Devouring the Empire

Chapter 4 examines the making of an anticolonial Indigenous coalition in the northern Andes in the sixteenth century that came to be known as the Pijaos. It moves away from interpretations of the Pijaos as a pre-Hispanic people who temporarily halted the Spanish conquest to argue that theirs was a political project that expanded in opposition to Spanish colonialism. The Pijaos went from being a few hundred people around the Saldaña River in the 1550s to thousands of people spanning the central Andean range in the 1600s. They spread a message of freedom from the New Kingdom of Granada and waged war against everyone who did not join their cause. The chapter shows that the Pijaos mobilized Spaniards’ own stereotypes and fears of cannibals against them. What the Spaniards saw as a massive feast of bodies was in fact the incorporation of new peoples and groups into their political framework.