Devouring the empire: the Pijaos’ anticolonial project in the sixteenth-century northern Andes

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the making of an anticolonial Indigenous coalition in the sixteenth-century northern Andes that came to be known as the Pijaos. I move away from interpretations of the Pijaos as a pre-Hispanic people who temporarily halted the Spanish conquest to argue that theirs was a political project that expanded in opposition to Spanish colonialism. The Pijaos went from being a few hundred people around the Saldaña River in the 1550s to thousands of people spanning the central Andean range. They spread a message of freedom from the New Kingdom of Granada and waged war against everyone who did not join their cause. To understand the historical construction of this Indigenous sovereignty and its expansion over half a century, we need to reflect critically on the Spanish stereotypes of the ‘indios caribes’ (cannibals), which abound in colonial archives. I show that the Pijaos mobilized Spaniards’ own stereotypes and fears of cannibals against them. What the Spaniards saw as a massive feast of bodies was in fact the incorporation of new peoples and groups into their political framework.