Juan Chocne

In the middle 1560s, thirty years after the invasion and in the middle of a demographic collapse, a teaching spread through the Huamanga highlands. It held that the huacas of the Andes, the local powers of springs, rocks, mountains and ancestors, were not dead and had not been beaten by the Christian God. They had left their old material bodies, which the Spanish had smashed, and were entering the bodies of living Andeans instead. Those possessed would shake and dance, which gave the movement its name, the dancing sickness. The huacas were said to have joined in a single alliance and to be preparing a war in which the Spanish would be destroyed and the sea would rise and cover them. What was required of Andeans was refusal: stop entering churches, stop taking Christian names, stop eating Spanish food and wearing Spanish cloth, and feed the huacas again.

Juan Chocne is the preacher named at the centre of it, associated with two women who took the names Santa María and Santa María Magdalena, a detail that shows how thoroughly Christian material had already entered Andean religious language even in a movement dedicated to expelling it. The movement was broken within a decade. The name is Quechua and describes what the possessed were seen to do rather than anything the movement called itself, which is worth noticing, because it means the label now used for the whole episode came from the people investigating it.

Practically everything recorded about Chocne comes from Cristóbal de Albornoz, the ecclesiastical visitor who suppressed Taki Onqoy and who afterwards produced accounts of his own success in support of claims for reward. Albornoz had every reason to describe a large, coordinated and dangerous heresy, and a small local disturbance would have earned him nothing. That single fact governs the historiography. One influential reading, associated with Luis Millones and with Nathan Wachtel, treats Taki Onqoy as a genuine pan-Andean nativist movement and a major episode of religious resistance.

A second, developed by later historians working directly through the visitation papers, holds that the movement was smaller and more local than the sources claim and that its coherence was largely manufactured by the men who investigated it, in the way inquisitions habitually manufacture the conspiracies they look for. A third position accepts a real movement while treating the reported doctrines as filtered through what the interrogators expected to hear.

Chocne himself was taken to Cuzco and made to renounce his teaching. After that the record on him effectively stops. What survives of him is therefore a shape cut out of a prosecution file. The honest description of the record is that it tells a reader more about Albornoz and his ambitions than it does about Chocne and his.