Q&A with Slavery and Utopia author Fernando Santos-Granero

In the first half of the twentieth century, a charismatic Peruvian Amazonian Indigenous chief played a key role in leading his people, the Ashaninka, through the chaos generated by the collapse of the rubber economy in 1910 and the subsequent pressures of colonists, missionaries, and government officials to assimilate them into the national society. In Slavery and Utopia, Fernando Santos-Granero reconstructs the life and political trajectory of the leader known as José Carlos Amaringo Chico. The people called him Tasorentsi, which is the name the Ashaninka give to the world-transforming gods and divine emissaries that come to this earth to aid the Ashaninka in times of crisis.

Santos-Granero demonstrates that, despite Tasorentsi’s constant self-reinventions, the chief never forsook his millenarian beliefs, anti-slavery discourse, or efforts to liberate his people from white-mestizo oppression. Slavery and Utopia thus convincingly refutes those who claim that the Ashaninka proclivity to messianism is an anthropological invention. We asked Fernando Santos-Granero a few questions about his book, the continued murders of Indigenous leaders in Guatemala and Brazil, and the evolution of Indigenous resistance.

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Describe the self-reinventions of Tasorentsi, the messianic Ashaninka leader that is the focus of your study.

José Carlos Amaringo Chico, also known as Tasorentsi, or “all-powerful blower world transformer,” lived during a tumultuous period in the history of Peruvian Amazonia, from the beginning of the rubber boom era, around 1875, to the beginning of the mass colonization of the region in the late 1950s. Throughout this period, Tasorentsi went through multiple and dramatic changes, sometimes in response to external events and sometimes as the result of an inner, moral conversion. In all these instances, he was able to reinvent himself in such a way as to maintain a leading position as either a secular chief or a divine emissary, or a combination of both.

As a young boy, he began working as a debt-peon for a local rubber extractor. During that time, he learned Spanish, became acquainted with the ways of white people, and acquired his Christian name. At around eighteen, he escaped from his boss and begun acting as an intermediary in the slave trade that was promoted and controlled by white rubber extractors and their Indigenous partners. Later on, he was directly involved in the capture of Indigenous slaves and was feared as a renowned warrior chief and shaman. In his mid-thirties, however, he experienced his first moral conversion and quit his slaving activities. Combining an anti-slavery and anti-white discourse with millenarian promises, he inspired a widespread Ashaninka movement that changed the region’s social landscape in the aftermath of the rubber era (1912–1914). 

Conibo group, Ucayali River, 1900s. Known as “Lords of the Ucayali” for the dominion they had historically exerted as pirates and raiders along the Ucayali River, the Conibo together with the Shipibo played an important role in the 1915 uprising and were harshly persecuted. Some of their leaders were captured and sent to prison in Iquitos. Source: A. Miles Moss, A Trip into the Interior of Peru (Lima: Printed by Charles F. Southwell, 1909), 106. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú.

A year later, in 1915, he expanded his influence throughout the region, becoming the paramount leader of a multiethnic uprising of the Ashaninka, Conibo, Yine, and Amahuaca, who until then had been bitter enemies. This feat was only possible through a millenarian discourse that promised liberation from white people, a deep transformation of the world, and the attainment of immortality. With the help of former Indigenous slavers, whom he convinced to join him, he managed to expel most rubber extractors from the region. In time, the government crushed the uprising and Tasorentsi had to hide, but for many years the region was free of white slavers. In the 1920s, having heard of the arrival of a “white god”—Adventist missionary Ferdinand Stahl– Tasorentsi experienced his second moral conversion, adopting an indigenized version of Adventist doctrine, abandoning violence as a means of fighting for the rights of his people, and becoming a very active “people-gatherer” on behalf of the Adventist Church. He never agreed to baptize, for this would have interfered with his shamanic activities and, particularly, with the ayahuasca séances he led to speed up Christ’s second coming.

Although the region’s white landowners pursued, imprisoned, and tortured him, Tasorentsi never stopped fighting for his people’s rights. During the remainder of his life, he promoted the nucleation of people in small settlements to await the arrival of Christ, while at the same time supporting peaceful coexistence with white people. At the same time, however, he encouraged Indigenous economic autonomy, strongly opposed debt-peonage, and endorsed formal schooling as a means of leveling the playing field with white people.

