eponymous Inca emperor, established a raiding “king-dom” in the central sierra, along the semitropical eastern slopes of Tarma andXauxa.52 This insurgency did have a discernible anticolonial ideology, articu-lated through an anti-Spanish, Andean (and Inca) messianism. At the sametime, Santos Atahuallpa established a territory outside Spanish hegemony bymoving to the fringes of Spanish rule, not by overthrowing Spanish authorityin the colonized territories of the Andes. And this took place hundreds of milesfrom Cusco, with little impact on the southern highlands.

But two conspiracies in Cusco, which took place in the years just beforeTúpac Amaru seized Arriaga, suggest threats to the colonial order closer tohome. The first, in 1776 and 1777, appears to have been more the intersectionof Inca messianism and a local riot against the corregidor in Urubamba than afull-fledged conspiracy.53 As 1777 approached, there was widespread talk in thehighlands of a prophecy by Santa Rosa that in the year of the three sevens anInca would be crowned as king of Peru. In 1776 Don Domingo Navarro Cach-aguallpa (a member of a prominent Inca noble family in urban Cusco) wasarrested, along with Juan de Dios Espinoza Orcoguaranca, for plotting rebel-lion. In turn, they said that “one named Sierra” had told them that “[in] theyear 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, símbolos ybatallas, 117–52, for conflict 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 Ramón Mujica Pinilla, Rosa

limensis: Mística, política e iconografía en torno a la patrona de América (Lima: IFEA / FCE /BCRP, 2002), 335–60; Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy, La Gran Rebelión en los Andes, 21– 45; andSzeminski, La Utopia Tupamarista.

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 doubtsince 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 Cach-aguallpa and Orcoguaranca were punished.55

In the following year, Don Joséf Gran Quipsi Tupa Ynga of Quito wroteto the captains of the Indian militia in Urubamba, advising them that “he hadto crown himself [king] because the time in which the prophecies of Santa Rosaand San Francisco Solano would come true was arriving.”56 In a reminder ofthe complexity of Inca identity—even in its millenarian form—he continuedthat, 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 notthe legitimate descendant of the Inca emperors and on that account,[Joséf Quispi Tupa] being a descendant of Guayna Cápac and ViracochaYnga, the kingdom belonged to him.57

The effect of Joséf Quispe Tupa’s appeal is unclear. That a riot against the cor-regidor of Urubamba began in the Inca stronghold of Maras in November1777 is certain, and remarkable, since such riots were almost unheard of in Incapueblos.58 In Maras’s jail, Joséf Quispe Tupa confessed to a massive plot, andcertainly letters had been sent far and wide in an attempt to build support forhis claims.59 However, the actual tumult did not spread beyond the tiny prov-ince of Urubamba, and in its events and trajectory it resembled other localuprisings—the corregidor’s house and furniture were burned, along with grainthat he had collected from the province. The Spanish population participatedalongside the Indian, and the riots did not draw much support from the Incanobility.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 deTemporalidades, leg. 89 (1770–1815), 35.

56. CDBR, 2:242.57. CDBR, 2:243.58. For the riot, see O’Phelan 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. O’Phelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones,

188–95.

1777, the Inca nobility of Cusco appear to have been uninterested in fosteringthe prophecy’s fulfillment.

The Silversmiths’ Conspiracy of 1780 drew from a more elite segment ofsociety and was overwhelmingly urban and creole, but it did have an Inca at itshead and clearly manifested a creole-Inca political identity.61 Spearheaded bymembers of the silversmiths’ guild (hit hard by a 1776 royal decree that theywork only with minted silver), the conspiracy was betrayed by a conspirator inconfession to his priest.62 Alongside the prominent Cusco creoles hung fortheir role in the conspiracy was Don Bernardo Tamboguacso Pomayalli, the24-year-old Inca cacique of Pisac (Calca y Lares), who was married to DoñaFrancisca Ynquiltupa, daughter of an Inca nobleman and former standardbearer of the Indian cabildo.63 What provoked Tamboguacso to participate inthe conspiracy is unclear. In December 1779, he had been jailed, at the requestof the church, for a matter involving his wife.64 More generally, like all whoseinterests were tied to Cusco’s grain, coca, and sugar trade, he suffered from theintroduction of the La Paz customs and the increase in the alcabala. Tam-boguacso himself stated that these created common cause between creole andIndian and led him to conspire, if not against the crown, at least against thereformed Bourbon order in Cusco.65

Túpac Amaru’s rebellion thus built on traditions of protest that were wellestablished in the 1700s: local riots against abusive officials and an anticolonial


61. Víctor Angles Vargas, El Cacique Tambohuacso: Historia de un proyectadolevantamiento contra la dominación española (Lima: Industrial Gráfica, 1975). For thegrievances of the plotters and their relation to the Bourbon reforms, see O’Phelan Godoy,Un siglo de rebeliones, 207–17.

62. Workers in silver mines were traditionally paid, in part, by informal takings fromthe mine; this silver was not minted and taxed and found its way into silver wares. Theorder that the silversmiths work only with taxed silver raised the price of their rawmaterial.

63. Angles Vargas, El Cacique Tambohuacso, 158–75. For Doña Francisca, see ARC,Juan Bautista Gammarra, leg. 133, [ ], 24 Sept. 1777. Her father was alférez real in 1757;ARC, Corregimiento, Causas Civiles, leg. 29, exp. 620.

64. He was quickly released, since, as the protector of Indians observed, “according tothe testimony presented in the Reales Cédulas, those of his class enjoy greater privilegesthan tributary Indians, and seeing as they enjoy all the prerogatives granted to the hidalgosof Castille, these should be conceded to them with the greatest justice; according to whichthese nobles should not be held prisoner except for serious crimes with ample evidence.”ARC, Corregimiento, Causas Ordinarias, leg. 59, exp. 1346. Contributing to his rapidrelease was the need to collect the crown’s Christmas tribute (a point made by theprotector).

65. O’Phelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones, 212.

Inca messianism. And he spectacularly succeeded in moving from local upris-ing to widespread rebellion, challenging not simply particular officials butcolonial rule generally, and not from the margins of colonial Peru but from itsvery heart. This success, in turn, gave Túpac Amaru the opportunity to articu-late his larger political ideology, something that, in their failure, the earlierinsurgencies in the bishopric had been unable to do. But the extraordinary suc-cess of Túpac Amaru also exposed fissures in indigenous society that hadremained hidden with the failure of earlier movements. Strikingly, one of thosewho exposed the Silversmiths’ Conspiracy was Pedro Sahuaraura, a reminderthat Cusco’s Inca nobility by no means united behind the goals of Inca mes-sianism or restoration.66 In general, though, people did not have to take sidesin uprisings that failed to materialize. In November 1780, the populations ofCusco—creole, Indian noble, and commoner—were forced to choose their al-legiance; in their overwhelming rejection of Túpac Amaru, the Inca nobility andcacical elite of the bishopric performed their own, complex colonial ideology.

The Indian Nobility and the Great Rebellion

At Sangarará, Indian forces dealt Spanish rule its most significant defeat sincethe 1530s and shook Cusco’s colonial society correspondingly. After this vic-tory, Túpac Amaru turned south and west, and by early December the rebel-lion had engulfed the highlands all the way to Lake Titicaca. Success broughtrecruits: by the end of the year the rebel forces numbered perhaps 50,000.67 Ahandful of Indian nobles joined Túpac Amaru.68 Don Juan Pablo HuamanSullca of Crusero (Caravaya) wrote to Túpac Amaru on December 9, 1780,advising him to beware of Spaniards and sending a book that showed theSpaniards had killed Túpac Amaru I.69 From an Aymara-Inca cacical lineage,Huaman Sullca claimed descent from the penultimate Inca emperor; he askedthat Túpac Amaru “give me some title in the militia, since I enjoy such privi-leges as a descendant of Túpac Yupanqui.” He also requested guns for his fol-lowers. Intriguingly, these he wanted so that they might “make war against the


66. Angles Vargas, El Cacique Tambohuacso, 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 Muñani,

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 Garcilaso’s Historia general del Perú? CDBR, 3:51–52.

infidel Chunchos in the pueblo of Inabari,” not against the Spaniards of thehighlands.70

