The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics, by S. Elizabeth Penry

Abstract

This book by Elizabeth Penry gives a history of ordinary Andeans of the Audiencia de Charcas who, throughout the centuries of Spanish domination, defined themselves by reinterpreting colonial institutions and ideas. It shows how those people struggled to govern themselves and to acquire full rights. It also demonstrates how they moved from ‘a politics of hereditary nobility, the caciques, to a hybrid form of participatory democracy, with the town council at its heart, that had roots in both the Andean and Spanish worlds’ (p. 3). This history is based on an impressive analysis of historical sources coming from many archives, and written with microhistory tools: interwoven stories that make a complex transformation comprehensible. Penry poses an important question that is the main thread of the book: what is the común? She traces the use of the word ‘común’ from the late seventeenth century until it became widespread during the revolutions of the 1780s. Común was, in Penry’s view, ‘the Andean voice’ of popular sovereignty, a term that only referred to the common people and not to the hereditary nobility. It was, however, a term that was not always in use, so she needed to reconstruct its history. For this purpose, she focuses on two pre-Conquest federations, the Killaka and the Karanqa. Within their territories, she concentrates on five highland towns, refounded with Christian patron saints in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The geography of the book also comprises the distant valleys belonging to those federations, which were located within the Qaraqara territory.