How has the field of anthropology contributed to the "historical amnesia" apparently surrounding the struggles of the Ashaninka?

On the contrary, anthropologists have been crucial in highlighting the long history of Ashaninka resistance against white oppression. Stefano Varese, Eduardo Fernández, Michael Brown, Soren Hvalkof, and Mariella Villasante, to name but a few, have written extensively on Ashaninka past and present-day struggles. Ashaninka people remember their struggles, which are often the main subject of their oral histories. For various reasons, however, in Ashaninka oral tradition there has been less focus on Tasorentsi’s struggles than on other confrontations with white people. I believe the main reason for this “historical amnesia” is that Tasorentsi was not a doctrinally pure Adventist, and the Adventist hierarchy therefore regarded him as somewhat suspect and left him out of their historical narratives; thus, many present-day Ashaninka Adventists do not remember him. This has been compounded by the fact that, for various reasons, Tasorentsi’s political activities have escaped the notice of Amazonianist anthropologists and historians. The main reason for this omission has been the fact that Franciscan missionaries, with the Jesuits, were Peruvian Amazonia’s main early historians, and they had no presence in this region at the time of Tasorentsi’s uprisings. My main objective in writing this book has been to draw attention to this remarkable individual, reintroducing him into Ashaninka historical consciousness and opening the subject to academic scrutiny.

Can you describe the immense body of original materials that you researched for this book? What were the most surprising discoveries to come out of those archival documents, oral histories, musical recordings, and visual works?

I did research in numerous archives and libraries in Peru and the United States. One of my first surprises was learning that the regional and national press had amply covered Tasorentsi’s Ashaninka movement of 1912–1914 and the 1915 multiethnic uprising. Not only that, it also brought to national attention the plight of Amazonian Indigenous peoples under the oppressive labor conditions of the rubber era, generating a heated debate about the causes of Indigenous hostilities. What surprised me was that many journalists and personalities justified Indigenous violence as being the direct result of the oppression and slaving activities of white rubber extractors. Also surprising was the amount of documentation generated by the conflicts between Adventist missionaries and their Indigenous supporters, on the one hand, and white landowners and regional authorities, on the other. The fact that Adventist missionaries were often US citizens of German ancestry meant that every time they were harassed, they informed their consulates. The latter pressured the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which, in turn, prompted regional authorities to investigate the matter. A great amount of information on Tasorentsi’s activities as an Adventist people-gatherer was preserved through this means.

Score of Tasorentsi’s song. Tasorentsi’s song does not resemble any of the known styles of Ashaninka songs, but it has some of the gravity of beshiriantsi worshipping songs. It betrays elements of both the Andean huaynos of the neighboring highland peoples of Pasco and Junín and the ancient Catholic hymns sung in Franciscan missions during colonial times. Courtesy of Bernd Brabec de Mori.

Yet another surprise was the realization that anthropologists who had worked among the Ashaninka in the 1960s and 1980s, such as John Bodley and Jeremy Narby, had collected much information about Tasorentsi’s activities and were generous enough to share it with me. Especially important was a song composed by Tasorentsi and recorded by Narby, provided by someone who had learned it when he was a child. In this song, the charismatic leader encourages his listeners to seek their Father, the solar divinity; announces that the divinity is coming, that he is near; and reveals that he awaits his people in the Sky River of Youth and will make them immortal. I never expected to obtain such a direct testimony of Tasorentsi’s millenarian discourse: one that allowed me to understand the appeal that he had for the region’s Indigenous peoples.

Equally surprising was the fact that I managed to find not one but three photographs of Tasorentsi—a remarkable feat given that they were taken in the 1920s. My greatest surprise, however, was to meet Tasorentsi’s youngest son. I knew that Tasorentsi had had many children and that his descendants lived somewhere along the Pachitea River. One day, an Ashaninka leader, Alcides Calderón, told me that he knew one of Tasorentsi’s nephews and that he was willing to accompany me to interview him. After a long boat trip, we arrived in Segundo Arroyo’s home. As it happened, he was not Tasorentsi’s nephew, but his youngest son. What he shared with me about his father’s last years and death, about which I knew little, helped me finish my book. But, more importantly, knowing him allowed me to perceive Tasorentsi, who until then had been only a historical figure to me, as a real, flesh-and-blood person with many gray areas, like any human being.