But Huaman Sullca was the exception. Few others heeded Túpac Amaru’scalls, and, like the Incas of Cusco, the cacical elite of the Titicaca basin remainedoverwhelmingly loyal to the crown.71 As news of the battle of Sangarará reachedLampa, the province’s caciques presented themselves in its capital with armies oftributaries to defend the crown: Quispe Cavana of Cavanilla brought seven hun-dred and Succacahua of Umachire brought eight hundred; the Choquehuancaswould soon arrive from Azángaro with some two thousand.72 In Lampa, Succac-ahua, Cama Condorsaina, Pachari, Mamani Tapara, Cagua Apasa, Calisaya,Quispe Cavana; in Huancané, Calisaya, Viamonte, Cornejo, Ticona, Machicadoy Mendoza; in Azángaro, Choquehuanca, Mango Turpa, Chuquicallata, UisaApasa; in Chucuito, Fernández Cutimbo, Catacora, Chuqui Ynga Charaxa, Llac-lla Garcia Paca; and so on—all remained loyal to the crown.73 With their fami-lies and often with large contingents of loyal tributaries, the powerful caciquesaround Titicaca fled west toward Arequipa or east of the lake toward Sorata, laterto return with loyalist troops.74

The southern campaign slowed the drive toward Cusco and the Incaheartland: not until late December did Túpac Amaru’s army again turn north.By then, while his armies remained dominant in the southern reaches of thebishopric, he was losing his support among the caciques in Tinta and Quispi-canchis. In late November, Don Antonio Solis Quivimasa Ynga, from the domi-nant family in Quiquijana (Quispicanchis), fled to Cusco.75 There he said thathe had only complied with the rebel’s orders earlier out of fear.76 His son-in-


70. The term chuncho was used generically in the agricultural and pastoral societies ofthe altiplano and the higher valleys to refer to the peoples who inhabited the low, easternslopes of the Andes. For conflict between highland Indians and “chunchos” of the Yungaswho lived outside Spanish authority (and the coding of the latter as bandits by the former),see Stavig, World of Túpac Amaru, 63–64.

71. Indeed, other Guaman Sullcas and Cotacallapas from Caravaya fought for thecrown. ARC, Diezmos, leg. 36 (1787–88); Archivo del Ministerio de RelacionesExteriores, Perú [hereafter RR.EE.], Puno, Real Audiencia, exp. 461 (1797).

72. See the testimony of Don Ramón Moscoso, in CDBR, 1:337.73. See n. 106 below for various requests for premios; also, O’Phelan Godoy, La Gran

Rebelión, 63–67.74. In his letter to the king, José Rafael Sahuaraura Ramos Tito Atauchi described in

detail the more important loyalist caciques—especially Sahuaraura, Pumacahua, andChuquimia of Copacabana. Published as Estado del Perú, 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.

law, Don Francisco Succacahua, stayed in Quiquijana and tried to stave offTúpac Amaru, asking that he not seize Quivimasa’s property.77 However, onDecember 10, Micaela Bastidas—Túpac Amaru’s wife and coleader of therebellion—ordered his arrest for refusing to comply with orders.78 Nor wasSuccacahua the only Indian leader to withdraw support: in their defense atlater trials, those who supported Túpac Amaru in November generally insistedthat they had done so only under duress and tried to flee as soon as possible.Such self-serving testimony is, of course, suspect; however, when she wrote toTúpac Amaru of Succacahua’s arrest, Micaela Bastidas lamented that “Suca-cagua has betrayed us, and the rest, as the attached will impress on you, and soI am not myself because we have very few people.”79

On December 28, the rebels began a siege of Cusco itself. Cusco’s mili-tias—including that of Indian nobles—went into battle, joined by loyalistcaciques leading their own tributaries. Mateo Pumacahua of Chincherosstopped the rebel forces at Calca, keeping them from the Cusco-Urubambaroad and, more importantly, from moving onto the Anta plain. Troops startedarriving from Lima, while the rebel forces—ill trained, poorly armed, and los-ing momentum—began to drift away. By January 10, the siege of Cusco ended.Túpac Amaru’s cousin, Diego Cristóbal Túpac Amaru, led a campaign to thePaucartambo Valley, causing considerable destruction in the agricultural re-gions of Calca y Lares, Quispicanchis, and Paucartambo, but by February thefocus of the rebellion had again moved south to Tinta. On February 24, mar-ciscal José del Valle arrived from Lima with his army; on March 19 theymarched against Túpac Amaru and his command at Tinta.80 Del Valle’s forceslaid siege to the town and on April 6 captured Túpac Amaru and his family.They were tried, sentenced, and on May 18 executed in Cusco’s main plaza;they were then dismembered and portions of their bodies sent for public dis-play to pueblos that had rebelled.81

The execution of Túpac Amaru did not bring an end to the rebellion,although the arena of action shifted south to Titicaca and the altiplano. Theevents of November in Tungasuca had had a parallel hundreds of miles to the


77. CDBR, 3:50–51.78. CDBR, 4:23. Succacahua later testified that he and his brother-in-law, the priest

Pedro Solis Quivimasa Ynga, had plotted (unsuccessfully) to kill Túpac Amaru andBastidas. Ibid., 5:171.

79. Ibid., 4:23.80. For his account of the campaign, see AGI, Cuzco, leg. 63 (“Cartas de José del

Valle”).81. Angles Vargas, Historía del Cusco, 2:1091–98.

south, in Macha (Chayanta), near Potosí.82 There Tomás Catari, a claimant tothe cacicazgo, had been battling the corregidor since 1779, appealing to theChuquisaca Audiencia. In August 1780, Catari and his followers seized the cor-regidor, although he was soon released. But in January, Catari was killed, andhis brothers launched a rebellion that, under the leadership of Julian Apasa(who took the name Túpac Catari) swept northward toward La Paz. In Febru-ary the one urban uprising in the larger rebellion took place in Oruro.83 TheCatarista troops then laid siege to La Paz from late March until the end ofJune, when the city was relieved by troops from Buenos Aires.

Meanwhile, the area from Tinta to La Paz had seen almost continuousfighting since December. Puno was attacked in March, but the rebels wererepelled. The next two weeks saw open war in Chucuito; Juli was sacked byrebel troops, and on March 24, 1781, rebels massacred a number of Indiannobles and Spaniards in Juli’s San Pedro church.84 After Túpac Amaru’s execu-tion, Diego Túpac Amaru moved southward. His troops laid siege again toPuno, which was abandoned by the royalists in late May. Another cousin,Andres Túpac Amaru, led a campaign down the eastern shore of Titicaca.Sorata, where royalists had taken refuge, fell on August 4, 1781, and the ensu-ing massacre left many of the region’s creoles and Indian nobles dead.85 How-


82. Chayanta province, and the Macha, have long been focal points of rural unrest.Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority; “Disputed Images of Colonialism: Spanish Ruleand Indian Subversion in Northern Potosí, 1777–1780,” Hispanic American Historical Review76, no. 2 (May 1996): 189–226; and “Customs and Rules: Bourbon Rationalizing Projectsand Social Conflicts in Northern Potosí during the 1770s,” Colonial Latin American Review8, no. 2 (Dec. 1999): 245–74; Tristan Platt, “The Andean Experience of BolivianLiberalism, 1825–1900: Roots of Rebellion in 19th-Century Chayanta (Potosí),” in Stern,Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, 280–323; and Erick Langer, “Andean Rituals ofRevolt: 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 Doña María Ygnacia Chique Ynga Charaja of Pomata

(wife of Ambrocio Quispe Cavana) and Doña Ysabel Ybaña Paca Nina Chambilla and DonFermín Garcia Llaglla, one of Juli’s cacical couples. ARC, Real Audiencia, CausasOrdinarias, legs. 30 (1798) and 33 (1799).

85. Most of the cacical family of Carabuco (the Siñani) were killed at Sorata; alongwith their son-in-law, Don Blas Choquehuanca (ANB, Expedientes Coloniales, 1786–85);Blas’s 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 [Huancané] and his son(ARC, Real Audiencia, Causas Ordinarias, leg. 33, 1799); many Cornexos of Huancané(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).

ever, by then the tide had turned. Royalist reinforcements from the coast andthe Rio de la Plata made their ways east and north and gradually reassertedroyal authority. In December 1781, Diego entered into negotiations with delValle, and, with part of his forces (including Pedro Vilca Apasa), he surren-dered in February 1782. Vilca Apasa then sought to rekindle the rebellionaround the lake; he was captured in March, executed, and dismembered. Thesurviving Túpac Amarus were taken to Cusco. In March 1783, a plot allegedlybacked by them was discovered; Diego, his mother, and others were executedon July 19, 1783.86 Their execution marks the end of the Great Rebellion,although with Diego Túpac Amaru’s surrender in early 1782 it had largely runits course. Given the nature of the rebellion—in which the organized cam-paigns of the Túpac Amarus and Cataris sparked, and in turn were fueled by,countless pueblo jacqueries throughout the southern highlands—pockets ofrebellion continued into 1783, and tensions remained extremely high until thenext 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, fromthe provincial politics of Tinta to the far greater military power and organiza-tion of the royalist forces.87 But at two critical junctures, the internal politicsand conflicts of Indian society struck crippling blows to the uprising. First, theIncas blocked the rebellion to the north, preventing Túpac Amaru’s troopsboth from seizing Cusco and from moving into the central highlands.88 Thefailure to capture Cusco is generally attributed to the reluctance of its creolepopulation to side with Túpac Amaru—for while the creoles of Cusco did,early on, consider treating with Túpac Amaru, its royal officials would not.


