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The Power of Naming, or the Construction of Ethnic and National Identities in Peru: Myth,History and the IquichanosAuthor(s): Cecilia Méndez-GastelumendiSource: Past & Present, No. 171 (May, 2001), pp. 127-160

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THE POWER OF NAMING,OR THECONSTRUCTIONOF ETHNIC ANDNATIONALIDENTITIESIN PERU:MYTH,

HISTORYAND THE IQUICHANOS*

We ... tend to forget that we usually speak to an audience with whomwe share more or less the same assumptions, the same codes, and thesame anxieties andperplexities, anaudiencecapableof attributingmeaning

to the points of silence in our text. But when we move from one countryto another, we have to do much more than translate words: we have totranslateour experience.1

In 1987, while teaching at the Universidad Nacional de San

Crist6bal de Huamanga (Ayacucho), in the south-central Andes

of Peru, I began investigating the 1826-8 rebellion that a groupof muleteers, landowners, priests and peasants of Huanta province

launched, in alliance with a group of Spanish soldiers, officers

andmerchants, against

therecently

establishedrepublic

of Peru.

Acting in the name of King Ferdinand VII, the rebels called for

the restoration of Spanish rule. They did not achieve their goal,

yet they managed to destabilize for three and a half years the

already feeble equilibrium of the nascent republic. The main local

leaders were never captured, and many of the 'fiscal reforms'

they had established in the region remained in force for manymore years. Most importantly, these once-monarchist guerrillaleaders ended up adapting to the republican system by actively

incorporating themselves into the armies of the new caudillista

* Theresearchupportinghis articlewas madepossibleby grantsprovidedbytheSocialScienceResearchCouncilof New York,the Wenner-Gren oundation or

Anthropologicalesearch,heHarryFrankGuggenheimoundation,nd heSpanishGovernment ellowshiporForeignHispanists.The writingprocesswas facilitated

by a fellowshipromtheProgramnAgrarian tudies t YaleUniversity,directedbyJamesScott,whosesupportand interest n thisproject wishto acknowledge.AlsoatYale,mythanks o BillChristianndLarryLohmann or theirhelpin editingmy

English;at the Universityof Californian Santa Barbarawherethis piece wasconcluded),hanks o my colleagueAlice O'Connor. wish to dedicate hisessayto

myfriendandcolleague,he Huantino nthropologistoseCoronel,orhisgenerosityandhospitalityhrough he manyyearsI have dedicatedo the investigationf the

historyof Huanta.1Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chicago,

1988),xv.

© The Past and PresentSociety,Oxford,2001



state,2 and, later on, by becomingpetty officials: in particular,their main leader,the semi-literatemuleteer AntonioHuachaca,

becamea justiceof the peace.The reasons for this uprising, known as 'the Iquichano

Rebellion', and for the ensuing process of assimilationof the

Huantapopulations nto the state, have been dealt with in their

many layers in a study I have recentlyconcluded.3My purposein this essay is to clarifysome points concerning he historyand

identityof the peopleswho formedthe bulk of the 'restorationist'

army, the so-called 'Iquichanos'.It is a subjectthat transcends

thehistorian's nterest.For, in addition o theircontinualpresenceon the nationalpoliticalsceneduringthe nineteenthcentury,this

peasantryhas also played a crucial role in Peru's contemporary

politics. The punas4of Huantaprovincein Ayacuchoare located

within the area wherethe ShiningPath (SenderoLuminoso)eganits terroristattacks in 1980, thereby initiatinga war that soon

took hold of Peru. One tragic incident, which occurredin an

early stage of this war, brought the 'Iquichanos'to national

attention: he murder, nJanuary1983,of eightPeruvian ournal-ists in the punasof Huanta. These journalistshad set out from

Lima to Huaychao, a peasant community in the highlandsof Huanta, to investigate the murder of a group of allegedSenderistas,whichthey attributed o the military.The journalistsnever arrivedat their destination.Not long aftertheirdeparture,the press reportedthe discoveryof their lifeless bodies in the

vicinity of Uchuraccay,anotherpeasantcommunityin Huanta.

Their corpses, which were found buried, carriedthe signs of a

horrifyingdeath. The case passed into history as the 'massacre

of Uchuraccay',and remains unsolvedin spite of the trials that

2 From caudillo('boss, military leader'). The 'caudillistastate' refers to the repub-lican state established immediately after independence, which was run by the militarycaudilloswho had fought those battles; it usually alludes to the period between 1824and the mid-1850s.

3Sonia Cecilia Mendez-Gastelumendi, 'Rebellion without Resistance: Huanta'sMonarchist Peasants in the Making of the Peruvian State: Ayacucho, 1825-1850'

(State Univ. of New York at Stony Brook, Ph.D. thesis, 1996).4 Puna is an ecological niche that denotes the highest habitable lands in the Andes

cordillera,usually between 3,800 and 5,000 metres above sea level (classificationsmayvary according to regions). Puna is commonly translated as 'high Andean plateau',but this definition is incorrect, for, in certain regions (as is the case with Huanta),punasare characterizedby a markedly broken topography.

NUMBER17128 PAST AND PRESENT



MYTH,HISTORYAND THEIQUICHANOS

followed; it is an unhealed wound in the memory of manyPeruvians.5

The case became politically charged as some of the media,especially on the left, accused the military of the journalists'murder.6Controversy rew, moreover,becausethe massacre,and

perhapsmoreforcefullythe ensuingtrial of the Uchuraccaycom-uneros community peasants),excited debates aroundthe (unre-solved)natureof Peruvian dentity,with not a few commentators

evoking images of the Spanish conquest. The Lima trial of the

Uchuraccaycomuneros,n fact, confrontedmonolingual or barely

bilingual) Quechua-speaking peasants with Spanish-speakingmagistrates,andrequired he presenceof interpreters.More than

any truth regardingthe death of the journalists, he hearingsof

Uchuraccayaid bare anothertruth: the problemsof communica-tion and the culturaldivides that separated ome Peruvians romothersat the very moment when socialanalystswere envisaginga new era of modernityand democratization.7The commission

appointedby the then PresidentFernandoBelaunde o investigate

the Uchuraccayevents, presided over by the novelist MarioVargasLlosa, arrived at the conclusion that the comuneros f

Uchuraccaykilled the journalistsbecausethey mistook them for

Shining Path guerrillas- and that they did so following the

military'sown advice that they should defendthemselvesagainstthe terroristas. his hypothesiswas unanimouslyendorsedby thecomuneroshemselves,8and its credibility lay in the fact that

Uchuraccaydid have a history of confrontationswith Sendero.

5 Hundreds of people had already died by then as part of the war launched by the

Shining Path in 1980, yet none of these killings was as widely publicized as the

Uchuraccaycase. While in the previous cases low-ranking policemen (guardiasciviles)and peasants, mostly Quechua-speaking and illiterate, were the victims, on this

occasion it was men of letters. Painful as it is to admit, adversity had to touch this

sector directly for the media and the government to pay more attention to a war that

had alreadyseverely hit the ruralpopulationsof the south-central highlandsof Peru.6This was a hypothesis endorsed by newspaperssuch as La Republica nd El Diario.7 In fact, for most Peruvians, Sendero appeared 'like lightning out of a clear sky',

as historian Flores Galindo put it. Sendero's war began precisely when most of the

left had decided to choose the electoral path and when sociologists and economistswere describing Peru as a modern country, one with a growing proletariat and a

peasantry in the process of extinction. Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca:

identidady utopiaen losAndes(Lima, 1987), 325. Throughout this article, all transla-

tions from the Spanishare my own.8Unpublished transcripts of recordings of Mario Vargas Llosa's interrogation of

the comunerosn Uchuraccay, 14 Mar. 1983. I thank Philip Bennett for providing me

with a transcript,and Delia Martinez for her help with the translationfrom Quechua.

129



Still, the general tendency was to exonerate the peasantsfrom

responsibility by appealingto the classic stereotypeof peasant

naivete, in consonance with the image the peasantsthemselveschose to present.Few couldaccept(withoutfallinginto the other

stereotypeswhich associatepeasantswith savageryandbrutality)the idea that the peasants,if indeed they killed the journalists,might have had their own reasons,ones which they chose notto reveal.9

The ensuing hearingsfound certainmilitarychiefs indirectlyresponsible,but theynever faced trial. ThreeUchuraccayan illa-

gerswere foundguiltyof the massacreand condemned o variousprison sentences;they never disclosedany furtherevidenceandone of them eventually died of tuberculosisin jail. The presswent on with its own speculationsand, in the end, each Peruvianwasleft with his or herown version of the events. One importantdocument, however - the report, the Informe de la Comision

Investigadorade los Sucesos de Uchuraccay,produced by the gov-

ernment-appointed ommissionwhichinvestigated he events-

is still pertinentfor discussion,not because it necessarilyunveilsthe truth of the massacre,but rather because t shows the limita-tions of the intellectualframeworkof the 'specialists'who werecalledupon to find out that truth.°OThe paternalisticattitudeofthe governmentis also evident. For, as Maria IsabelRemy has

rightly pointed out, althoughthe case entailed criminal nvesti-

gation,not a singledetective was commissioned. nstead,anthro-

pologistswere entrustedwith the taskof uncovering he 'cultural'elements of a

killingthatwas

thoughtto have

'magical-religious'underpinnings.In terms of my own project on the monarchistuprising of

1826-8, the Informewas an extremely pertinentdocument,for it

providedthe 'state of the art' of all that was known, or rather

supposedasI cansaynow) about the Uchuraccaypeasants,whomthe Informedentified as 'Iquichanos'.It sought to provide not

9For further discussion and thorough bibliographicalreference on the Uchuraccaycase (newspaper, journal and magazine articles), see Enrique Mayer, 'Peru in DeepTrouble: Mario Vargas Llosa's "Inquest in the Andes" Reexamined', in GeorgeE. Marcus (ed.), RereadingCulturalAnthropology Durham, NC, 1992).

10Mario Vargas Llosa et al., Informede la Comision nvestigadorade los SucesosdeUchuraccay Lima, 1983).

' Maria Isabel Remy, 'Los Discursos sobre la violencia en los Andes, algunasreflexiones a prop6sito del Chiaraje',in Henrique Urbano (ed.), Podery violencia enlos Andes(Cuzco, 1991).

