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Reviewed by:
  • Revolution in the Andes: The Age of Túpac Amaru by Sergio Serulnikov, and: The Tupac Amaru Rebellion by Charles F. Walker
  • Marcela Echeverri
Revolution in the Andes: The Age of Túpac Amaru. By Sergio Serulnikov. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Pp. xvi, 159. Illustrations. Maps. $79.95 cloth; $22.95 paper.
The Tupac Amaru Rebellion. By Charles F. Walker. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. 347. Illustrations. Maps. $29.95 cloth.

The Tupac Amaru rebellion was one of the most significant events in the history of the Spanish empire. It was the first symptom, and a massive one, of an emerging crisis of Spanish rule in the Americas at the end of the eighteenth century. The rebellion began in 1780 in Chayanta, a rural village in northern Potosí, and during the following three years expanded northward, encompassing the region around Lake Titicaca, between the cities of Cuzco and La Paz. Its regional evolution reveals a vital web of political relationships among the Aymara and Quechua indigenous people. It also speaks of the significance for Spanish rule of native political expectations and practices in the Andes at the end of the eighteenth century. The two books under review here, recent works by Sergio Serulnikov and Charles Walker, are impressive evidence that the historiography on this rebellion has expanded in new directions in recent decades.

Along with Sinclair Thomson’s We Alone Will Rule, a study of the final phase of the insurrection around the city of La Paz, Serulnikov’s Subverting Colonial Authority and Walker’s Smoldering Ashes are two important works published in the 1990s which reconstruct the political dimension of the rebellion, putting indigenous peoples’ political practices at the center of the analysis. Taken together, these three books produce a fascinating picture of the transformations that took place during the rebellion’s chronological progression and over its geographic extension. In other words, they describe the rebellion as a broader regional phenomenon. Yet, while it is clear that there were intricate connections between the various phases of the rebellion and the areas in which it took place, we find in each of the three books interpretations that point to intrinsic differences among the different stages of the insurrection.

Correction: The author of the review of Marc Hertzman’s Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil (from Duke University Press, 2013), published in the October 2015 issue of The Americas, Vol. 72, no. 4 (October 2015), was incorrectly identified as Antonio Herculano Lopes. The author was Paulina L. Alberto. A corrected version designating proper authorship is published in this Reviews section. [End Page 257]

In Walker’s Smoldering Ashes, we see why Túpac Amaru upheld a monarchist stance and how a major trait of the rebellion in Cuzco was the search for horizontal, multiethnic alliances between creoles and indigenous people. In Subverting Colonial Authority, Serulnikov links the rebellion in Chayanta with the Indians’ long-standing engagement with Bourbon reformism through their struggles in the legal arena. In We Alone Will Rule, Thomson treats what is known to be the most radical part of the rebellion, exposing the erosion of the cacicazgo and its consequences for the crisis of colonial rule. Thomson also focuses on the twin pillars of violence and democratization to uncover a deeply anticolonial movement among Aymara people in and around La Paz.

In Revolution in the Andes, Serulnikov has created a narrative that puts the three regions and moments of the rebellion together. The book is a translation of Revolución en los Andes, published in Argentina in 2012. In the 2013 Duke translation, Charles Walker provides a foreword praising Serulnikov’s capacity to compare the different phases of the rebellion and the areas which it took place. It is worth quoting Serulnikov further on these connections: “The La Paz uprising [which assumed unmistakably anticolonial overtones], in great measure due to its timing and geographical location, could be simultaneously nurtured by the egalitarian drive of the indigenous movement in Charcas and the neo-Inca aspirations of the Andean people of Cusco [sic]” (p. 119).

Both Serulnikov and Walker return to this topic, using their mastery of...

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