86. José Gabriel’s teenage half-brother was sentenced to exile in Spain; he returned toBuenos Aires in the 1820s. Juan Bautista Túpac Amaru, Cuarenta años de cautiverio, ed.Francisco A. Loayza (1822; Lima: [Editorial Miranda], 1941).

87. For the military superiority of the crown’s forces, see Leon G. Campbell, TheMilitary and Society in Colonial Peru, 1750–1810 (Philadelphia: American PhilosophicalSociety, 1978), 99–153.

88. Stern sees the inability of the rebellion to spread to the central highlands ascrucial to its eventual failure. However, he locates this failure in the Spanish militarizationof the central sierra after the Santos Atahuallpa insurgency, not in the rejection of therebellion by much of the indigenous population of Cusco. “Age of Andean Insurrection,”63–76.

However, not only creoles remained loyal to the crown: the surroundingIndian pueblos also rejected Túpac Amaru’s calls.89 In Paruro, along the Vil-canota north of Urcos, and on the Anta plain—that is, precisely the area underthe rule of the Inca nobility—Indian tributaries as well as nobles refused torebel and often joined the royalist forces.90

Second, in the Titicaca basin the rebellion became a civil war. In the Vil-canota highlands, most pueblos and their elites joined the rebellion. AroundCusco, both communities and their leaders remained loyal. In the Titicacabasin, the Indian nobility and Spaniards overwhelmingly took the side of thecrown, while most communities rose against them. To be sure, when TúpacAmaru’s troops first marched toward Titicaca in December 1780, many watchedat a distance. An Indian noblewoman in Cavanilla (Lampa) who supportedTúpac Amaru wrote to him saying she had “ordered all the Indians in thiscommunity to appear before you, and those who have remained here are enroute; but the rest have removed themselves from this pueblo to a distance ofthree or four leagues.”91 Others joined their caciques in loyalist armies. But asthe rebellion dragged on for months, the loyalist caciques lost their hold overtheir tributaries. Diego Choquehuanca and his son Joséf brought two thousandtributaries to the royalist forces in December 1780. However, by the summerof 1781 Diego was forced to abandon Carabuco, since “his laborious effortsand ardent zeal were incapable . . . of keeping the Indians that were in hischarge in the obedience of Your Majesty.”92 While he fled the area, much of hisfamily—descendants of Guayna Cápac and among the most powerful Indiannobles in Peru—took refuge in Sorata, where they were massacred. The openclass conflict around Titicaca prevented Túpac Amaru’s forces from unitingwith those of the Catari: had Choquehuanca and the many other loyalistcaciques sided with Túpac Amaru, the Titicaca region could have bound thetwo rebellions together; instead, it formed a massive battlefield that drainedboth.

Thus, the Indian elites of the bishopric—the sizable Inca nobility aroundCusco and the powerful cacical dynasties around Titicaca—served as a checkto the rebellion. The obvious explanation of the nobility’s loyalty is self-interest:as privileged members of a subject group, Indian elites accepted and supportedcolonial rule for the benefits that accrued to them. Moreover, not all had suf-


89. Garrett, “Los Incas borbónicos.”90. Mörner and Trelles, “The Test of Causal Interpretations,” 94–109.91. Doña Juana Quispe Yupanqui, CDBR, 3:56.92. AGI, Charcas, leg. 537.

fered under the Bourbon reforms. The reparto rendered cacical office eco-nomically threatening but also potentially more rewarding. And, anecdotally,resignations by caciques seem more common in the 1740s and 1750s than inthe two decades before the rebellion.93 As tribute and reparto burdens in-creased in the 1760s and 1770s, so did the highland population, making caci-cazgos more lucrative. Certainly, a number of Indian caciques were prosperingin the 1760s and 1770s.94 Those dependent on the portage of goods fromCusco to Alto Peru were hit hard by the division of the viceroyalties in 1776.However, with the exception of a few muleteers like Túpac Amaru himself,long-distance trade was, by then, the domain of creoles.95 While the caciquesaround Titicaca marketed local produce and manufactures in altiplano mar-kets, these were exempt from the alcabala anyway.

In addition, as O’Phelan has well shown, fiscal measures were only a partof the Bourbon reforms to affect the Indian nobility.96 In the mid-1700s, thecrown began a slow retreat from the ethnic division of Andean society that hadbeen the hallmark of Habsburg rule. Two modest innovations in particularaffected the Indian elites of the bishopric of Cusco. The first was the increas-ingly frequent appointment of Spaniards to vacant cacicazgos.97 However, in1780 this had not yet eroded the cacical authority of the Incas around Cusco orof the major dynasties of the Titicaca basin. More important to the upperreaches of the Inca nobility and the highland cacical elite was the opening ofuniversities, military posts, and, above all, the church to the Indian nobility.98


93. For examples, ANB, Expedientes Coloniales, 1793–11 (Chucuito); ARC, RealAudiencia, Administrativo, leg. 167 (1808–9) (Ñuñoa).

94. Bernardo Succacahua of Umachire and his brother Francisco (of Quiquijana,above) were active tithe farmers in the 1760s, entering into contracts of one thousandpesos. Archivo Arzobispal del Cusco [hereafter AAC], XIII.3.59. Vicente Choquecahua ofAndaguaylillas also prospered in the 1770s, purchasing 32 topos of land for 2,070 pesos incash earned in the lamb trade. ARC, Juan Bautista Gamarra, leg. 146, 432ff, 1 Oct. 1778.

95. Stavig, The World of Túpac Amaru, 155–56.96. O’Phelan Godoy, “Repensando el movimiento nacional Inca.”97. O’Phelan Godoy views this phenomenon as fairly widespread; Kurakas sin

sucesiones: Del cacique al alcalde de indios, Perú y Bolivia 1570–1835 (Cusco: Centro Bartoloméde Las Casas, 1997), 17–28. Stavig (The World of Túpac Amaru, 126) and Garrett(“Descendants of the Natural Lords,” 585–701, passim) argue that it did not become sountil 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 Orejón, “Laigualdad entre indios y españoles: La real cédula de 1697,” in Estudios sobre la políticaindigenista española en América (Valladolid: n.p., 1975), 1:365–86; although the decree wasnot widely honored in Cusco until the mid-1700s.

With that, the Indian nobility gained access to the most powerful institution inthe Andes, and its valuable offices. Indeed, the decades before the rebellion sawthe first Indian priests in the bishopric; by 1780 most of the major Inca andTiticaca basin families had sons in the church.99 Thus, in 1780 it appeared thatthe blurring of the boundary between the Indian nobility and its creole peerscould result in a strengthening of the former, rather than its eclipse by the latter.

Ultimately, however, purely materialist explanations of the nobility’s loy-alty are unsatisfying. First, they fail to account for Túpac Amaru’s exceptional-ism. More importantly, they implicitly reject the possibility that loyalist Indiannobles acted on a set of political ideals—a motivation reserved for TúpacAmaru and his followers. But just as the hanging of Arriaga and the storming ofthe obraje at Pomachanchis were political actions by the tributary masses of theVilcanota highlands—violent but extremely articulate rejections of particularmaterial and political relations in late colonial Peruvian society—so too didthe Inca nobility perform a political act when they marched to Sangarará to battle the rebels. Recent work has been more interested in recovering theideals and motivations of those who chose rebellion than of those who rejectedit, and the case of Túpac Amaru is no exception. This section thus attempts torecover the political ideology of the loyalist Indian nobility and to locate it inrelation to that espoused by Túpac Amaru.

Túpac Amaru and Micaela Bastidas were captured just five months afterthey had seized Arriaga. In those months, the couple sent numerous lettersthroughout the highlands and made several proclamations that outline theirgoals and suggest a coherent ideology, most clearly seen in a letter sent to theCusco 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 re-placement of the latter by a salaried “Alcalde Mayor of the same Indian nationand other persons of good conscience, with no more jurisdiction than theadministration of justice, the Christian education of the Indians and other indi-viduals.” He insisted on the creation of an Audiencia in Cusco with its ownviceroy and the resumption of free commerce between Lower and Upper Peru.Túpac Amaru had also been waging a decade-long battle to be recognized as


99. O’Phelan Godoy, La Gran Rebelión, 47–68; and David T. Garrett, “La Iglesia y elpoder social de la nobleza indígena cuzqueña, siglo XVIII,” in Decoster, Incas e indioscristianos, 30–36.

