Coronado - The Andes Imagined

The Andes Imagined
Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas

John Beverley and Sara Castro-Klarén, Editors
Jorge Coronado
the andes imagined
Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity
u n i v e r s it y o f p itts b u rg h p r e s s
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 2009, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Coronado, Jorge.
The Andes imagined : indigenismo, society, and modernity / Jorge Coronado.
p. cm. — (Illuminations: cultural formations of the Americas)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-6024-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8229-6024-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Peru—Civilization—20th century. 2. Peru—Civilization—Indian influences.
3. Ethnicity—Peru—History—20th century. 4. Identity (Psychology) —Peru.
5. Peru—Intellectual life—20th century. 6. Indians of South America—Peru—
Ethnic identity. 7. Peru—History—1919–1968. 8. Indians in literature. 9. Peruvian
literature—20th century—History and criticism. 10. National characteristics,
Peruvian. I. Title.
F3410.C676 2009
985.06'31—dc2 2008052974
For Hannah, in love and devotion
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction Indigenismo, Modernity, Indigenismos,

Modernities 1
chapter one The Revolutionary Indio: José Carlos Mariátegui’s
Indigenismo 25
chapter two A Modern Andean Culture? José Ángel Escalante
and Indigenismo at Odds 52
chapter three (Un)Happy Endings: Film, Modernity, and Tradition
in Carlos Oquendo de Amat 75
chapter four An Assembly of Voices: Labor and the Publics
of Print 102
chapter five Photographs at the Edge: Martín Chambi and the
Limits of Lettered Culture 134
Conclusion Reading Indigenismo, Writing the Indio 163
Notes 169
Works Cited 185
Index 195
vii
Illustr ations
1. Cover of 5 metros de poemas, by Carlos Oquendo de Amat, n.d. 81

2. Martín Chambi, “Tristeza andina,” 1933 137
3. Martín Chambi, “Novia en la mansión de los Montes,” 1930 139
4. Martín Chambi, “Chambi trabajando en su estudio de la calle
Marqués, junto a su equipo de ayudantes,” 1935 145
5. Martín Chambi, “Primera motocicleta de Mario Pérez Yáñez,”
1930 149
6. Martín Chambi, “Autorretrato en motocicleta,” 1930 149
7. Martín Chambi, “Campesinos indígenas en el juzgado,” 1929 159
ix
Acknow ledgments
It is my belief that, at its best, a book is the result of a community that nur-
tures it. I have been privileged over the last many years to be a member of
many such communities, spread out over time and space. I hope to be able
to begin to thank them here, however inadequately, for their inspiration
and support.
In the United States, my immediate family has never faltered in their
support. My mother, Nancy Luz Urruchi Mayo, has been a bottomless
source of inspiration to me. Her determination and rectitude help me get
through the days. My sister Nancy Coronado and her family, James, Sofía,
Eleanor, and little James, have always opened their joyful home to me. My
father, Alcides Coronado, and his wife, Eva Oviedo, have been a warm and
constant company over the years. Linda Lowell and Jackie Allen, suegras
insuperables, prove to me that family is much more than blood ties. To all of
them, my respect and affection.
In Peru, arriba y abajo, I have always been received by my extended
family with overflowing generosity during my many visits. This has been
the case in Lima, in Cuzco, and of course in Coracora. I thank my rela-
tives in all these places for their patience with my questions about the An-
des then and now, and for the deep knowledge they have shared with me
through conversation, humor, and song. Iván Ramírez, Pepe Urruchi, Ed-
win Urruchi, Enós Urruchi, Mica Cuadros, Ella Cuadros, Tito Cuadros,
Chela Cuadros, Italo Bocángel, Mari López, América López, Vladimiro
Coronado, Lucho Coronado, Héctor Cuadros, and many others have been
a living resource for me. My cousins, Karina Ramírez, Erika Cuadros, Luis
Alfonso Cuadros, Laura Vilchez, and Omar Cuadros have never failed in
demonstrating to me the vibrancy of Andean culture today. Gracias. Sev-
eral individuals and institutions have also facilitated my research: Andrea
xi
xii ≈ acknowledgments
Espinar, Antonia Vega Centeno, and Xavier Ricard Lanata at the Fototeca
Andina at the Centro Rural Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Biblioteca Nacio-
nal (old and new), the Casa Museo José Carlos Mariátegui, and the Pontifi-
cia Universidad Católica del Perú’s Instituto Riva Agüero. I am especially
grateful to Teo Allaín Chambi and the Archivo Fotográfico Martín Chambi
for permission to reproduce Chambi’s images here. The heirs of José Sab-
ogal graciously allowed me to use his art for the cover.
At Northwestern, I must thank first and foremost my colleagues in the
Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. Josef Barton, Frank Saf-
ford, Mary Weismantel, Brodie Fischer, Ed Gibson, Ben Ross Schneider,
and others have been key intellectual interlocutors and occasional cocon-
spirators who have taught me the value of working with others, in and
through an institution. I must express a special word of gratitude to Josef
Barton of the Department of History and Spanish and Portuguese and
Frank Safford of the Department of History. In these two colleagues I have
found an invaluable mentorship expressed less in words than in their unin-
terrupted and selfless example. I have learned from them how to be in a uni-
versity. In my home department, Spanish and Portuguese, I could not have
been luckier than to have a junior cohort as collegial as they are entrañable:
Julio Prieto, Patrick Garlinger, Yarí Pérez Marín, and Nathalie Bouzaglo.
Lucille Kerr offered her support at several points over the course of this
project. Beyond my department, Kevin Bell, Doris Garraway, Reg Gibbons,
Cecily Hilsdale, Jon Sachs, Miguel Amat, Stephen Eisenman, Liz Brumfiel,
Sherwin Bryant, Chris Herbert, Dévora Grynspan, and Peter Hayes have
been valued colleagues. A fellowship at the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for
the Humanities, then headed up by Roy Gooding-Williams and Elzbieta
Foeller-Pituch, helped give this book definitive form, as did funds from the
Northwestern University Research Grants Committee and the National
Endowment for the Humanities. Many Northwestern students contributed
to the elaboration of this work, and I will name three in the hopes that they
may stand in for the many others: Paige Conley, Niki Fabricant, and Ena
Kumar. Northwestern staff members have been unfaltering in their assis-
tance with various aspects of this project over the years. I am especially in-
debted to Husna Mohiuddin, Devon McKean, Lauren Trinker, Roman A.
Stansberry, Sarah B. Ellis, Claire Stewart, Tom O’Connell, and the staff at
the Northwestern Library, including Interlibrary Loan Services and Digi-
tal Collections. I am grateful to Provost Daniel Linzer, deans Aldon Mor-
ris and Andrew Wachtel and the staff at Weinberg College of the Arts and
Sciences and the Graduate School for their support over the years.
acknowledgments ≈ xiii
Beyond my own institution, I must thank many scholars who in their

commentary and conversations bettered this book and illuminated its au-
thor. Jean Franco has been characteristically generous over the course of
this book’s many iterations, especially early in the process. George Yúdice,
Andreas Huyssen, Bruno Bosteels, and Raul Marrero Fente likewise pro-
vided important feedback during this book’s initial development. Laura
Lomas has offered key insights over the years, and at all times has been
a wonderful classmate and, later, colleague. Efraín Kristal, Estelle Tarica,
Elizabeth Monasterios, Michelle Clayton, and Gonzalo Lamana, all exem-
plary Andeanists in their own right, have provided both inspiring work and
fecund conversations over the years.
Thanks to Devin Fromm, my editor at the University of Pittsburgh
Press, as well as the Illuminations series editors, John Beverley and Sara
Castro-Klarén, for first considering this manuscript. At several stages,
Devin offered valuable commentary on the manuscript. Kathryn Lither-
land enhanced this work with her sharp copyeditor’s eye. Two anonymous
readers immeasurably improved this book through their informed insights,
suggestions, and valuable criticisms. I thank and acknowledge Taylor &
Francis and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies for permission to
reprint a part of chapter 1 that was first published there. Similary, I thank
Latin American Literary Review for permission to publish a part of chapter 2
that was published in that journal.
Finally, there are three beings that have lived with this work as much as
I have. They have shown great patience with it and with me. Lola and Ade
laide assisted, in their uniquely canine way, in much of the composition of
this book. Hannah Feldman bettered every page here, and yet I am certain
that I have not been able to take full advantage of her illuminations. How
fortunate I am to have such a witness. This book is dedicated to her, for all
the reasons that she and I know.
The Andes Imagined
I n t roduction
Indigenismo, Modernity,
Indigenismos, Modernities
T
his book explores the contradictions that lie at the center of indi-
genismo, the cultural, social, and political movement that grew to
prominence in the early twentieth century in Latin America. As a con-
stellation of extremely varied practices, including painting, photography,
literature, and literary and cultural criticism, as well as diverse government
policies, indigenismo endeavored to vindicate the area’s indigenous peoples
after centuries of abuse and marginalization. In order to achieve this goal,
it promoted the reconfiguration of society such that it would be more ame-
nable to the indio, the term used to designate all indigenous people. With-
out exception, the discourses that sought to articulate this reconfiguration
all constructed particular versions of the indio and of indigenous culture.
As a result, the indio, represented by others’ projections, became the critical
component of the new configurations of Andean society and culture that
these practices imagined. That is to say, the discourses of indigenismo were
always also ways of figuring how the region might, in its own way, become
modern. Thus, rather than focusing exclusively on how indigenismo rep-
resented the indigenous population and indigeneity, I seek to understand
1
2 ≈ indigenismo, modernity, indigenismos, modernities
a wide range of indigenista work as a commentary on and reaction to the