130 NUMBER 171AST AND PRESENT




only the culturalbut also the historicalreasonsbehind the mas-sacre. I should like to discuss briefly the main report of the

Informe,signed by Vargas Llosa, Mario Castro Arenas andAbrahamGuzman(henceforth'the VargasLlosa text'), and the

anthropological eport, signed by anthropologists uanM. Ossioand Fernando Fuenzalida, and placed as appendix 1 to the

Informe.12

The first thing that attractsattentionin the VargasLlosa textis the commission'sseemingconviction that therewas somethingparticularlyold, culturally archaic'and deeply 'primitive'about

these peasants.Added to this was the 'isolation' in which, thecommissionersclaimed,the 'Iquichanos'had lived for centuries,and the commissioners'certaintythat the way the villagerslivenow was the way they have alwayslived: 'they [the peasants]have lived isolated and forgotten from pre-Hispanic times' (my

italics).It seems as thoughthe authorsbelieved not only that the

peasantsof Uchuraccaypreservedthe past,but thatthey embod-ied it: 'the Iquichanoshave managedto preservea culture,per-

haps archaic,but rich and deep, and which is related to all ourpre-Hispanicpast'.'3Still more references abound in relation totheir 'primitivism','atavisticconduct' and their practicesdatingback from 'times immemorial'.14 ll this in spite of the fact thatthe anthropological eport acknowledged hat these peasantshadnot only established commerce with neighbouringareas- andeven worked as labourers n the coca slopes which lay east andnorth of their towns, into the area known as the 'cejade selva'

('thejungle'smountainridge')5-

but alsoparticipated speciallyactively in nineteenth-centurynationalpolitics. This acknow-

ledgementnotwithstanding,he very sameanthropological eportcould not avoid fallinginto the same stereotypedconstructpre-sented in the VargasLlosa text, with one ingredientadded:theeffort to portraythe Uchuraccaypeasant communityas partand

12 There are four other appendices to the report, written, respectively, by another

anthropologist, a linguist, a psychoanalystand a lawyer, but I cannot discuss all these

texts indepth

here.13VargasLlosa et al., Informe,36.14 For example: 'It is unquestionablethat this atavistic attitude explains, in part as

well, the Iquichan decision to combat the Shining Path, and to do so with rude and

fierce methods,which are the onlyonestheyhave at theirdisposal ince times mmemorial'.

Ibid., 39 (my emphasis).15 Ceja de selva, also referred to as montana,or monte, is a warm, humid, and

mountainousecological niche, transitional between the high cordillerasand the jungle

(selva) to the east, which is well suited to the cultivation of coca, tobacco and coffee.

131



centre of an 'ethnicgroup', comprisingsome twenty communit-

ies, who are endowed with a strong sense of 'ethnic, tribal'

identity, have 'maintain[ed]close links of solidaritysince pre-Hispanictimes', and 'live in a universe of traditionalbeliefs'.16

'The precisenumber and identityof the peasantcommunitiesofthe Iquichanogroup', the argument continues, 'is still to be

determined, as is much of what concerns the survivingpre-Hispanic structuresof rural Peru'.'7 The 'Iquichanos', the Informetells us, are direct descendantsof the 'old tribe of Iquicha', partof the Pokras'kingdom'which, in turn, was partof the 'Chanka

Confederation'18 - an untamed nation of warriors who resistedthe Inca mperialist xpansionpriorto the arrivalof theSpaniards.The 'Iquichanos', this story continues, have supported their

regional autonomy ever since, even though they engaged in

dealings and negotiations with the republican governmentthroughout he past century.

NOT-FINDING AS A FINDING

Driven by these seemingly convincingpostulates,some of whichdrew on sources as prestigiousas Jose MariaArguedas,I myselfsubscribedto the idea of the 'Iquichanos'as being a hereditary'ethnicgroup'of the 'ChankaConfederation', ndI attemptedto

trace, if not the pre-Hispanic, then at least the colonial ante-cedents thatwould help me (so I expected)to explaintheirpro-

royalistmilitancy n the 1826-8 rebellion.'9What I encountered,in archive after archive, on trip after trip, and year after year,was a disconcerting,at times frustrating, ack of evidence.

As a student of my John Murra-inspiredprofessorsat theUniversidadCat6lica n Lima,20 had learntthat a good way of

tracing pre-Columbian 'ethnic groups' was through colonial

16 Vargos Llosa et al., Informe,74, 73.17

Ibid.,44

(my emphasis).8Ibid., 46, 74.

19See, for example, my first essay on the 'Iquichano' uprising: Cecilia M6ndez,'Los Campesinos, la independencia y la iniciaci6n de la repfiblica: el caso de los

IquichanosRealistas,Ayacucho, 1825-1828', in Urbano (ed), Podery violencia,165-8.20

John Murra is an influential ethnologist in Andean scholarship who for manyyears taught at Cornell University. See his La Organizacion conomica el estadoInca,trans. Daniel R. Wagner (Mexico City, 1978), and Formaciones con6micas politicasdel mundoandino(Lima, 1975).





sources such as visitas,21sixteenth-centurychronicles,tributaryrolls, and the Relacioneseogrdficas. tried those and much more.

I searched n the diariesof missionarieswho travelledthe regionin the late eighteenth century,and I studiedtheir maps, and theabsencewas still striking.22Yet I persisted,on accountof the factthatroyalistnativepeople did appear n every otherregion, suchas Puno, Arequipa,Oruro and Cuzco. Law cases of curacas theAndeannativelords, chiefs of what Murracalled 'ethnicgroups'and the Spaniardsdesignatedas 'nations' or 'kingdoms') whotraced their loyalty to the crown back to the sixteenth century,

in suits that could last centuries,had been documentedby otherresearchers,and were not hard to find in the archives. These

legal proceedingswere not an uncommonpracticein the Andes.Curacas'outwardproof of fidelity to the king was a necessaryrequirement o legitimizetheir own statusandprivilegesas 'noble

Indians',which the crownprotectedbecausecuracaswere instru-mental in recruitinga labour force and collecting tribute from

the 'nations'they represented.Lawsuitsfeaturingroyalistcuracas

becameespecially frequentin the late eighteenthcenturywhen,in order to counter the effects of the TuipacAmaru uprising(1780-1), the crownbeganoffering juicyrewards or curacaswho

were able to prove their loyalty in that struggle. My dream was

to find preciselysuch a trialfeaturing Iquichano'curacas.But it

was to no avail. The lengthyrecordsof landdisputeskept in the

section 'DerechoIndigena'of the Archivo Generalde La Nacionin Lima, which had led other researchers o reconstruct ethnic'

and peasant community histories, reflected a similar absence.Toponymic research did not help, either. There was no trace

of a place called 'Iquicha'in the relationsof earlyIndian settle-

ments (reducciones)stablishedby the Spaniardsn the sixteenth21Visitas were a combination of census and narrativechorographicsurvey carried

out by an emissary of the crown (the visitador)throughout the colonial period, whose

main objective was to provide the crown with the information needed for taxation

(and Christianization)purposes.22 These maps, and their attached diaries, were prepared mainly by Franciscan

missionaries.Many

of them are kept in the Archivo General de Indias, Seville. For a

published example, see Dionisio Ortiz, Las Montanasdel Apurimac,Mantaroy Ene,2 vols. (Lima, 1975), i, 144-5. I have also had access to the very exhaustive map

produced by Demetrio O'Higgins on the basis of his visitas to the Intendance of

Huamangabetween 1802 and 1804 - the most complete nineteenth-century map of

Huamanga I have seen: Archivo General de Indias, Seville, MP, Peru-Chile, 158,

'Mapa original de la Intendencia de Guamanga del Peru'. I am grateful to JaimeUrrutia for providing me with a copy of this map, the original of which I was able

to see later in Spain.

133



century.23 Not a clue on the 'Iquichanos' appeared anywhere,and I was about to give up - until I realized that this absence

of clues was the clue.What led me to this conclusion, in Lima, around 1993, was the

analysis, settlement by settlement, of all the existing tributaryrecords for Huanta province (covering the late eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries) kept in the Archivo General de la

Naci6n, which corroborated the non-existence of 'Iquicha' as an

officially demarcated settlement or geographical area (let alone

group of peoples), and, parallel to this, the re-reading in my

sources of the language with which contemporaries of the mon-archist uprising designated the inhabitants of the Huanta high-lands and the region itself, as well as the language with which

the rebels designated themselves, their headquarters and home

towns. I also contrasted these discourses with analogous evidence

for the period prior to the uprising. Only then did I realize that

the first time the term 'Iquichano' appeared in written documents

was in the very context of the monarchist rebellion of 1826-8. It

was used by the rebels to designate their armies, but more pro-fusely by the authorities to designate the rebels. The allusions to

'Iquicha' were, however, far more imprecise; the term seemed

to stand sometimes for the whole area under rebel control.

It is indeed paradoxical that the place that was to lend its name

to the rebellion and to the rebels should be so elusive in the

hundreds of documents produced by the insurgents during the

course of the war. I have been able to find among them only one

reference to the 'Headquarters at Iquicha'.24Later documentation23 Luis E. Caverostates that, 'When the viceroy of Peru, Don Francisco de Toledo,

made his visit to the city of Guamangain 1571 ... he found there the encomienda

[Indians granted to a conquistador] in Iquicha': Luis E. Cavero, Monografiade laProvincia de Huanta, 2 vols. (Lima and Huancayo, 1953-7), i, 178. However, thereis no evidence that the Spaniardsever recorded a place by the name of Iquicha in thesixteenth century. Maria Rostworowski, citing Garcilaso's Comentarios eales de losIncas (1607), maintains that Iquicha was one of the ayllus (extended kinship units)composing the Chanka group: Maria Rostworowski, La Historia del Tawantinsuyu(Lima, 1988), 56. However, I have found no mention of Iquicha in Garcilaso's

chronicle,even in the most elaborate of the editions: for

example,Inca Garcilasode

la Vega, Comentarios eales de los Incas, ed. Angel Rosenblat (Buenos Aires, 1943). I

suspect that the roots of these misunderstandings ie in the work of Victor Navarrodel Aguila: see below, pp. 158-9.

24 On 8 February 1827 in Ayahuanco,Antonio Huachaca, the supreme caudilloofthe uprising, issued an order to bring 'detractors' (detractores) to the Iquicha head-

quarters'. Archivo Departmental de Ayacucho, Ayacucho, Peru, Juzgado de Primera

Instancia, Causas Criminales, legajo 27, cuaderno 521 (hereafter ADAY, JPI, CC,leg., cuad.), 'Cuadernocuarto del juicio a Soregui y otros', fo. 49r.





clarifiedthat it was merely anothername to designatethe Luis

Pampa barracks n Uchuraccay,then a haciendaand the main

headquartersof the rebellion. Indeed, while references to the'Iquichanos'are omnipresent n the authorities'documentsandratherscant n those of therebelsthemselves,mentionof 'Iquicha'as a town or community s non-existentin both.25

From the plentifulevidenceto this effect, let me cite but one

example. When commanderGabrielQuintanillareportedto the

prefect of Ayacuchohis finaland triumphantattackon the Luis

Pampabarracks n Uchuraccayn March1828,he did so without

mentioning 'Iquicha' n his descriptionof what was, supposedly,the heartland of the uprising.26And although, according to

Quintanilla'sreport to the prefect, five of the twenty-two menand women who were taken prisoner in this raid 'came from

Iquicha'- with the remainingseventeenreportedlyoriginatingin five other differentlocations- the declarationsmade by the

prisoners hemselves n the trialthatensuedsuggestotherpossibleinterpretations.Revealingly,none of the five prisonerswho were

listed in the reportas 'comingfromIquicha'testified in the trial.The only prisonerwho presentedhimself in trial as originatingin 'Iquicha'wasSebastianCahuana,a sixty-year-oldpeasant.Hisdeclarations were transcribed thus: 'that he is a native of

Challhuamayoocated in the punasof Iquicha'.27Whereas onecannotdiscardthe possibilitythat this referenceto 'Iquicha'wasadded by the trial's interpreteror secretary (especially since

Cahuana, ust like most of the individualswho where caught up

25 References to a 'town of Iquicha' appear clearly only after the monarchistuprising. For example, on 6 March 1834, Huachaca,Mendes and Choque, the Huantaleaders of the monarchist rebellion (who in the end gained their freedom and took

part in another uprising), signed a document in the 'Uchuraccay Headquarters,jurisdiction of the town of Iquicha and doctrinaof Carhuauran' 'Cuartel General de

Uchuraccay, comprehencion del pueblo de Yquicha y Doctrina de Carhuahuran').Archivo General de la Nacion, Lima (hereafter AGN), PL, 15-437, 1835, fo 17r. Inwhat follows, the same document refers again to the 'town of Iquicha', along withother 'towns of the Punas', denoting this time its status as a settlement and not justan 'area'. Still, government documents contemporaneous with this citation refer to

Iquicha as an estancia(cattle ranch) rather than as a town.26 Thus, Quintanilla wrote: 'The Great Palace of General Huachaca, the fort of

Luis Pampa, all of Ninaquiro and all the rebels' homes -all have caught fire'.