100. Quoted at length in Angles Vargas, Historica del Cusco, 2:1039– 41.

the closest living relative to Ñusta Beatriz, and in the letter he made explicit hisclaim 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 recog-nized the sovereignty of the king of Spain.

In itself, Túpac Amaru’s letter contains little that would have shocked thesensibilities of Peru’s elites, beyond its tone. The abolition of the corregidorand the reparto were already under consideration and would shortly begin.101

Central to the Bourbon reforms was the division of unwieldy jurisdictions, andjust seven years after Túpac Amaru’s letter Cusco did receive its own Audien-cia, albeit under the viceroy in Lima. The proposal to appoint an Indian officialin place of the corregidor was a bit further from the mainstream of Peruvianpolitical discourse, although, strikingly, the Inca nobility of Cusco had them-selves proposed something similar just two years earlier. That the new provin-cial official would receive an adequate salary, and therefore not rely on extor-tion and forced sales, was a central (if unrealized) goal of the intendant systemsoon to be implemented in Spanish America. Finally, repeal of increases insales taxes and internal duties had been basic demands of all urban riots andconspiracies in Arequipa, Cusco, La Paz, and Cochabamba during the preced-ing decade.102

More problematic, both for the Incas of Cusco and for the ideology ofSpanish rule, was Túpac Amaru’s claim both of leadership among the Inca eliteand therefore of legitimate authority, as a result of his self-proclaimed role as“Inca,” in colonial society. Túpac Amaru’s ideal of political authority was mon-archic, hierarchical, and pro-Castilian in its imperial vision. However, it wasalso anticolonial, rejecting the marginalization of Indian elites within the colo-nial order, asserting a larger sphere for Indian (Inca) authority within the Span-ish Empire, and reaffirming that Indian nobles were the appropriate rulers ofthe Indian commons. At the same time, he expressly courted the creoles ofCusco and of the countryside, acknowledging them as countrymen and as fel-low 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 ofCusco’s Inca nobility? Events unfolded so quickly between November 1780


101. The system of corregidores was replaced in the southern highlands by theintendant 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.O’Phelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones, 304–5.

and January 1781 that we have few explicit accounts of the beliefs and goalsthat motivated the actors, particularly among the Indians who remained loyalto the crown. Nor were Indian nobles prolific writers: the few postrebellionaccounts of their actions are formulaic assertions of loyalty as part of appealsfor royal favors.103 Thus, to explore their motivations we must investigate theiractions as much as their statements.

Attempts to recover the political beliefs of indigenous Andeans have fo-cused heavily on their actions during the rebellion, implicitly privileging thepolitical nature of actions taken in explicit defense or rejection of the colonialorder. In fact, the Inca nobility of Cusco and the Indian elites of the country-side were constantly involved in political battles—among themselves, withpriests and corregidores, and with their communities. They conducted thesebattles largely in the colonial courts, where as participants they articulated andsought to bring about their conceptions of the proper order of society.Throughout the 1770s, both the Inca nobility of Cusco and Túpac Amaruwere involved in two lengthy legal battles that suggest the political beliefs ofthe participants and directly influenced the trajectory of the rebellion. The firstwas between the Inca nobility and the “alcalde mayor de las ocho parroquias”of Cusco, Don Bernardo Góngora; the second was between Túpac Amaru andDon Diego Betancur Túpac Amaru over a vacant mayorazgo. Both were causescélèbres in Cusco—huge lawsuits in which the power of Spanish officeholders,the extent of Inca privilege and exceptionalism, and the ancestral and ethnicclaims of different sectors of the bishopric’s elite were rehearsed and chal-lenged before royal judges. If the Bourbon reforms and Inca utopianism are theAndean context of the rebellion, then these lawsuits are the local context.

From 1775 to 1778, Cusco’s Inca nobility waged a legal war against thecity’s alcalde mayor. Góngora’s relation to the Indians of Cusco Cercado appearsto have been like that of a rural corregidor to his subjects.104 Charged with col-


103. The lengthiest indigenous account of the rebellion is Sahuaraura’s Estado delPerú. For petitions to the crown asking for rewards, see ARC, Real Audiencia,Administrativo, leg. 148 (1787–89) (Diego Choquehuanca); Archivo General de la Nación(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, RealAudiencia, Causas Ordinarias, leg. 11 (1792) (Mateo Pumacahua); ARC, Audencia,Administrativo, leg. 149 (1789–90) and Archivo General de la Nación (Perú) [hereafterAGN], Derechos Indígenas, exp. 472, 1792 (Diego Cusiguaman); AGN, DerechosIndígenas, exp. 643 (1784) and exp. 845 (1799) (the Sahuarauras).

104. The Cercado of Cusco included the city itself (the Cathedral and four otherparishes), two suburban parishes, and two outlying agricultural parishes (San Gerónimoand San Sebastián) that in the eighteenth century were the stronghold of the Inca nobility.

lecting tribute from the ayllu caciques of the Cercado, he took advantage ofthis responsibility to introduce repartos and to force people to work on hishacienda and in his obraje. At the same time, like many Spanish officials, heboth intervened in, and was drawn into, disputes within the Indian republic.Góngora had served as the alcalde mayor for two decades, during which hismain foe was Don Cayetano Tupa Guamanrimachi, the powerful “caciqueprincipal” in the parish of San Sebastián (the bastion of the Inca nobility): theirmutual lawsuits over land, water, and general abuses date to the mid-1750s.105

Tupa Guamanrimachi himself was disliked by many of his Inca peers, andGóngora forged an alliance with the anti-Cayetano faction in the 1760s.106 In1766 he joined a lawsuit, initiated by almost two dozen Inca nobles from thecity’s various parishes, that denounced Tupa Guamanrimachi’s abuse of officeand made the usual aspersions against his ancestry. In 1770 Góngora succeededin having Tupa Guamanrimachi jailed, but he was soon released. Tupa Gua-manrimachi had the support of both the corregidor and another faction of theInca nobility, and Góngora never succeeded in toppling him from SanSebastián’s cacicazgo.

By the middle of the 1770s, the dynamics of intra-Inca politics had clearlychanged, so that the focus of Inca animus was no longer Tupa Guamanrimachi,but rather Góngora. In May 1775, the ayllu caciques and nobles of San Se-bastián complained that Góngora had done a reparto of pigs in the parish.107 Atthe time, seven other caciques from the parish joined Tupa Guamanrimachi ina complaint against Góngora; these included some of Tupa Guamanrimachi’sstaunchest foes in the parish. Complaints against Góngora grew rapidly: inearly June, the city’s advocate for Indians accused Góngora of having orches-trated the unlawful arrest of Tupa Guamanrimachi in 1770, of having hit DoñaCatalina Tisoc Sayritupa (a cacical heiress in Santiago parish) and causing herto abort in 1774, and of conducting the illegal reparto, claiming that it was atthe behest of the corregidor (who then joined the complaint against Gón-gora).108 Góngora’s 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 Indígenas, exp. 336; ADC, Corregimiento, leg. 47, exp. 1043.107. ARC, Corregimiento, Provincias, Causas Criminales, leg. 85 (1773–75). 108. The accusation that an abusive official had caused a woman to abort was a

common feature of litigation against colonial authorities: Góngora was also accused in twoother instances. Further showing the complexity of Inca politics, at the same time CatalinaTisoc Sayritupa and her husband joined Cayetano Tupa Guamanrimachi in denouncingGóngora, the couple entered into a separate suit against Catalina’s sister and her husband,

arrest. The case dragged on until 1778, joined by Inca nobles from the city’sother parishes.109

The goal of the Inca nobility was clearly to have Góngora removed fromoffice. To that end, in November 1777, two dozen Inca nobles complainedabout Góngora’s abuses to the Royal Treasury in Cusco and made a remarkableproposal: “[S]ince in order to liberate us from the extortions that we suffer it isnecessary to appeal for remedy, we make present to Your Lordship for our alle-viation, that we have at hand a subject of ability and fortune and distinctionamong those of our nation, who is Don Ambrocio Garces Chillitupa, such thathe might administer the collection of tributes, while certainly with zeal andexactitude in favor of the Royal Estate, at the same time with love and leni-ency.”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 office hadpassed to the city’s creole elite.111 In proposing Chillitupa—an Inca elector, for-mer alférez real, and cacique in neighboring Oropesa—the Inca nobles soughtto reassert one aspect of the earlier, Habsburg order of the city. Initially, theattorney for the Royal Treasury in Cusco supported Góngora’s removal butopposed Chillitupa’s appointment, suggesting that the crown’s officers were notsympathetic to a return of such Inca authority. But in the end, the Royal Trea-sury rejected the attorney’s suggestion, arguing that the charges against Gón-gora had not been proven, and he kept the office pending further investigation.

