Filled with almost unthinkable hardships (which, nevertheless, were not uncommon at the time for convicts and others deprived of their freedom), Juan Bautista’s narrative provides the storyline for the illustrated history and the accompanying critical essay, penned by Clarke and Walker, respectively. The graphics are well crafted and their rich, comic-like aesthetics, truly powerful. Maps, family trees, primary documents, and other visual resources effectively condense large amounts of information and vividly convey Juan Bautista’s plea, making the story easy to follow, even for students with little to no knowledge of the subject (here I speak from experience). The essay sets the historical context, weaving the main character’s biography into the Tupac Amaru revolt and, more broadly, the Age of Revolution. Juan Bautista’s life of imprisonment, liberation, and partial redemption, while generally impacted by the social events that gave this era its name, was dramatically affected by the Great Andean Uprising, Napoleon’s invasion and occupation of Iberia, Spain’s Liberal Triennium, and the Spanish American wars of independence. Juan Bautista’s experiences across the Atlantic put a human face to these epochal transformations. 

Crafted with an undergraduate audience in mind, Witness to the Age of Revolution is suited for a general readership as well. In terms of its useful- ness in the classroom, the book includes “Further Reading” and “Primary Source” sections (a simple “Chronology” would have perhaps enhanced its pedagogical value even further). The latter section, besides an abridged version of Juan Bautista’s memoirs, includes key documents in translation, which cover different aspects of his forty-year-long captivity and his life in Buenos Aires (including an 1825 letter to Simón Bolívar), as well as the aftermath of Juan Bautista’s published account, originally titled The Dilated Captivity under the Spanish Government of Juan Bautista Tupamaro, 5th Generation Descendent of the Last Emperor of Peru). As Walkers remarks, this latter period holds some of the keys for understanding why the last of the Tupa Amaros was never proclaimed a national hero, in Peru, in Argentina, or elsewhere. 

Students in survey and upper-division courses as well as those in advanced research seminars will be invited to ponder this and other aspects of Juan Bautista Tupa Amaro’s remarkable life, including the difficult questions surrounding The Dilated Captivity’s authorship. While the visual and textual materials put together by Walker and Clarke shed some light on the Andean uprising of the early 1780s, perhaps the most intriguing classroom questions and interpretations will stem from Juan Bautista’s transformation from traitor and outcast in the 1780s, to powerful symbol of resistance to and liberation from Spain’s tyrannical yoke in the 1820s. Though reflected in the book, this is a crucial point about Juan Bautista memoirs—in most instances our only source to reconstruct many details of his life—with which the authors could have done more. 

Students might want to reflect on what changed during these pivotal years. What was, in other words, that which Juan Bautista “witnessed”? As he reminisced about his forty- year ordeal and committed his thoughts to writing, Juan Bautista did not merely recount the recent colonial past, he also helped to resignify it, rendering it useful to the nascent Latin American nations struggling to gain (and legitimize) their independence from Spain. Within the new political context that he witnessed but also helped to forge, Juan Bautista’s life story seems to have contributed to a Creole (Spanish American) redefinition of his brother José Gabriel’s 1780 uprising as a first step toward independence from Spanish tyranny (in truth, it was hardly that). Similarly, Juan Bautista’s memoirs effectively recast his sufferings and the cruelty of his captors, which many in Peru and Spain saw as just punishment for his unspeakable crimes against God and King, as an irrefutable proof of his unwavering loyalty toward an Americano cause, an ordeal that, rather than being the source of indelible shame, merited praise and reward. This cause had now been embraced with patriotic fervor by the Latin American (mostly white) elites who agreed to Juan Bautista’s request for a pension in Buenos Aires in exchange of his writing the account he had presented to substantiate his claims “in his own handwriting.” In that sense, students might not help but wonder whether Juan Bautista was merely a witness or, in fact, the inextricable nexus between an era and its own political reinvention. 

Published in Early American Literature, Volume 57, Number 1, 2022, pp. 321-323.