ADAY, JPI, CC, leg. 30, cuad. 566, fo 1v. The document was signed at the 'MilitaryHeadquartersin Tambo', 20 Mar. 1828.

27 Ibid., 'Cuaderno segundo del juicio a Leandro', fo. 7". The places of origin(paises) of the remaining seventeen prisoners are given as follows: five each from

Ninaquiro, Huanta and Chacabamba,one each from Tambo and Luricocha. Ibid.,fos. 1"-2 .

135



in the Uchuraccayraid, made his utterances n Quechua,which

naturally increased the margin of distortion they were sub-

ject to), his testimony deserves attention. First, because inQuintanilla'sreport the same man appears as originating in

Ninaquiro, another village, that is, higher than Challhuamayoand closer to Uchuraccay.No mention of 'Iquicha'is made inthat instance.While this pieceof informationmaysimply suggestthat peoples' forms of identificationwere variable rather thanattachedto a single village, Cahuana's estimonystrikes us for a

yet more compellingreason:for its descriptionof Challhuamayo

as being located 'in the punas'.28For, while punadesignatesthehighestinhabitablenichesof the Andescordillera,Challhuamayois a lower and temperate town, located midway between theHuantapunasandAyacucho's astern ungles eighthoursfrom

Uchuraccayand four hours from present-day Iquicha, at anoutsider'space (and half that time at a villager's pace). These

apparent nconsistenciesreveal how politicala term supposedlydesignatinga given geographical andscapecould be; and they

also suggestthe very malleabilityof the scope of 'Iquicha'.Collating hisreferencewithmost othercontemporary llusions

to Iquicha,one is left with the impressionof the latter as beinga rather ooselydefinedterritory n the highlandsof Huanta,onewhich encompassedseveral villages and haciendas and various

ecologicalniches, and which is, at times, hardlydistinguishablefrom the district (doctrina)of Ccarhuahuran.29nlike Iquicha,however, a town of Ccarhuahuranoes appear registered n the

tributaryrecords of the late eighteenth century, summing up28 The termpuna,as it appearsin the documentsrelatingto the monarchistuprising,

hardlydesignatesa specific ecologicalniche. Studyinga more recent epoch and another

region (the province of Chumbivilcas, in Cuzco), the anthropologist Deborah Poolefinds that puna is usually associated with the idea of 'empty spaces' and portrayed as

being aloof from the state, ideas which she convincingly demonstrates did not corre-

spond to reality. See Deborah Poole, 'Qorilazos, abigeos y comunidades campesinasen la provinciade Chumbivilcas(Cusco)', in AlbertoFlores Galindo(ed.), Comlunidades

carnpesinas:ambios permanencias, nd edn (Chiclayo, 1988). One could make sim-

ilarly forceful arguments regarding the punas of Iquicha, on the basis of even morerecent evidence.

29Several sources from the 1820s and 1830s suggest, indeed, that Iquicha wasanothername to designate the towns comprised by the 'doctrina ecclesiasticaldistrict]of Ccarhuahuran',also referred to as 'punasof Ccarhuahuran': or example, ADAY,JPI, CC, leg. 55, cuad. 1, dossier by Tomas Lopez Geri (tithe-collector for Huanta),fo. 13. Latersources bluntly present them as synonymous. A treasuryofficialreportedin 1838: 'Antonio Huachaca has become justice of the peace in the district ofCcarhuauranor of the area [las comlarcas] nown as Yquicha'. ADAY, JPI, Causas

Criminales, leg. 44, cuad. 847, 1838, fo. 2. Another source states: 'From the year' col()t i.o . 1371




MYTH, HISTORY AND THE IQUICHANOS

fifty-seventribute-payingIndiansby 1801, and the same is true

for the two 'home towns' of the witnessCahuana,Ninaquiroand

Challhuamayo,he sparsepopulationof the latter notwithstand-ing. Challhuamayos listed as a 'cattle ranch' (estancia)with atotal of thirteentribute-payers,whileNinaquiroappearsasa townwithninety tribute-payersby 1801(we shouldsupposeonefamilyper tribute-payer); quichais non-existent.30

Just as intriguingas the above, given the how profuselythename 'Iquichano'appearsafter 1826, is how difficult it is to findthe namein the testimonies rom the independence trugglesthat

make referenceto the regionand its inhabitants.When, monthsbefore and after the battle of Ayacucho (9 December 1824),patrioticofficialsreportedtheir harassmentby the people fromthe highlandsof Huanta,they referredto the 'Indiansof Huanta'ratherthanto 'Iquichanos'.The samethingoccurred n 1814and

1815, when the people of this very region mobilized to containthe rebel troops of the Angulo brothers, who were nearingHuamanga rom Cuzco.31n short, it would seem that until 1825

no one had heard of either 'Iquicha'or the 'Iquichanos'.It was only in the course of the rebellion of 1826-8, and as a

result of the disseminationof the first monarchistproclamations,writtenprincipallyby the Spanishcapitulados,32hat the inhabit-ants of the communities situated in the punas and valleys of

in. 29 cont.)

1825, if my memory does not betray me, the dwellers of the district of Carhua uran

[sic] also known by the name of Iquicha, have refused to pay the contribuci6nthe

republican form of Indian tribute]'. AGN, PL 21-164, 1841, Juan F. Arias, sub-

prefect of Huanta, to the prefect of Ayacucho, Huanta, 2 Nov. 1840, fo. 1r.30 Ninaquiro also appearsas 'Canoy Ninaquiro' and was registered as a town, with

a varayoq(Indian mayor), in the tributaryrolls from 1786; its population in that yearincluded seventy tribute-payers. My information on tributary records comes from

AGN, Tributos, Huanta, leg. 3, cuad. 49, year 1782; leg. 3, cuad. 67, year 1786; leg.4, cuad. 105, year 1796; leg. 5, cuad. 9, year 1801. No detailed tributaryrecords exist

for Huanta (called 'Zangaro'or 'Azangaro' during the early colonial period) before

1782 or after 1801. The insignificance of Iquicha as a town or estanciais noted in

Cavero, Monografia, , 69.31 On the harassmentof patriots by the peasantsof Huanta and Huando during the

independence campaigns,see: Coleccion ocumental e la

Independenciael Peru

(Lima,1970-6), tom. v, vol. 6, pp. 102, 132, 268, 533-4; AGN, Coleccion Santa Maria,00611; John Miller, Memoriasdel General Miller al serviciode la Repiblica del Perti,trans. Jose MariaTorrijos, 3 vols. (Santiagode Chile, 1912), iii, 11-12. For the same

matters in 1814-15, see: Colecci6ndocumentalde la Independencia el Peru, tom. iii,vol. 7, pp. 583-5; tom. xxvi, vol. 4, p. 72; ibid., vol. 1, pp. 335, 452, 453.

32 Literally, 'the surrendered':soldiers and officers belonging to the royalist armydefeated in the battleof Ayacucho,which sealed Peruvian and SpanishSouthAmerican

independence.

137



MYTH, HISTORYAND THEIQUICHANOS

this evolution as clearly as the petitions regarding tributaryexemptionsthat the Huanta communitiesaddressedto the gov-

ernment authoritiesduringthe 1830s and 1840s.

II

SEDUCEDBY THEIQUICHANOS?

Whenin 1831 the Indianmayors34f ninecommunitiesof Huanta

(Ccarhuauran, Secce, Aranhuay, Ayahuanco, Mayhuavilca,Chaca,Huarcatan,PampacorisandMarcaraccay)ddressed heir

respective pleas to the prefect requesting exemption from thatyear's tribute, they declared themselves victims of the war pro-moted by 'the leaders of the Iquichano party', by whom theyclaimedto have been seduced. So said themayorof Ccarhuauran:

Being victims of seduction by the leaders [corifeos]of the Iquichano partywhich had expanded in those places, we have suffered the damagesresulting from a destructive war. The pastures of those barren lands arenot insulted [sic] by any domestic livestock, since the soldiers, be theyfriends or enemies, did away with all of it. The farmed lands [chacras]

have become forests, for we had recently taken up agriculture. On theother hand, we had no other choice for our subsistence than to raise somelivestock or other, and to cultivate the lands of said town, which, as theyare situated in the punas, yield no more than barley, potatoes, beans and

quinoa,provisions which are not at all desirable.35

The petitioners were correct in referringto the poverty of

their resources, and that all the soldiers, 'be they friends or

enemies',had 'sufferedthe damagesresultingfrom a destructive

war'. Yet this very phrase,meant to convey atonement,revealed

that the petitionershad, in fact, takensides. For it was preciselyfor having supportedthe monarchist nsurrection their friends)that these towns had taken the brunt of the beating duringthe

government's(their enemy's) campaignsof repression.Butif thesecommunitieshad beenimplicatedn the monarchist

insurrection o so greatan extent, if the authoritieswere already

referringto them as 'Iquichanos',what logic lay behind their

self-exculpatory laims?Whowere those 'leadersof theIquichano

34 'Alcaldes ndigenas', a legal category by which the petitioners identifiedthemselves

in most of these pleas. The alcaldes ndigenas or varayoqs: staff-holders') representedtheircommunitiesn all of its legaltransactionsnd claimsand wereresponsibleor

rectifying irregularities or abuses which might affect the community according to

laws established by the Spanish,but which were still in force during the early decades

of the republic and even into the twentieth century.

35AGN, PL, 11-82, 1831, fo. 2r.

