The Tupac Amaru Rebellion

The largest rebellion in the history of Spain's American empire—a conflict greater in territory and costlier in lives than the contemporaneous American Revolution—began as a local revolt against colonial authorities in 1780. As an official collector of tribute for the imperial crown, José Gabriel Condorcanqui had seen firsthand what oppressive Spanish rule meant for Peru's Indian population. Adopting the Inca royal name Tupac Amaru, he set events in motion that would transform him into Latin America's most iconic revolutionary figure. Tupac Amaru's political aims were modest at first. He claimed to act on the Spanish king's behalf, expelling corrupt Spaniards and abolishing onerous taxes. But the rebellion became increasingly bloody as it spread throughout Peru and into parts of modern-day Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. By late 1780, Tupac Amaru, his wife Micaela Bastidas, and their followers had defeated the Spanish in numerous battles and gained control over a vast territory. As the rebellion swept through Indian villages to gain recruits and overthrow the Spanish corregidors, rumors spread that the Incas had returned to reclaim their kingdom. Charles Walker immerses readers in the rebellion's guerrilla campaigns, propaganda war, and brutal acts of retribution. He highlights the importance of Bastidas—the key strategist—and reassesses the role of the Catholic Church in the uprising's demise. The Tupac Amaru Rebellion examines why a revolt that began as a multiclass alliance against European-born usurpers degenerated into a vicious caste war—and left a legacy that continues to influence South American politics today.

Charles Walker examines the largest rebellion in the history of Spain's American empire, led by Latin America's most iconic revolutionary, Tupac Amaru, and his wife. It began in 1780 as a multiclass alliance against European-born usurpers but degenerated into a vicious caste war, leaving a legacy that still influences South American politics today.

The largest rebellion in the history of Spain's American empire—a conflict greater in territory and costlier in lives than the contemporaneous American Revolution—began as a local revolt against colonial authorities in 1780. As an official collector of tribute for the imperial crown, José Gabriel Condorcanqui had seen firsthand what oppressive Spanish rule meant for Peru's Indian population. Adopting the Inca royal name Tupac Amaru, he set events in motion that would transform him into Latin America's most iconic revolutionary figure. Tupac Amaru's political aims were modest at first. He claimed to act on the Spanish king's behalf, expelling corrupt Spaniards and abolishing onerous taxes. But the rebellion became increasingly bloody as it spread throughout Peru and into parts of modern-day Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. By late 1780, Tupac Amaru, his wife Micaela Bastidas, and their followers had defeated the Spanish in numerous battles and gained control over a vast territory. As the rebellion swept through Indian villages to gain recruits and overthrow the Spanish corregidors, rumors spread that the Incas had returned to reclaim their kingdom. Charles Walker immerses readers in the rebellion's guerrilla campaigns, propaganda war, and brutal acts of retribution. He highlights the importance of Bastidas—the key strategist—and reassesses the role of the Catholic Church in the uprising's demise. The Tupac Amaru Rebellion examines why a revolt that began as a multiclass alliance against European-born usurpers degenerated into a vicious caste war—and left a legacy that continues to influence South American politics today.

Portrays the three indigenous rebellions that threatened Spanish control of its South American colonies more than a quarter century before the Wars of Independence (1808-1825). This collection includes maps, a chronology of the rebellions, and a glossary of terms.

The Tupac Amaru rebellion of 1780-1783 began as a local revolt against colonial authorities and grew into the largest rebellion in the history of Spain's American empire-more widespread and deadlier than the American Revolution. An official collector of tribute for the imperial crown, Jos? Gabriel Condorcanqui had seen firsthand what oppressive Spanish rule meant for Peru's Indian population and, under the Inca royal name Tupac Amaru, he set events in motion that would transform him into one of Latin America's most iconic revolutionary figures. While he and the rebellion's leaders were put to death, his half-brother, Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru, survived but paid a high price for his participation in the uprising. This work in the Graphic History series is based on the memoir written by Juan Bautista about his odyssey as a prisoner of Spain. He endured forty years in jails, dungeons, and presidios on both sides of the Atlantic. Juan Bautista spent two years in jail in Cusco, was freed, rearrested, and then marched 700 miles in chains over the Andes to Lima. He spent two years aboard a ship travelling around Cape Horn to Spain. Subsequently, he endured over thirty years imprisoned in Ceuta, Spain's much-feared garrison city on the northern tip of Africa. In 1822, priest Marcos Dur?n Martel and Maltese-Argentine naval hero Juan Bautista Azopardo arranged to have him freed and sent to the newly independent Argentina, where he became a symbol of Argentina's short-lived romance with the Incan Empire. There he penned his memoirs, but died without fulfilling his dream of returning to Peru. This stunning graphic history relates the life and legacy of Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru, enhanced by a selection of primary sources, and chronicles the harrowing and extraordinary life of a firsthand witness to the Age of Revolution. .