appearance and implementation of modernization in its different forms
within a region marginal to Europe and the United States. To do so, we
must outline indigenismo in broad terms and then address conceptualiza-
tions of modernity as they relate to it.
While I will discuss some important concepts pertaining to the terms
modernization and, in particular, modernity, it seems useful to make some
initial comments concerning these two at times unwieldy terms. By modern-
ization I mean to refer to a wide array of material and conceptual changes in
Latin America, especially as they began to take place after the independence
period of the 1820s. These transformations include the processes of societal
democratization and the subsequent emergence of new subjects into the na-
tion, the region, the city, the neighborhood, and other conceptual units of
communal and individual identity. These transformations triggered subal-
tern subjects to lay claims on the societies that had previously marginalized
them and, in most cases, persisted in so doing. This pressure from below
is crucial to understanding the contours that modern societies assume in
Latin America in general and the Andes more specifically.
In contrast to such claims, which can be understood as reactions, the
term modernization may also denote initial actions. In this sense, it signals
the influx of economic entities and systems from other parts of the globe,
as well as the introduction of new technologies into Latin America in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One has only to imagine the impact
that gas lighting, railroads, electricity, running water, radio, and cinema—
to name but a few innovations—had on the organization of daily life to
conceptualize the vast transformations that these advances wrought on An-
dean societies. Each of these innovations alone, and all of them together,
decisively changed what it meant to live in the region over the course of this
period. We must also not forget the importance of the industrialization of
certain sectors of the economy, such as (significantly for this study) mining
and textile production. Within this second connotation of modernization,
which one might clarify by calling it instead “technologification,” I want
to stress technology’s deep alteration of human experience and sensibility.
In reality, it is difficult and perhaps impossible to separate, say, the imple-
mentation of railroads from their economic manifestation in a local con-
text. Nevertheless, insisting on the conceptual distinction between these
imports and the real-world contexts in which they appeared as novelties al-
lows us to fully appreciate Latin America’s initial receptiveness toward the
material and conceptual apparatuses that appeared on its stage.
indigenismo, modernity, indigenismos, modernities ≈ 3
Finally, by modernization I also mean to invoke the arrival and eventual

eruption of foreign cultural concepts and artistic production in emphati-
cally local cultural scenes. Here I note simply that foreign ideas—often
experienced in the form of printed matter—were part and parcel of the
mounting influx of goods that is a hallmark of the period. In whatever form
they entered, these high and low cultural imports—which include Marx-
ist concepts, cinematic forms, and highbrow surrealism—were sought out
and eagerly welcomed by many Latin Americans. By suggesting that these
conceptual and material imports are an explicit component of moderniza-
tion, I anticipate the related, but distinct, terminology I will here employ to
distinguish between the moment of their arrival—that is, modernization—
and their absorption or reformulation into what we might understand as
properly Latin American cultural discourses.
The term I assign this second aspect is, in fact, modernity. In this sense,
modernity designates quite explicitly the cultures that arise as a result of
the types of encounters, contacts, and absorptions described above. I use
this term to signal not an ideal state, but instead a fluid response to the diz-
zying varieties of modernization that spread across Latin America in the
early twentieth century (although the term is applicable to much broader
time periods and geographies). It is especially important to note that once
any aspect of modernization is present in these societies—and it would be
correct to ask, as Aníbal Quijano has, if there was ever a time from the mo-
ment of the conquest that modernization was not in some manifestation
present—the production of modernity becomes unavoidable (“Modernity,
Identity” 141).1
I also use the term modernity—often in the plural—to describe the
particular discursive formations belonging to the intellectuals who took it
upon themselves to represent indigenous peoples in their own works. This
usage stresses modernity as a discursive strategy that, although not always
realized in the material world, speaks about shaping the features of the
future and the present in response to the forces or agents of moderniza-
tion as described above. The articulations of Andean modernities that I
study here are assertions of local agency before the often-foreign processes
that shape both global and local realities. My use of this concept relies on a
broad definition of culture as the customs, art, and worldview of a people, as
expressed by either the whole of the group or by any individual who forms a
part of it, even if here I focus on texts and those who write them as primary
examples.
In choosing to narrow the concept of modernity in this way, I depart
from a broader understanding of the term that is intimately tied to the no-
tion of the subject as it emerges in Europe from seventeenth century on-
ward. In a recent study on the term modernity, Frederic Jameson claims that
“Descartes’ thoroughgoing break with the past constitutes not only the in-
auguration of modernity but already a self-conscious or reflexive theory of
it” (31). This is because, according to Jameson, “with Descartes, we should
be able to witness the emergence of the subject, or in other words, of the
Western subject, that is to say, the modern subject as such, the subject of
modernity” (43). Jürgen Habermas, in his well-known essay “Modernity:
An Incomplete Project,” clarifies the impact of this new subjecthood and
its stance before the object world in his discussion of Max Weber, whom
he says “characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substan-
tive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three autonomous
spheres. They are: science, morality, and art” (9). The problems that arise in
each of these spheres could, in turn, be handled as “questions of knowledge,
or of justice and morality, or of taste” (9). The distance from this fragmenta-
tion of reason to the institutionalization of it proper to modernity is short.
According to Habermas, this form of the subject, and in particular the
principle of subjectivity, determines modern culture (Philosophical Discourse
17). For him, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revo-
lution constitute the key historical events that embody the realization of
the modern subject at the center of what had previously been a divinely
ordered world. Thus, the godly became something formulated and refor-
mulated by man much as the law lost its foundation in divine dictum and
became anchored instead in the principle of the freedom of will, as reflected
in the Napoleonic Code and in the Declaration of the Rights of Man (17). In
this understanding, then, modernity can be taken to designate a utopian
horizon at which the individual subject would be fully and triumphantly
rationalized, to use Weber’s terminology. This rationalization is indeed
equivalent to the eighteenth-century ideals—embodied in the nascent
French republic’s call for liberté, egalité, fraternité—fomented in the wake of
Europe’s industrial and bourgeois revolutions. While there is no doubt that
these ideals operate in the historical period and geopolitical space I study
here, my use of the term modernity should be understood as a sort of ac-
count of their continuing journey through the Andes, and in particular of
the eddies left in their wake.
One point merits a clear and forceful articulation here: in my view, mo-
dernity is not a choice with respect to the human subjects that experience it.
Subjects may resist modernization, and they may even articulate or enact
an antimodernization agenda. Indeed, history is full of examples of people

who have done just this, and for multitudinous reasons. However, once sub-
jects respond to modernization, they have already defined themselves in re-
lation to phenomena that do not, by definition, reflect pure originary social
and cultural values. That is, I do not primarily understand modernity in
the Andes as the outcropping or manifestation of an Enlightenment invest-
ment in an emancipated, egalitarian citizenry. Rather, I conceptualize mo-
dernity as the symptom that invariably and irrevocably, probably for better
and for worse, marks the body of what was once the nonmodern.
Encompassing a wide array of intellectual production concerning the
indigenous peoples of Latin America, indigenismo is intimately related to
these two terms—modernization and modernity—and the phenomena to
which this book understands them to refer. Without doubt, the early twen-
tieth century witnessed an explosion of literary, critical, and visual work on
the figure of the indio, especially in Mexico, Guatemala, and the Andean
region. This broad geographical presence stems from the wide applicability
and appeal of indigenismo’s central, self-declared objective of vindicating
the continent’s indigenous peoples. This objective and the efforts to imple-
ment it distinguish indigenismo from the idyllic and idealized representa-
tions of the indio with which Latin American cultural history is equally
rife, as evidenced by, for example, romanticism-inflected indianista works
of the nineteenth century. As opposed to indigenismo, indianismo por-
trayed the indio in a sentimental light and was noticeably silent regarding
the indigenous population’s social, economic, and political marginalization
in modern Latin America. Cumandá (1879), by Ecuador’s Juan León Mera
(1832–1894), for example, illustrates indianismo’s tendency to represent in-
dios as part of an idealized past and thus to ignore the conditions of their
contemporary presence. By omitting any possibility of claims to the present
that indigenous peoples might have, indianismo was successful at repre-
senting the indigenous while upholding entrenched hierarchies that kept
the indio in subservience.
In contradistinction, indigenismo takes a critical position with respect
to the dominant society and accuses it of exploiting and debasing indig-
enous people and their cultures. Such critical views, of course, are not
unique to the twentieth century. Indigenismo finds foundational anteced-
ents in figures such as Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566) and El Inca
Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), who, respectively, denounced the atrocities
visited upon indios by the Spanish colonizers and praised the order and
complexity of the Inca Empire in the face of accusations of its barbarity.
Other sympathetic works on the indio can be found in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, including Clorinda Matto de Turner’s (1852–1909)
novel Aves sin nido from 1889 and Narciso Aréstegui’s (1818–1892) El Padre
Horán from 1848, the last of which the critic Efraín Kristal considers a ma-
jor early Andean indigenista work. These works evidence the outrage that
typifies indigenista discourse, as well as their authors’ willingness to chal-
lenge such strongholds of authority as the church and the state. Thus, the
vindication of the indio through the indictment of social and political insti-
tutions was already in place at least as early as the mid–nineteenth century.
Later indigenistas were equally in debt to figures such as Manuel González
Prada (1848–1918), who was among the first, in works such as the 1888 “Dis-
curso en el Politeama,” to call for social revolt in order to rectify the abuses
committed against the indigenous population.
While indigenismo should, and indeed must, be historicized among
the many writings on the indio produced during the colonial and repub-
lican periods, its defining moment occurs with the explosion of voices on
indigenous matters in the first decades of the twentieth century. This is a
period marked by the efforts to rebuild the nation and national pride af-
ter Peru lost the War of the Pacific to Chile in the late nineteenth century.
A critic of indigenismo, Henri Favre makes a distinction between what he
calls a corriente, or current, which generally preceded the modern period
in Latin America, and what he calls a movimiento, or movement, in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a periodization that is helpful in con-
textualizing the significance of these twentieth-century cultural practices.
For Favre, the term current in this context denotes a generally favorable
opinion toward the indigenous population that, according to the French
anthropologist, has been in existence ever since Columbus wrote idealized
accounts describing the natives that he encountered in the New World. As
such, indigenismo, as a current, is “ancient, permanent, and diffuse” (7). In
contradistinction, indigenismo as a movement has an ideological density
that is not present in the current. Favre locates the start of the movement in
the nineteenth century, in conjunction with the problematic of nationalism
(8). Thus, Favre understands the indigenista movement to have taken on its
full vigor, paradoxically, at precisely the moment when the fragility of Latin
American nation-states became apparent.
At its core, the movement is understood to have crystallized around
several seminal novels, such as Alcides Arguedas’s (1879–1946) Raza de
bronce (Race of Bronze) from 1919, Jorge Icaza’s (1906–1978) Huasipungo
from 1934, and Ciro Alegría’s (1909–1967) El mundo es ancho y ajeno from
1941. However, as central as these novels have been to our understanding of