139



party',of whomtheydeclared hemselves he victims?They were

surelythe principalcaudillos f the monarchistuprising, ncluding

Spanishofficers. Whether or not they had indeed been seduced,the peasantsemployedthis argument, n all likelihoodawarethatit was consonantwith the view harbouredby the state. Inheritorof the paternalistcolonialmentality,the republicangovernmentconsidered that the Andean peasants - then designated as

indigenas, r Indians- were naive creatures,easily manipulatedand seduced. When the peasants had to be judged for their

participationn the monarchistrebellion,the politicalauthorities

advisedthe judgesto avoid 'possiblemisfortunes or the indigenastaken prisoner',recommendingpenaltieslike enlistment in the

army, whose end was instruction rather than punishment;'butnot so for those who ganged up, nor for the other caudillos,allof whom must be judgedand sentenced in accordancewith thelaw as an exampleto all who seek to emulatethem'.36With thesame logic prefect Domingo Tristan had soughtthe intercessionof the priest Manuel Navarro 'to use shrewdness to rid the

headmen of these errant indigenasof the delusion from whichthey sufferand so that they see the cautiousway of thinkingandturn over the foreign caudilloswho seduced them in the devil'sstead'.37

The claimused by the mayorof Ccarhuauran, f havingbeen'victims of seduction',thusprovedcompatiblewith the logicandrhetoric of the governmentitself. Without making too great a

leap in time or interpretation,I believe that this was the same

attitude hat thepeasantsof Uchuraccay doptedwhensummonedby VargasLlosa to reveal the details regardingthe journalists'murder in 1983: they reiterated their incapacityto understandand consistentlyclaimed, 'we do not know any more', 'we are

ignorant'.38In the course of the 1830s,however, the very petitionerswho

in 1831 had so forcefullydenied their associationwith the term

'Iquichano'would shift their strategy.This came as a result of

36ADAY, JPI, CC, leg. 30, cuad. 596, fo. 37v, FranciscoJavierMariategui,minister

of government, to the prefect of Ayacucho, 27 Nov. 1827.37 Ibid., prefect Domingo Tristan to Manuel Navarro, Huanta, 26 Dec. 1827.38

Unpublished transcripts of recordings of Vargas Llosa's interrogation of thecomunerosn Uchuraccayin 1983. In a similarway, Russian peasantsclaimed devotionto the tsar, and conveyed naivete before the authorities while trying to obtain furtherbenefits from the laws regardingthe abolition of servitude in mid-nineteenth-centuryRussia. See Daniel Field, Rebels n the Name of the Tsar (Boston, 1976).





their involvement in the wars waged among the different politicalfactions governing and aspiring to govern Peru during that

decade. The successful military support they offered, first toPresident Orbegoso (1833-4), and then to General Santa Cruz,chief of the Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation (1836-9), made

them worthy of recognition and praise from these governments,

which, interestingly, happened to embrace liberal programmes.39These governments, and their generals, engulfed in constant

battles against the ever-conspiring General Agustin Gamarra, had

actively campaigned in Ayacucho to persuade the once scorned

Huanta peasants and their guerrilla leaders to take their side.Having succeeded, the generals publicly decorated the peasants,

referring to them as 'brave Iquichanos'; they also granted them

tributary exemptions. Henceforth, and borrowing the very lan-

guage that the government used to address them, the peasantswould claim that they had 'served the patria' and 'defended the

nation', just as the patriotic peasants had done during the inde-

pendence wars. As a result of this new situation, they would not

only come to identify themselves as 'Iquichanos', but also gain acertain pride concerning the name they had once utterly

rejected.40In sum, if at first the inhabitants of these nine villages aimed

at conveying the image of 'poor deceived indigenas' in the hopeof minimizing possible penal sanctions and, especially, to avoid

paying tribute, with time they would learn to profit from the fear

which the population felt towards them after the 1826-8 rebel-

lion, as well as from their new prestige as courageous fighters.They would also exploit this fear to protect themselves from

the misfortunes brought about by the caudillista wars, which

39 When I say that Orbegoso and Santa Cruz embraced liberalprogrammesI mean

that they supported a policy of free trade, rather than protectionism, for Peru and,at the social level, they were more inclined than their opponents (Cuzco-born AgustinGamarra,and Lima-bornFelipe Salaverry) o establish effective alliances with popularsectors. For background on the economic aspects behind the 1830s political strug-

gles,see Paul

Gootenberg, Tejidos,harinas,corazones

ymentes: el

imperialismode

libre comercioen el Peru (Lima, 1989). For an analysis of the Peruvian-BolivianConfederation and its historical significance, see Cecilia Mendez G., 'Incas si, Indios

no: Notes on Peruvian Creole Nationalism and its Contemporary Crisis', Jl LatinAmer. Studies,xxviii (1996).

40 For a detailed presentation and analysis of these episodes, see Cecilia Mendez

G., 'Pactos sin tributo: caudillos y campesinos en el nacimiento de la Repfiblica,

Ayacucho, 1828-1850', in Rossana Barragan,Dora Cajiasand Seemin Qayum (eds.),El Siglo XIX, Boliviay AmericaLatina (La Paz, 1997), esp. 538-9.

141



intensified n the regionafterthe defeatof the Peruvian-BolivianConfederation that they had supported. These considerations

inform my observationof the evolution that one of the ninevillages of this story, Secce, underwent during the years thatfollowedthe fall of the Confederation.

III

THE BIRTH OF IQUICHA

The inhabitantsof Secce had been paying the tribute, althoughirregularly,until 1839, the year in which the Confederationwas

defeated,when they stopped doing so:

there are [in Secce] very few people because they almost finished with itin the revolution [the ConfederationWar] and there are no more thanfour or five people, and more than fifteen men are dead, and moreoverthe wretched people [gentalla]of this place are entirely ruined and someare about to leave for other lands because they are very poor.41

With these words the Indianmayorof Secce, FranciscoQuispe,

replied to the sub-prefectof Huantain September1841, whensummoned to explain why the villagersof his hamlet refused to

pay the tribute. The following year, commissionedby the sub-

prefectin Secce,AnselmoCorderoandJuanMaldonadoAlvarado,

respectivelygovernorandpriestof Tambo,could corroborate hefacts describedby Quispe. Upon their arrival n the town, theyfound only the new mayor,BernardoLapa,

who, apprised of the interrogation to which he was being subjected,

replied that the rest of the Indians were not in this hamlet [estancia]butin Pante, Marayniyocc and other places, and that even now they are

gathering at the mayor's urging, and making their homes, that they arenot paying their tributes because they are still recovering from their pastlosses, that they previously belonged to this district [Tambo], and thatdue to the recent revolutions, the headmen mandones of that time hadadded themto Yquicha.. and that so longas thoseof Yquichabegin opay,so will they.42

Whattheseeloquenttestimonies eem to be unveiling s nothingless than theemergenceof thewould-be districtof Iquicha.Those

who fled from Secce (and eventuallyother towns) went on tocolonize what was, until then, a most inconspicuousarea, and,

41 AGN, PL 27-51, 1847, fo. 10r, Francisco Quispe, mayor of Secce, to JuanFranciscoArias,sub-prefect f Huanta,20 Sept.1841.

42Ibid., fo.4, AnselmoCordero,governorof Tambo,and JuanMaldonado

Alvarado, o JuanFranciscoArias,sub-prefectof Huanta,Tambo,23 Feb. 1842(my emphasis).

142 PASTAND PRESENT NUMBER171




sheltered by a new denomination - 'Iquichanos' - sought to

protectthemselvesfrom the demandsmadeby the caudillowars,

the local priestsand the burdens of the tributewhich they weresupposedto pay in Tambo. They refused to comply with bothcivilian and religiousauthorities n Tambo, and instead:

the dwellersof that hamlet [Secce] called themselvesYquichanos,and withthis excusetheyrefrainedrom paying this district[Tambo], and even ceasedto come to mass as indeed they have done ... For I say those of Secca

[sic]never come to hear mass, nor do they pay the obligationswhich theyowe for their unctions, marriagesand funerals, and I do not know where

they take them to but I assume that it is to Yquicha.43

The authoritieswere aware of the repercussionswhich couldresult from the movementsundertakenby the villagersof Secce,as well as of the refusal of this and other villages to registerthemselves in their original districts. In April 1842, the sub-

prefect of Huanta claimed that in order to get them to pay the

tribute, 'it was first necessaryto reconquer,by reasonor force,the estanciaof Secce, as those of Yquichahave extended their

conquest that far'.44 The reality, however, was probably the

reverseof this. I suspectthatit was the inhabitantsof the variousvillagesand hamlets of the Huantahighlandswho, throughpro-

gressive displacementsundertakenduring the upheavalsof thecaudillowars, began to 'conquer'a spot hitherto omitted from

the maps, until they transformed t into the village and district

of Iquicha.45Whatever the name 'Iquicha' stood for before those events

(and, generally,priorto the republicanera), or whether it even

existed, we can only speculate. Was it an itinerantcommunity

43 Ibid., fo. 8, Anselmo Cordero,governor of Tambo, to JuanFrancisco Arias, sub-

prefectof Huanta,Tambo,16Aug. 1841(my emphasis).44 Ibid., fo. 12r, Anselmo Cordero, governor of Tambo, to Juan Francisco Arias,

sub-prefect of Huanta, Tambo, 12 Apr. 1841.

45I render as 'town' or 'village' what appears in the sources as pueblo, and as

'hamlet' what the sources name aldea, caserio or estancia- although, according to

the context, I may translateestanciaor caserioas 'cattle ranch'. I am, however, aware

that settlement categorizationin the Andes was quite complex at this time; the same

Spanishword could stand for

quitedifferent

things,and

usagevaried

by region.Although geographers and state officials sought to homogenize the nomenclature of

settlements, they never found a Spanish equivalent for Quechua terms such as ayllu

(which was normallyleft untranslated). Ayllu reflected a form of political organizationand kinship peculiar to the Andes, and could hardly be reduced to the idea of a

nucleated settlement (a village in the Europeansense). Also, a pueblocould be created

by decree, regardless of its actual demographic standing or size. For a particul-

arly enlightening source on these issues, see MarianoFelipe Paz Soldan, Diccionario

geogrdfico estadisticodel Perz (Lima, 1877), esp. introduction.

143



(ayllu) of peasant herders which managed to escape writtenrecords?The name for a hillside?A pasturearea,a rivulet? Did

it stem from the Aymaraword iki, as some suggest?All this islikely - especiallysince Aymarawas spoken prior to Quechua,andalongside t, inmanyareasof thesouthernAndes(particularlyin the highestelevations)beforethe Spanish nvasion.46The factis that after two decades of eventful republicanrule, this namehad come to signify something greater and more visible than

anythingit could thus far have been: a core settlement aroundwhichgroupsof peoples,hithertounrelated o thisname or place,

would establishand seek to identify themselves.The identityof Iquicha andtheIquichanos) emainedvariable,

however. As other witnesseswent on declaring,with great elo-

quence,of the villagersof Secce: 'that sometimesthey call them-selves Yquichanos,and some other times [they say] that theybelongto the townof Huamanguilla,wherethey go to nametheir

authorities,andpresenttheirofferings,for they say that they eatin the lands of Huamanguilla'.47ut thisvariability and herein

lies the richness of this testimony- seems to have been morethanjust a manipulative trategyto rid themselves of fiscalbur-

dens;it seems as well to have been an expressionof actual,verymobile, patternsof settlement,access to resourcesand forms oflocalgovernmentamongthe variouscommunities n Huanta.Forthoseof Seccemay, in fact,have 'eaten'(thatis, farmedor owned

lands)andperformedritualactivityin Huamanguillasituated nthe southernmostcorner of the provinceof Huanta,on the out-

skirts of the city Ayacucho),as the witness states.48But this didnot preventthemfromestablishingother,more or lesspermanentsettlements in the less accessible north-eastern slopes of the

46 Bruce Mannheim, The Languageof the Inka sincethe EuropeanInvasion(Austin,

1991), ch. 2.47

AGN, PL, 27-51, 1847, fo. 24", declarations of Jose Manuel Cardenas,farmer

[labrador] rom Vicos, Tambo, 12 May 1843.48 The expression 'present their offerings in Huamanguilla' ('llevando sus obse-

quios') may simply be alludingto the rituals that usuallyaccompaniedand accompany

agricultural ife in the Andes, but it could more audaciouslybe interpretedas referringto practices that were meant to delimit territorial boundaries. Insofar as Andeancommunities' patterns of settlement followed a 'non-contiguous' territorial logic, itis understandable that boundaries should need to be constantly 're-enacted'. AsDeborah Poole puts it: '[in the Andes] territory is an actively constructed concept,whose boundaries must be constantly recreated through daily exchanges of offeringsand formalized salutationbetween neighbors'. Deborah Poole, 'Landscapesof Powerin a Cattle-Rustling Culture of Southern Andean Peru', DialecticalAnthropologj,xii

(1988), 384.