Miguel La Serna's gripping history of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) provides vital insight into both the history of modern Peru and the link between political violence and the culture of communications in Latin America. Smaller than the well-known Shining Path but just as remarkable, the MRTA emerged in the early 1980s at the beginning of a long and bloody civil war. Taking a close look at the daily experiences of women and men who fought on both sides of the conflict, this fast-paced narrative explores the intricacies of armed action from the ground up. While carrying out a campaign of urban guerrilla warfare ranging from vandalism to kidnapping and assassinations, the MRTA vied with state forces as both tried to present themselves as most authentically Peruvian. Appropriating colors, banners, names, images, and even historical memories, hand-in-hand with armed combat, the Tupac Amaristas aimed to control public relations because they insightfully believed that success hinged on their ability to control the media narrative. Ultimately, however, the movement lost sight of its original aims, becoming more authoritarian as the war waged on. In this sense, the history of the MRTA is the story of the euphoric draw of armed action and the devastating consequences that result when a political movement succumbs to the whims of its most militant followers.

In Smoldering Ashes Charles F. Walker interprets the end of Spanish domination in Peru and that country’s shaky transition to an autonomous republican state. Placing the indigenous population at the center of his analysis, Walker shows how the Indian peasants played a crucial and previously unacknowledged role in the battle against colonialism and in the political clashes of the early republican period. With its focus on Cuzco, the former capital of the Inca Empire, Smoldering Ashes highlights the promises and frustrations of a critical period whose long shadow remains cast on modern Peru. Peru’s Indian majority and non-Indian elite were both opposed to Spanish rule, and both groups participated in uprisings during the late colonial period. But, at the same time, seething tensions between the two groups were evident, and non-Indians feared a mass uprising. As Walker shows, this internal conflict shaped the many struggles to come, including the Tupac Amaru uprising and other Indian-based rebellions, the long War of Independence, the caudillo civil wars, and the Peru-Bolivian Confederation. Smoldering Ashes not only reinterprets these conflicts but also examines the debates that took place—in the courts, in the press, in taverns, and even during public festivities—over the place of Indians in the republic. In clear and elegant prose, Walker explores why the fate of the indigenous population, despite its participation in decades of anticolonial battles, was little improved by republican rule, as Indians were denied citizenship in the new nation—an unhappy legacy with which Peru still grapples. Informed by the notion of political culture and grounded in Walker’s archival research and knowledge of Peruvian and Latin American history, Smoldering Ashes will be essential reading for experts in Andean history, as well as scholars and students in the fields of nationalism, peasant and Native American studies, colonialism and postcolonialism, and state formation.

Equally concerned with the lives of ordinary Andean people and sweeping historical processes, this book unveils a complex colonial world of indigenous villagers and their Spanish neighbors from the ground up and in the process examines one of the most significant indigenous uprisings in the Americas. This rebellion, known by the name of its leader, T£pac Amaru, ignited in colonial Cuzco near the former Inca capital during the late eighteenth century (1780?83) and spread rapidly throughout much of the Andes. Led by the descendant of the last Inca ruler, the rebellion severely disrupted the colonial economy and proved to be the most serious challenge to Spanish authority in Latin America since the sixteenth century. Focusing on the Cuzco provinces of Quispicanchis and Canas y Canchis, which were the wellspring of the rebellion, Ward Stavig examines the issues, values, and themes central to the lives of ordinary Andean women and men?senses of identity, conceptions of sexuality and gender, the threat of crime, the value placed on work, competition for land and its relation to cultural identity, and the impact of forced labor. Stavig interweaves an intimate and richly textured portrait of the lives of Native villagers with an analysis of economic and political colonial institutions to show not only how Native peoples in Cuzco made sense of their lives but also how their strategies of survival shaped colonial society.

This book examines how people in the Andean region have invoked the Incas to question and rethink colonialism and injustice.