Could a figure like Tasorentsi emerge today, and how might the Peruvian authorities and transnational entities respond?

We know of many charismatic Indigenous leaders –whether Ashaninka or not—who, through a millenarian and anti-white discourse, managed to mobilize the Ashaninka against white domination. The best known of these leaders was Juan Santos Atahualpa, a man of Andean origin who, in the mid-eighteenth century, managed to unite the Ashaninka and their Amazonian neighbors to fight the Spaniards. But there were others in the 1890s, the 1910s, the 1940s, and the 1960s, and even as late as the 1970s. So it is quite possible that a figure like Tasorentsi might emerge once more. In fact, a few years ago, during a time of fast and aggressive expansion of extractive activities (oil, gas, timber, and gold) in Ashaninka territory, all kinds of rumors began to spread about how white people intended to exterminate the Ashaninka by abducting people using mysterious flying machines. This created the kind of frenzy that characterizes the early stages of Ashaninka world-transforming movements.

I imagine that if a Tasorentsi-like figure appeared today, the response of the State, extractive companies, and regional authorities would be similar to that of their peers in past ages—to wit, they would attempt to silence him or her through whatever means possible. The only advantage that such a figure would have today is that communication is so fast and widespread that it would be difficult to suppress him or her without generating national and international outrage. Yet the killing of Indigenous leaders continues in Guatemala and Brazil, to name just a few examples, and nothing much happens.

Tell us what you are working on in your role at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

At present, I am engaged in a new research project titled “The Reconquest of Chanchamayo: Frontier Expansion, Modernization, and Nation-Building in Postcolonial Peru, 1847–1891”. The reconquest of Chanchamayo, the Amazon region closest to Peru’s capital, took place in the context of the rapid expansion of internal frontiers that swept the Americas in the second half of the nineteenth century. It overlapped the conquest of the West in the United States (1848–1881), the occupation of Araucania in Chile (1861–1883), the conquest of Patagonia in Argentina (1872–1884), and Brazil’s march toward the west, which began in 1864 and has not ended yet.

The reconquest of Chanchamayo—a region that was free from white presence from 1742 to 1847—was seemingly prompted by President Ramón Castilla’s vision of a more modern, civilized, and territorially integrated country. There is evidence, however, that the economic interests of Andean landowners and miners and the civilizing agenda of Franciscan missionaries may have lurked in the background, prompting the State to “reduce” the local Yanesha and Ashaninka populations and occupy their lands. The objective of this project is to disentangle the relative weight of these various social actors in achieving these goals. At the same time, it seeks to examine the position of these actors with regard to what was then called “the Indian problem,” and assess how their goals and actions shaped the evolution of Indigenous resistance. Combining archival materials with oral sources, I intend to bring back to life the voices of these diverse actors and, especially, to rescue from oblivion the will, agency, and creative thinking of the Yanesha and Ashaninka peoples.

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Q&A with Peruvian Novelist Alonso Cueto

As the latest work in our Latin American Literature in Translation series, The Wind Traveler showcases the mesmerizing storytelling of Alonso Cueto at the top of his career. At the heart of his latest work is a seemingly ordinary man named Ángel, who sells kitchenware at a store in Lima. In the early 1990s, he had served as an army soldier, engaging in brutal acts whose aftermath still reverberates. He is forced to reckon with his past when a woman he was instructed to kill enters the store and buys a few items. How can she still be alive? What's more, how can she not recognize Ángel? Remarkably, she asks him to deliver her purchases to her

house. From this moment, Ángel feels compelled to make amends through any means necessary, even if it requires sacrificing his life of quiet retirement. Publishers Weekly gave the translation a starred review, writing:

“Staggering . . . Cueto imbues every page and character with the brutal consequences of war in his compulsively readable story of a man’s reckoning with a history of violence. Wynne and Mendez’s splendid translation brings readers an essential work of Peruvian literature.”

We asked Alonso Cueto a few questions about the English translation of The Wind Traveler. The book publishes on October 13, 2020. 

The Wind Traveler is set in Peru in the aftermath of guerrilla warfare and the insurgent violence of the Shining Path. Please describe the historical context.