NUMBER17144 PAST AND PRESENT




'jungle's mountain-ridge', an area which - they would (some-

times) claim - formed part of 'Iquicha', and where by the early

1840s they would start building a chapel. 'Those of Secc-secc',claimed the farmer Jose Manuel Cardenas, 'are building them-

selves a chapel in Pantecc [located in the 'jungle's mountain-

ridge'] so that the priestof Yquichacan go in due time for their

festivities, and for this reasonthey no longercome to this town

[Tambo]'.49

Hence, along with the itinerancy that characterized the Secce

villagers' modus vivendi - and which so exasperated the govern-

ment officials trying to confine them to a single place - lay'sedentary aspects', so to speak. In the places where they moved

the villagers built chapels; and chapels are, by far, the most

enduring of architectural structures in Andean villages, around

which an important part of the life of a community took place.

Moreover, chapels and churches were precisely what differenti-

ated a village from other lesser types of settlement, according to

the nineteenth-century geographer Mariano Felipe Paz Soldan.

They were the most distinctive feature of a pueblo: 'In Peru onecalls pueblo any union of houses, as long as they are close to a

chapel or church, however miserable it be, and where [people]

gather on Sundays for religious festivities'.50 A church, that is,could make a 'village' of the most inconspicuous settlement. And

it is preciselyin this sense that the Secce villagers' migrationtothe rim of the forest to comply with the Catholic liturgy and

build a chapel, while also claiming to belong to 'Iquicha', is

significant.It means that their refusal to

complywith the state's

dictates at the fiscal level cannot be interpreted as an attitude of

blunt confrontation with the state or the church.51It may, more-

over, mean that when they claimed to 'belong to Iquicha', the

49 AGN, PL, 27-51, 1847, fo. 24', declarationsof Jos6 Manuel Cardenas,Tambo.

50Paz Soldan, Diccionario eogrdfico estadistico,xv. In the early twentieth century,

geographers' categorizationof places was less sensitive to nuances, and was imbued

with markedly fixed hierarchies in which the variable 'race' intervened (i.e. 'lesser'

places were defined as 'dwellings of Indians'); see, for example, German Stiglich,Diccionariogeogrdficodel Perz (Lima, 1922), v.

"1Although I have not been able to determine when the church of the current

village of Iquicha was built, it stands in stark contrast to those of the neighbouring

villages, both in style and size. It is much taller than the churches of Huaychao and

Uchuraccay,which until recently formed partof haciendas,and it looks disproportion-ate to the small population (perhaps a sign of Iquicha's major importance in another

era). It is made of stone, using construction techniques that resemble those of the

Wari era (sixth to eleventh centuries of our era), but which could well have been

employed a few decades ago. It differs, too, from the church of Secce, which can

/cont. onp. 146)

145



Secce villagers were not necessarily deceiving the governmentofficials. Instead, they were expressing how forceful and effective

a name could be in reshaping the ties that they had establishedwith other communities at the level of everyday practice. By

claiming 'Iquicha', that is, the peasants were redefining patternsof periodic migration, and remoulding the political and adminis-

trative landscape in the highlands of Huanta. Thus, a name which

rose to prominence as a result of these communities' play of

confrontation and alliance with the state, ended up creating a

place whose boundaries were to be continually recreated.

Furthermore, given that, in the Andes, the concept of communityhas not necessarily been tied to the idea of a contiguous territory,but rather has coexisted with notions of non-contiguous territor-

iality and ever-flexible boundaries, the history of Iquicha could

be but one among many untold histories of Andean 'villages' or

districts which came into existence as a result of similar processes

throughout the nineteenth century, and perhaps even later.52

In response to this situation, the government took pains to

'reconquer' these territories. Firstly, because Secce - with itsvillagers constantly moving to other areas and, especially, to that

which came to be known as 'Iquicha' - refused to pay tribute

for many more years, setting a precedent for other towns to

follow, as the prefect Francisco del Barco reported in 1848: the

villagers of Palomayoc refused to pay tribute 'on the pretext of

(U. 51 cont.

easilybe identified as

Spanish-style,a

typicalchurch of a late

eighteenth-centuryreduccidn.A great part of the church of Iquicha has been burnt (as has that at

Uchuraccay) as a consequence of the recent war. Archaeological work in this area

could be invaluable in shedding light to complement my findings (and non-findings).52 Andean 'non-contiguous' patterns of territoriality were first studied by John

Murra in the 1960s and 1970s, on the basis of Spanishsourcesof the sixteenth century,

mainly visitas. Subsequently, other anthropologists and historians have either con-firmed or expanded Murra's models on the basis of archival evidence and fieldwork.The survival of such patterns of settlement is apparentin many regions of the Andes

throughout the centuries, but few investigators have traced their evolution with

reference to the expansion of the state during the republican period. On how pre-

Hispanic notions of territorialityand community survived and/or adapted to Spanishinstitutions, see: Karen Spalding, Huarochiri: An Andean Society under Inca and

SpanishRule(Stanford, 1984);CarlosSempatAssadourian,Transiciones acia el sistenmacolonial andino (Lima, 1994); Luis Miguel Glave, 'Sociedad, poder y organizaci6nandinas: el sur peruano hacia el siglo XVII', in Flores Galindo (ed.), Comunidades

campesinas.The notion of community as moulded by the community's interactionwith the state is discussed by Deborah Poole, 'Qorilazos, abigeos y comunidades',ibid.; Alejandro Diez Hurtado, Comunes haciendas:comunalizaci6n n la sierra de

Piura (siglosXVIII al XX) (Cuzco, 1998).





it [Palomayoc]being in the districtof Yquicha'.53But secondly,and most importantly,because it was the governmentitself that

acknowledgedthe villagers' 'conquests'.This time, however, itwas not by means of symbols, ritualdecorations,or promisesof

tributary exemptions, but rather through more worldly and

permanent measures: the delimitation of the new politicalboundaries.

In the 1830sthe authorities eferred o the 'districtof Iquicha',even though it did not officially exist. 'Iquicha' was then, as

alreadymentioned,another name to designatethe towns consti-

tuting the district of Ccarhuahuran.n 1849, a guidebookliststhe towns of Ccarhuauaran nd Ayahuancoas 'capitalsof thefamousdistrict of Iquicha', showing the predominance hat thenamehadacquiredby then asa regionaldenomination.54ounderevidence of the existence of both a village and a district called

'Iquicha'is, however, found only from the second half of thenineeteenth century, coinciding, significantly,with a period ofconsolidationof state institutions n Peru. In 1853,a parishcensus

for AyacuchoistsIquichaas one of the six doctrinasecclesiasticaldistricts)making up the Huantaprovince.55By the mid-1850sacourt of the peace was firmly established in the 'district of

Iquicha',and in 1877 thehistorianandgeographerMarianoFelipePaz Soldan estimateda populationof 3,112 inhabitants or thesamedistrict,308 of themcorrespondingo thepuebloof Iquicha,capitalof the district.56A number of 'verbal hearings'(juicios

verbales) ecided in the 'court of the peaceof Iquicha'from 1855

to 1915, whose records are still kept in Huanta,attest to the factthat these administrativeunits were in operation.Written docu-

mentaryevidence blends well with the substanceof local tradi-tions in suggestingthat the legendarymuleteer andguerrilla, he

self-proclaimed General-in-chiefof the Royal Armies of Peru',Antonio Navala Huachaca, might well have ended his days

53 Centro de Estudios Hist6rico Militares del Perui,Lima, Archivo Hist6rico Militar,

leg. 8, doc. 27, 1848, prefect of Ayacuchoto the ministry of government, 5 Aug. 1848.

54 GuiaPolitica,

Eclesidstica Militar del Perz de1849,

cited in Cavero,Monografia,i, 70.

55 El Comercio,12 July 1853. The census shows the following information: 'Born:

89 men, 101 women. Married: 30. Died: 60 men, and 87 women'.56 Paz Soldan, Diccionariogeografico,465. Cavero states that the district of Iquicha

was created by a law of 2 Jan. 1857 and subsisted in this capacity in the politicaldemarcations of 1867: Cavero, Monografia,i, 178. The first map in which I have

located a place called 'Iquicha' appearsin MarianoFelipe Paz Soldan,Atlas geogrdficodel Peru (Paris, 1865).

147



occupyingthe office of justiceof the peacein Iquicha,one of themost coveted positionsin local politicsin any region.57

In the second decadeof the twentiethcenturyone loses trackof the 'districtof Iquicha',as the whole area had fallen underadifferent administrationby 1915.58It seems that the onlyIquichanoentity that survived the subsequentpoliticaldemarca-tions was village-based,althoughit would take specificresearchintoIquicha hrough he twentiethcenturyto provethisassertion.Whateverthe case, the name 'Iquichano'had acquiredsuch a

powerfulresonanceamong ocalwriters,travellersand authorities

since the end of the monarchistuprisingin the late 1820s thatthe reach of the 'Iquichano' identity (and the boundaries of

'Iquichano erritory')would not cease to be exaggeratedn writ-ten accounts.In 1838,a governmentofficialreferred o the territ-

orycontrolledby AntonioHuachaca s the 'republiqueta'statelet',derogatorilydiminutivefor 'republic']of Iquicha'.59n the early1850s, upon his arrival in Ayacucho, the English travellerClements R. Markhamexpressed great curiosity 'to see the

IquichanoIndians'.His descriptionof the area which lay 'to theeastward[of the village of Huanta]'as 'the wild countryof the

Iquichanos' s highly telling of the reputationthat the area andits people had by then attained.60 uchallusionswould, in turn,powerfullyaffect the peasants'self-perception.

Today,there is no districtof Iquicha n the provinceof Huanta.

