The book is divided into three parts, with the first section featuring the graphic history. A half-brother of José Gabriel Condorcanqui Tupac Amaru, leader of the massive 1780 rebellion, Juan Bautista was arrested, imprisoned, and eventually exiled to Ceuta in 1788. The graphic history includes powerful images of the rebellion and the cruelty of the colonial system that forced Juan Bautista to witness the death of nearly his entire family (including his wife) through execution, miserable conditions in fetid prison cells, and grueling crossings of the Atlantic. While in exile, Juan Bautista would once again be swept up in a revolutionary tide, this time of the French Revolutionary Wars in Europe.
The bulk of the narrative stems from Loayza’s 1941 biography of Juan Bautista. However, Walker and Clarke should be applauded for their research and attention to detail. If a picture is worth a thousand words, I would think that a graphic history image is probably composed with a comparable amount of additional research. The accurate depictions of Andean clothing from the 1780s, soldiers’ uniforms and weapons of the era, ships, historic architecture, and much more should be applauded. Extensive use of maps also aids readers. Perhaps the most important value of this genre is that it brings into stark relief the human experiences and suffering of the era of Atlantic Revolution in ways that traditional historical narratives simply cannot convey. It is a very good example of the pedagogical value of graphic history.
With the help of Marcos Durán Martel, a rebellious friar from Peru also exiled to Ceuta, Juan Bautista employed the new political language of the revolutionary Atlantic to petition Spain’s new liberal government for his freedom in 1822. Returning to Buenos Aires with Durán Martel at a moment when many looked to the Inca past in the construction of a new national identity, the elderly Juan Bautista wrote his memoirs with the help of Durán Martel and passed away in 1827, never returning to his beloved Cuzco. The final part of the story investigates how nineteenth-century historians dismissed Juan Bautista’s story as apocryphal because they could not imagine such a historical subject having such a lucid and skilled memoir. Only in the 1940s was Juan Bautista’s narrative rediscovered and rehabilitated, by the dogged effort of Peruvian historian Francisco Loayza.
The second part of the book is a more traditional historical narrative that retells Juan Bautista’s story with more context. The third part contains selected excerpts of primary sources related to Juan Bautista’s narrative. Even though specialists of this era of Latin American history may find these sections repetitive, it is exactly this repetition that makes this book so valuable for instruction. Students are introduced to the narrative, then provided deeper historical context in the second part, and finally can interact with historical sources recounting the events in the third and final part. These two later sections also bring up important questions about how history is remembered (or misremembered) at times.
This book also should serve as a call to revisit the historical and pedagogical value of the biography. While biographies are sometimes unfairly dismissed, Witness to the Age of Revolution shows how they can not only weave multiple historical themes into one narrative but also put a very human face on these events. Walker highlights two additional figures and their fascinating times in this narrative, Durán Martel and Loayza, both of whom merit biographies of their own. Hopefully, a student inspired by this engaging book will follow this call for further research.
Published in The Americas vol. 79, n. 2 (April 2022), p. 363-5.
