Spanish conquistadors arrived in what is now Peru in the 1530s. Thanks in large part to internal divisions among the Indigenous, they quickly overcame and displaced the ruling class of what had been a remarkably capable and technologically proficient Imperial civilization, the Inca, which stretched from what is now Ecuador in the North to Chile in the South.
The Inca Empire had its center in Andean Cusco, but the Spaniards established the coastal settlement of Lima as the hub of their vast South American Empire. Many Indigenous people were put to work in the extractive activities that were the focus of Spanish economic interests, particularly in the mines of Potosí (present-day Bolivia).
Under the Spaniards, the Indigenous were subject to Catholic evangelization, and viewed with official suspicion, not least after a massive rebellion led by Túpac Amaru II in the 1780s.
But extractive colonialism also led to neglect, exacerbated when Peru became an independent country in the 1820s, and the remote countryside was left to large landowners, who often had a symbiotic relationship with Indigenous tenants who were effectively feudal serfs.
In this context, Indigenous people held on to much of their culture and structures of self-organization, if often in syncretic or hybrid form.
The twentieth- and twenty-first-century history of Peru is complex and sometimes goes against the grain of trends elsewhere in Latin America.
It includes uneven modernization, export booms and the expansion of capitalist markets, internal migration and urbanization, left-wing military dictatorship, Maoist insurgency, and an opening up to neoliberalism and tourism, among much else.
One constant, however, is preoccupation with what in the 1920s the renowned Peruvian Marxist, José Carlos Mariátegui called “the Indian question.” The 2021 election—and 2022 overthrow—of President Pedro Castillo was a symptom of what is still an unresolved history.
Today, in addition to Indigenous tribes in the Amazon, and migrants to coastal cities such as Lima, Andean Peru remains overwhelmingly Indigenous, with over seven million speakers of Quechua in the southern Andes (and many speaking Aymara near the borders of Bolivia).
But who counts as Indigenous and what it means to be Indigenous—and what Indigeneity means—has changed repeatedly over this long history, and remains contested and subject to dispute and struggle. Indigeneity has been invented and reinvented both by people who claimed to speak as Indigenous and by those who claimed to speak for them and about them. It is that making and unmaking that the course will study.
