Carla Hernández Garavito

CARLA HERNANDEZ GARAVITO, University of California, Santa Cruz, California, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2022 to aid research and writing on “Reimagining Colonialism: A Local History of Community and Empire in the Peruvian Andes Between the 15th and 18th centuries.” “Reimagining and Colonialism” is an archaeological and historical rendering of the experience of the people of Huarochirí (Lima, Peru) and their engagement with successive waves of colonialism by the Inka and Spanish empires between the 15th and 18th. This book builds on the results from archaeological excavations in the sites of Ampugasa and Canchaje in Huarochirí, the revision of published and unpublished archival sources, and spatial modeling to bridge both data sets and investigate the history of Huarochirí focusing on the on-the-ground communities and their interactions amongst themselves and with the empires. I use the idea of reinvention to center attention on how local communities transformed not only themselves but significantly acted upon colonial policy to claim positions of belonging. I focus on history-making to discuss the Indigenous appropriation of history, understood in this context as a body of knowledge that gave legitimacy to group identity and informs the ongoing production of community and polity, which Indigenous communities in Huarochirí reframed into local practice. Throughout the chapters, I argue that, in the face of drastic socio-political changes, the people of Huarochirí expanded their local practices to apprehend the places and tools of colonizing empires.