indigenismo, they should not overshadow the significant and equally im-
portant critical and scholarly production on and about the indio in the same
period. Here I refer to works such as José Carlos Mariátegui’s (1894–1930)
Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana from 1928, Pío Jaramillo
Alvarado’s (1884–1968) El indio ecuatoriano from 1936, Hildebrando Castro
Pozo’s (1890–1945) Nuestra comunidad indígena from 1918, and José Vascon-
celos’s (1882–1959) Indología from 1926, all of which purported to study “the
indigenous question” through a more rigorously scientific lens than that
provided by literary fiction. These critical works, perhaps more so than
their aesthetic counterparts, reveal the ways in which the importation and
acquisition of foreign theoretical models stoked new perspectives on what
role the indigenous population should play in a modern Latin America, as
well as how they, in fact, generated multiple solutions. Marxist political
and cultural criticism, for example, was central to efforts to animate the
defense of the indio within revolutionary frameworks that understood the
indio as a constituent component of classed society. Models proposed by
the German historian Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (1918) also
irrefutably informed the surge of optimism concerning Latin America’s
indigenous peoples and the battle on their behalf. No matter how foreign
their theoretical models, the novelistic, poetic, and critical discourses on
the indio had a profound impact on social and political movements, includ-
ing the emergence of socialism in Peru and political parties like the APRA
(Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana).2 At the same time, it must
be noted that indigenismo also found ready proponents in conservative and
establishment circles.
This book addresses a particular historical period within this move-
ment as defined by Favre, the period roughly from 1920 to 1940. As a scholar
of lettered production, I was readily drawn to this period by the explosion
of literary and academic works that occurred during this span. Although to
my knowledge little quantitative data has been collected on the actual num-
bers of indigenista works published during the period, there is no doubt
that these decades have long been widely recognized as witnessing a veri-
table avalanche of writings focused on the plight of the indio, as the works
of Luis Enrique Tord, Wilfredo Kapsoli, José Deustua, José Luis Rénique,
Efraín Kristal, José Tamayo Herrera, Mirko Lauer, and others indicate. As
this book will show, this production ranged across a variety of lettered prac-
tices, including the properly literary practices named above but also, and
crucially, fields such as law, journalism, and social criticism.
This effervescence, of course, did not arise in a void. As my attention

to the great nineteenth-century Peruvian essayist Manuel González Prada
shows, the effort to represent indigenous people, with a view to their vindi-
cation, took off at a full gallop after the disaster of the War of the Pacific
(1879–1883). The war is widely understood to have demonstrated the utter
failure of Peru and its state apparatus to consolidate the citizenry into a
modern nation in the six decades following independence (Bonilla 220–
21). Peru became involved in the conflict, originally a regional squabble
between Bolivia and Chile over land and especially mineral rights in the
Atacama Desert, when it refused to pledge neutrality. Peru thus emerges
as a full participant in the war beginning in 1879, and indeed after 1880 the
war effectively devolved into a struggle between Peru and Chile. However,
equipped with a modern war machine, including technologically updated
naval vessels, Chile was easily able to devastate the armies of the other two
Andean nations.
Ultimately, the war resulted in not only humiliation and occupation
but also the loss of both Peru’s and Bolivia’s southern coast. The shock of
this loss, compounded by Peru’s occupation and administration by a for-
eign power, led to much national concern with interrogating the causes
for the defeat. Figures such as González Prada focused on denouncing the
Creole oligarchy, which he, along with others such as members of the po-
liticized El Círculo Literario (Kristal 107–10), understood to have retarded
Peru’s development by clinging to a colonialist and Hispanist culture and
by relying on the semifeudal landowning system as the basis for a national
economy. Such critics also vociferously denounced the marginalization of
the indio as a central flaw in Peru’s progress. As a result of this critique—
occasioned, it should not be forgotten, by a lost war—González Prada came
to be regarded as the first modern indigenista. No doubt, the effectiveness
of Peru’s indigenous masses in the resistance to the Chilean armies and
their occupation played an important part in the launching of this denun-
ciation. González Prada may well have taken note of this resistance and
understood it as the emergence or possible protagonism of the indigenous
masses in a future Peruvian history. Both Florencia Mallon and Nelson
Manrique have indicated that, at the time, the militarized indigenous peas-
antry was responsible for creating their own brand of incipient nationalism
(qtd. in Bonilla 223–24).
It would be several decades, however, before the critique of the na-
tion’s economic bases that arises in the aftermath of the war was addressed
fully, in Augusto B. Leguía’s government, and especially during his second
tenure as president from 1919 to 1930, an eleven-year period known as the

oncenio, when he significantly expanded foreign investment in Peru. This
period thus saw the exacerbation of differences between the export bour-
geoisie and the landed middle class whose wealth was rooted in the hacienda
system. The moment was equally characterized by a massive migration of
middle- and lower-class highland Andeans to the major urban centers, such
as Lima, in search of educational, economic, and social opportunities.
Significantly, this same government enacted the swiftest absorption
of indigenista ideas to date. For example, as Paul Gelles points out, dur-
ing the 1920s Leguía authorized several hundred indigenous groups to be-
come legally recognized as comunidades indígenas with title to lands (244).
Furthermore, Leguía also funded and supported the activities of the in-
digenista Comité Pro-Derecho Indígena Tawantinsuyo. This body oper-
ated under the leadership of the activists and intellectuals Dora Mayer and
Pedro Zulen until 1923 and therafter existed under Leguía’s sponsorship,
when, as María Elena García recounts, the Comité split into two different
groups because of a successful co-optation by the Leguía government (70).
According to Marisol de la Cadena, the split occurred because of a heated
disagreement over the Ley de Conscripción Vial (96). This piece of legis-
lature emerged as part of the government’s version of indigenismo. It was
meant to modernize roads and thus allow merchandise and primary goods
to flow more freely through the Andes. Perverted from the ideals of a libera-
tory indigenismo, this law meant to free up indigenous labor by removing
it from the land and channeling it toward modernizing projects. It was thus
promoted as liberating the indio from his colonial past. The irony that the
labor was not paid and was frequently forced seems not have been a prob-
lem for Leguía or the government-aligned indigenistas who took over the
official Comité.
The period I study in this book is thus defined by the existence of indi-
genismo first as an oppositional force, but then also as both an oppositional
and an establishment set of practices. This duality is fundamental to the
1920s and 1930s, when revolutionary groups flourished alongside official
government offices dedicated to bettering the lot of the indigenous popula-
tion. The concomitant institutionalization of indigenismo in the law and in
academic disciplines such as archeology, anthropology, and ethnography
represents the movement’s simultaneous entrenchment in and rejection of
the status quo. As we shall see, however, indigenismo’s activities across the
political spectrum seem to have had at best an ambivalent effect on the day-
to-day lives of the indigenous population.
Indigenous persons in the Andes were likely the majority during the
period in question. Thomas Davies reports, for instance, that Peru’s 1940
census revealed a total population of 7,023,111, with indigenous persons
representing 40 percent of this number, or 2,847,196 (3). These figures do
not square with José Carlos Mariátegui’s oft-cited calculation, published in
the late 1920s, that the indigenous peoples constituted 80 percent of Peru’s
population (Siete ensayos 44). Magnus Mörner states that in 1950 official
numbers put the percentage of that country’s indigenous population at over
60 percent, while close to 40 percent were classified as such in Ecuador’s
1942 census (209). As Davies and Mörner remind us, an important fact to
remember is that the censuses were conducted in the absence of rigorous
guidelines, and we do not know how fundamental categories such as indio
and mestizo were then defined (3; 208–9). Most likely, the truth lies some-
where between the census and higher estimates such as Mariátegui’s.
According to the same census that Davies cites, the central and south-
ern highlands of Peru contained the largest number of indigenous persons,
in particular in the departments of Ancash, Huánuco, Huancavelica, Ay-
acucho, Cuzco, and Puno (3). Living conditions for highland indios were
generally abysmal. Davies recounts the scarcity of nourishment and chronic
hunger, terrible sanitation, absence of health care, inadequate housing, and
the continual exploitation faced by highland indigenous peoples during the
period (4–9). Indeed, the pervasiveness and intractability of these problems
are evident in recent studies that find that 79 percent of Peru’s indigenous
population continues to live in poverty (Macisaac 171).
Mörner has provided an ample vision of indigenous people’s plight
within a fuller context of economic structures and political developments.
The Swedish historian has also given body to the claims made by Andean
thinkers such as Manuel González Prada and José Carlos Mariátegui to the
effect that the republic treated indigenous peoples worse than the colony
did. Mörner understands the insertion of the Andes into the world mar-
ket as the reason for this worsening situation, insofar as production for the
world economy at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of
the twentieth was based on the exploitation of indigenous labor (162). This
circumstance led inevitably to indigenous uprisings across the Andes and
notably in Peru and Bolivia, which were violently repressed (186, 210). It
should not be forgotten that recent studies have demonstrated that, across
the Andes, the period of the early twentieth century also witnessed the or-
ganization of indigenous people into political actors who demanded their
rights be recognized (Gotkowitz, Revolution 69–100; Becker, “Comunas”