The Shining Path war started in the context of the deep inequality of Peruvian society and the abandonment of the state in rural areas. In the area of Ayacucho, in the Peruvian southern Andes, a professor of philosophy—Abimael Guzmán, by then in his late forties—declared the insurgence of the group. Its first act was to burn the ballot boxes the day of the presidential elections in April 1980. Soon afterwards, inspired by the hard line of the Communist Party of China, members of the group demonstrated their disagreement with Deng Xiaoping’s government by hanging dogs from posts in downtown Lima. The dogs symbolized the new members of the Chinese Communist Party and the hanging of the animals was meant to meant to represent their symbolic execution as traitors. During the eighties and early nineties, Shining Path conducted a violent campaign in the southern Andes and then in the rest of the country. The execution of mayors in towns in the Andes, the massacre of villagers, and the explosion of buildings and banks were very frequent in those years. The government sent the army to Ayacucho and other areas. Soon the methods of the army became as violent and heartless as the ones implemented by the Shining Path. Many soldiers were forced to commit terrible crimes and the memories haunted them for the rest of their lives. The Wind Traveler tells the story of a man who was in the army and recognizes a prisoner of war whom he thought he had killed.

There is an element of haunting in The Wind Traveler, but this is neither science fiction nor magical realism. How would you describe this in formal terms and what makes it especially appropriate for writing about violent histories?

I agree. The memory of the main character has always haunted him and he is very aware of the power of its images and voices. The story is told from his point of view. The character deals with his past and I think it reflects everybody’s experience. Somehow we all have a permanent, conflicted relationship with our own past. The same can be said of societies and communities and their relationship with common memories. My first book of stories was called The Battle of the Past. Talking about this title, a friend once told me that we can still win the battle of the past; in other words, we can try to be at harmony with our own memories.

In one of the very first pages of The Wind Traveler, the character sees this woman, whom he thought he had killed, enter the store where he works. She doesn’t seem to recognize him and acts as any other customer would. This the way the past works sometimes, just surprising us when we least expect it to. I think of the quote by L. P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” But it is also true that the past is our own country always and that we have it whispering its words and showing its images to us all the time. In The Wind Traveler, this past takes the shape of a woman who enters the daily life of the main character.

The narrative perspective is unique: oscillating between past and present, shifting from what initially seems like third-person omniscient to include first-person interjections. What can you tell us about the narrator?

I always try to change the narrator because I think all of us see our lives from different perspectives. We also have in our lives times with an omniscient narrator and times with a very intimate connection with ourselves. The way we talk to ourselves at different times of the day is an indicator of the changing of our own narrators. It is difficult to make these changes in a novel but it is also the best way to reflect our own life narration. I try to adapt the type of narrator to the moment of the story, depending on how the character sees himself in relation to his surroundings.

A character uses the Quechua word ñawpa, which feels central to this novel and your writing broadly. Please define this word for us.

The word ñawpa is an expression of the way the Quechua world imagines time as a whole. It means both future and past. Furthermore, it can also be said that the idea of the future for the Quechuas has to do with what is behind you, whereas the idea of the past is what is in front of you. In other words, we all face the past since we know what happened but we have our back toward the future because we don't know what will happen. In another sense, ñawpa means both in front of and behind. The word expresses a sense of time as a unity and excludes the Western division of time as divided by terms such as past, present, and future. Time is a whole and the same can be said about space in the Quechua sense of reality. This idea of the past as something that is always in front of us although it is also behind us fascinated me from the beginning, and this is why I included it in the novel.

A number of your works have been translated many times over. Is the translation process different for every book?

The translator is a creator, a second writer, who adapts the instrument of the original words of the writer to new sounds, meanings, and nuances. I can only say that the translators of this novel have done a wonderful job.

Alonso Cueto is an award-winning novelist, playwright, journalist, professor of journalism, and author of more than thirty books whose works have been translated into sixteen languages.

Frank Wynne is a literary translator from Ireland, the author of I Was Vermeer, and the translator of Cueto's The Blue Hour.

Jessie Mendez Sayer is a literary translator, editor, and former literary scout. She studied history and Spanish at the University of Edinburgh.