While the treasury’s refusal to remove Góngora might be expected toalienate the city’s Incas from the crown and hence lead them to support the Sil-versmiths’ Conspiracy early in 1780, the opposite was the case. The 24 electorsof Inca cabildo, along with caciques and other Indian nobles, remained loyal tothe crown; it was Pedro Sahuaraura who detained the first conspirators whenthey were exposed.112 For the appeal by the Indian nobility had been rejectedby officials 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 thandid the crown itself; nonetheless, they had faith that—brought to the attentionof the king and viceroy—their loyalty would be rewarded.


Don Joséf Manuel Tupa Guamanrimachi—Cayetano’s son—over a cacicazgo in Santiagoparish. ARC, Intendencia, Gobierno, leg. 139 (1787).

109. See the additions to the suit in ARC, Cajas Reales, leg. 8 (1777–81). See also therelated complaint against Góngora in AGN, Superior Gobierno, exp. 403 (1776).

110. ARC, Cajas Reales, leg. 8 (1777–81). 111. Amado Gonzales, “El alférez real de los Incas,” 228–31.112. Angles Vargas, El Cacique Tambohuacso, 169–70.

Nor was this belief ill founded. The Incas’ history of petitioning the crowncourts dated to first decade of conquest. Again and again over the next two cen-turies, the Inca nobility of Cusco appealed to Lima, and even Madrid, to winrestitution of the noble privileges and civic prerogatives of the cabildo whenthese were threatened by local officials. This tradition was still strong in themid–eighteenth century. In the late 1760s, an appeal to Lima had won restitu-tion of the noble exemptions of San Sebastián.113 More generally, in 1756 theInca cabildo gave power of attorney to Don Juan Bustamente Carlos Ynga—one of the city’s creole-Inca elite who had taken up residence in Madrid—topetition the king for rewards and recognition of their quality, merits, and ser-vices to the crown.114 Bustamente Carlos Ynga also received numerous powersof attorney from Cusco’s creoles, equally eager to draw the king’s attention totheir loyal service and thereby win some favor.115 For the relatively poor pro-vincial nobles of Cusco—creole as well as Indian—this was a difficult task:appeals to Lima were expensive, and chances to petition the royal court inSpain were rare indeed. Ferdinand VI’s reception of Bustamente Carlos Yngacould only have strengthened the Incas’ faith that Madrid’s royalty was farmore kindly disposed to them than were the officials of Cusco. Bishop Mos-coso’s October 1781 letter to Diego and Mariano Túpac Amaru urged them tosurrender and specifically referred to what must have been common lore in thecity: “You well know the recent example of Don Carlos Bustamente, who withthe name of Carlos Ynca was treated in the splendid and magnificent court ofthe King with such distinction that not only was it the fulfillment of his claims,but greater than whatever he could have hoped, the Monarch making such aspectacle of him among the most outstanding people that it was the wonder ofthose 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 thecorregidor, Don Diego Manrique y Lara, to strip the Inca nobility of their privileges, seeARC, 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

Ñusta Beatriz mayorazgo (ARC, Alejo Gonzalez Peñalosa, 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 RoyalHacienda accounts, ARC, Intendencia, Real Hazienda, leg. 167 (1785).

117. Joseph Joaquín 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 wasnever heard from again. ARC, Juan Bautista Gamarra, leg. 133, 22, 20 Feb. 1781.

of Bustamente Carlos Ynga in Madrid was a strong reminder that appeals toLima and Madrid had a good chance of being heard favorably. Indeed, the con-tinued survival of Inca noble privilege was the result of two centuries of inter-vention by the Lima Audiencia against attempts by corregidores and otherCusco officials to collect tribute from the Indian nobility and interfere in caci-cal succession.

The Inca nobility of Cusco had another reason for not joining the silver-smiths: the conspiracy was exposed before any action took place, and eventhose who sympathized would hardly support it after its exposure. But thelengthy lawsuits of the 1770s underscore that the Inca nobility had their ownmechanisms and ideology for challenging those aspects of the colonial orderthat threatened them. Just as the pueblo riots against the corregidor func-tioned, and were generally understood to function, as complex negotiationsbetween the communities involved and the government, so too were the law-suits of the Inca nobility. These lawsuits often yielded beneficial results, partic-ularly as they worked their way higher through the court system, where thelocal officials (like Góngora) had less influence. As a result, an integral part ofthe Inca nobility’s political consciousness was a belief that challenges to localauthority and relations of power were best conducted through the royal courts.

Not all Incas took this stance: Tamboguacso’s participation in the Silver-smiths’ Conspiracy and the Cusipaucars’ role in the Urubamba riots show thepolitical diversity of the Inca nobility. But again, in both instances the localelites implicated were overwhelmingly creoles, not Incas. In general, the Incanobility remained loyal to the crown in moments of open crisis, placing theirfaith 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 colonialorder: unrest and turmoil were generally not in their interest. But it was pre-cisely this privilege that informed their understanding of colonial politics.Spanish hegemony was neither unified nor coherent. In the particularities thatconstituted life in late colonial Cusco, the relations and order of Spanish colo-nial rule were open to constant challenge and negotiation, and the particularposition of the Incas guided the form of their challenges. Thus, while many as-pects of Túpac Amaru’s program were widely accepted by the Inca nobility (and,indeed, were implicitly or explicitly advocated in their lawsuits against Gón-gora), the manner of his challenge contradicted their own political ideology.

Moreover, Túpac Amaru’s letter to the Cusco cabildo came less than tenmonths after the Incas’ strategy of public loyalty and legal challenge met withresounding success. On May 19, 1780, their loyalty after the exposure of theSilversmiths’ Conspiracy reaped its reward: after years of frustrated appeals,


Viceroy Guirior finally ruled in their favor and against Góngora. By officialdecree, the viceroy ordered the corregidor of Cusco

to call together the electors and caciques and give them due thanks forthe faithfulness and zeal they have shown in the current situation, mak-ing them see that very soon all this will be presented to the King OurLord. . . . [W]ith respect that [they] complain of the tribute collectorB[ernar]do Góngora, let it be arranged that, [Góngora] not having titleof cacique conceded by this Royal Audiencia, or in propriety by thisSuperior Government, the Corregidor separate him from the office ofCollector. . . . [A]nd as to the excesses [by] . . . Góngora, it is ordered thatthe said corregidor inform me punctually about his conduct.118

In appealing to the courts and remaining loyal to the crown in the tense days ofMarch, the Incas had worked within the logic of Spanish colonialism to asserttheir position and contest certain relations of Bourbon Cusco; their acts hadbeen consummately political and had been understood as such. So, too, in earlyNovember 1780 had the people of Tungasuca, under the leadership of TúpacAmaru, engaged in political acts understood as such, but they were articulatedin a vernacular foreign to that of the Inca nobility.

That the Inca nobility contested aspects of the colonial order throughpetitions and lawsuits rather than through riot and rebellion was hardly theonly reason they failed to support Túpac Amaru. Their historic loyalty to thecrown was greatly reinforced by the suspicion with which they viewed TúpacAmaru’s claims. While the more political demands made by Túpac Amaruwere not particularly outrageous to Cusco’s Incas, his insistence that he was thesole claimant to Inca blood alienated them completely. During the years thatthe Incas were active participants in the conflict with Góngora, they had beeninterested bystanders in one of the more intriguing disputes of colonial Cusco:the legal battle between José Gabriel Túpac Amaru and Diego Betancur TúpacAmaru. In the 1760s, José Gabriel had discarded his paternal surname (Con-dorcanqui) and adopted that of the last monarch of Vilcabamba as part of hisclaim to the mayorazgo brought by Ñusta Beatriz to the Marquises of Al-cañices y Santiago de Oropesa.119 That grandee family had died out in 1744,


118. ARC, Corregimiento, Administrativos, leg. 94 (1767–84).119. Ñusta Beatriz was the daughter of Sayri Túpac, Manco Inca’s brother, who

succeeded him as the leader of the rump Inca state at Vilcabamba. In the 1550s, SayriTúpac acknowledged Spanish rule and converted to Christianity; in return he was grantedthe Inca pueblos of Yucay, Maras, Guayllabamba, and Urubamba in encomienda. He then

leaving the valuable mayorazgo vacant.120 According to José Gabriel, whenFelipe Túpac Amaru—the last Inca sovereign—was executed in 1572, he hadleft an illegitimate daughter, Juana Pilcohuaco, who would have been Beatriz’scousin. José Gabriel alleged that Juana, in turn, had married Don Diego FelipeCondorcanqui (from a non-Inca ruling lineage in the southern highlands). Thecouple ruled as caciques of Surimana, leaving only one surviving child, DonBlas Túpac Amaru. He married Doña Francisca Torres; in 1687 their childrenpresented this information to the corregidor of Canas y Canchis (later Tinta),who declared them the descendants of Juana and therefore of Felipe TúpacAmaru. Blas and Francisca’s son Sebastián succeeded them as cacique of Suri-mana.121 He married Doña Catalina del Camino; their son, Miguel, marriedDoña Rosa Noguera. Miguel died young, and Rosa’s brother served as interimcacique until Rosa and Miguel’s son, José Gabriel, was of age. Arguing that themayorazgo should revert to the line of Juana Pilcohuaco, as Beatriz’s closestrelative, José Gabriel launched a claim that would span the 1770s and bringhim into conflict with the Inca and creole nobility of Cusco.