531–44).
This stark reality can correctly be taken up as the impetus behind the
most benign of indigenismo’s goals. However, when indigenismo is un-
derstood beyond its desires to improve the lot of the region’s indigenous
peoples and placed, rather, at the intersection of nationalist, classist, and
racial contentions and the difficult birth of a modern society, the contra-
dictions between indigenista texts and discourses and their titular objects
become glaring. At this intersection, the disconnect between indigenismo’s
representational goals and its real effects becomes visible. This disconnect
raises the question of why indigenista writers and artists would choose the
indio, arguably the representative of some of the most backward aspects of
Andean society as it relates to modernization, to communicate ideas about
how the Andes should enter into and reap the benefits of a modern future.
That is to say, why choose precisely the nonmodern in order to articulate
the modern? At least in part, the answer to this question can be found in
the processes of societal modernization itself.
Indigenismo’s stated intention to make the indio an equal member of
society, or at least to alleviate his centuries of penury, was put into effect
in differing fashions depending on the interests of particular authors. For
example, in texts such as Contribución a una legislación tutelar indígena (1920)
and La educación: Su función social en el Perú en el problema de la nacional-
ización (1913), the educator José Antonio Encinas (1888–1958), from Puno,
suggested that proper instruction of the indio, through reform of the Pe-
ruvian educational system, would substantially better his condition. Oth-
ers, such as Pedro Zulen (1889–1924), an indigenista activist who founded
the Asociación Pro-Indígena in 1909, tended to emphasize the role of moral
improvements in bettering indigenous people’s lives. These motives not-
withstanding, in most cases the impulse to redeem the indio allowed, either
explicitly or implicitly, indigenistas to articulate novel forms of communal
identity in the Andes. This fact has usually resulted in the elaboration of
a particular version of nationalism, but importantly it has also led to the
fabrication of regionalisms, as in the case of the Cuzco indigenistas.
The emergence of coexistence and competition between regionalism
and nationalism follow from the weakness of the latter and as a result of the
processes that are hallmarks of many modern nations, such as democrati-
zation, a capitalist consumer economy, and the elaboration of a civil soci-
ety. The often-mentioned and well-known coexistence of traditional forms
of social organization with society’s advances is not solely a hallmark of the

Andes today. In his by now canonical study of how nations are imagined as
communities, Benedict Anderson provides a definition of nation that can
be employed both expansively and productively in the context of the An-
des. He writes that the nation “is an imagined political community—and
imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). But what if the all-
encompassing imagination of a community in a given geopolitical space is
made not from a centralized locus of official power and through its organs,
such as dominant print media, but rather from another, marginalized posi-
tion in an area’s geopolitical space? What if what is perceived as sovereign
is not the nation per se, but a part of its people? In modernity, Anderson’s
definition applies equally well to regional elites within a national space that
elaborated a “deep, horizontal comradeship” that nevertheless limited itself
to a unit smaller than the nation (7). Anderson’s idea of imagined commu-
nities thus pertains equally to both nations and other social units in the
Andes.
Within the Andes, regionalisms have been strong enough, as the case
of the Cuzco indigenistas demonstrates, to mount a considerable response
to the homogenization of a given geopolitical space proposed by national-
ism. In turn, of course, regionalisms have proposed their own homogeniza-
tion across class, race, and culture in alternative geopolitical spaces. While
I cite Cuzco’s intellectual movement as an example, regionalism should not
be understood as limited to local, reduced geographical areas. The weak-
ness of nationalism also cut another way: figures such as Gamaliel Churata
(1897–1969), for instance, were able to fabricate discourses that exceeded
any one nation and included at least two in a sort of super-regionalism.
Thus, in his novel El pez de oro, from 1959, Churata sought to characterize
Andean culture beyond national borders to include both Bolivia and Peru,
and also importantly Aymara, Quechua, and Hispanic cultures.
In either the case of regionalism or nationalism, the discourse on the
indio in the Andes has been, in part, the product of an anxiety about pre-
cisely who and what constitute the area’s societies. González Prada signaled
it early by asking who it was that, in fact, made up the majority of the na-
tion. In the aftermath of the War of the Pacific, González Prada suggested
that indios, and not the coastal limeños who had led the disastrous war
against the foreign enemy, were the “real” national subjects. In so doing,
he not only inverted the received knowledge of who could be counted as a
citizen of Peru, but he in fact implemented a reasoning that came out of the
egalitarian promises, although not realities, of independence. We should
take it as indicative that this meditation on the indio arises in the context
of the war, widely understood to have been lost precisely because of Peru’s
insufficient modernization and thus inadequate modernity. Although writ-
ten some years later, the despair at an inadequate modernity is also the case
for the Bolivian Alcides Arguedas, whose pessimistic Pueblo enfermo from
1909 assigns this backwardness and the impossibility of modernity in the
Andes precisely to a broad degeneration symbolized in the indigenous peo-
ple themselves and present in all sectors of Andean society. In either writer,
the indigenous becomes essential to imagining what modernity might —or
might not—signify in the Andes.
The “discovery of the indigenous,” as the historian Jorge Basadre mem-
orably termed it, has had its greatest impact on intellectuals thinking about
communal identity in the twentieth century. While we might immediately
think of the preponderant turn in recent critical theory to a concern with
identities marginal to dominant constructs of nation (gender, sexuality,
and race, among others), indigenista works of the 1920s and 1930s did not
generally seek to articulate a communal identity at the margins. As Silvia
Rosman has commented, while critical paradigms that challenge dominant
national identity, such as postcolonialism and queer theory to name but
two, seek to designate identities at some distance from the centers of power,
they continue to rely on and reiterate the idea of nation in order to do so
(10). The nation still provides the contours of these identities, even as they
mark its limits.
Quite to the contrary, the indigenistas discussed here had little interest
in elaborating a novel identity at the social margins of dominant political
traditions. Their discourses made claims on the very centers of regional and
national identities and in fact sought to banish alternative articulations of
community to power’s periphery. In this way, the indigenistas presented
a vocal and sharp contestation of traditional, established forms of under-
standing the nation, such as those based in Lima and in its wealthy elite.
Signs of their success in these efforts at destabilization mark the century’s
literature.
One example that speaks to this point is the work of the Peruvian critic
and playwright Sebastián Salazar Bondy (1924–1965). His writing dem-
onstrates the urgency of doing away with inherited, unworkable modes
of expressing communal identities and, in their stead, creating inclusive
models. The publication of the limeño’s Lima la horrible in 1964 testifies
to the impact of indigenismo. In this text, Salazar Bondy mounted a fe-
rocious and eloquent critique of Lima and its avatars. He singled out one
of these, criollismo, which designates the culture of Creoles, or Peruvians