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Dispatches from the Latin American Studies Association International Congress in Peru

By Kerry Webb, Senior Editor

Acquisitions areas: Latin American and Pre-Columbian studies, Latin American history, Latino/a studies

Series: Border Hispanisms, Historia USA, Inter America

Recently, my colleague Inés ter Horst and I attended the 2017 Latin American Studies Association meeting in Lima, Peru. We quickly got into the swim of things with a walk along the famed Malencón, situated on the edge of cliffs overlooking beautiful views of the beaches of Lima and the Pacific Ocean, and a lunch of some delicious ceviche. To set up our book exhibit, after lunch we made our way to Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, the site for most of the panels at the conference and which was also celebrating its 100th anniversary.

Despite the hustle and bustle of the city, it was hard not to be constantly reminded of the deep and rich history of Lima and Peru, from the archaeological sites of many little-known, pre-Incan civilizations to Lima’s unique history as a colonial stronghold of the Spanish Empire in South America. In fact, there was an Incan site right on the edge of campus and adjacent to the book exhibit hall. When I asked one of our authors who was from Lima what it was, he said that it was one of the Incan roads that was part of a massive transportation network that stretched the length of the Incan Empire at it’s height, from Colombia all the way down to Chile and Argentina.

It was the perfect place to showcase our books, including several recent additions to the list that are focused on Peruvian and Andean studies such as The Peculiar Revolution: Rethinking the Peruvian Experiment Under Military Rule, Kevin Young’s Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Boliva, and Gary Urton’s Inka History in Knots: Reading Khipus as Primary Sources. We were also happy to learn that three of our recent books won major awards at LASA: Barbara Mundy’s The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, The Life of Mexico City won the Bryce-Wood award and Mark Christensen’s book The Teabo Manuscript: Mayan Christian Copybooks, Chilam Balams, and Native Text Production in Yucatan won the Mexico section’s award, while Inez Hernandez-Avila and Norma Cantú’s anthology of Tejana cultural production Entre Guadalupe Y Malinche: Tejanas in Literature and Art won the prize for the Latino studies section, further highlighting published work from other important parts of our publishing lists for LASA.

This conference is always a special opportunity to meet with current and potential authors, and we were especially pleased to be one of the US presses that were able to showcase our books and meet with authors, many of whom reside outside of the States, at a conference that, more than ever, has a truly international flavor.

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Steve Bourget on Sacrifice, Violence, and Ideology Among the Moche

In a special precinct dedicated to ritual sacrifice at Huaca de la Luna on the north coast of Peru, about seventy-five men were killed and dismembered, their remains and body parts then carefully rearranged and left on the ground with numerous offerings. The discovery of 

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this large sacrificial site—one of the most important sites of this type in the Americas—raises fundamental questions. Why was human sacrifice so central to Moche ideology and religion? And why is sacrifice so intimately related to the notions of warfare and capture?

Steve Bourget is a world authority on the Moche and author of Sex, Death, and Sacrifice in Moche Religion and Visual Culture and coeditor of The Art and Archaeology of the Moche: An Ancient Andean Society of the Peruvian North Coast. He is currently a research associate in the Department of Anthropology at the Université de Montréal. We asked him some questions about his latest book, Sacrifice, Violence, and Ideology Among the Moche: The Rise of Social Complexity in Ancient Peru. His study uncovers some fascinating relationships, like how El Niño conditions influenced broader aspects of Moche religion and cosmology, how a concomitant relationship emerges between the practice of human sacrifice and the rise of social complexity across New World societies, and how uniting iconography with archaeology helps scholars deepen our understanding of the Moche people and their power structures.

Why was human sacrifice so central to Moche ideology and religion?

The practice of human sacrifice in any ancient society is a complex matter. Each situation must be approached with caution and understood within its own cultural context. In the Moche case, the archaeology and its visual culture have shown that this ritual practice was closely related to their power structure. In death, high-ranking individuals are regularly buried with retainers who appear to have been sacrificed, and in life, sophisticated sacrificial rituals were apparently carried out to celebrate the link between these individuals with the divine domain.