57 The verbal hearing records relating to Iquicha are in the manuscript collectionof Leoncio Cardenas in

Huanta,and remain unclassified. I thank Mr Cardenasfor

allowing me access to these sources, and Ponciano del Pino for telling me about them.The evidence that Huachaca was named 'justice of the peace' in 1837 comes from adocument dated that same year:ADAY, JPI, CC, leg. 44, cuad. 874, 1838, leg., fo. 1v.

Although according to the same source Huachaca was 'removed from office' shortlyafter, other evidence furnished in the same dossier suggests that he continued toexercise that position, allegedly 'illegitimately'. That Huachaca died as a justice ofthe peace cannot be confirmed but is strongly suggested by oral tradition, and byother indirect evidence.

58 Uchuraccay is said to belong to the 'district of Cercado' in the 'Querella porRobo de ganado en campo a Abierto', Huanta, 1915: Notaria Cardenas, Huanta,

unclassified. In 1922 GermanStiglich lists Iquiche (sic) as a settlement ('Pobl.'-

i.e.,presumably, poblado) n the province of Huanta, with 422 inhabitants,but mentionsno district with such a name: Stiglich, Diccionariogeogrdfico,563.

59 ADAY, JPI, CC, leg. 44, cuad. 874, 1838, fo. 2v. 'Proceso criminal que se siguede oficio contra el Juez de Paz del Distrito de Carhuahurandon Antonio AbadHuachaca [sic] por los ecxesos [sic] y abusos que comete con los pobladores'.

60Markhamin Peru: The Travelsof ClementsR. Markham, 1852-1853, ed. PeterBlanchard (Austin, 1991), 70. I thank Natalia Majluf for calling my attention tothis source.

148 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 171




And the districtof (SanJose de) Secce,locatedwithin the area hat

the authoritiesof the nineteenthcenturyreferredto as 'Iquicha',

is now called (San Jose de) Santillana:a Quechuaname havingbeen (significantly) eplacedby a Spanishone. Ccarhuahuran nd

Iquichaare, in turn, two clearlydifferentiatedvillages,and shareno apparentboundaries.While the administrative nitsof Huantaremainin constantflux, and the presenceof the governmentismore visible than ever since the defeat of the ShiningPath in

1992, the tendencyin the most recent politicaldemarcationss,clearly,towards ragmentation ndeven overlappingocal author-

ity. As of today, however,a self-acknowledged Iquichano den-tity' remainselusive(if it existsat all) anywherebeyondthe levelof the villageof Iquicha.The inhabitantsof this hamlet achieved

recognitionas a 'peasantcommunity'as lateas 1991,in the midst,and apropos,of the civil war that was then devastatingPeru.61At thatpoint, Uchuraccaywas still struggling or thisrecognition.

IV

UCHURACCAYEVISITED

Iquichanos?Yes, then we joined with them.62

If the members of the Uchuraccaycommission were to go backto Uchuraccaynow, theywouldprobably eave witha verydiffer-ent impression.The substanceof any report they would writewouldprobablybe justas different. The town has been relocatedto a

steepincline

highabove the remainsof the old town or casa

haciendawhere the journalists'murderis said to have occurred.Official government slogans have replaced the graffiti of the

ShiningPath on the rugged mountainsthat surroundthe town;billboardsannouncinggovernment projects are posted on theroadsthat lead to it. White houses of cement and brick with tileroofs have replacedthe old huts of stones and clay with roofs ofichu.63Unlike the old houses, dispersedover the landscape,themodern ones are concentrated mimickingurban patternsof

settlement- arounda centralsquarewhere, every morning,the

61 Directorio de comunidades campesinas (Lima, 1991), 195: resolution no.

019-91-GRLW/SRAS-DRT, 13 June 1991.62 President of the peasant community of Uchuraccay, in conversation with the

author, Mar. 1997.63 A dry plant that grows in the puna; it is a good cattle food and has a variety of

domestic uses besides roof-making.

149



Peruvianflagis raisedwhile the villagers n columns honour the

country's foremost national symbol. A 'highway' (or carretera

afirmada, s one calls roads in Peru)now extends to the town byway of Tambo. Until three days before my arrival n the town,on the afternoonof 23 March 1997, a military garrisonwas still

quartered n Uchuraccay o preventattacksby the ShiningPath

which, thoughmuchweakened,was still a threat.64Thus, at leasttwo of the pleas that the Uchuraccaycomunerosmade to the

VargasLlosa Commission n 1983have, seemingly,been acknow-

ledged. 'We want a highway', they hadsaidthen;'we needarms';

'let the sinchis soldiers]come each week'; 'we want schools'.65Onlya few years ago, however,not a soul could be seen either

in Uchuraccayor manyof the surrounding unacommunities.In

the 1980s the villagershad fled en masse to the cities or lower

villages after having experiencedthe worst of the war, leavingbehind burnt housesandchurches,and crossesto markthe placeof the dead. In 1991, some were living in Lima and workingasfarmersand brickmakersn the area of Huachipa.If you asked

them about their towns they would reply, 'no one is there ...it's all desert'.66But the capture n 1992 of AbimaelGuzman,themainleaderof the ShiningPath, and the consequentnationwide

dismantlingof the terroristmovement,broughtabouthopes forthese displacedpopulations 'losdesplazados').Around1993theybeganto go home in a processnot yet concluded.67

They do so with the supportof the government.They are alsobackedby a growingnumberof non-governmentalorganizations

(NGOs)andby students andprofessors rom the Universidadde

64 thank the four people from the Instituto parael Desarrolloy la Paz en Ayacucho(IPAZ)and the Universidad Nacional de San Crist6balde Huamangawho accompaniedme to Uchuraccay,and the three ronderos f Cunyawho escorted us on our way from

Cunya to Uchuraccay. I am grateful to Jose Coronel and Jefrey Gamarra, whofacilitated my contact with the comuneros uring my successive trips to Huanta andto Renee Palomino for being my guide and interpreter in the punasin 1998.

65 Unpublished transcripts of recordings of Vargas Llosa's interrogation of thecomunerosn Uuchuraccayin 1983.

66 'Esta todo desierto'. Author's conversations with comuneros f Iquicha living as

'war refugees' in Huachipa, c.1992. I thank Jaime Antezana for introducing meto them.

67For an analysis of this process, see Carlos Ivan Degregori et al., Las rondas

campesinas la derrotade SenderoLuminosoLima, 1996);Jefrey Gamarra, Lo Piblico

y lo privado en tres comunidades desplazadas', Afanes, btisqueda esdeHuamanga,i

(1996); Ponciano del Pino, 'Ayacuchode los Noventa: cambios culturales y nuevos

actores', ibid. For a recent source in English, see Steve Stern (ed.), Shiningand OtherPaths: War and Society in Peru, 1980-1995 (Durham, NC, 1998).





San Crist6balde Huamanga, n the form of projectsthat rangefrom facilitatingcredit for animalsand seeds to promotingand

restoringthe infrastructureof the towns. Many villagers bringback urban ways and dress, new expectations, and even new

religions(as the evangelicalchurches take over the spiritualter-rain abandonedby Catholicism).The warexperiencehas engen-dered, as well, new forms of communalorganization. Amongother things, it is now a civic duty and a source of pride to bearmed: the peasantsare organizedin rondas(patrols, or 'self-defence committees'),with which they expect to repel further

attackson their towns. In this regard,the communities hat fledhave learnt from those that remained and defeated the ShiningPath (with no little loss of life) precisely by means of these

organizations. Agricultureis in full swing again. In Cunya, a

'returning'communityborderingUchuraccay, eventeenvarietiesof potato are cultivated in what can be considered some of theharshestagriculturaland on earth, 3,800 metresabove sea level;the land lay abandoned ust threeyearsearlier.68

In the early1990sit wouldhave seemed moresensible giventhosepunassown with crossesand burnt houses- to predicttheend of the countryside.Yet rather than waning, the number of

peasant communities is increasing.Former hamlets (pagos, or

anexos)are now peasantcommunities n searchof officialrecogni-tion, challengingall theories that predictedthe end of the peas-antry and stubbornlyreversingthe allegedly 'inevitable' trendsof history. The internal war uprootedmore than half a million

people,of whom 16

percent had returned to their towns

bymid-1997.69The processof return shows increasingnumbersbythe year.70

Where are the 'Iquichanos' n all this? In Ayacuchocity theywill tell you that the Iquichanosare 'in thepunasof Huanta'. But

68 Author's conversations with residents of Cunya, 24 Mar. 1997.69 El Domingo,Sundaysupplement of La Republica Lima), 24 Aug. 1997, editorial.

70According to the government-sponsored agency Programa de Apoyo al

Repoblamiento (PAR), 1,596 families returned to their homes in 1995; according to

IPAZ, by August 1995 the number had exceeded 2,000, which involves some 10,000

people and 65 communities, to consider only four districts of the province of Huanta.

Jose Coronel, 'Violencia politica y respuestas campesinas en Huanta', in Degregoriet al., Las rondascampesinas,108. A more recent source states that 15,612 Peruvians

uprooted by the war had returned to their towns in the departments of Ayacucho,Junin, Huancavelicaand Apurimacsince 1994,as partof PAR-sponsoredprogrammes.La Republica,28 Apr. 1999, statements by Luisa MariaCuculiza, ministry of promo-tion of women and human development.

151



in Huantayou will find no Iquichanos,except for those who are

resettlingthe hamlet of Iquicha,two hours'walkingdistance(at

avillager'space;four hours'atmyown)fromUchuraccay.When,during my March1997visit to Uchuraccay, told the peoplebitsof theirnineteenth-centuryhistory,partsof which I have summed

upin thisessay,and mentioned he name'Iquichanos',hepresid-ent of the community, alluding to more contemporaryevents,

replied:'Yes, then we joinedwith them' his finger pointingupthe road that leadsto the hamletof Iquicha.It is clearto me thatthese communities, while sharing very similar ways, dresses,

physiognomy,andspeakingthe samevarietyof Quechua,do notnecessarilydentifywith thelabelof 'Iquichanos'hatanthropolo-gists, authoritiesand intellectualshave persistentlyattributedtothem. Today, as in the past, they may use it sometimes. For

instance,the name 'Iquichanos'regainedresonancea few yearsafter the 1983 Uchuraccay massacre, when the governmentstartedchannellingbenefits to whatit called(perhaps borrowingthe languageof the Comision nvestigadora) 'Iquichanotowns'.

Then communitiessuch as Callampa,Parccora,Ccarasencca ndOrccohuasi,whose inhabitantswere living in Lima and other

places as war refugees, called themselves 'Iquichanos',71ust ashad happenedsome 160 years before with a number of othercommunities.But now that the government'sbenefits are seem-

ingly directedcommunityby community, they have returned to

calling hemselvesby theircommunitynamealone,astheyusuallydo and have most often done. This should not be surprising.

There is no reason to expect people in the Huantahighlandstodefine themselves accordingto one identity when nobody elsedoes. It is understandablehat, in the contextof extreme material

hardshipand limited choices such as exists in the Huantapunas,people should resort to using as many of the resources at their

disposalas possible, includingthe adoptionof an ambiguousor

shiftinglanguage, n order to widen the scope of their choices.72No identity problem or immanent contradiction s necessarily

posed here,save for an observer who has a set notion of what

71I owe this information to Jaime Antezana: telephone conversation with author,Jan. 1997.