José Gabriel was not the only claimant. Opposing him was Don DiegoFelipe Betancur Túpac Amaru of Cusco.122 The son of Don Bernardo Betan-cur y Arvieto and Doña Manuela Túpac Amaru, Diego Felipe had been born inthe late seventeenth century, the product of an alliance between Cusco’s creoleand Inca nobilities. The Betancur claim argued that Felipe Túpac Amaru hadleft not a daughter, but a son, Don Juan Tito Túpac Amaru. His grandson,Don Lucas Túpac Amaru, had married a creole woman, Doña Gabriela Arze;their daughter was Diego Betancur’s mother.123 Diego had married DoñaLucia de Bargas y Urbina, a Spaniard “of well-known nobility.”124 Based on thisgenealogy, Diego Betancur spent the three decades before his death trying to


retired to Yucay, where he died a few years later. Through Beatriz’s marriage to Martín deLoyola (the nephew of St. Ignatius), the encomienda passed to the Marquises of Alcañices.Angles Vargas, Historia del Cusco, 1:397. For Beatriz’s will, ARC, Betancur, 3:145–54.

120. The mayorazgo was declared vacant by royal decree on 16 Oct. 1744. ARC,Tomás Gamarra, leg. 176, 497ff, 3 Dec. 1778.

121. Francisco A. Loayza, ed., Genealogía de Túpac Amaru por Jose Gabriel Túpac Amaru(documentos inéditos del año 1777) (Lima: [Editorial Miranda] 1946).

122. For the Betancur claim, see the 13-volume collection compiled in the nineteenthcentury by Vicente José Garcia and extant in the ARC as the Colección Betancur, esp. vol. 1, for genealogical information. Also Diego Betancur’s will, in ARC, Tomás Gamarra,leg. 176, 497ff, 3 Dec. 1778.

123. ARC, Tomás Gamarra, leg. 173, 497ff, 3 Dec. 1778.124. ARC, Betancur, 1:117.

claim the mayorazgo for his family and waging an endless legal battle against“an Indian from Pampamarca, Don Joséph Condorcanqui Noguera BalenzuelaCamino y Torres, that he not call himself Túpac Amaru.”125

Given the enormous importance of José Gabriel Túpac Amaru in Peru-vian history, the relative merits of his claims versus those of the Betancurs haveexcited much academic interest.126 The reaction of Cusco’s nobility, however, ismore relevant to this work than the question of which, if either, had the betterclaim. That a highland cacique, whose last proclaimed link to the Incas was hisgreat-great-grandmother, would title himself the heir to Manco Inca (and po-tentially the encomendero of four Inca pueblos) was not well received in Cusco.Moreover, Túpac Amaru’s wife, mother, and grandmother were provincialSpaniards, who (in Cusqueño eyes) ranked far below both the Inca nobility andthe “notoriously noble” creole families related to Betancur. In an extraordinarymove that suggests the Inca nobility’s position, in 1778 Diego Betancur wasappointed an elector for the Inca cabildo’s 12th house, that of Guayna Cápac:the only creole so elected.127

For many reasons Betancur’s pretensions were preferable, to the Incas, tothose of Túpac Amaru. The Betancurs were closely linked to Cusco’s creoleelite, with whom the Inca nobility had strong ties and whom they valued asallies far more than the dominant family from a pastoral pueblo far up the Vil-canota. Indeed, Betancur was much more the peer of the Inca nobility than wasthe cacique of Surimana. For more than two centuries, the Incas had lived anddealt with the descendants of the conquistadors, and each group acknowledgedthe social standing of the other. In contrast, to acknowledge, as Beatriz’s heir,the claims of someone with almost no ties of kinship to the surviving Incanobility would undermine the basic premise of the colonial Incas: that it wasconstant intermarriage that maintained Inca nobility and that the bastardized


125. ARC, Tomás Gamarra, leg. 176, 497ff, 3 Dec. 1778. Betancur also sued DonGaspar Túpac Amaru Ynga, or Balderrama, of Oruro over his use of the Inca name. ARC,Betancur, III.

126. See especially Cahill’s recent analysis of the competing claims, the history of theMarquesado, and their treatment in the historiography in “Primus inter pares.” See alsoJohn H. Rowe, “Genealogía y rebelión en el siglo XVIII: Algunos antecedentes de lasublevación de José Gabriel Thupa Amaro,” Histórica (Lima) 6, no. 1 ( July 1982): 65–86;Carlos Daniel Valcárcel, “Documentos sobre las gestiones del cacique Túpac Amaru ante laAudiencia de Lima (1777),” Letras (Lima) 36, no. 3 (1946): 452–66, and “La familia delcacique Túpac Amaru,” Letras (Lima) 37, no. 1 (1947): 44–89; and Fisher, The Last IncaRevolt, 33–37.

127. The election took place on 25 Feb. 1778. ARC, Betancur, vol. 1.

Inca lines of the former empire had no role in Cusco’s ceremonial and politicallife. At heart, the issue was whether the “Incas” had ceased to exist as a group inthe sixteenth century (so that those who could trace descent from the precon-quest rulers could claim to be “Inca” themselves), or whether the “Incas” werean ongoing ethnic nobility, zealously preserving their purity of blood (withallowances for judicious marriages to other Indian nobles and creoles of goodfamily).128 And in that debate, the Incas of Cusco and José Gabriel Condor-canqui, or Túpac Amaru, were necessarily on different sides.

The conflict over the mayorzago paralleled, or spilled over into, cacicalpolitics in Túpac Amaru’s own parish. Following his father and uncle, TúpacAmaru had been confirmed as cacique of the small pueblos of Tungasuca, Pam-pamarca, and Surimana in 1766, at the age of 28. However, disputes with thecorregidores of Tinta and other claimants led to his removal from 1769 to1771; he was reinstated, but (as often happened) the dispute smoldered on.Early in 1780, a number of caciques and Indian nobles from the vicinity ofPampamarca gave testimony about Túpac Amaru’s ancestry. The particularallegations are the stuff of any eighteenth-century succession battle and shouldnot be taken at face value: there had been no Doña Juana Picohuaco; or if therehad been she was not the matriarch of the Condorcanqui line; José Gabriel andhis in-laws, the Nogueras, had stolen all of their documents from the trueclaimants; other of his papers were forged; and so on.129 The most powerfulcacique of the area, Doña Tomasa Tito Condemayta (who later supported therebellion), testified that Túpac Amaru’s father, Miguel, “was always a poor, des-titute man, and without any right whatsoever to the name of Túpac Amaru andthat the above-mentioned took the name Túpac Amaru just as the Indians takethat which seems appealing to them . . . and the said Don Miguel was an ordi-nary Indian without any privileges.”130 Whatever their truth, the challenges toancestral authority that were always at the heart of intraelite politics sur-rounded Túpac Amaru’s pretensions, and not only in Cusco.131

These legal battles suggest two tenets of the Inca nobility’s political ideologythat put them at odds with Túpac Amaru. First, while Inca nobles were far frompassive in challenging those aspects of Spanish rule that they opposed, they were


128. For eighteenth-century Inca marriage patterns, see Garrett, “Los Incasborbónicos.”

129. ARC, Betancur, 2:309–50.130. ARC, Betancur, 2:345.131. For the local and provincial politics surrounding Túpac Amaru, see esp. Stavig,

“Eugenio Sinanyuca”; and Glave, Vida, símbolos y batallas, 117–78.

committed to doing so through petitions to the crown and appeals to the courts.In this, they both supported Spain’s colonial hegemony and demonstrated howelements of that hegemony were open to challenge and revision through sanc-tioned 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 crownin no way required that they accept all aspects of the colonial order. Their formof rejection, however, was distinct from that advanced by Túpac Amaru. Second,while they shared with Túpac Amaru a strong commitment to a colonial orderthat recognized Inca authority, their definition of that authority, and who shouldexercise it, differed radically from his. His claim to be the sole successor to TúpacAmaru I (and thus Guayna Cápac) certainly resonated throughout the Vilcanotahighlands, but it fell flat in Cusco. That a mestizo highlander descended from anillegitimate child of Túpac Amaru and an Aymara cacique would claim prece-dence over the numerous descendants of Paullu Inca was unthinkable.132 Indeed,one of these descendants—Pedro Sahuaraura—led the Indian regiment againstTúpac Amaru at Sangarará. It is an ironic, and telling, indication of the com-plexity of colonial Andean society and ideology that Túpac Amaru himselfadopted 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 farmore complex, and vibrant, elite identity; whether intentionally or not, TúpacAmaru’s claims necessarily represented a threat to colonial Inca privilege as it wasunderstood and constructed in Cusco.

