I have to say that I preferred the Lima Reader to The Lettered City. I found The Letter City at the beginning a bit confusing and the writing was an academic fancy writing that says a lot while not really saying anything. But as I read more of it I got the hang of understanding what it was saying which is basically about how cities in Latin America, like Lima, were constructed by the Spanish and why. Still not my favourite and not a nail biter for me.
I was quite interested by The Lima Reader though. I was a bit surprised by the little sections but it was cool to have little bites of different stories and information. The section about the failed rebellion was one of my favourites I think because right of the bat I was pulled in. I think I have heard about this rebellion in another class before but I can not be sure. One thing that really surprised me was that in the rebellion one of the goals was to keep the Catholic faith. I would have thought that they would want to get rid of it entirely as it was something forced on them by the Spanish conquerors and was being used to forced out the indigenous religious practices. But maybe something about catholicism spoke to people which was why they wanted to keep it around after the rebellion.
I would not have thought that mestizos would also be part of a rebellion but it makes sense. They would have also been restricted and oppressed by the colonial government, just in different ways than full blooded indigenous people. They would have had a stake in wanting change in their society too. Freedom was the main goal of the rebellion as rebels believed that everyone should be free to live their lives and that there should not be slavery. The mestizos would likely have also desired freedom and saw this rebellion as a good opportunity to improve their society and their lives.
The brutality that those who resisted were met with did not surprise me at all though. In the reading they talked about heads being cut off and salted and then left hanging up around the city as a warning to people about what would happen if they also tried to rebel. It was also mentioned that some people were sent into forced exile and one man got 200 lashes in public. I wonder if he survived that. I would think that a person would die from pain before getting to 200. But this type of brutality is not uncommon in Latin American history after the Spanish arrived. Even today violence on this level still happens, especially to indigenous people. It would seem that these governments have not left the colonial times behind and are still trying to beat the indigenous into submission. One thing that I was wondering was how history would be if the rebellion had succeeded. What would today look like if the Spanish had not won?
This last question allows us to speculate a little. We generally think of the Conquest as a series of defined and definitively established events, however it is a process that was carried out in stages and had different strategies depending on the native cultures that the conquistadores faced. It is true that violence was always present. And unfortunately that can be said of the present. But it is also necessary to see the discontinuities, because we run the risk of seeing historical processes not in their concrete elements to understand which forms of violence remain almost unchanged and which have become more complex (or even subtle, but no less dangerous).
Hi Anja, I also enjoyed reading the Lima Reader as it is a collection of essays from various authors. You bring up an interesting question, one thing that comes to mind would be that we would probably have a more complete knowledge set of “indigenous practices”. For example in our tour of Museo Larco, it was mentioned that some practices such as the accounting system with the thread were lost due to the imposition of Spanish rule and the refusal to inform the settlers of the practice, which was compounded with the assimilation of the indigenous peoples. Perhaps if rebellion was successful, we would have the knowledge to read these records. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!