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REVIEWS
| The Plebeian Republic: The Huanta Rebellion and the Making of the Peruvian State, 1820–1850. By Cecilia Méndez (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. xvi plus 343 pp. $23.95).
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| The issue of state building and the role of the peasantry has been the most important field for nineteenth-century Latin American history over the past decade. This book makes a substantial contribution to the debate and also to Peruvian historiography by examining a little-studied royalist revolt in the Andean highlands a few years after independence. The author creates a new category for understanding the early post-independence period (the "plebeian republic") in which she shows that during the rebellion peasants inverted racial and social categories in ways we had not suspected before. She also turns the historiography of the nineteenth-century Peru on its head, arguing that the Peruvian peasantry was successful in imposing its version of political culture in the first decades after independence. |
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The region she studies resonates in twentieth-century history, since it was in this part of the south-central Andean highlands of Ayacucho province that eight Peruvian journalists were massacred by peasants in 1983. The peasants asserted that they thought they were Shining Path insurgents. Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa headed a famous commission to investigate the tragedy, making the obscure Maoist insurgency famous throughout the world. He blamed the massacre on the lack of connection of the Andean peasants with the modern nation and on their innate rebelliousness. Méndez shows convincingly that the Vargas Llosa commission got it all wrong. |
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