Voices from Vilcabamba: Accounts Chronicling the Fall of the Inca Empire

Abstract

Over more than three decades, Brian Bauer has been a constant, prolific leader in the expansion of anthropological and historical knowledge of the Inca and the ancient Andes more broadly, frequently involving students and other colleagues in research and publications that bridge the Spanish-English language barrier. In their recent book, Voices from Vilcabamba, Bauer and coauthors Madeleine Halac-Higashimori and Gabriel E. Cantarutti hew to this legacy. They present the decades (ca. 1536–1607) of historical struggle between the last Inca sovereigns, Spanish colonizers of various stripes, and other Indigenous groups throughout this rugged eastern Andean enclave. The volume consists of two short, densely detailed chapters of historical narrative, and five sections with English translations of early Spanish colonial documents (hence the plural “voices” from Vilcabamba).The first chapter covers the decades of Inca rule in exile, from Manco Inca’s rejection of Spanish co-rule in Cuzco to Viceroy Toledo’s administration, the invasion of the hardly accessible Vilcabamba, and the capture and execution of Tupac Amaru (in 1572). The second chapter deals with Spanish colonization of Vilcabamba from 1572 to circa 1607, concentrating on the tenure of governor Martín Hurtado de Arbieto, his unsuccessful campaigns to extend colonial control in the region, and settlement of colonial towns. Notwithstanding this general outline, one of the richest series of events—the history of Augustinian missionary to Vilcabamba, Diego Ortiz, and his afterlife as a candidate for sainthood—is included in the first chapter, even though its narrative arc extends beyond 1600. The organizational choice keeps thematic continuity: Ortiz was in Vilcabamba by Titu Cusi Yupanqui’s invitation and was killed on suspicion of involvement in the Inca’s 1571 death. However, in light of what the histories show of the mutability of social and political alliances and animosities in Inca and post-Inca Vilcabamba, this organization also illustrates how religious conversion or alliance making were not unilineal, irreversible chronological realizations, but instead processual.Following these summaries are sections with English translations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Vilcabamba documents. A perennial challenge in introducing undergraduates (and attracting future specialists) to Andean ethnohistory is the amount of critical material in Spanish. On this score alone, Voices is valuable and most welcome. The opening section includes the first English translations of writings from Martín de Murúa’s influential Historia general del Perú (ca. 1590). Next is the (ca. 1611) testament of Baltasar de Ocampo Conejeros, covering “the final years of independent Inca kingship in the Andes” (109), and subsequent efforts to colonize Vilcabamba, including military campaigns against the Pilcosuni. Next comes Diego Rodríguez de Figueroa’s (1565) compellingly related eyewitness report of Titu Cusi and his comportment during their meeting in Vilcabamba. The fourth translation is from a chronicle by a Spanish functionary who accompanied “Toledo during the fall of Vilcabamba and may have personally witnessed the execution of Tupac Amaru” (177). The last section draws on testimonies from multiple documents produced in the Augustinian investigations into Ortiz’s death and possible saintly miracles effected by his buried body. These new and corroborating details are the authors’ hardest won, and they highlight the authors’ indefatigable and thorough “archival fieldwork.” Such disentangling of historical/historiographic threads drives home the merit and value in uniting these documents in one volume. Each document is situated within its sociohistorical context, and copious endnotes enhance both the book’s narrative and document portions. Most interesting for interdisciplinary approaches, the notes also mention archaeological research (often Bauer’s own) that bears on specific items in the narratives.The book is full of the sorts of passages that pique ethnohistorical interest in different peoples navigating different times. For instance, Rodríguez de Figueroa’s references to cannibal Amazonians and Europeans’ bargaining with glass beads will be familiar to ethnohistorians. Why, following Ortiz’s execution, did Vilcabamba Indians repurpose his vestments and dispose of the soil on which he had said mass? And did a battle really end when the Spanish governor convinced his Pilcosuni foes to doubt the damage they had inflicted by covering his several wounds with ash, as a Spaniard reported? In some cases (wisely, I think) the authors examine suggested interpretations, in others they simply include the detail and continue their historical narrative.Voices from Vilcabamba’s narratives and documents have already been used in advanced historical and anthropological research; surely, this will continue. The book should also interest scholars of Andean history and colonial interactions in the early modern period. The volume’s succinct but comprehensive narrative chapters and its translated documents are well suited for use in large introductory and upper-division “area studies” courses.