In the latter decades of the sixteenth century, Spanish authorities in Peru implemented a massive social engineering project that moved over 1,000,000 indigenous people to new towns. The reducciones reflected Spaniards' apprehension about their tenuous control of the Inca empire and their distaste for Andean people's mobility. For the Spanish, people should pertain to a single pueblo and not rotate from one place to another. In this engaging and important book, S. Elizabeth Penry uncovers how people in what is today Bolivia adopted to these measures, creating a form of local democracy that endured over the centuries. She closes her study with the great Andean rebellions of the 1780s, but her findings clearly have repercussions until today.
Commoners in the Audiencia of Charcas, specifically the highland areas south of La Paz and Cochabamba, transformed the común de indios into both a space and a practice of local decision-making and solidarity....
