Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes - Hardcover

Serulnikov, Sergio

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822331101 ISBN 13: 9780822331100

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

This innovative political history provides a new perspective on the enduring question of the origins and nature of the Indian revolts against the Spanish that exploded in the southern Andean highlands in the 1780s. Subverting Colonial Authority focuses on one of the main--but least studied--centers of rebel activity during the age of the Túpac Amaru revolution: the overwhelmingly indigenous Northern Potosí region of present-day Bolivia. Tracing how routine political conflict developed into large-scale violent upheaval, Sergio Serulnikov explores the changing forms of colonial domination and peasant politics in the area from the 1740s (the starting point of large political and economic transformations) through the early 1780s, when a massive insurrection of the highland communities shook the foundations of Spanish rule.

Drawing on court records, government papers, personal letters, census documents, and other testimonies from Bolivian and Argentine archives, Subverting Colonial Authority addresses issues that illuminate key aspects of indigenous rebellion, European colonialism, and Andean cultural history. Serulnikov analyzes long-term patterns of social conflict rooted in local political cultures and regionally based power relations. He examines the day-to-day operations of the colonial system of justice within the rural villages as well as the sharp ideological and political strife among colonial ruling groups. Highlighting the emergence of radical modes of anticolonial thought and ethnic cooperation, he argues that Andean peasants were able to overcome entrenched tendencies toward internal dissension and fragmentation in the very process of marshaling both law and force to assert their rights and hold colonial authorities accountable. Along the way, Serulnikov shows, they not only widened the scope of their collective identities but also contradicted colonial ideas of indigenous societies as either secluded cultures or pliant objects of European rule.

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Sergio Serulnikov is Assistant Professor of History at Boston College.

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"Sergio Serulnikov analyzes the root causes, key moments, and bloody consequences of the massive indigenous revolt that nearly toppled Spanish rule in the southern Andes in the early 1780s. Exhaustively researched and cogently argued, this is a major work on the connection between everyday resistance to colonialism and revolutionary upheaval to end it forever. Essential reading for students and scholars of colonial rule everywhere."--John H. Coatsworth, Harvard University

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Subverting Colonial Authority

Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern AndesBy Sergio Serulnikov

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2003 Sergio Serulnikov
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822331100

Chapter One

Political Legitimacy in Mid- Eighteenth- Century Andean Villages

In mid-1747, a group of Indians of Chullpa, one of the six ethnic groups that comprised the Chayanta repartimiento, traveled to the city of La Plata to ask the audiencia of Charcas for the dismissal of their cacique, Dionisio Choque. While it was not the first overt confrontation between communities and native chiefs at the time, this conflict would have particular repercussions. As a member of a well-established family of Chullpa ethnic lords, Dionisio Choque had in the 1720s succeeded his father, Pedro Choque, who had been cacique since the late seventeenth century. In confronting Dionisio Choque, the Chullpas resorted to a judicial strategy that would thereafter become a cornerstone of peasant contention in northern Potosi, even in the midst of the great insurrection of 1780: they exhibited before the Charcas court a document with the names, place of residence, and minor ayllu membership of fifty-five tributaries that paid their taxes to the cacique but were not registered in official tax rolls. These "concealed" Indians would have increased the state revenues by 452 pesos per year. Equally important, this litigation by the Chullpas brought to the forefront the sharp disagreements within the colonial administration in the Andes. Despite the opposition of the provincial corregidor, Agustin Perez de Vargas, the audiencia ministers, the highest authority in the region, backed indigenous claims by ordering not only Dionisio Choque's removal from office but also his detention in the court jail in La Plata.