Remains of a pair of victims, precisely laid in opposite directions on the ground of the sacrificial site

Ritual violence and sacrifice clearly index the power of the ruler and separate its status from that of the Moche population in general. The most complex rituals depicted in the iconography, the remains of which have sometimes been detected in the archaeological record, often culminate with human sacrifice and the exchange of the blood of the victims between high-status individuals. In these contexts, the rulers possess, like divine beings, the power over life and death. The presence of the same individuals instigating the cycle of ritual violence in the scenes of ritual warfare leading to capture and, eventually, human sacrifice indicates that they oversee all the aspects of the ritual process. They are both the instigators of this violence and the recipients of the benefits of sacrifice.

Therefore, the use of ritual violence and human sacrifice is structurally associated with the development of Moche power and the nature of rulership. In addition to creating a fundamental difference between the rulers and the rest of the society, human sacrifice reinforces the sacred dimension of these individuals and that of their lineages.

Explain how the ritual ecology of El Niño conditions influenced broader aspects of Moche religion and cosmology.

Firstly, the term "ritual ecology" refers to the use of the natural environment in its broadest sense to anchor and validate ideological precepts and religious beliefs disseminated by Moche elite. Therefore, the animal species and the environmental conditions selected by the Moche systematically contributed to highlighting and reinforcing certain ideological aspects. El Niño conditions were embedded in this overall scheme to create a symbolic system of everything that was both ritually and ideologically significant for the exercise of power. By using such an elaborate metaphorical system centered around the impact of El Niño events in the north coast region, their objective was to provide a rationale for the exercise of power and rulership. During the humid conditions brought by El Niño, the land is drastically transformed, the desertic landscape is transformed, countless animal species thrive and multiply, both on the land, in the air and in the waters, and the limitless power of the gods become apparent in the physical world. Harnessing the power of this climatic event to serve their ideological needs has to be recognized as one of the most brilliant ideas ever devised by an Early State society.

'Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between' Q&A with Ananda Cohen Suarez

Examining the vivid, often apocalyptic church murals of Peru from the early colonial period through the nineteenth century, the new book Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes explores the sociopolitical situation represented by the artists who generated these murals for rural parishes. Arguing that the murals were embedded in

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complex networks of trade, commerce, and the exchange of ideas between the Andes and Europe, Ananda Cohen Suarez also considers the ways in which artists and viewers worked through difficult questions of envisioning sacredness.

Ananda Cohen Suarez is an assistant professor of history of art at Cornell University. She is editor and principal author of Pintura colonial cusqueña: el esplendor del arte en los Andes. She has also published articles in the journals Colonial Latin American Review, Americas, and Allpanchis. We talk to Professor Suarez about her work, her intentions, the preconquest and postconquest visual world in Latin America, and the challenges she faced in documenting, photographing, and writing about mural painting. 

In the region you cover in your book, what are the differences between rural art production and how religious art changed in urban centers?

I have found that by the seventeenth century, we begin to see a shift in artistic production between the city of Cuzco and its rural environs. The churches and convents in the urban center tend to feature larger-than-life canvas paintings, elaborate gilded retablos, and an array of aesthetic embellishments that endow these religious spaces with a sense of grandeur and architectural complexity. Rural parishes located in Cuzco’s southern provinces are usually much smaller with humbler interiors, especially the farther you travel from the city. You see a sparser prevalence of gold and silver, given their high cost. The artworks contained within these churches are often produced by so-called “second rate” artists whose prices would have been more affordable for the priests, donors, and confraternities that commissioned their works. However, their visual impact is no less stunning. It is in these spaces that you find the exuberant murals featured in this book.

Interior view of the Church of Rondocan, Acomayo Province, with murals dating to the late 17th or 18th century. Note the combination of trompe l’oeil framed paintings, depictions of angelic musicians, and textile murals lining the choir and nave. Photo by Raúl Montero Quispe.

Mural painting remained a prevalent art form in the rural Andes well into the nineteenth century. Even today, you can find political slogans and imagery painted along the exteriors of residences and stores throughout the Andean countryside. Murals were expected to do much of the “heavy lifting” for church decoration, imitating retablos, picture frames, textiles, and an array of other expensive materials through the medium of tempera on adobe walls. These murals began to develop their own aesthetic language by the eighteenth century, and in fact, we can trace uncanny similarities across far-flung mural programs by this period, demonstrating the cohesiveness of rural artistic networks across the southern Andes.