In this slender book, Rafael Varón draws in the region of Huaraz, located in the Callejón de Huaylas, in the still mostly blank ethnohistorical map of sixteenth-century Peru. In the 1530s, the region became a major transit route of Europeans into the heartland of the crumbling Inca empire and thus a “locus of transculturation” (p. 47). Once the dust of conquest had settled, Huaraz was subject to the usual European demands and policies and the ever-present peril of disease.
Forced to adjust to the new pressures, the people of Huaraz gradually accommodated themselves to the new regime. Somehow the experience of the vanquished did not spell collective trauma, as Nathan Wachtel perceived it. They seemed to weather change fairly well, melding European elements with some Andean traditions into a new cultural synthesis. And yet, I wonder how much the author’s perception of social change as an organic process of adaptation and cultural syncretism—of restructuration, in French structuralist lingo—is shaped, as it were, by the sources he did not consider. Where are the censuses that etch the sharp descent of native people and denote the ever heavier burden of tribute on peasant households? Where are the testimonies of Indians who witnessed encroachments on their village lands and herds?
In fact, the author assesses the magnitude and intensity of local change largely on the basis of only three documents, and his main index of acculturation turns out to be the behavior and status of kurakas. Two 1558 visitas reveal the principal kurakas actually “benefiting as much from Andean practices as from those recently imposed by European domination” (p. 64). When the author turns to consider a dispute in 1643 between the moieties of Huaraz over the rightful possession of the town’s patron saint, he discovers a new generation of kurakas who are well versed in Spanish law and policy. Like most court records of intracommunity disputes, this litigation provides glimpses of the strained and tangled web of relations among members of a collectivity under Spanish rule. It is quite another matter, however, to extrapolate from a 1643 court case about a century of native accommodation. Furthermore, recent research in ethnohistory has breathed life into many tough and shrewd kurakas in the mid-sixteenth century who, in the scramble to claim or recover valley mitmaq lands, turned Spanish law to their own ends, or else built their cases on Andean principles or tradition. Kurakas used any means at their disposal to shore up the position of their ethnic groups in the floodtide of Spanish imperialism. What strikes me as interesting about the Huaraz case in 1643 is not the fact that some kurakas manipulated Spanish concepts of community membership and native origin, but that others still publicly interpreted basic rights through Andean principles.
Regardless of whether Rafael Varón put most weight on the side of change (accommodation?) or tradition (resistance?), it is a pity that the author did not publish the documents themselves along with his interesting and suggestive commentary.
