El tema de la “gran rebelión” surandina de 1780-1783 ha retomado actualidad con la publicación del libro La Rebelión de Tupac Amaru (Lima: IEP, 2015), de Charles Walker. El autor ha optado por una historia narrativa (que presenta paso a paso el desarrollo de los sucesos, mostrando las incertidumbres de cada momento y evitando un análisis determinista), exponiendo de manera clara y crítica las interpretaciones sobre el movimiento rebelde (interpretaciones previas así como propias, aunque sin abundar en complicados debates historiográficos). Esta estrategia discursiva y analítica resulta más accesible a los lectores, que en el Perú de hoy parecen estar demandando conocer un pasado del cual todos creen saber algo, pero que no terminan de entender a cabalidad.

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The Tupac Amaru movement, strictly understood as the rebellion led by Jose ́Condorcanqui, who went by the Inca royal name Tupac Amaru, and his relatives in southern Peru between Cuzco and Lake Titicaca from 1780 to 1783, was one of the best-kept secrets in Latin American history. The largest uprising of native peoples against European rule since the conquest era, it is an obligatory reference in any survey of Spanish colonialism, Peruvian history, and peasant or indigenous unrest. It has been also the object of intense historiographical scrutiny since at least the 1970s onward, following the impulses of consecutive waves of socioeconomic history, history of mentalities, structural anthropology, collective action theories, and the like. Tupac Amaru has become in due time a transnational political and cultural icon as well. His name figured prominently in late twentieth-century Latin American guerrilla groups, folk songs, and even the American rap scene. Even those who know nothing about the Andean past know something about the self-proclaimed new Inca.

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The Tupac Amaru Rebellion stormed through the Andes from 1780 to 1783. The largest uprising in colonial Spanish-American history, it stretched from its base just south of Cuzco, Peru, into Charcas, in present-day Bolivia, with parallel skirmishes and revolts in what became Chile, Argentina, and Colombia. Rebels sacked haciendas, torched textile mills, and harangued the indigenous peasantry in the Inca language, Quechua, to rise up against the Spanish. The rebels presented a complex platform that included Inca revivalism and the abolition of a series of taxes and impositions on indigenous people.

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