EPILOGUE
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AT THE CLOSE OF THIS JOURNEY through the lettered cultures of mid- and late-colonial Andeans, it is important to summarily highlight the continuity and change in Andean discursive production and social activism into post-colonial times. In the early nineteenth century, Andean writing reappeared, echoing the aftermath of the social upheavals of the late colonial era from the perspectives of both supporters and opponents.1 In the subsequent decades, a prevalent genre of Indian memoirs and autobiographies—oral, written, dictated, or a combination of these forms—is found, which became rather prolific in the twentieth century. The post-independence period in Andean Peru brought little change to the deteriorating social situation of indigenous peoples; according to their writings, we might think that the advent of capitalism only deepened their marginalization more generally. Indian memoriales abound in postcolonial times, exposing the depth of violence against Andeans in the Peruvian countryside as agrarian capitalism made inroads in the first decades of the twentieth century. The validation of oral history in late–twentieth-century academia has made texts by contemporary indigenous scholars and representatives of communities in the public sphere accessible to wider audiences. Native scholars re-created discourses of protest that also proceed from within community struggles with capitalism in the countryside and in mining and industrial areas.2
A prime example of this pattern of legal struggles conducted through extensive networks of Indian legal representatives and large-scale social mobilization into the postcolonial years can be found in Bolivia. During these years, Andean networks of caciques apoderados were constituted mostly of traditional indigenous authorities and came to represent communities from around the country in their struggle to recover communal lands and cacicazgos. Indian legal representatives, however, no longer traveled to the royal court in Madrid but instead went to the national courts in La Paz; rather than clerics as companions, they were accompanied by their lawyers, in search of social justice from the nation-state.3
Even though there are no known extant records of colonial indigenous women’s discursive and textual production, in the twentieth century the remarkable participation of indigenous women in the production of oral narratives and the reconstruction of their community struggles through memory reminds us of women’s involvement in the social and legal struggles, written documents, and direct negotiation with top authorities for the defense of community land rights—a culture inherited from the colonial Andean scholars and social activists studied in previous chapters.4
In the last fifty years, the intersection of religion and popular politics has been central to the social and political struggles of different groups of Latin American poor. What developed in the twentieth century as “liberation theology” bears an unmistakable similarity to the ideas and discursive strategies of the colonial Andean intellectuals studied in this book, although it is usually acknowledged to have begun only in the 1950s–1960s. As opposed to Andean scholarship, liberation theology’s tenets are broadly inspired by the modern values of the French Revolution and some Marxist tenets.5 Liberation theology became the religious doctrinal expression of some Latin American social movements in the 1960s—mostly in Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia, and Central America—which included key groups within the lower church and a few in the upper church (priests, missionaries, bishops, and lay religious organizations) and an array of social groups and organizations, including women, peasants, workers, and civic communities.6
Among liberation theology’s central tenets, the reformulation of biblical books such as Exodus as “the paradigm of enslaved people’s struggle for liberation”7 speaks directly to colonial Andean scholars’ discursive strategies. As established in Chapter 3, the “Representación verdadera” is a lamentation that paraphrases the words of the prophet Jeremiah on the captivity and oppression of the Hebrews by the Egyptians—a passage Andeans used to protest the hardship they experienced under Spanish rule and as a call for ethnic liberation. Late-colonial Andean leader José Gabriel Condorcanqui Túpac Amaru II also drew a parallel between the oppression of Indians in Peru and the captivity of the Hebrews in Egypt and presented himself as in line with the liberator prophet Moses and the divinely appointed King David.8
In most of the writings studied here, Andean scholars offered moral condemnation of colonialism, constructing Spanish rule as inherently sinful (violent, unjust, corrupt, and ultimately non-Christian). Similarly, liberation theology in the second half of the twentieth century advanced a critique of dependent capitalism as an immoral, unfair, and utterly harmful system—ultimately “a form of structural sin.”9 Although indictments of colonialism and the use of the Bible to support ideas of social justice were hardly the exclusive province of the Andean scholars studied in this book, these expedients were part and parcel of the early clerical critiques of Spanish conquistadors, such as those leveled by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás, and Fray Bernardino de Sahagún in the conquest era. While the specific tenets and agendas of such critiques changed over time, Andean critiques of colonialism through expressions of Christianity have remained a vital and long-lasting feature of Andean political culture. In the process, Christianity and its discursive form have been transformed and reutilized by Andean intellectuals who found no redress for their social marginalization in either the colonial or the national state.
NOTES
1. Sahuaraura Tito Arauchi, “Estado del Perú”; Túpac Amaru J. B., cited in Loayza, Cuarenta años de cautiverio.
2. Painemal Huenchal, Vida de un dirigente Mapuche; Encinas, Jinapuni.
3. Cusicanqui, “Indigenous Women and Community Resistance”; Churi Condori and Ticona Alejo, Escribano de los Caciques Apoderados.
4. Cusicanqui, “Indigenous Women and Community Resistance.”
5. Löwy, War of Gods. Liberation theology also responded to transformations inside the Catholic Church that produced theological reformulations grounded in modern social sciences and philosophy known as “social Christianity,” mostly in Germany and France during World War II. The movement attempts to offer a response to the major social, economic, and political changes occurring in Latin America since the 1950s, specifically the widespread phenomenon of poverty in capitalist-dependent societies. See also Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú; Bidegain, Historia del cristianismo en Colombia.
6. Löwy, War of Gods, 32.
7. Ibid., 34.
8. Durand Flores, Colección documental del bicentenario, 206, 237; Szemiński, “The Last Time the Inca Came Back,” 287.
9. Löwy, War of Gods, 35.