Thus, both the nature of Túpac Amaru’s call for reform, and his dynasticclaims, alienated Cusco’s Inca nobility. Just as importantly, on the ground therebellion developed in ways at odds with Túpac Amaru’s own pronouncements,and both the actions of his followers and the constitution of the movement’sleadership reinforced the ideological divide between Túpac Amaru and both theCusco nobility and the Titicaca cacical elite. Notwithstanding Túpac Amaru’span-Andean rhetoric and his implicit insistence that Inca blood should translate


132. Paullu Ynga, a son of Guayna Cápac, remained loyal to the Spanish after hisbrother, Manco, rebelled in 1535. He converted to Christianity in the 1540s. Descendantsof Paullu’s 15 or so sons by different women ranked at the top of the colonial Inca nobility.See Ella Temple Dunbar, “Un linaje incáico durante la dominación española: LosSahuaraura,” Revista Histórica (Lima) 18, no. 1 (1949): 49–53.

133. And that historians have concurred with Túpac Amaru’s understanding of “just”succession; see above, n. 132. Equally telling, Diego Betancur and José Gabriel TúpacAmaru had almost identical ethnic ancestries: both were three-quarters Spanish and one-quarter Indian noble. That Betancur is (and was) considered “creole” and Túpac Amaru is(and was) considered “Indian” says much about both the fluidity of ethnic classifications inthe eighteenth-century Andes and the politics of twentieth-century attributions.

into political authority in the Andes, the leadership of the rebellion from No-vember 1780 to March 1781 was overwhelmingly drawn from Tinta and south-ern Quispicanchis, and it came more from the rural Spanish population thanfrom the Indian nobility.134 That Túpac Amaru’s principal officers and support-ers came from his extended family and the nearby elite is hardly surprising. By1780, that elite was a mix of old Inca and Aymara lineages and rural Spaniards,and the muleteer profession—of which Túpac Amaru was part and which pro-vided many of his allies—was dominated by the latter. However, Túpac Amaru’sfailure to recruit before the rebellion, or win over in the first two months of suc-cess, the dominant Indian families north of Quiquijana or south of Sicuaniexposes the narrow geographic boundaries of the “provincial nobilities” of thesouthern highlands. In their own eyes, Cusco’s Inca nobles were not tied toTúpac Amaru by marriage, blood, or common cause. Nor did the great dynas-ties of the Titicaca basin have bonds with Túpac Amaru’s clan and allies. Rather,kin solidarities formed limits to political consciousness in the late colonial high-lands. While Túpac Amaru could articulate a political vision that rivaled (andparalleled) the viceroyalty in its scope, in the end he could not transcend thelocal and regional affiliations that structured the Indian elite. To the Incas ofCusco, Túpac Amaru was not their leader or liberator, but rather an arrogantmestizo cacique from a small puna pueblo whose pretensions threatened theirown understanding of colonial Inca authority.

While Túpac Amaru failed to attract the support of elites more than 30 or40 miles from his pueblo, the rebellion was singularly successful in breakingpast regional boundaries and mobilizing large swaths of the tributary popu-lation, crossing the cultural divide between the pastoral communities of theupper Vilcanota and the Aymara societies around Titicaca. As it did so, it quicklymoved beyond the limited, reformist ideology that he had espoused. PerhapsTúpac Amaru had always intended the radical turn that the rebellion took, andhis letter to the Cusco cabildo offered a mild reformist program in the hopes ofdeceiving them into surrendering. Or perhaps Túpac Amaru was radicalized by Cusco’s intransigence and the rejection of his leadership by the Incas andthe caciques around Titicaca.135 Alternatively, the more aggressive actions ofthe rebels may have reflected a peasant, anticolonial consciousness that took


134. Campbell, “Social Structure of the Túpac Amaru Army”; O’Phelan Godoy, Unsiglo de rebeliones, 308–17.

135. That his pretensions were rebuffed by the Lima Audiencia as well as by Cusco’sInca nobility only strengthened his commitment to them: following the victory atSangarará, he and Micaela Bastidas commissioned portraits of themselves as Inca and Coya.Walker, Smoldering Ashes, 39.

charge of the rebellion and placed it beyond Túpac Amaru’s control. Thisunanswerable question remains a topic of debate.136

Nevertheless, that the rebellion radicalized as it progressed is beyonddoubt.137 It began with the violent, but rather routine, capture and execution ofa corregidor by an angry pueblo. For Cusco’s Inca nobility and creole elite, theaction was both comprehensible and ultimately unthreatening. The exactionsof corregidores violated the moral economy of the highlands, cutting acrossclass and ethnic boundaries: here was one aspect of colonial rule rejected bymost of colonial society.138 The destruction of the obraje at Pomacanchis wasa more direct challenge to urban Cusco. The obraje was a fixture of the bish-opric’s social landscape: a huge complex just off the royal road on the shores ofa highland lake, it had hundreds of workers and had been operating for morethan a century.139 To the surrounding pueblos, it was a constant indication of the oppressive relations of colonial rule: a vast, creole-owned property inwhich those who could not pay tribute, or had committed some crime, or of-fended local authorities were confined; which no doubt demanded more thanits share of water and land; and whose profits flowed to the city of Cusco. Tothe citizens of Cusco—Indian and creole—the obraje was instead an eco-nomic colony in the Indian highlands that produced some of the city’s wealth;indeed, it was the foundation of the Count de Laguna’s fortunes. While noIndian nobles owned anything remotely resembling that obraje in scale, thepopular strike against elite property in the remote rural highlands must alsohave raised concerns about the fate of their own small factories, their privateranches, and their large houses filled with their families’ movable wealth. Nowthe anticolonial actions of the rebels were not directed simply against abusive,


136. Piel, “Cómo interpretar la rebelión,” 74–76; Walker, Smoldering Ashes, 50–54.137. Campbell, “Ideology and Factionalism”; O’Phelan Godoy, La Gran Rebelión,

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 KevinGosner, 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, “EthnicConflict, Moral Economy, and Population in Rural Cuzco on the Eve of the Thupa AmaroII 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 itsownership from 1660 through independence, see Neus Escandell-Tur, Producción y comerciode tejidos coloniales: Los obrajes y chorrillos del Cusco, 1750–1820 (Cusco: Centro Bartolomé deLas Casas, 1997), 433–34.

middling royal officials but against the very structures of colonial society onwhich the fortunes of both rural elites and the city of Cusco depended.

The massacre at the church of Sangarará can only have exacerbated theopposition of Indian elites to the rebellion.140 The church was both the symbolof colonial rule in the rural pueblo and the symbol of the pueblo itself. Gener-ally, Andean elites (Indian and Spanish) were reasonably orthodox in theirCatholic practice and accepted the basic Catholic pantheon of saints and theTrinity. The symbolism of these massacres is striking: the Indian elites and thecreoles of pueblos in rebellion sought sanctuary in their churches, no doubtbecause they were the strongest buildings in town but also because the right ofsanctuary was well entrenched.141 The assault on these temples, and thoseseeking refuge in them, represented a profound rejection of the church as acorrupt, colonial institution. Colonial elites criticized aspects of the colonialorder, but they generally embraced colonial society, which here the rebelsstruck at its heart.

As the rebellion moved south into the Titicaca basin, it became an openassault on all aspects of colonial authority. Tributaries there expressed a strongresentment of the rural elite, and the crowds that assembled in the plazas ofhighland pueblos directed their wrath against Indian nobles and creoles alike.Indeed, such might have been the pattern even in the earliest stages of therebellion: three of the caciques who were tried with Túpac Amaru testified thatthey had been forced to join the rebellion by the mobs.142 Such self-servingclaims contain a grain of truth: in those pueblos close to the epicenter of therebellion, caciques were forced to make rapid decisions as rebels converged ontheir villages. To the south, whether provoked by their caciques’ refusal to jointhe rebellion, or never giving them the chance, rebels and pueblos rose againstthe cacical elite. In Azángaro, the wife and daughters of the cacique of Urin-saya were hanged in the main plaza by women from the pueblo, and the hered-itary cacique of Verenguelillo suffered the same fate.143


140. Interestingly, in Cusco the rebels killed almost no priests. A “Relación de lossucesos desgraciados que han sufridos los curas” made clear that many had had their livesthreatened 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. ManuelChoquehuanca of Azángaro, AAC, IV-8-147 and XXXVIII-1-15.

