On the Road to Justice: Indigenous Communities and the Colonial Legal System in Late Eighteenth-Century Altiplano

The importance of Indigenous communities in the Altiplano appears to suddenly vanish after most insurrections in late eighteenth century were “pacified.” The well-known “age of the Andean Insurrections” crowned by the movements of Tupac Amaru II and the Kataris in 1780-82 appear to have been the summit of their influence and then succumb in oblivion. Most scholars assumed that indigenous communities’ agency was eliminated as a result of the erasure of caciques with the power vacuum the colonial regime responded to the insurrections. A closer analysis of the abundant, although scattered, archival records shows that altiplano commoners individually and collectively consciously reinvented their mechanisms of resistance and continued to be influential locally and regionally.

In this paper I argue that the colonial regime’s policy of undermining and eventually eliminating the office of the cacique generated a series of changes at the community level. The complex and largely ignored process of political transformations at the inside the community structure and facilitated the emergence of collective agency led by some previously secondary community figures. Thus, native communities consciously promoted secondary figures of authority such as Jilacatas, Segundas, Varayocs, and some common folks instead of the caciques. Beyond the fall of the caciques and the apparent restoration of the colonial power a fundamental aspect of the convulsive late colonial Altiplano was the reinvention of the native community politics from below.