The success of this protest set in motion widespread defiance of rural ruling groups. Following the example of the Chullpas, Indians of the Caracha community managed to have their cacique, Pedro Yavira, discharged in 1747 through a denunciation over fiscal fraud. Yavira identified himself as cacique propietario, which meant that his position had been recognized by the audiencia or the viceroy because of his noble lineage. One year later, after numerous collective petitions in Chayanta and La Plata, their neighbors in Puraca succeeded in replacing Marcos Tococari (who had held the post for eighteen years) with one of the protest leaders, an Indian named Sebastian Auca. By this time, fifteen native chiefs and hilacatas (tribute collectors) of the six ethnic groups that composed that the Chayanta repartimiento-Puraca, Chullpa, Laymi, Chayantaca, Caracha, and Sicoya-threatened to resign if Indian dissent were not suppressed. Protests were likewise made by four caciques of Macha and one of Pocoata. In March 1750, the Jukumanis (Aymaya repartimiento) blatantly overlooked their native chief by delivering the tribute payments to an Indian whom they themselves had elected. Discontent among the Chullpas and Puracas, on the other hand, continued after the removal of their respective caciques because corregidor Perez de Vargas had put a mestizo named Gregorio Jorge de Medina in the place of Dionisio Choque and demanded that the Puracas formally disavow their previous charges of tribute embezzlement in exchange for the appointment of Sebastian Auca. In mid-1750, after a new wave of protests, Perez de Vargas's successor, Pablo de Aoiz, was eventually forced to remove Gregorio Jorge de Medina and to carry out a population recount that demonstrated the concealment of taxpayers in both Chullpa and Puraca. Then, in 1751 and 1752, the native lord of Chayantaca, Pedro Espiritu Portugal, and of Pocoata, Blas Cori, were driven out of office. The latter, who had faced litigation since at least 1744, was, like Dionisio Choque of Chullpa in 1747, placed under arrest in La Plata's court jail. Summarizing the current state of avairs, one of the caciques who had managed to keep his post, chief of Sicoya Francisco Callisaya, urged the grandson of a former cacique "to take his place as governor, for his people were behaving in a very arrogant and quarrelsome manner with him."

In short, northern Potosi experienced during these years extended challenges to the community system of rule. Equally significant, as the beleaguered Andean chiefs enjoyed the firm support of the corregidores, parish priests, and most Spanish town-dwellers-and as the high court of Charcas became actively involved in these occurrences-rural disturbances exceeded the level of intraethnic disputes or mere local affairs and turned into conflicts over the institutions of village government. In fact, the breakdown of political subordination bred by community/cacique strife expanded to other important economic spheres. Between 1751 and 1753, some Indians denounced the forced distribution of goods carried out by the corregidor, as well as the abuses perpetrated in the collection of veintenas-the tax levied on wheat and livestock raised on Indian lands. In July 1748, a hacendado in the valley of Carasi, along with several Indian tenants, violently assaulted a diezmero (tithe collector) and some of the indigenous and Spanish officials escorting him. As indicated by a corregidor's lieutenant, this attack rapidly spread to other areas of Carasi (a district populated by Laymis, Puracas, Pocoatas, and Machas) where "more than fifty Indians rose against the diezmero ... [in view of the fact] that no exemplary measure was taken for the continence and subjection, calmness and peace, of the Province and the people who inhabit it." In a society where state power relied on scarce means of coercion, those in charge of conducting the daily business of government in the Andean countryside-a few Spaniards in an overwhelmingly indigenous world-knew all too well the potential impact of open political defiance.

"Popular views of authority and the law were forged in the crucible of conflict," John Brewer and John Styles (1983: 15) observe in their study on the interaction between society and government in eighteenth-century England. In this chapter I argue that the events of the late 1740s, the first crisis of domination in northern Potosi during the eighteenth century, prefigure in many regards the attitudes toward authority and the law dramatically played out during the mass Indian uprising three decades later. Although little violence occurred, these years witnessed collective demonstrations of force, overt and subtle expressions of insubordination, and tenacious indigenous judicial politics. In response to the perceived violation of community rights, the Andean peasants thus developed certain routines of contention, i.e., certain established modes of collective action in the public realm of colonial institutions and in the rural world emerged. More generally, the crisis of ethnic chieftainships is linked to the emergence of a principle of political legitimacy that underwrote, implicitly or explicitly, Indian rights to select the caciques according to their purported capacity to preserve the social and economic fabric of the Andean ayllu. This contractual principle of authority stood in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822331101
• ISBN 13: 9780822331100
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar