In Andean Cosmopolitans, José Carlos de la Puente Luna engages with colonial indigenous peoples’ fascinating movement and transformation, their traveling throughout the Americas and across the Atlantic, to explore the creative ways they positioned themselves in symbolic sites of knowledge and power—i.e., literacy, social networks, legal system, courts, fashion, and performance—to mobilize personal as well as collective interests. Drawing from varied archival and literary sources, de la Puente Luna tracks indigenous activism: the lived experience of Andean travelers in the process of accessing justice within imperial domains.

In chapter 1 we learn that in order to claim justice, they had to appropriate Iberian legal culture (26) and creatively identify themselves with, and be explained within the grid of, the cultural intelligibility of customary laws. Fueros made them appear as subjects of justice. Chapter 2 illustrates pueblos’ interactions with the court system, by way of village attorneys, sapci endowments, and the instrumentality of khipus in supplementing legal arguments. Indigenous activism and the movement of local, regional, and transatlantic Andean litigants actively seeking royal justice and circulating within and among the realms of the monarchy expanded the juridical web, but defied the totalizing effects of the colonial order designed by Juan de Matienzo and Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, as chapter 3 explains. Because of legal costs, health problems, and legal agents’ conflicts of interest, Toledo proposed, “king's justice had to reach vassals in their homelands” (59), and not vice versa. State representation, however, blocked indigenous access to justice and forced claimants to continue deploying legal strategies of empowerment (72, 83).

Chapter 4 describes the entrance of another group of legal actors into the Atlantic scene, a parallel literate elite to the native lords, or caciques, who spoke on behalf of the Nación Índica in local and metropolitan contexts, and were the most visible agents of social change. This translated into social mobility, a community in the making, unattached to the hereditary aristocracy of rural pueblos, with political skills that secured appointments. Chapter 5 examines the resourceful ways through which some of these individuals, who turned into travelers to the Habsburg royal court, manipulated the discourses of poverty, wretchedness, and king's obligation, putting the force of discourse to practical use for personal and collective purposes. Chapter 6 illustrates the point by way of the case of Don Lorenzo Zamudio El Lucayn, a literate Indian who crossed the ocean to have his identity legitimized and ancestry demonstrated (163). His quest for recognition within the República de Indios exemplifies the broadening of the elite status at the expense of fabricated documents through which commoners would rework, or ignore, established markers of racial purity and social status. The process shows understanding of the power of the written word, the authority of notaries, and the instrumentality of witnesses (170), attire (177), and performance (176) in establishing truth about ancestry and negotiating a position of social prominence and exemption from tribute and labor dues. The appropriation and subversion of Spanish exclusionary categories enabled indigenous subjects seeking justice and reward over the Atlantic to also separate themselves from “traditional Indian corporations, turning instead into spokespersons of a more abstract Nación Índica” (190). The commemoration of King Philip V's abdication in favor of his son offers a case in point. Chapter 7 discusses the manner through which leaders from the República de Indios disassociated their activities from Cuzco and Inca symbolism and “reembedded” them within “a limeño-migrant milieu” (194).

This final example summarizes the remarkable strengths of de la Puente Luna's book: constant attention to the indigenous as that which is constructed in discourse and through discourse, and thus is indicative of subjection, limited by the law, yet transformative of it, in the charged contexts of local and imperial representation. Taking their cue from its articulation at the intersection of the law, travel, and justice, the reader can track the ways through which de la Puente Luna's critical methodology expands what it means to be indigenous and opens up space to further questions of identity, in a modality that dialogues with studies on indigenous mobility written by James Clifford, indigenous critique of colonialism by Jodi Byrd, and indigenous self-recognition by Glen Coulthard, among others.