Black Missionaries and Black Rebels of the Montaña: Africans and the Juan Santos Atahualpa Rebellion

The Juan Santos Atahualpa rebellion has been lauded as one of the “precursors” to Peruvian Independence, especially those in the Peruvian Indigenista movement who strove to demonstrate Indigenous buy-in to the mainly creole-led independence movement. Some of the uprising’s most important rebels, however, were neither Indigenous nor Creoles but Africans. This erasure of Africans from the rebellion’s histories even by more modern academic historians is the result of the inconvenience of these Africans’ presence to the centrality of Indigeneity in the rebellion’s narratives. This article looks to rewrite Africans back into the narrative of the rebellion. Many Africans were key lieutenants to the mestizo rebel leader, Juan Santos. These Africans had arrived in the frontier missions in the central high jungle of Peru where the rebellion was fought decades before Juan Santos, looking for social advancement and as enslaved servants to the missionaries. Many of these Africans married into these communities, and when the rebellion broke out, they joined the mostly Indigenous rebels.