The Plebeian Republic: The Huanta Rebellion and the Making of the Peruvian State, 1820-1850 (review)

The issue of state building and the role of the peasantry has been the most important field for nineteenth-century Latin American history over the past decade. This book makes a substantial contribution to the debate and also to Peruvian historiography by examining a little-studied royalist revolt in the Andean highlands a few years after independence. The author creates a new category for understanding the early post-independence period (the "plebeian republic") in which she shows that during the rebellion peasants inverted racial and social categories in ways we had not suspected before. She also turns the historiography of the nineteenth-century Peru on its head, arguing that the Peruvian peasantry was successful in imposing its version of political culture in the first decades after independence.

The region she studies resonates in twentieth-century history, since it was in this part of the south-central Andean highlands of Ayacucho province that eight Peruvian journalists were massacred by peasants in 1983. The peasants asserted that they thought they were Shining Path insurgents. Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa headed a famous commission to investigate the tragedy, making the obscure Maoist insurgency famous throughout the world. He blamed the massacre on the lack of connection of the Andean peasants with the modern nation and on their innate rebelliousness. Méndez shows convincingly that the Vargas Llosa commission got it all wrong.

The book has a somewhat odd organization, one that makes the author's arguments in small pieces and forces the reader to ponder largely the wider implications of her work on his/her own. After disposing of the historiographical issues in the first chapter, in the following chapter Méndez provides a narrative of the Huanta revolt that lasted from 1826 to 1828. She asserts that the rebels were not so much royalist as they were against the new organization of the post-independence state and its tax policies preserved from the colonial period. Next she shows how Peruvian elites were conflicted about independence, since many had benefited greatly from the colonial system. A geographic analysis of the region follows a rhetorical analysis of the few surviving declarations the rebels wrote. The real core of the study is contained in the last two chapters, which circle back to the rebellion and its aftermath. Chapter Six shows that the major leaders of the royalist rebellion were Indians, with Spaniards as subordinates. She postulates that the Huanta rebels conceived of a country where ethnic origin did not matter, an idea that, ironically, was inimical to the non-Indian leaders of the nascent republic. Independence in this region brought about the rise of new merchants and peasant muleteers into leadership positions and witnessed the decline of the old landlord class. The last chapter follows the rebel leaders' careers after the rebellion, where Méndez shows that they played important roles in Peruvian politics, especially as allies of Bolivian-born president Andrés de Santa Cruz during the short-lived Peru-Bolivian Confederation (1836-1839). She helps resurrect this episode as one worthy of analysis for what it says about Peruvian politics, not simply as an imposition by outsiders. Throughout the book, she shows the peasants as fully engaged in national politics, not the isolated villagers or victims that other scholars have portrayed.

The book is controversial in a number of respects. It is a pleasure to see Méndez take on a whole host of ideas about nineteenth-century Peru and Andean politics, though at times she misses her marks. Among others, she counters Florencia Mallon's (and other scholars') contention that elites were successful in suppressing peasants throughout the nineteenth century. She also denies that an "Andean utopian project" existed, as Mallon, Alberto Flores Galindo and Charles Walker have contended. Instead, she argues that the peasants simply wanted to integrate into the Peruvian body politic as citizens and did so quite...