By creatively combining historical and archaeological lines of inquiry, Di Hu explores how ordinary workers in the textile mill of Pomacocha (Vilcashuamán, Huamanga, Peru) gradually developed “social landscapes of resistance” to colonialism. Spanning the 450 years from the Inca conquest to the fall of the royal government, the book revisits the complex relationship between nonviolent, everyday forms of resistance to compulsory labor dating back to the early centuries of colonial rule and the more open, violent, and widely coordinated resistance that contributed to naming the period from about 1780 to 1825 the Age of Revolutions.
Hu argues that small, cumulative, quotidian changes centered on Pomacocha and other textile workshops (obrajes) in the Vilcashuamán region gradually shaped a series of “rebellious landscapes” that, though punctuated by seemingly sudden outbursts of violence, actually configured effective forms of ongoing resistance within a wider horizon of latent possibilities. As important, it was the emergence of these rebellious landscapes and the social networks that held them together that explains why local revolts grew into generalized rebellion at the end of the colonial era. Obrajes were common targets of rebel violence as well as sites for the emergence of the rebel solidarity, consciousness, and organization that made those rebellions possible.
With the aid of a host of methodologies, most prominently archaeological excavation, architectural analysis, and deep archival research, Hu takes the reader into the rooms, prisons, and patios of these regulated spaces. She shows that obrajes, a centerpiece of colonial manufacturing and the forced sale of goods, were conducive to social control and atomization—by surveilling workers and ranking them according to occupation, gender, and caste. However, they also fostered social cohesion and ethnogenesis, through commensality, community building, and the collective defense of customary practices. Indeed, life in Pomacocha and other textile workshops of the Huamanga region was characterized by a delicate balance between the demands of owners and administrators on one hand, and the customary rights of their workers on the other. Though labor shortages were chronic, obrajes exerted a strong gravitational pull, attracting local and migrant workers by promising exemption from other colonial demands. Even so, the heavy exactions and notorious abuses that textile mills came to be known for also pushed local villagers away, thus generating a series of demographic transformations that became the base of social change.
Hu argues that colonial networks of migration and exchange, along with the kinship bonds and renewed identities they helped to forge, were conduits for (as well as the product of) increased intercaste interactions and alliances, and that these alliances gave rise to heightened political solidarity, a more cosmopolitan political outlook, and a “systemic understanding of exploitation” (6) among workers that sprang into collective political action during the wars of independence. Although the Pomacocha workers did not join the Tupac Amaru rebellion, the area would witness intense Morochuco activity. The obraje at the center of the book would become a notorious rebel base, even hosting Simón Bolívar for one night in 1824.
In this book, Hu is not afraid of tackling big questions concerning the nature of colonial capitalism and its relation to race-making, ethnogenesis, and resistance. She is conversant in several historical and archaeological literatures. Connecting the micro with the macro, Hu does something exceptionally well in this book: she pays attention to the smallest details—a discarded bat found in the kitchen trash of the obraje—without losing sight of the major historical processes that fill them with meaning.
The spotty nature of the historical sources, even for a place with such a comparatively large archival footprint as Pomacocha, forces Hu to extrapolate information from other obrajes, both within the region and beyond, and thus to present certain interpretations in a more tentative tone than historians are used to. The types of sources, in other cases, portray racial categorizations as “fixed,” that is, more stable than they really were. Hu's claim of an “intercaste” composition of the Pomacocha workforce—and thus the development of a corresponding cross-caste culture and political consciousness—is not entirely convincing, though this specific aspect does not affect her overall argument in a significant way.
Perhaps the book's most significant contribution is to help us rethink the pax colonial and the Age of Andean Insurrection together, through the lens of effective landscapes of resistance that were not only an alternative to the violent rebellions that led to independence from Spain but also the very precondition for them.
