This article explores the changing meaning of Indianness during the long independence era. Focusing on six towns around Santa Marta, it discusses why these were considered Indian in the late colonial period, why they supported the royalist cause during the Independence struggles and how their inhabitants ceased to be identified as Indians within a few decades of republican rule. While recent subaltern studies have emphasised Indian resistance against the liberal, republican states formed in early nineteenth-century Latin America, here it is argued that some former Indian communities opted for inclusion into the republic as non-Indian citizens.
The study of marriageways in colonial Latin America has altered and deepened our understanding of the societies and cultures within the Spanish and Portuguese empires of the New World. During the last thirty or forty years a series of studies have explored the complex and varied patterns of marriage and family formation in colonial Latin America. Inspired by the work of Peter Laslett, Lawrence Stone and Louis Flandrin among others, historians of the region have produced a rich historical literature on the demographic, social and cultural aspects of colonial marriageways. Most studies have focused on the late colonial period, and the years after 1778 when the Pragmática sanción de matrimonios (first issued in Spain in 1776) was extended to Spanish America. One effect of the new law was an astonishing outpouring of reports, questions, lawsuits and regulations concerning marriage, which in turn have been seized upon by historians to reconstruct important aspects of late colonial Latin American societies. Despite the frequent use of these sources, the legislation itself has received little serious attention, and several basic misunderstandings prevail regarding its background and meaning. As a consequence, the political implications of marriage have been poorly understood.
only the colonial state but also the privileged position within it of this indigenous elite. Its almost unanimous response, as chapter six shows, was to proclaim allegiance to the Spanish crown and participate actively in the brutal repression of the rural insurgency that continued until 1783, notwithstanding the execution of Túpac Amaru and his immediate family in 1781. However, to the surprise and dismay of the collaborators, the inflexible peninsular bureaucrats who dominated local administration in the aftermath of the rebellion, preoccupied with both restoring order and increasing the yield of tribute, pursued a conscious policy of marginalising the potentially subversive Indian elite. Increasingly, caciques found themselves liable to be registered as tributaries, and local communities witnessed the tendency for the audiencia of Cusco to confirm the appointment to cacicazgos of well-connected creoles, essentially as tax collectors rather than as the defenders of indigenous rights. Conversely, the ethnic identities incorporated in the structures of the Hapsburg period were further blurred by the attempts of local creoles to appropriate an imagined Inca identity and legitimacy as part of their quest for regional autonomy from Lima, and even, as the so-called Rebellion of Pumacahua of 1814-1815 demonstrated, the creation of an independent Peru with Cusco as its capital. This is a rich, complex book, which throws much new light upon the history of the indigenous elite of southern Peru, particularly after 1780. It concludes with the conventional observation that the maladroit attempts of Simón Bolívar to improve the lot of the Indians by abolishing not only tribute but also cacicazgos and the inalienability of community lands brought in their train the marginalisation and pauperisation of the indigenous population of southern Peru in the post-1824, creole-dominated republic. One suspects that the next step for revisionism will be to question if this was really what happened, particularly in the Titicaca basin.
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