From the Cacique to the Community: Political Transformations in the Altiplano 1750-1850

In this study I reveal that the late colonial indigenous communities in the altiplano generated a process of political transformations from below that challenges key previous assumptions about community politics. It had been mostly assumed that the political structure of the indigenous community continued deeply dependent on the cacique figure until the end.[1] Thus, the colonial government’s policies directed to undermine and erase the office of the cacique, mainly for their contentious role in the late colonial insurrections, have been largely explained as an attempt to eliminate the political power of the communities that caciques controlled.

On the contrary, I argue that beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, commoners themselves began to organize collective movements and litigations with former secondary figures such as the segundas, jilacatas, and alcalde de indios. These commoners’ movements sought to respond to their immediate political needs by adapting enduring forms of collective views and practice. They used for instance, mechanisms of cooperation, cargo system, and community funds for support, intelligence, and defray the expenses of the costly procedures in the legal system.

This study examines a pool of 445 primary sources constituted mainly of petitions, letters, litigations records, and official investigation reports that were generated by collective community movements. This examination reveals that commoners engaged collectively in their struggles, generated an explosion of litigations, and a series of disputes against their caciques, local authorities, and elite sectors. They struggled primarily about their immediate problems; however, aware that most communities faced similar problems, they were open to cooperate and join efforts with other communities. The aristocratic-style caciques that had formerly appeared prominently on behalf of their communities began to be displaced by these movements led by the former secondary figures taking leadership roles. This was a complex intra-community process that helps to explain the significance of the community struggles in the late colonial and the early-republican decades against the elites (Spanish, creoles, mestizos, and Indians) as demonstrated by scholars studying the nineteenth century Andes.[2]

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[1] See Scarlett O’Phelan, Kurakas sin sucesiones, Del cacique al alcalde de indios, Peru y Bolivia 1750-1835, (Cusco: CBC 1997): 29-39; Nuria Sala I Vila, Y se armo el tole tole, tributo indígena y movimientos sociales en el Virreynato del Peru, 17840-1814. (Ayacucho, Peru: Instituto de Estudios Regionales, Jose Maria Arguedas, 1996); David Cahill “The Long Conquest: Collaboration by Native Andean Elites in the Colonial System, 1532-1825.” In Technology, Disease, and Colonial Conquest in Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. George Raudzens Ed. (Boston: Brill, 2001).

[2] See the case of Huachaca in Cecilia Mendes, The Plebeian Republic: The Huanta Rebellion and the Making of the Peruvian State (Duke University Press, 2005); Bonilla, “The Indian Peasantry and ‘Peru’ during the War with Chile” in Stern Steve J., Resistance, Rebellion and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, ed. Steve J. Stern (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Mallon, Peasant and Nation: the Making of Post-colonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Thurner, From two Republics to One Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial Nation Making in Andean Peru (Durham, N.C, London: Duke University Press, 1997). Relevant comparative studies that examine indigenous political struggles against colonial rule, are those developed by scholars specialized in Southeast Asian history. Similar to Latin American indigenous, peasants in India struggled primarily against colonial local and regional intermediaries’ abusive behavior. In this process, as Mukherjee argues, Peasant’s notions of justice are a fundamental factor that not only justifies but mobilizes peasant communities. See Mridula Mukherjee, Peasants In India’s Non-Violent Revolution: Practice and Theory (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004); and Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). Also, for relevant debates about peasant resistance and views on autonomy and nation, see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and the Spread of Nationalism (NY: Verso, 1991), and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993).