The “Rebellion of the Barrios”: Urban Insurrection in Bourbon Quito

Abstract

IN 1765, one of the longest, largest, and most formidable urban insurrections of eighteenth-century Spanish America occurred in Quito. Throughout that year, the city was affected by a conflict which touched virtually every level of its society, shook the foundations of government, and eventually required a military expedition fully to restore royal authority. It was not the only challenge to government authority to occur in the Audiencia of Quito during the eighteenth century: there were other incidents of civil disorder of varying proportions and potency, mainly from among the large Indian population of the Ecuadorian highlands.' But in terms of its scale, duration, and the directness of the challenge that it presented to the colonial government, the insurrection of the capital city was without precedent or parallel. The Quito was, moreover, a significant episode in the history of late colonial Spanish America, for it was the first of the major insurrections provoked by the Caroline reforms of the later eighteenth century and one which, in some respects, prefigured the later rebellions of the Comuneros in New Granada and Tulpac Amaru in Peru. Yet, like much else in the history of Ecuador, the Quito has attracted relatively little attention from historians. In Ecuadorian historiography-where it has become known as the rebellion of the barrios and is regarded as an early avatar of independence-the events of 1765 have never been fully reconstructed, and analysis of their significance has been confined within a national framework.2 The only recent work has been that