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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Tengo la satisfacción de presentar una entrevista con el gran Arnold “Arnie” Bauer, publicada originalmente en The Americas (Abril de 2013, 69:4) y traducida al español por Pablo Whipple y Giselle Gibbons. Desde mi llegada a Davis en 1992, Arnie ha sido un gran amigo, consejero y colega, lector y crítico de todos mis trabajos. Comparto con muchísima gente en Chile, y otras partes, una gran admiración por él como ser humano, historiador y escritor.

Su vida, de una granja de Kansas a California, con etapas en Marruecos, México, Berkeley, y, por supuesto, Chile, es fascinante. Aquí nos da algunas pistas autobiográficas, reflexionando sobre su inusual carrera académica, su amor por América Latina y su obra tan vasta como variada. Inmediatamente después de la entrevista hemos incluido fotografías de su álbum familiar y del vino que Bauer produce en su viña, así como las portadas de sus numerosos libros en inglés y español.

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