born of Hispanic ancestors, and studied how it had allowed for a confla-
tion of a colonialist ideology with a discourse of community that sought to
be understood as the essence itself of Peruvianness (25–37). Salazar Bondy
felicitously phrased the internal contradictions and powerful exclusionary
tactics that constituted criollismo as “limeño nationalism” (27). Further-
more, Salazar Bondy’s critique of dominating, urban articulations of a na-
tional community is motivated precisely by the fact that “here, in Lima, like
pilgrims from all of Peru, the provinces have come together and, thanks to
their frequently rending presence they now reproduce, in a multicolored ur-
ban image, the national duel: its abyssal split into two different fates, into
two opposed—and one could say enemy—groups” (8).3 Writing past the
middle of the twentieth century, Salazar Bondy’s awareness of indigenous
people, and of the pressure their demands placed on efforts to articulate an
Andean society, is deeply influenced by the effervescence of indigenismo.
While the indigenistas’ efforts lay in creating novel concepts of communal
identity, it remains significant that their emphasis on the figure of the indio
has left a long and deep imprint on this and innumerable other attempts to
fashion an Andean identity.
In a sense, this imprint is a direct result of one of the issues that I find
to be central to the representational strategy that the indigenistas fostered
in respect to indigenous peoples. As they mounted their titular defense of
the indios, they also created an image or figure that could represent, and do
so amply. Until the rise of indigenismo in the nineteenth century, the indio
as a cultural sign had seldom stood for more than the negative qualities
and backwardness that were ascribed to indigeneity. A large part of indi-
genismo’s labor and energy was spent in rehabilitating this figure and, in
the sense Julio Ramos gives the term in his study of nineteenth-century
Latin American literature, lending the indio representativity. With respect
to identity and literary forms, Ramos asserts, “If identity has not always
been an external piece of information to the discourse that names it—if
the form, authority, and the institutional weight of the subject that desig-
nates it determine in large part the shape, the choice of materials that com-
pose identity—perhaps today we could say, remembering Martí, that there
would not be a Latin America until there was a discourse authorized to
name it. Literature would bear the enormous and at times imposing weight
of that representativity” (16, emphasis in original). Ramos’s description of
the interplay between identitarian discourse, literature, and the visibility
of a region overlaps in telling ways with the project of indigenismo. The
indigenistas mobilized both lettered discourse and lettered institutions in

order to articulate a novel communal identity for the Andes. However, liter-
ature is perhaps too broad and unwieldy a term for what ultimately bore the
enormous weight of this representation. The study of indigenismo has been
overwhelmingly centered on novels and book-length critical works, while
arguably the most resonant contributions to the indigenista effervescence
appeared in periodical publications and, especially in the Andes, in poetry.
In their work on newspaper debates and on avant-garde poetry of the 1920s,
respectively, Gerardo Leibner and Mirko Lauer have begun to shatter the
façade of indigenismo as a mainly narrative and novelistic project. The
implications of opening up the corpus of texts used to study indigenismo
reconfigure the movement beyond narrow attempts to understand it as an
effort in fiction.
While it was lettered production—in forms as diverse as the novel, the
short story, poetry, anthropological treatises, literary theory, and history—
that constituted the means through which the brunt of the indigenista as-
sault on received articulations of the Andes was launched, it was actually
the indio, in all of these cases, who bore the pressure of representing pecu-
liar and divergent modernities. This pressure, according to each particu-
lar indigenista’s vision, shaped the representation of the indio according
to particular discursive needs. If the subject of this book is the use of the
indio to conjure modernity in early twentieth-century cultural production
in the Andes, it must also be centrally concerned with the variety of these
configurations. It is precisely through them, and not through other means
within this lettered movement, that the challenges of thinking society and
identity in the region become perceptible.
My account departs substantially from what is perhaps the most impor-

tant conceptualization of indigenismo in recent criticism. First developed
in his reading of the indigenista tradition, Peruvian critic Antonio Cor-
nejo Polar’s theory of heterogeneity is applicable to vast portions of Latin
American literature. According to Cornejo, heterogeneity describes literary
texts in relation to their permeability, as Hispanic and European cultural
products, to American indigenous cultures. Cornejo saw heterogeneity as
a defining factor in Latin America’s literary history, and he located it at
every point in that history, beginning with the event of the conquest, and
in particular with the different crónicas that came out of it (“Indigenismo”
106–7). His understanding of heterogeneity placed the concept between a
homogeneity that the violence of conquest contaminated and an implied
other, future homogeneity that might arise when subaltern, indigenous cul-
ture would be able to express its own values to itself. As Cornejo Polar him-
self notes, this trajectory of literary practices surrounding the indio mirrors
Mariátegui’s early theorization of a tripartite progression from indianista
literature that romanticized the indigenous, to indigenista literature that
advocates for the indio and is written by mestizos, to indígena literature, to
be produced eventually by the indio himself (109–10).
Cornejo’s discussion of Andean indigenismo, and notably of the work
of José María Arguedas, makes clear the real force and value of heterogene-
ity as a critical tool. Its power lies in its capacity to maintain the status of
literature as representational of the complex social dynamics and history
of the Andes. For Cornejo, this means that heterogeneity makes visible the
violence and discord that lie at the center of Andean society. Heterogeneity
involves the eruption of the codes and semantic systems of a subaltern cul-
ture into products of the dominant culture, but this does not imply that any
sort of synthesis takes places. Rather, instances of heterogeneity are a sort
of tense cohabitation and agon between two estranged cultures. Heteroge-
neity takes two major forms: “either the subjection of the referent to the
rule of exogenous factors . . . or, as in some exceptional cases, the capacity
of that same referent to modify—and the implications are obvious—the
formal order” of the dominant tradition’s texts (108). The results of the de-
grees of heterogeneity, of the intensity of its constituent parts, are visible in
the literary text.
I make recourse to the concept of heterogeneity in order to understand
works of Andean literature as reflective of the conflict between the region’s
different cultures and groups. However, Cornejo Polar’s theory exceeds a
singular representation of conflict: “The best indigenismo . . . does not just
assume the interests of the indigenous peasantry; it also assimilates, at a di-
verse degree, timidly or boldly, certain literary forms that organically per-
tain to the referent. It is understandable that this dual assimilation of social
interests and aesthetic forms constitutes the dialectical correlate of the
imposition that the indigenous world suffers from the productive system
of indigenismo: in a manner of speaking, this is its response” (114). While
the representation of the exteriority of the conflict between two different
cultures seems undeniable in indigenismo, we must view with skeptisim
Cornejo Polar’s insistence that the interiority of an indigenous worldview
might also be communicated in this production. Even in the case of José
María Arguedas, whom Cornejo Polar signals as an exemplar of this “best
indigenismo,” the assertion that cultural forms “common to the referent”
(that is, indigenous culture) can be transported intact into a distinct tradi-
tion (in this case, the materiality of Hispanic literature) is suspect. At best,
and happily, Spanish-language literature offers an approximation of that
culture’s forms (114).
My understanding of indigenismo thus differs from Cornejo’s as ex-
pressed through his early elaborations of heterogeneity. Rather than conjec-
ture the presence of indigenous culture in the indigenista texts, I read the
continual and tenacious displacement of this same culture and its associ-
ated interests. This is to say, I understand indigenismo not in a represen-
tational register, but rather as a constant disavowal of an indigeneity that,
by definition, cannot be equal to it. In my conception, lettered practice of
the period does not embody or authentically communicate indigenous in-
teriority. Rather, in relation to indigenous subjects and cultures, lettered
indigenismo operates as a mechanism that constantly evokes an indigenous
object. As it does so, indigenismo may create novel cultural forms, but it
does so always at a distance that reflects the gap between Hispanic soci-
ety and indigenous cultures. Indigenismo’s many cultural products do not
close this distance; on the contrary, they mark it.
Importantly, in his late writings on indigenismo (such as the masterful
Escribir en el aire [1994]), Cornejo Polar himself stressed an alienation of the
indigenous in indigenista production. This he attributed to the movement’s
political goals: “Indigenismo is as much an effective weapon against its his-
torical enemy, the oligarchy and especially the Andean hacienda system,
as it is a displaced writing that, precisely because of this, puts at the center
of the national scene the producer of the discourse on the other, the Indian
(Escribir 206).4 Thus, in his final work, Cornejo Polar noted a tension be-
tween his previous claims of indigenismo’s representativity with respect to
indigenous culture and the ways in which that same discourse represented a
will to power put into circulation by an ascendant mestizo subject. I follow
and build upon this skeptical turn in Cornejo Polar’s later work.
The skepticism with respect to the claims of authenticity that hetero-
geneity can channel is borne out in the early twentieth-century texts that I
analyze here. This suspicion arises not from an a priori judgment concern-
ing the capacity of Hispanic lettered works to represent indigenous peoples,
but rather from reading these texts together with their historical moment.
Texts such as Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peru-
ana, Oquendo de Amat’s 5 metros de poemas, and the newspaper Labor, when
placed within the historical context of modernization, overwhelmingly
suggest that indigenista works were much more concerned with articulat-
ing a vision of Andean society that would fit into the modern period than
they were in offering truthful accounts of indios and their worldview. In-
deed, this suspicion should ultimately be applied to Cornejo Polar’s theory,
in particular as it concerns Arguedas’s own attempts to envision, through
his rich and polymorphic indigenismo, the modern Andes of his time. The
purpose here is not to deauthorize or denounce these works as false because
they do not “truly” represent the indigenous. On the contrary, these works
responded to the challenge of conceptualizing a modernity in such a way
that might itself better accommodate the indio. But these efforts are not
synonymous with a communication of indigenous culture from within.
Cornejo Polar argues that heterogeneity operates both in the circula-
tion of a literary text and on the level of the text’s language itself (104–5).
That is, it may be expressed in a text’s audience and in its codes. But whereas
the backdrop for heterogeneity, and ultimately its referent, is the conquest
and the clash of cultures to which it gave rise, the referent for my reading of
indigenismo is modernization and the modernity that it triggered, particu-
larly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Mariátegui
himself noted, indigenismo “is not disconnected from the other new ele-
ments of this hour. On the contrary, it is connected to them” (Siete ensayos
238). While Cornejo’s theory of heterogeneity attempts to understand indi-
genismo as an instance of the intercalation of indigenous culture as a dis-
ruptive presence within one of the central institutions of Hispanic society
in Latin America, my intention is not to produce a similar snapshot of a
particular moment of conflict between cultures in the Americas. Rather,
in my reading, indigenismo provides a rich account and conceptualization
of the forms that modernity was thought to take, and still might, in the
Andes. Under this view, indigenismo constitutes one of the richest archives
on the modern in Latin American letters.
This study relies on the notion that at a given historical moment, in a

