Sponsoring popular culture: The Jesuits, the Incas and the making of the pax colonial

Abstract

The Cuzco region was the principal theatre of protest, rebellion and sundry subversive activities in the Viceroyalty of Peru during the last half-century of colonial rule (c.1770–1824).1 Between 1780 and 1815 the region was the scene of two abortive revolutions against Spanish overlordship, as well as of three failed conspiracies and desultory murmurings that shared the same separatist goal. The common denominator of this welter of uprisings and conspiracies was the search for an Inca as leader of a movement that could provide a political alternative to continued Spanish domination, a search favoured as much by Creole groups as by indigenes. Now, the attractiveness of this concept of a new Incario for the surviving Incan and other indigenous nobility will be obvious, but its enchantment for the Creole elites of the region requires a more detailed explanation. Historians have traditionally ascribed the Creole acceptance of this concept either to romantic nostalgia for a supposed ‘Golden Age’ or to cynical opportunism, but our understanding of the concept has always been impeded by the lack of any clear formulation of its content in the eighteenth century itself. This search for an Inca to lead a rebellion and/or to serve as titular head of a restored Incario was an idea that ran like a red thread through the separatist politics of the era. It was an idea that was obviously imbued with some messianic or millenarian content. In the wake of the 1780 rebellion, the Bishop of Cuzco criticised the availability of a popular and prophetic literature that foretold the restoration of Tahuantinsuyu. For example, a 1723 edition of the Comentarios Reales de los Incas by Garcilaso de la Vega included a prologue by Gabriel de Cardenas which recorded a prophecy of just such a restoration of the Incario (in this case with the protection of England).2