Micaela Bastidas Puyucahua

Micaela Bastidas Puyucahua (c. 1742-1781), Peruvian revolutionary. Details on Bastidas’ early life are limited but suggest that she was born in Pampamarca, a community in southern Peru. This area had once been part of the Inka Empire, the largest empire in Native American history, which stretched 3,000 miles along the Andes Mountains in South America. In the 1500s, the Spanish conquered the empire and killed the last Inka emperor Thupaq Amaru (whose name is often Hispanicized as Túpac Amaru). War, disease, and the brutal Spanish labor system caused the Native American population of Peru to drop from 9 million in 1520 to 600,000 in 1650. In part because of this massive population decline, the Spanish also brought thousands of enslaved Africans to work on Peruvian farms and mines, and eventually there were many people of mixed Native American and African ancestry. One of these was Bastidas. Although some scholars have argued that she was of Native American and white ancestry or even completely white, this is due in part to the fact that respected people of mixed ancestry were officially labeled as mostly or wholly white so that they could receive certain privileges without running the risk of racial equality for all. Although the Spanish pressured both Native Americans and Africans to assimilate into Spanish culture, most people in places like where Bastidas grew up had preserved their Qhichwha (also spelled Quechua) language, Inka culture, and knowledge of their heritage, while African slaves had done the same with their cultures. There were dozens of rebellions against Spain throughout the 1700s, but anger at colonial rule grew even greater in the 1770s due to an economic decline and a tax increase that was levied to fund Spain’s involvement in the American War of Independence. This led to the Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II in 1780, led by Bastidas and her husband José Gabriel Condorcanqui, who claimed descent from the last Inka emperor and changed his name to Túpac Amaru II.

Although the rebels were inspired by their memory of the Inka past, Bastidas and Amaru created a diverse coalition of Inka, black slaves, free blacks, people of mixed ancestry, and whites, seeking to create a new, independent, multiracial country. While Amaru led troops in the field against Spain, Bastidas stayed in the city of San Felipe de Tungasuca and led the logistical efforts. This involved recruiting new troops, paying them, supplying villages and the troops with food and supplies, helping villagers travel safely, and enforcing loyalty to the rebellion. She spent a great deal of time fighting acts of banditry, arguing that the independence struggle would not be used as an excuse to further exploit Native Americans; “it is necessary,” she concluded, “that these thieves leave the town or pay with their own lives.” Another letter to local officials ordered them to help stop the mistreatment of Native Americans “to completely ruin the source of all the aggravation and bad government.” She also demanded that Catholic priests be protected because they were held in high esteem and because she did not want the Spanish to attack the rebellion as anti-religious. Bastidas personally led troops in battle on several occasions, writing Amaru that “The enemy from Paruro is in Acos; I am going forward to attack them, even if it costs me my life.” When she heard that he was in danger in a town twenty-two miles away, she walked there to rescue him or, as one witness later recalled, “to die where her husband died.” The troops called her La Reina (“the queen”) and carried wooden carvings of her likeness into battle, while local officials addressed her as Senora Gobernadora ("Madam Governor") or Muy Senora mia y toda mi veneracion ("My most venerated Lady”) and one grudgingly admitted that she commanded “with more authority and rigor than her husband.” In a time when both Inka and Spanish society saw women as second-class citizens and when most people of African descent were slaves or poor free people, Bastidas was likely the most powerful black and Native American woman, and possibly the most powerful woman of any race, in all of Latin America.

In 1781 Bastidas urged Amaru to attack the major city of Qosqo (also spelled “Cusco”), writing “I have warned you again and again not to dally…I am already a shadow, and of myself and beside myself with anxiety, and so I beg you to get on with this business.” His delay enabled the Spanish to bring in thousands more troops from throughout South America. This in turn caused some members of the rebellion to conclude that the war was lost and that they should save themselves by betraying its leaders. Bastidas and her family were captured, and although Spain typically did not try women for treason on the grounds that they were incapable of committing it, they made an exception for her. One witness stated that “In Micaela one could see more rebelliousness, arrogance and pride than in her husband; for that reason she became more terrible than he.” Some argued that because of her gender she should be imprisoned rather than executed, but court officials would only agree to her being strangled with an iron collar rather than hanged. After being forced to watch her son’s death Bastidas was placed in the collar, but her neck was too small for it to work properly, so she was strangled to death. Her head was placed on a pike in a public place, her body was burned, and her property was destroyed. She and her husband and son were among the roughly 100,000 people of Native American ancestry to die in the Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II. The Spanish tried to prevent further uprisings by the gruesome public executions and by banning the Qhichwha language, the wearing of Inka clothing, and the mere mention of Inka culture and history. This proved unsuccessful. Resistance against Spain continued until Peru finally gained its independence in 1826. The new government abolished the African slave trade and created a plan to gradually free all remaining slaves, although this took until 1854 to complete and Peruvians of black and Native American ancestry continue to face discrimination to this day. Despite Spanish efforts to eradicate Inka and black cultures, Afro-Peruvian culture has become famous around the world, while Qhichwha is the world’s most widely spoken Native American language with more than 10 million speakers. In Bastidas’ native southern Peru, a district (equivalent to a county) and the Universidad Nacional Micaela Bastidas de Apurímac were named for her. In New York in 1972, Micaela Bastidas Puyucahua’s legacy of cultural pride and resistance to oppression lived on in a new way: the one-year old son of an African American revolutionary was renamed Tupac Amaru Shakur by his mother, who explained that “I wanted him to have the name of revolutionary, indigenous people in the world. I wanted him to know he was part of a world culture and not just from a neighborhood.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.