given geographic space, the expression of a unique modernity is likely and
indeed unavoidable. In his study of the cultural discourse of modernity in
Latin America, Carlos Alonso asserts, “‘Modernity’ is a concept with a his-
torical dimension that is privative to every context in which it is invoked
and thus must be accounted for—not only because the idearium of mo-
dernity and what is regarded as ‘modern’ evolve both in metropolitan and
peripheral circles but also because the historical circumstances in which
every claim for modernity is made in Spanish America lend concrete speci-
ficity to each claim, however repetitive or derivative the gesture may seem”
(Burden vi). Accordingly, the context of indigenismo in the early twentieth

century in the Andes necessarily lends its proper stamp to the series of dis-
cursive formations analyzed here, and it does so in ways that are inflected
by both the forms that these discourses take—poetry, newspaper, polemic,
essay, and photography—and by the uniquely nuanced perspective of the
agents that enunciate them. In other words, we must take into account both
the materiality and the social and historical contexts of the production of
these indigenista works.
This approach to indigenismo and to its discourses on the modern
leads inevitably to the conceptualization of modernities: that is, to a plural
understanding of the cultural forms modernization generates in societies.
It is precisely the insistence on this plurality that informs theories that have
been attentive to modernity’s manifestations in societies peripheral to Eu-
rope and the United States. In the introduction to a collection of essays on
the topic, Dilip Gaonkar lucidly comments on the notion of “alternative
modernities” and on the interrelationship of this notion with the idea of a
central modernity. In his commentary on Charles Taylor’s work, he charac-
terizes the idea of a single modernity, applicable everywhere, as “acultural”
(16). Such an understanding “describes the transition to modernity in terms
of a set of culture-neutral operations, which are viewed as ‘input’ that can
transform any traditional society” (16–17). According to Gaonkar, this no-
tion does not take into account the deeply cultural nature of modernity as
originated and disseminated from Europe, nor the diverse encounter with
this European modernity in the global margins.
In contrast, Gaonkar gestures to a cultural theory of modernities,
which “holds that modernity always unfolds within a specific cultural or
civilizational context and that different starting points for the transition
to modernity lead to different outcomes” (17). This articulation necessarily
multiplies the impact of the modern and thus gives rise to modernities as
Alonso has also described. This theory of divergence allows for an under-
standing of the ways in which specific cultures inflect and interpret modern
transformations. These modernities are perhaps best understood as “an at-
titude of questioning the present” (13).
With respect to the lettered and visual discourses that are the subject
of this book, I believe one finds this critical stance in relation to the con-
temporary moment at almost every point. However, this dimension of the
articulation of the modern in the Andes does not take precedence over, and
indeed may be secondary to, the forceful proposition of particular dynam-
ics and manifestations inspired by the question posed by the processes of
modernization. Said another way, while the cultural production studied

herein questions the technological, intellectual, and social transformations
as they appear in the Andes in the twentieth century, it also takes them
as extraordinarily and fundamentally pliable. There is a vibrant agency at
play here that undoes the idea that modernization is simply a threat to tra-
ditional cultures, against which local cultural producers defend themselves.
None of the writers and artists discussed here can be understood solely as
guardians of the local. Rather, in order to understand the full impact of
their work, they must be taken as inventive middlemen who saw, in the
modern, a chance to shape their lived and cultural contexts and thus to
respond to and especially to correct long-standing local problems. In this,
these discursive modernities evidence something of the dynamism that
Néstor García Canclini, in his Culturas híbridas, identifies in the contact
between traditional and modern cultures in the Latin American context
and that he understands as hybridity.
This book evidences this negotiation and inflection of modernity by a
local, Andean context. Both a literary theorist and a social critic, Mariátegui
unifies disparate revolutionary discourses in Siete ensayos de interpretación de
la realidad peruana (1928) and other writings, evoking the basic teleological
synonymy of both Marxism and indigenous utopianism in a way that al-
lows him to sidestep the significance of indigenous cultural forms in favor
of purported indigenous revolutionary beliefs. Thus, Mariátegui creates
a specific image of the indio gleaned from an emphasis on and misread-
ing of particular details, such as indigenous communal labor practices. If,
in Mariátegui’s view, indigenismo was meant to enfranchise the indio, it
was severely hampered in this goal by employing representations that were
removed from indigenous reality and a deep knowledge of the indigenous
population and that omitted the indio’s own worldview. Importantly,
Mariátegui utilizes literature and, in particular, its arguably most rarified
form in Western literary culture, poetry, in order to claim the centrality of
the indio in Andean society of his time. His insistence on César Vallejo’s
poems as the premiere site for making the indio visible signals, in fact, the
indio’s invisibility within his own formulation of the modern.
Various other undercurrents in indigenismo sought to introduce in-
digenous and highland cultures into the formulation of modernity in the
Andean region. Figures such as the conservative José Ángel Escalante
(1883–1965) first muddied the placid waters of a dominant, coastal indi-
genismo led by figures such as José Carlos Mariátegui by insisting upon
indigenous cultural customs and identities that questioned hegemonic in-
tellectuals’ subordination of regional cultures to a utopian national iden-

tity. Contextualizing Escalante’s discourse under the arc of a century of
indigenista discourses demonstrates the importance of this idealized na-
tional identity. Escalante’s disruption of indigenismo’s tactics makes visible
the power dynamics at the center of the movement. Furthermore, his inter-
ventions characterize the frequent tensions between regionalist and nation-
alist discourses within indigenismo. Finally, Escalante’s case is also highly
instructive as to the mobility of indigenismo’s political allegiances, as he
eventually became a government official who used indigenista discourse to
prop up the government.
The innovative book-object created by the Peruvian poet Oquendo de
Amat (1905–1936), 5 metros de poemas, uses the metaphor of film to conceptu-
alize the conflictive contact between the Andes and the influx of moderniz-
ing forces. For Oquendo de Amat, the Andes is equally evocative of nature,
the area’s indigenous and mestizo inhabitants, and his own childhood. He
thus represents these elements by gesturing to the region and the traditions
that, for him, it epitomizes. In the encounter between tradition and mod-
ernization, the poet eventually advocates the abandonment of a technologi-
cal modernization. Oquendo de Amat’s denial of technology leads him to
propose migration as a cultural model that might allow Andean subjects to
exist in both traditional and modern spaces without mixing them. Effec-
tively, Oquendo de Amat proposes an impossible denial of modernization’s
processes and identifies poetry with traditional Andean culture in order to
do so. His poetry thus narrates the emergence of a sort of antimodernity,
and it is telling that after this work was published, Oquendo de Amat never
again prioritized his poetic activity by publishing any other books of verse.
Labor was a working-class newspaper in the 1920s, created by Mariá
tegui but edited and written by a collective of indigenista intellectuals and
activists that included Tristán Marof, Ricardo Martínez de la Torre, and
Esteban Pavlevitch. Although at first Labor participated in an idealization
of indigenous people, and in particular of their assumed communism, it
is nevertheless a pioneer within indigenismo because its publication and
circulation among both regional and urban masses quickly led its edito-
rial group to consider indigenous people from the perspective of class. The
newspaper thus shifted away from dominant indigenista texts, which re-
mained anchored in ethnicity and race. In understanding indigenous peo-
ples through a concept of class dynamics, Labor strove to connect indios
to their rural and urban working counterparts, rather than to distinguish
them. This shift leads directly to a politics of self-representation in print,
and thus constitutes a turning point in the configuration of lettered institu-