142. O’Phelan Godoy, Un siglo de rebeliones, 308–17.143. For Azángaro, see Gilberto Salas Perea, Monografía sintética de Azángaro (Puno:

Los Andes, 1966), 22. For Verenguelillo, see Ticona Sancho Larico’s suit over thecacicazgo, ARC, Intendencia, Causas Ordinarias, Provincias, leg. 99 (1802–3). For others,

That the rebellion became so much more radical in the Titicaca basinowed much to the social structure of the region.144 Spanish rule had solidifiedthe preeminence of a handful of cacical lineages around Titicaca, so that anintermarried nobility dominated the area’s tributaries. These caciques amassedgreat wealth and formed a closed ruling class. When Túpac Amaru’s rebellionagainst colonial exactions and corrupt officials spread from the pastoral andpotato-growing pueblos of Tinta to the agricultural communities around thelake—separated by more than one hundred miles and centuries of cultural andeconomic difference—its dynamics changed. The “massacre of the caciques”at Juli’s San Pedro church was every bit as much an anticolonial action as thehanging of Arriaga in Tungasuca.145 In the Titicaca basin, the conjunctures ofAndean history and the Spanish tributary/mining economy had produced thelargest, richest, and most stratified Indian societies of colonial South America.Those who bore its burdens directed their destructive fury inward, toward thesocial order of the colonial pueblo.

Conclusions

The Túpac Amaru Rebellion was a complex, contradictory social explosion;indeed, it achieved such initial success and spread so rapidly precisely becauseit united, however briefly, the reformist demands of rural elites with the subal-tern anticolonialism of the pueblos. Túpac Amaru’s demands challenged cer-tain 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-establishedand growing tradition of the riot as a means of articulating this antagonism andcalling for reform. Overall, though, Túpac Amaru upheld fundamental rela-tions 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 RogerRasnake, Domination and Cultural Resistance: Authority and Power among an Andean People(Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1988), 144– 47.

144. Thomson, We Alone Will Rule; O’Phelan 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 werethen defiled, with Indian nobles a particular focus of postmortem violence. Two of thepueblo’s caciques were found hung from gallows with their hearts cut out, while the bodyof one cacique’s wife had been drained of blood, reputedly drunk by the rebels. Szeminski,“Why Kill the Spaniard?” 171.

the role of local elites, and Inca privilege. By challenging certain existing socialrelations that had been dictated by royal decree, his demands were, in a narrowsense, anticolonial. However, people in the colonial highlands did this all thetime: they simply articulated their challenges differently, using the institutionsof colonial rule to contest and refine local social relations while performingtheir humility before a distant king. Overall, Túpac Amaru’s own politicalgoals were similar to those of other members of the Indian elite; indeed, muchof his “platform” either paralleled specific goals of the Inca nobility or wasalready under consideration by officials in Lima and Madrid.

Nonetheless, the Inca nobility and the cacical aristocracy rejected TúpacAmaru’s rebellion, and his leadership, out of hand, for three reasons. First,their own strategy, and history, of negotiating the demands of colonial rule wasthrough petition and the courts. These venues were tried and true, and theroute of riot and rebellion—though equally part of the colonial Andean polit-ical lexicon—had always been rejected by the Incas. Second, Túpac Amaru’sInca pretensions seem almost intended to alienate the Inca nobility. He hadfew blood ties to Cusco’s Inca nobility, and his claims implicitly rejected theirown complex understanding of Inca identity and privilege. The leadership ofthe rebellion also served as a challenge to Cusco’s creole elite and the greatcacical dynasties of the Titicaca basin. Both groups cherished their ancestriesand had a strong sense of their rightful position in the bishopric, which placedthem far above a mestizo cacique and his provincial Spanish kin. Finally, by lateDecember 1780 (when the siege of Cusco began), it was clear to all that therebellion itself represented a far more serious threat to the social order of theregion than did Túpac Amaru’s relatively modest demands. Thus, to the Incaand creole elites of Cusco and the cacical dynasties of the Titicaca basin, therebel armies that had taken over the Vilcanota, Apurímac, and Ayavire high-lands did not represent the promise of liberation and the restoration of Incarule. Rather, they were an invading army of Indian peasants and “españoles de latierra” under the leadership of a mestizo cacique whose claims of royal ancestryCusco’s nobles had long disputed.

The past three decades have produced a wealth of literature establishingthat mobs are political, not the irrational actors condemned by elites and his-torians. Certainly, the forces in the Túpac Amaru rebellion demonstrate this;their actions also show a much more aggressively anticolonial stance than thatof their (short-lived) leader from the rural elite. Indeed, that they proved soradical was the downfall of the rebellion; precisely because they were acting outa subaltern anticolonial assault on the social order, they met resistance fromthose whose interests lay in challenging particular relations within the colonial


order but not the society as a whole. To the Indian nobility, the rebels weremobs, tearing away at the foundations of society. The rebels rejected not onlySpanish rule, the corregidor, and tribute: they also rejected private property,Indian noble privilege, and the sanctity of the church. These were central tothe social ideology of the Indian nobility, and they acted on those beliefs. Ulti-mately, the rebels ran up against the colonial consciousness of the Inca nobil-ity and southern caciques, who accepted the fundamental idea of Spanish hege-mony precisely because this hegemony was fluid, complex, and contestable.Indian elites had a centuries-long history of challenging colonial rule throughits own institutions. The Great Rebellion was, in many ways, a civil war withinIndian society, and as such it was profoundly political. To suggest that the loy-alists were somehow backward-looking defenders of the ancien régime, and therebels precursors to a nationalist future, imposes a problematic teleology oncolonial political consciousness.

The trajectory of the rebellion exposes the interrelated divisions that con-stituted highland society in the late eighteenth century. The rebellion was sup-ported by the tributary societies in the catchment basin of the Potosí mita,which corresponded with the old Aymara señorios.146 The rebellion spread onlyfleetingly to the traditionally Quechua areas surrounding these highlands andfailed absolutely to cross the Apurímac gorge to the Quechua societies of cen-tral Peru. The distinction was not strictly linguistic: the cradle of the rebellionwas, by the 1700s, Quechua-speaking, as part of the bishopric of Cusco.147

But economically and culturally, the divide between the pastoral and potato-growing highlands and the temperate, agricultural lands of the valleys was aspronounced then as under Inca rule. The initial surge of Túpac Amaru’s forcesdown the Vilcanota was as much an invasion by highland herders of the agri-cultural heartland of the Incas as it was an Indian rebellion against Spanishrule. 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 theIncas, saw themselves threatened and humiliated by Indian plebes from thesouth.

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 upperApurímac 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 denaturales addressed the community in Aymara, not Quechua. AGN-A, Sala IX, 7-4-3, exp. 4.

The Túpac Amaru and the Catari rebellions were rural uprisings. With theexception of Oruro, highland cities remained royalist strongholds. The bur-guesía and aristocracy fretted about the loyalties of the urban underclasses, butthe urban-rural divide was pronounced in the colonial Andes, and city dwellersof both repúblicas rejected the rebels’ call. Spanish rule favored the cities,which, as centers of creole settlement and Spanish institutions, were net bene-ficiaries of the tributary economy. Túpac Amaru’s program threatened theSpanish dominance embodied in the cities and sought to destroy the economyof tribute and extraction on which the comfortable life of city dwellers depended.Less than three decades later, cities across Spanish South America would them-selves lead the rejection of European rule, using the invasion of Spain to asserttheir de facto independence. Like the rebellions of 1780– 83, these were anti-colonial revolutions, but ones that reflected the interests of the cities andrejected the authority of the Audiencia, the viceroyalty, and the Council ofIndies, 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 con-sciousness of the rebels. Around Cusco, the tributary population generallyjoined the Inca nobility in repulsing the rebels; in the Titicaca basin, manyjoined the rebels to attack the cacical elite. Ironically, the Inca-dominated com-munities around Cusco were the most aggressive in asserting a historical con-sciousness that treated the Spanish Conquest as a defining moment of rupture,and they constantly rehearsed their primordial privilege and pre-Hispanicprecedence; yet it was in precisely this area of heavy Spanish settlement, urban-ization, strong regional markets, and colonial Inca privilege that the institu-tions and ideals of colonial rule had taken deepest root. For large segments ofsociety in the temperate stretches of the Vilcanota Valley, on the Anta plain, inParuro, and in Cusco itself, the sweeping anticolonial program of the rebelswas self-destructive. But in the heavily burdened pueblos of the mita basin, therejection of the corregidor, cacical power and wealth, and the demands of thecolonial state proved enormously appealing.


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