72 The portrait of Bahian people in Brazil, as described by Leni M. Silverstein in'The Celebrationof Our Lord of the Good End: Changing State, Church and Afro-Brazilian Relations in Bahia', in David J. Hess and Roberto A. Damatta (eds.), TheBrazilian Puzzle (New York, 1995), esp. 138, furnishes a useful parallel for what I

ic:ot. o,i p. 153

152 NUMBER171ASTAND PRESENT




the observedought to be. However, it would not be surprisingif the Huantacomuneros urged to define themselves in terms

of only one collectiveidentity- chose to identifythemselvesasPeruvians.For twelve yearsof war (andseven of 'armedpeace')have broughtto these highlandsmore than tens of thousandsof

deaths;they have also broughtan increasingawarenessamongstthese populationsof havingcreatedstrongerbondswith the stateand with the nation, as is clear in their demands for highways,health and education(that is, for their rights as citizens), and,moreover, an increase in their willingness to demonstratethat

they are entitledto this citizenshipby havingdefeated what wasthen the nation's most fearsomeenemy, the ShiningPath. This

feat, which not even the armycouldboast,wasthe specialaccom-

plishmentof peasantsbelongingto the communities that never

fled, and that stood up to Sendero hroughout he war. Not onlydid these peasantpatrollers ronderos)roudlyparade,theirriflesover their elbows, in the Independence Day celebrations thattook place in the capital of the republic in 1995; they even

volunteered to join the army in Peru's conflictwith Ecuador.73Troubling as they may appear, these facts clearly indicate theextent to which a section of Peruvians,for a long time raciallydiscriminatedagainstand marginalizedas 'Indians',is eager toshow not only thatthey belongto the very Peru that has so oftenturned its back on them, but that they are, moreover, its

paramountdefenders.Their attitudecannotbut evoke GeneralJose de SanMartin's

famous 1821 'decree'whichestablished hatall Indiansshouldbecalled 'Peruvians'.74The change of terminologywas, in fact,effected, to judge by officialdocuments,war communiquesandthe patriotic poetry datingfrom that era. But, if anything,this

in. 72 cont.

identify here. Moreover, anthropologicalfieldwork, combined with archivalwork, byAfricanist scholars sheds particularlyuseful light in understandingthe elusiveness of

so-called 'ethnic' identities: see, for example, Terence Ranger, 'The Invention of

Tradition in Colonial Africa', in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The

Inventionof

TraditionCambridge,1983), esp.

247-8, 260; EricWorby, 'Maps,

Names

and Ethnic Games: The Epistemology and Iconography of Colonial Power inNorthwestern Zimbabwe', Jl SouthernAfrican Studies, xx (1994). After years spenttrying to locate this 'ethnic group' in actuality and in colonial maps, Worby finds

only unruly frontiers, flexible identities, and especially, the reluctance of people to

respond to the names that had been attached to them by others.73 Del Pino, 'Ayacuchode los Noventa', 28.74 This 'decree' was actuallya clause within a decree which abolished Indiantribute,

and which was issued by San Martin the same year he proclaimed Peruvian

(cont. on p. 1541

153



changeonly provedtheprevalenceof the exclusionistconceptionsthat it sought to attack.For 'Peruvian' becamea substitutefor

'Indian',a namegiven to Indiansalone,not a name alsogiven toIndians. With time, 'indigena'proved to be a more enduringsubstitute for 'Indian', although both were commonly used as

synonymsuntil comparatively ecently,when they werereplacedby 'peasant', n accordancewith the spiritof agrarianvindicationof the Velascorevolution(1968-75). As of today, 'peasant' 'cam-

pesino') emains he mostwidespread,and leastderogatory,appel-lation for Andeanruralpeoples in Peru, while 'Indian'sounds

increasinglyanachronistic,and is unlikely to be politicallyre-deemed, despite recent worldwide ethnicallyoriented politicaltrends, and despite similarlyorientedpoliticaldevelopmentsinPeru'sAndeanneighbours.San Martin's celebrated decree' has

probablynever been so close to actuallinguistic practiceas it isin Peru today.

V

EPILOGUE

The conceptof 'ethnicgroup' ... dissolvesif we define our termsexactly.75

History s not an ancestralmemorynor a collective radition. t is whatthe peoplelearned rom the priests,schoolteachers,authorsof historybooks,andcompilers f articles,and from TV programmes.76

Must we then conclude from all the above that what has been

conceived of as a centuries-old 'ethnic identity' was rather a

republican-born,variable, politically convenient and strategicway of using a name?In a certainway, yes. And by sayingso, Ido not mean to deny the existence of common culturaltraitsandbonds (old and new) among the villagers in the highlandsofHuanta. Yet these culturalelements and practicesdid not seem

i 7. 74 cott. i

Independence: 'From now on the aborigines should not be called Indians or Natives;

theyarechildren ndcitizensof Peru,andasPeruviansheyshouldbe known.Givenin Lima,on 18August,1821,Josede SanMartin, ndJuanGarcia el Rio'. Coleccio6ndocumental de la Independencia el Peru, tom. xiii, vol. 1, ed. Jose la Puente Candamo,350 (emphasis as in the original).

75Max Weber, Econom1yandSociety,trans.EphraimFischoff et al., 2 vols. (Berkeleyand Los Angeles, 1978), i, 395.

76 Eric Hobsbawm, lecture delivered at the CentralEuropeanUniversity, Budapest,pubd in El Viejo Topo,no. 72, Feb. 1994, 80; retranslatedfrom the Spanish.





to have either sustainedor propelled a sense of 'group cohes-

iveness', as is commonlyasserted.When this sense of identity

did take shape, it was transientlyprompted by politicalevents,and requiredthe interventionof non-villagers:caudillos,ax col-lectors and hacendados n the nineteenth century; NGOs, the

government, ntellectualsand otherpoliticalactors in the twenti-eth. In other words, whenever it was self-assumed,the identityof the HuantacomunerossIquichanos,rather hanacknowledginganythingcultural,conveyedsomething political;more thanany-thing ancestral, t expressedsomethingimmediate.This was the

case in the earlynineteenthcenturyas it is in the present.Inanessayon 'ethnicgroups'thatremarkably nticipatesmuch

of today's deconstructionistapproaches(inspired by Anderson)towards 'ethnic' and nationalidentities,Max Weberpostulated,almost a century ago, that ethnic membershipwas, in the main,a 'presumed dentity'.77Weber'seffort to comeup with a seriousdefinition of 'ethnicgroup' clashed with the realization hat the

political sphere played a crucial role in defining the 'ethnic

group's' identity. The more he attempted to establish its use-fulness, the more scepticalhe grew about the analyticalvalue of

the term. 'Ethnicgroup' is a conceptthat 'dissolvesif we define

our terms exactly', he would conclude.78This is the closest a

theoreticalapproachhas come to capturing my own uneasiness

with the term 'ethnic group' while attemptingto renderintelli-

gible the historyof the Iquichanos.On severaloccasions when I presented publicly the results of

my work, I encounteredpeople who urged me (I am sure withthe best of the intentions)to go on digging throughsourcesin

search of the 'true history'of the Iquichanos(possibly meaning'their' history, their 'ethnic' history, not 'my' readingof it), in

orderto find thatpartof the tale that the people and the sources

have 'hidden' from me. Admittedly,I might have overlookeda

boundary,a record,a spot on the map;I might have needed to

learn Quechua,to live among, and not just visit, the villagers,

and to painstakingly ecordtheir oral traditions.And yet, had Idone this with the utmost accuracy,could I then claim to have

77Weber, Economyand Society, i, 389. An article which particularly caught my

attention for its use of Weber's insights on ethnicity, and which was a motivation in

my own work, is Danielle Juteau, 'Theorising Ethnicity and Ethnic Communalisations

at the Margins:From Quebec to the World System', Nations andNationalism, i (1996).78

Weber, Economyand Society, i, 395.

155



reconstructed,or to be able to reconstruct,the 'real' Iquichano

history? Would that story be 'truer' than the one told here?

Wouldit be more 'authentic'or 'legitimate'?The answer,obvi-ously enough,is no. Not becauseI think such a task to be in vain

(to date, no ethnographyhas been written of these peoples,somethingwhich could have been immensely helpful in my own

work).79Yet not even the most conscientiousethnographercanclaim to convey an 'insider's'perspective- especiallywhen weclashmore and more often with native people's 'oral traditions'that symptomatically esemble stories spreadby a priest in the

colonialera, or by a schoolteacher n the republic,and even byour own predecessors n the field.80Moreover,the rapiditywith

which writtenknowledgefiltersthroughpredominantly ral soci-eties canhardlybe exaggerated,as I was able to confirmnot onlyin collatingnineteenth-centurygovernmentand travellers'docu-ments with those produced by the peasants'spokespersonsbut

also, most amazingly, n relationto my own scholarlywork.81 none of my recent visits to the punas of Huanta, in September

1998, I engagedin a casual conversationwith the mayorof thepeasantcommunityof Ccarhuauran,who happened o be writinga historyof his village;he mentionedto me a numberof historicaldetails that closely matched my own archivalfindings. I laterlearntthat, amongother sources,he had access to my very first

piece on the 'Iquichanorebellion', publishedin 1991, which a

veryHuantino olleagueof minehadprovidedhim.Inadvertently,my own interpretationof the 'Iquichanorebellion'- parts of

which I no longersubscribeto - had come to form partof theCcarhuauran illagers' historicalmemory that anthropologists,

79 Unlike the central and southern provinces of the departmentof Ayacucho,whichhave been object of detailed ethnography, the northern provinces of La Mar andHuanta have remained mostly unexamined by modern anthropologists. To date (andto my mind), the richest 'ethnographic' data on Huanta still stems from the mono-

graphs produced by local writers during the 1950s, esp. Cavero, Monografia,vol. ii.

80 Recent scholarship in Peru has called attention to the fact that myths usuallyconsidered an expression of a certain 'non-Western' or 'Andean'worldview, such as

the myth of Inkarri, originated in sermons used during the Christianevangelizationof the Andean peoples. See Juan CarlosEstenssoro, 'Descubriendo los poderes de la

palabra',in GabrielaRamos (ed.), La Venidadel reino:religion,evangelizaci6n culturaen America,siglosXVI-XX (Lima, 1994); Juan CarlosEstenssoro, 'Les Pouvoirs dela parole, la predication au Perou: De l'evangelisation a l'utopie', AnnalesE.S.C., li

(1996); G. Ramos, 'Politica eclesiasticay extirpaci6n de idolatria:discursosy silenciosen torno al Taki Onqoy', Revista andina,xix (1992).

81 M6ndez, 'Los campesinos, la independencia y la iniciaci6n de la repiiblica'.





journalistsor government agents may eventuallyportrayas the

villagers'ancestraloral traditionsor 'inner'historicalviews!