tions in Andean modernity. Whereas previously the indigenous are often
instrumentalized by lettered practice, Labor destabilized these lettered au-
thorities and allowed for the possibility of the emergence and recognition
of subaltern voices.
A consideration of Martín Chambi’s (1891–1973) photographic practice
allows us to take up the dynamics between lettered and visual cultures.
Against scholarship that understands Chambi’s work as indigenista dis-
course in the vein of either José Uriel García’s celebratory view of the trans-
formation of indigenous culture through mestizaje in El nuevo indio (1930)
or Luis Varcárcel’s messianic interpretation of the indio in Tempestad en los
Andes (1927), I argue that Chambi’s pictures of indigenous people and other
highland denizens, taken between 1925 and 1940, visually represent and
document the roles that they assume within the processes of societal and
technological modernization. In equal measure discourse and documenta-
tion, these photographs attest to a peculiar Andean modernity that neither
obliterates nor aggrandizes the indio but instead strives to understand the
persistent ways in which indigenous and local cultures adapt to and exploit
the rifts and fissures that modernization leaves in its wake. An analysis of
modern visual technology suggests the contours and limits of lettered cul-
ture’s representations of indios in the Andes.
Although I emphasize the plurality of modernity in the Andes, other
theories of modernity propose a monolithic view of that phenomenon.
These come in two varieties: those that are Eurocentric, as Gaonkar and
others have identified; and those that, while asserting the unity of all as-
pects of modernity on a global scale, nevertheless understand the signifi-
cance of different geopolitical parts of the globe as at least equal. The first
are associated with figures such as Daniel Bell, who understands modern-
ization as a process that runs its course in a similar way in every corner of
the globe and which will thus eventually result in an identical modernity
everywhere. His view, in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, insists on
the beneficence of this modernity but cannot account for the local contexts
in which modernization takes root.
The latter variety, mapped out persuasively by critics such as Imman-
uel Wallerstein through the concept of world systems theory, holds that
modernity originated as part of a dialectical process in the contact between
Europe and the rest of the world and that any conceptualization that takes
into account only one geopolitical site is therefore incomplete. A prominent
Peruvian critic of modernity in the Andes, Aníbal Quijano, stands as a ma-
jor affiliate of this theory in Latin America. Quijano describes Latin Amer-
ica’s relationship to modernization and modernity by saying, “Although
Latin America may have been, in fact, a latecomer to, and almost passive
victim of, “modernization,” it was, on the other hand, an active participant
in the production of modernity” (“Modernity, Identity” 141). In this fash-
ion, Quijano touches upon the peculiar correlation between modernization
and modernity in the area. The mere appearance of the first is enough to
create a full manifestation of the second; indeed, this has almost always
been the case in Latin America, given the region’s lackluster record of ex-
pansive technological and industrial growth.
Furthermore, Quijano argues that “this copresence of Latin America
in the production of modernity not only continued but became more con-
scious throughout the period of the crystallization of modernity, especially
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (142). As such, and given
the weakness of modernization, he understands modernity in Latin Amer-
ica to have been largely intellectual: that is, to have taken place in the inter-
subjective realm of cultural production (144).
Quijano’s emphasis on the cultural manifestations of modernity, as
opposed to its objective material existence, leads directly into my field of
investigation here. Nevertheless, although I am aware of the persistent calls
to propose a totalizing notion of modernity, I ground my analyses here on
a synchronic plane and leave a diachronic reading—no doubt fascinating
in the Andes—to another project. I take this position because I believe that
the dynamics of a universal modernity can only be grasped after careful
scrutiny of the particulars of modernities in many geopolitical hinterlands.
Timothy Mitchell, in his commentaries on modernities at the margins, has
argued that critics must note “the singularity and universalism of the proj-
ect of modernity and, at the same time, attend to a necessary feature of
this universalism that repeatedly makes its realization incomplete. Briefly,
if the logic and movement of history can be produced only by displacing
and discounting what remains heterogeneous to it, then the latter plays the
paradoxical but unavoidable role of the ‘constitutive outside’” (xii–xiii). It
is this constitutive outside, and especially its paradoxes, that I sound in my
research into Andean indigenismo.
Indigenismo is synonymous with cultural modernity not simply be-
cause as a movement it came to the fore at one of the most fervent historical
moments for thinking about the modern. To make such a declaration limit-
ing the contact between indigenismo and modernity to simple contempora-
neousness would be to misunderstand the deep ties that bind them together.
Whether it be Mariátegui’s strident emphasis on and central position of the

indigenous, Escalante’s seesawing commitment to indios, Labor’s driven ef-
fort to absorb indios into a broader reading of class, Oquendo de Amat’s
attempt to affiliate the indigenous with rural tradition and his insistence
on safeguarding such a position, or Chambi’s photographic reflection on
Andean subjects and modernity, all interpret the material and conceptual
presence of the modern as more than mere tools. Simply put, they take the
modern as the impetus, indeed the mandate, to correct the colonial legacy
and neocolonial reality so firmly rooted in the region. As such, we should
not forget the profoundly utopian sense that undergirds each of these at-
tempts to pronounce modernity.
ch a p t e r on e
THE REVOLUTIONARY INDIO

José Carlos Mariátegui’s Indigenismo
I
n a brief essay on José Carlos Mariátegui, the well-known Peruvian
critic Aníbal Quijano characterizes Mariátegui's work from the 1920s
as expressing an “intersubjective universe that is constituted by the pro-
cess of Latin American culture of that period, as an alternative to the one
imposed by the Creole oligarchy. It is a question of a distinct rationality,
that even then some proposed to recognize as ‘indoamerican’” ("Prólogo”
x). The rationality that Quijano terms “indoamerican” is part and parcel of
indigenismo. In this citation and elsewhere, such as in his article “Moder-
nity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America,” Quijano argues for an under-
standing of Mariátegui that locates an authentic indigenous worldview in
his work.
As such, Quijano conceptualizes Mariátegui's writings as capable of
making indigenous concerns, and even culture, organic to the deep struc-
tures of an oppositional lettered critique. Quijano bases this view on the
fact that Mariátegui consistently invoked myth in order to communicate
his utopian visions of the Andes. In this way, Quijano argues, Mariátegui
understood that socialism, as it had been articulated in Europe, “was not a
25
26 ≈ the revolutionary indio
real—rational, that is—proposal for Peruvian society of the time, which

was populated mainly by peasants, indios in fact” (xi). Quijano insists that
Mariátegui's indigenismo, when faced with the inapplicability of rational
socialist thought to the Andes, permeated Marxism with irrational, and
presumably indigenous, underpinnings. For Quijano, then, indigenismo
is capable of genuinely representing more than indigenous strategic inter-
ests; for him, Mariátegui's version captures and transmits what would be
the indio's unique cultural essence: that is, a non-Western, mythic irratio-
nality. With the exception of Quijano's insistence on Mariátegui's volunta-
rism in being able to communicate an indigenous worldview, this notion of
Mariátegui's work being home to both European and indigenous compo-
nents closely resembles Cornejo Polar's premise concerning heterogeneity. I
look upon this notion skeptically by focusing on Mariátegui's articulation
of the indio from the stronghold of the letter. Mariátegui’s characteriza-
tions of the indio, as we shall see, have roots in contemporaneous concepts
of revolution that arise from his deep immersion in the international lan-
guage of social change.
In the early months of 1926, at a house located on Jirón Washington
just beyond the wealthy, balconied mansions and aristocratic elite of Lima’s
centuries-old colonial center, three young Peruvian intellectuals debated
how best to title a journal that, at a crucial moment in Peruvian intellectual
history, actively sought to overturn their society’s traditional hierarchical
organization. It was a portentous task whose outcome would herald a his-
toric turn in Latin American thought. Equally a product of and a reflection
upon an uneven but irrefutable modernization in Latin America, the jour-
nal that sprang from this collaboration radically transformed intellectuals’
conceptions of their own region. Indeed, Amauta (1926–1930)—as it was fi-
nally and significantly named—emerged at a moment of drastic change in
the Andean world. Migration to the city, the instability of traditional class
and racial divisions, and a rushed, chaotic urbanization increasingly char-
acterized the experience of a significant portion of the Andean population.
These transformations paralleled a new phase of relations with the outside
world, relations spurred on by the region’s reinvigorated ties with central
nations—the United States especially—in the form of massive investment,
technological imports (in which motion pictures and the automobile figure
prominently), and the freer circulation of cultural commodities, particu-
larly those from Europe.1
As Luis Alberto Sánchez recounts it, the question of what title the van-
guard publication would bear had actually been a source of debate for some
the revolutionary indio ≈ 27
time (Aquézolo Castro 166). In the weeks prior to the decisive meeting in
Mariátegui’s study, the bland Vanguardia had been favored for the homage
it paid to an international movement, even if it did risk losing itself in a
flurry of Latin American publications inspired by avant-garde activity in
Europe.2 However, by the time that these three young men—Mariátegui,
Sánchez, and the historian Jorge Basadre—met on jirón Washington in or-
der to come to a decision, they brought to the table very definite opinions
regarding the objectives that the journal’s title should reflect. Sánchez re-
members: “One afternoon in José Carlos’s study, José Carlos, Basadre and
I argued about the title of the future journal. The biggest problem was that
the title should be inclusive. Basadre suggested something related to the Re-
publican Era, which is the true melting pot of the races, and Mariátegui de-
fended the idea of autochthony, already taken with the term amauta. Amauta
appeared” (Aquézolo Castro 166, emphasis mine).3
If Basadre favored a term that harkened back to the beginning of the
republic by highlighting the mix of races he associated with that period,
Mariátegui looked to entirely different sources, sources which both pre-
dated the republican epoch and, importantly in Mariátegui’s conception,
postdated it as well. Apparently, the term amauta had been suggested to
Mariátegui weeks earlier by the cajamarquino José Sabogal, a painter well
known for his indigenista motifs. Upon hearing it, Mariátegui had been
completely taken with the Quechua word, which means “poet and teacher.”
As he would explain later, one of the key reasons for choosing this title was
the ambiguous implications of such an outdated term: “The title translates
our affiliation to the Race, it reflects our homage to Incaism. But with this
journal the word Amauta acquires a new meaning. We are going to recreate
it” (“Presentación”).4
For Mariátegui, the choice between a title that would, as Vanguardia
did, locate their project in the increasingly widespread and international
fervor for all things modern, or another that harkened back to the nine-
teenth century, or one that specified not only Peru but especially its indig-
enous population and culture was no choice at all. By 1926, Mariátegui’s
firsthand experience with avant-garde movements in Europe and his close
contact with their Latin American counterparts had already led him to
assume a distanced and critical opinion of those artists and intellectuals
who strictly championed the cause of the new for its own sake. In an article
entitled “Arte, revolución y decadencia” presented in Amauta’s third issue,
he alluded to the primary problem with an aestheticized manifestation of
the vanguard: “We cannot accept as new an art that gives us nothing but a
new technique. That would be to be distracted by the most false of the mo-
ment’s illusions. No aesthetic can reduce artistic production to a technical
problem. The new technique should correspond to a new spirit as well. If
not, the only thing that changes is the adornment, the decoration. And a
revolution does not content itself with formal conquests” (3).5
His argument rests on the refusal to concede that art might be sepa-
rated from the realm of the social, and in particular that its innovations
might not somehow reflect and inflect this same social reality. He was well
aware of diverse and divergent political attitudes at home and abroad, and
he clearly saw the need for a vanguard organ that would not only articu-
late a critically leftist view of Peruvian reality but would also direct high
cultural production toward social ends. Anywhere, but especially in a
place like Peru, Mariátegui reasoned, cultural practices could not be left
to construct themselves in a social vacuum. There can be little doubt that
the “spirit” that Mariátegui mentions is an indigenous one, loaded with the
meaning of social reform.
Unlike Basadre’s suggestion, amauta allowed a historically remote
referent to coexist with a meaning that left itself open to be determined
by indigenismo’s plans for the future. For Mariátegui, amauta described a
project that distanced itself from the remote past at the same time that it
renewed and deployed the forms it found therein. Thus the journal would
take Incan history as a point of departure, but the past would not be its des-
tination. In a move that characterizes Mariátegui’s political positioning of
culture, his choice of this title culls from the ashes of an old civilization the
kindling necessary to ignite a new one. In this sense, his strategy broke with
the modern insofar as it did not rely solely on notions of originality and
on the denial of the past. His usage strives to bring indigenous culture—
although how this is to be defined is as yet unclear—into contact with and
indeed into the center of modernity’s ubiquitous presence in 1920s Lima.
It is important to note the full implications of Mariátegui’s choice of
a word that referred to the Incan past. Critics such as Alberto Tauro have
noted that the term, in Quechua, designated “a wise man who in filling
the role of a teacher to a certain degree socialized his knowledge, in this
way training the functionaries that the empire required. He became a pivot
point of the administration” (10). In his decision, then, Mariátegui heav-
ily emphasized an element of Incan society that no longer existed and in
the same movement slighted present-day indigenous culture. The figure of
the amauta was and is closely associated with imperial Incan society, and
much less so with contemporary indigenous cultures. This disconnect in
Mariátegui’s critique between intellectual discourse on indigeneity and

