UC Santa Barbara

“The Atusparia Rebellion: Political Culture, Race, and Modernity in Ancash, 1885-1900” investigates political culture in Latin America. My project examines indigenous mobilizations in late nineteenth-century Peru to provide a fresh perspective on how racial and ethnic categories were constructed. My dissertation examines the Atusparia Rebellion of 1885, the largest indigenous peasant rebellion of nineteenth-century Peru. Though scholarship has shown that unfair taxation animated the politics of this short-lived rebellion in the Andean region of Ancash, which was violently suppressed by the military after two months, my research explores why a sector of the press in Peru, a predominantly an agrarian country, reported that this mobilization in the Andes was a peasant communist revolution. Through an examination of newspapers, monographs, and government documents, I contend that narratives about indigenous people as “communist terrorists” were first articulated during the Atusparia Rebellion. In 1885, these representations generated fear among the ruling classes facilitated the exclusion of indigenous people from the democratic process, and justified state violence. Since then, these patterns of racism and violence have become more prevalent in Peruvian politics, most emphatically during Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980-2000) and the ongoing political crisis.