Some time before the above conversationwith the mayor ofCcarhuauran ook place, I had alreadyresolved not to think interms of what the sources and the peoplewere 'hiding'from me,but rather what they revealed. And among the most significantthings the sources, in particular,have revealed are silences: asilence of colonial recordsregardingan 'Iquichano' entity, thatcontrasted with an unexpectedly loquacious early republicanperiod on the same subject. I say unexpectedbecause,as noted

at the outset, identities which, like the Iquichano,have beenlabelled 'ethnic' are commonly associatedin the Andes with adistantperiod, be it Inca, pre-Inca, conquest or early colonial,and aremostlytracedthroughcolonialsources.82 omeparadigmsareclearlynot workinghere, andthoughthe Iquichanocasemayindeed have its singularities, think we would be wrong merelyto brandit an exception.

Whatmy studyhasrevealed,in otherwords,is the significance

of nineteenth-century arlyrepublicannationalconflicts n defin-ing ruralpeople's regionalandpolitical dentities n AndeanPeru.These identities,whichsurfacedalongsideruralpeople'sinvolve-ment in and perceptionof independenceand post-independencewars, as well as early caudillista truggles,were to leave lastingimprintsinto the twentieth century. And this idea needs to bestressed nsofaras even mostrespectablehistoriansof nineteenth-

centuryPeru have fallen into the cliched assertion that peasant

communitieswere 'naturally solated' and remainedundisturbedby the politicalturmoil of the caudillo ra.83

None of this is meant to denythe decisivenessof the sixteenth-

centuryevents - let alone to replacethe foundational myth ofthe conquest'with a foundationalnational-periodmyth'. It does

imply, however,that the thinkingthat divides the historyof Peru

along a sharp line between periods 'before' and 'after' the

82 Although this picture has been changing recently as historians(and, increasingly,

anthropologists) 'rediscover' the nineteenth century, work on Andean 'ethnic groups'that incorporates this period is still rare, but in any case more abundant for otherAndean countries, and notably for Bolivia. See, for example, Thierry Saignes, Ava yKarai: ensayossobre a FronteraChiriguano, iglosXVI-XX (La Paz, 1990); Thierry

Saignes, Los AndesOrientales: a historiade un olvido(La Paz, 1985); Nathan Wachtel,Le Retour des ancetres:les Indiens Urus de Bolivie, XXe-XVIe siecle: essai d'histoire

regressive Paris, 1990).83 For example, Paul Gootenberg, 'Population and Ethnicity in Early Republican

Peru: Some Revisions', Latin Amer. ResearchRev., xxvi (1991), 145.

157



European nvasionhas to be qualified,while new research and

presentevents open new paths for periodization.It is not just a

'chronology'or an understandingof the past which is at stakehere,but ratherthe wayit shapes(andis shapedby) the languagewith which we perceiveand definesociety and humanityin the

present.For it is preciselythe fixationon the Europeanconquestas the ultimate source of historicalexplanationsof the presentthat lies at the base of the binary construct which has denied

historicityto Andeanpeoples, while conceivingof them as 'rem-

nants', vestiges, unevolvedand, ultimately,'ethnic'.

What VargasLlosa, undoubtedlyone of the most convincedproponentsof such conceptualizations,probably ignoredis thathis own discourse,so often self-portrayedas 'modern',rationaland opposed to every form of indigenismoas he defines it, aromanticview of Indians),itself constitutedbut a re-elaborationof the least reliableof indigenistanterpretations f theIquichanos,set forthby Ayacucho-bornVictorNavarrodel Aguilain 1939.84

Althoughthe idea of the Iquichanosas the warlike heirs of the

pre-HispanicPokras

(allegedly,one of the 'tribes' that formed

part of the so-called ChankaConfederation)was conceptualizedearlier,duringthe late nineteenthcentury, it was Navarro who

gave this idea its most elaborate orm.85

84For Vargas Llosa's views on indigenismo, ee Mario Vargas Llosa, La Utopiaarcaica: Jose Maria Arguedasy las ficciones del indigenismo Mexico City, 1996). A

widespread current of opinion that politically condemns Vargas Llosa for his anti-

indigenista(and, I would say, anti-Indian) standpoint seems not to notice that he

shares with indigenismohe most important of its philosophical premises: a dualisticview of society. For an example of this current of opinion, see Alberto Manguel'sotherwise insightful 'The Double Man', TimiesLit. Suppl., 7 Aug. 1998, 7-8. For aview more akin to my own, see Marisol de la Cadena,IndigenousMestizos: The Politics

of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991 (Durham, NC, 2000), esp. ch. 7.

Although I disagree with some of De la Cadena's broadest conceptualizations,I findher argument about the link between the indigenistas'and Vargas Llosa's thinking

compatible with my own views.85 A much-quoted source is a paragraphin an essay by the Ayacuchan physician

and geographer Luis Carranza,published originally in 1883: 'All of this region was

originally inhabited by the Pokras and Huamanes, tribes of the Chanka race; and

perhapsthe Iquichano Indians, who form a special community between Huanta andLa Mar, are today's

representativesof the ancient Pokras'. Luis Carranza,La Ciencia

en el Peru en el siglo XIX: selecci6nde articulospublicados Lima, 1988), 267 (myemphasis). Nevertheless, what for Carranza was a possibility ('perhaps') is turnedinto a certainty by Navarro. Although I have found sparse allusions to 'the Pokras'in connection with the 'the Iquichanos' in a number of government reports from the

1820s, no further elaboration of their pre-Hispanic roots can be made from this

period's sources. Moreover, recent researchcasts doubt on the very existence of 'thePokras': see Jaime Urrutia, 'Los Pokras o el mito de los Huamanguinos', Revista delArchivoDepartamiental e Ayacucho,xiii (1984).





In terms akin to the VargasLlosatext, Navarrodescribedthe

Iquichanosas people of rude and fierce customs,and sought to

prove this claim etymologically. Iquicha',he wrote, 'might bederived from [the Aymara]Iky (to behead,flay, peel, autopsy)',andhe proceeded o identifythe Iquichanos s 'beheaders f cada-vers86 an interpretationhatI found,at first,revealing.Couldthe Spanishofficersand the other caudillos f the 1820s Huanta

rebellion,who startedto popularizethe name 'Iquichano',havechosen anothermoreappropriate ame if whattheywished was tomake themselves feared and respected?Still, in the course of

broadeningmy researchI came to rule out this hypothesisalto-gether,forNavarrowas mistaken s to theetymology tself.Tracinghis own sources,one finds that in 1877, Paz Soldan,on whomNavarropurports o rely, states: Iquicha: ossiblya corruptionof

Iquitha:o sleep,to fornicate; r of Hikitha: o rootout, to husk,or

to have thehiccups'.87 he processby whichNavarro urneddesho-

jar ('to husk') into degollar'to behead')remainsa mystery,but itwassurelynot a questionof anylapse.Writingduringthe peakof

a boom of 'folklorist'and indigenistatudies throughoutPeru,Navarro ought,likemanyotherintellectuals henwritingon indi-

genouscultures, he creationof a historicaldiscoursewithwhich to

underpinhis own discourseof identityas a memberof a regionalelite. As withmanyhistoricaldiscourses ssessing dentity,thisonetook the form of an epic - hence the stress on the Iquichanowarlikeabilities,andallegedfiercetraits.88

Political ntentionsaside,little else differentiatedNavarro'scon-

ceptualizationsof the Iquichanosfrom those embracedin theanthropologicaleportwhich substantiated he VargasLlosa text.

Thus,theUchuraccaynformeid not createmythso muchas recast

86'They [the Iquichanos] were then tribes of the same magnitude as the Pokras,

beheaders of cadavers'. Victor Navarro del Aguila, Las Tribusde Ankcu Wallokc

(Cuzco, 1939), 63.87 Paz Soldan, Diccionariogeogrdfico,465. Paz Soldan's hypothesis on the roots of

the word 'Iquicha' was based on Ludovico Bertonio, Vocabulario e la lenguaAymara

([1612]; facs. edn Cochabamba,1984).88 'Heroic Ikichas of

yesterdayand

todaystill bear 80

percent Pokra blood in their

veins, and today persist in a rough, yet neither fratricidalnor barbaric,struggle: inch

by inch they are conquering the jungle, whence, before long, the resurgence of the

historic capital of the department of Ayacucho, that Wamankawhich has so manycharms as a landscapeand colonial archaeologicaljewel, will proceed'. Navarro, Las

Tribus,63. On Ayacuchan ntellectualthought, see Jefrey GamarraCarrillo, El Espacio

regional como pretexto: historia y producci6n cultural en Ayacucho, 1900-1950', in

Hiroyasu Tomoeda and Luis Millones (eds.), La Tradicci3n ndinaen tiemposmodernos

(Osaka, 1996), esp. 141-6.

159



it, with the Peruvianwriter's nvolvementn the wholecasedeeplyaffectinghis own literaryoutputand pervadinghis dualvision of

Peruviansociety.Known and acclaimeduntil the early1980sas aratherurbannovelist,VargasLlosawould, followinghis involve-

mentin the Uchuraccay nvestigation, tartplacing heAndes,and

the 'Indians',at the centreof his novels:the formerasaplace apartfromcivilization;he latter nvariably ncouth,alien to modernity,anddebased.89 s the novelist efthiscountrya frustrated olitician,followinghis defeatin the 1990presidential ace thatgavevictoryto AlbertoFujimori,Peru would not takelong in achievingpeace;

the Andes and the 'Indians'began movingin exactlythe oppositedirection o that of the imagecreated n VargasLlosa's novels-

that is (as I hope to have demonstratedn this essay), becomingever more ntegratednto the Peruvian tate,and ncreasinglywareof theirbelonging o the Peruviannation.

Insofaras this integrationhas come about at the expenseof aninternal war - perhapsthe most violent recordedin Peruvian

history and under the auspicesof a governmentwhichhasbeen

rulingwithundisguised uthoritarianismuring hepastfew years,it is not somethingI can happilycelebrate.But neither can I beblind to thisreality,which hasinevitablyaffectedmy investigation.It ispreciselyonaccountof thischangingpresent hatI havedevoted

myselfto rereading portionof Peru'shistory,and to rewriting t.

Mypurposehere has not beento denythe fact that Andeanpeopleshave an ancienthistory, so much as to emphasizewhat is most

commonlyforgotten (notably, outside Peru): that they have a

modernone. The creationof Iquicha, he makingandremakingofthe 'Iquichanoowns',and the whole issue of the 'Iquichanoden-

tity' - volatile, ethereal, ambiguous - cannot be comprehended

apartfrom the creation,makingand remakingof the republicanstate n nineteenthcentury.Nor cantheybecomprehendedutsidetheirconnectionwith the Peruvian tatetoday.

Universityof California, Cecilia Mendez-Gastelumendi

Santa Barbara

89This trend can be said to start with La Historia de Mayta (Barcelona, 1984),where the protagonist, of Indian origins, is endowed with entirely negative aestheticand political attributes; it continues with El Hablador(Lima, 1987), where 'Indians'

appear in a more idealized vein, but always apart from ('Western') civilization; andit culminates in Liturnaen los Andes (Barcelona, 1993), translated into English as,

160 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER171

the power of naming, or the construction of ethnic and national identities in peru myth,

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