The result of a one-day conference held in Amsterdam in November 1994, this collection concentrates on rebellions, past and present, in Chiapas and the Andes because the Zapatistas and Sendero Luminoso have been “in the spotlights” (p. vii).
Much of the Chiapas material, essays by Jan De Vos, Kevin Gosner, and Jan Rus, contains recapitulations and, to some extent, reformulations of material previously published. That section is followed by three essays on the Zapatistas. Arij Ouweneel sketches the history of Chiapas since independence, stressing the hardships caused by land hunger and expropriation, population growth, and the various laws on the abolition of communal lands and price supports of the Salinas de Gortari regime. Via some advocating of the semiautonomous nature of the colonial pueblo de indios (a hobby-horse to which he returns in the appendix) and an occasional hard swipe at historians who have ignored or differed on the question (“we know that Gibsons findings are outdated, prejudiced, and sometimes even wrong,” p. 104), Ouweneel returns to the Zapatistas and finds that revolts such as theirs prove that socialist possibilities have not ended, as Francis Fukuyama claimed.
Garry Gossens tries to convince readers that the Zapatista revolt fits somehow into a cosmovision that “constitutes the core of how Maya people have thought and acted in history over the past two thousand years” (p. 109). Deep roots indeed! This section closes with a brief testimony from a Tzotzil on the impact of the revolt on him and others.
The Andean essays cover far more territory, of course, and more of them are original contributions. Ward Staving returns to his previous work on the Thupa Amaro rebellion. John Dawe, stretching the territory covered to southern Chile, gives an account of the last, nineteenth-century Araucanian uprisings against the Chilean state, contrasting his findings with the generalizations of several authorities, such as Ranajit Guha, Eric Hobsbawm, and James C. Scott. These last armed revolts were not the end of the story, Dawe points out, because the Mapuche continue to assert themselves by other means.
Lewis Taylor studies two revolts, the one in the central Peruvian Andes related to the Chilean occupation, and the Atusparia revolt (1885) in Ancash. More than a new account, this essay is a judicious assessment of the appropriate historiography and arguments; and it ends with a listing of the general causes of revolt and the extent to which they apply to these two.
Perhaps the most complex and interesting essay is the one by Michiel Baud on the “Huelga de los Indígenas” of 1921-22 in Cuenca, Ecuador. The author gathers all the factors involved, builds a tentative and comparative Andean model, and decides that the major cause around Cuenca was not local unrest but hostility to the intrusions of the oppressive and increasingly self-conscious state.
Dirk Kruijt’s general account of the military and Sendero in Peru ends an uneven and somewhat formless anthology redeemed by a few essays of interest and an excellent bibliography.