contemporaneous indigenous people would remain a constant.
On the other hand, Basadre’s and Sánchez’s impulse toward a title that
would adequately reflect “the republican era, which is the true racial melt-
ing pot” emphasizes their interest in an immediately prior history, the lega-
cies of which were made visible only by the advent of the twentieth century.
Thus the preference of Basadre, the historian from the provinces, speaks
to the flux in racial boundaries and, more often than not, concurrently in-
vokes movements across class lines, a phenomenon he judges began with
independence. Needless to say, Basadre’s observation is made possible as
much by distance from the era of the early republic as it is by the Lima of
the 1920s that he inhabited, a city flooded with migrants of every variety.
Indeed, during Augusto B. Leguía’s eleven-year regime, Lima’s population
almost doubled, from 200,000 in 1919 to 375,000 by the late 1920s (Tamayo
Herrera, El indigenismo limeño 16). During the same years, the colonial cen-
ter of power and wealth became increasingly visible through the contrast
provided by the rings of humbler and less ambitious settlements that slowly
encircled it.6 Although not as extreme, these sorts of changes occurred in
urban centers throughout the country.
In this nation in flux, one of the intelligentsia’s central concerns was
the necessity of creating a national identity that might somehow respond
to the deep transformations modernization left in its wake.7 Modernity
in the Andes is deeply marked by the presence and vigor of identitarian
projects. Launching such a project was, in fact, the agenda at that meet-
ing in Mariátegui’s study on the jirón Washington. For both Basadre and
Mariátegui were attempting nothing less than the complete recasting of the
nation’s sense of itself, albeit in radically different ways. Basadre sought to
fix the flux of the present moment by addressing the nation’s cultural di-
versity, its status as a “melting pot,” while at the same time confirming its
continuity with the century-old republic. Hailing from the recently reinte-
grated city of Tarma, Basadre was clearly invested in a project in keeping
with the nineteenth-century desire to see Peru present itself as unified in
light of relations with its old enemy and occupier, Chile. Modernization
meant transition, and transition, instability; in Basadre’s eyes, it was essen-
tial that Peru continue to define itself as a nation with respect to the found-
ing moment that was independence in order to maintain its literal integrity
and political sovereignty.
Mariátegui, however, saw in the same period of transition and social
flux the opportunity to grasp the reins of history. In the many forms that
modernization took at the time, he intuited a democratization and eco-

nomic development of previously ignored social sectors to be phenomena
powerful enough to shake the very foundations of Peruvian society; his is a
discourse of the future, no matter that it harkens to the past. Accordingly,
for him the 1920s were to be the arena in which two histories—the ancient
indigenous past and Peru’s occidental history since first contact—would
meet. It was Mariátegui’s conviction and objective that a new socialist so-
ciety arise from that combative meeting, and the creation of this society
would drive all of Mariátegui’s articulations of an Andean modernity.
To be sure, few figures have been as important as José Carlos Mariátegui

to the narrative of Latin American history that twentieth-century cultural
and literary critics have labored to construct. In his function as patron of
vanguard cultural practices and vociferous critic of the neocolonialist sta-
tus quo, critics who are strongly invested in models of mixed culture find
an ideal representation of the mestizo’s accomplishments in the twentieth
century.8 According to these readings, Mariátegui, as both man and author,
embodies the earliest and most ambitious manifestation of a figure—the
mestizo—that would ceaselessly propagate itself physically and discur-
sively throughout the century in the numerous countries that make up the
region.
Historically, at least, there can be little dissent on this point, for in fact
the mestizo and the cultural and racial mixture he entails are writ large
across the century’s history. Mariátegui was a mestizo, and as noted by Bas-
adre, Sánchez, and a slew of others at the time and afterward, the class and
race to which he belonged were to rise from their obscure origins at the cen-
tury’s threshold in order to recast the nation in their image. The mixed cul-
tures of Latin America have produced a dazzling array of cultural artifacts,
and indeed, the century’s most dazzling cultural production has readily set
itself to the task of making sense of that mixture’s apparent chaos.9
However, while the historical conditions of modernization, such as
the intense migration and visibility of a mestizo middle class, made pos-
sible Mariátegui the public man and dissenter, and also created the space
in which he was to pronounce his Marxist-inspired discourse on the uses
of literature and the indio, they may have also limited the fecundity of the
ground onto which that discourse was sown. Mariátegui did belong to the
provincial mestizo middle class that vied for political and cultural power in
1920s Lima, but he himself did not imagine that class as a model for the na-
tion. It is one thing to interpret Mariátegui at the emergence of a moment
in history, but quite another to obscure his own unique critique of the pos-
sibility and future of Latin America by limiting his vision to the ambitions
of his class. Fernanda Beigel, in her recent book on Mariátegui’s critical
thought, has been especially insistent on this point (50).
Among the many critics who have positioned Mariátegui as central to
their promotion of a mestizo culture in Latin America, perhaps no other
author more convincingly argues—with a store of knowledge as broad as it
is nuanced—for the incontestability of Latin American cultural mestizaje
than the Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama. Insofar as Rama develops one of
the central and most representative theories of cultural mestizaje in his
elaboration of the concept of transculturation, his work serves as a fine ex-
ample of that theory’s obfuscation of alternate versions of modernity, such
as Mariátegui’s.
In the prelude to the reflections on Andean culture that end his 1982
landmark study, Transculturación narrativa en América Latina, Rama traces
a compelling history of the emergence of the mestizo social subject in mod-
ern Peru. He describes the newly urban mestizo’s play for ascendancy in the
early twentieth century in the following manner:
We will find a worldview animating these works and imparting mean-
ing to them; it was created by a new social stratum that had developed
in provincial towns and cities thanks to education. It allowed them to
ascend from their initial position in the lower levels of the burgeoning
middle classes. They responded to the irresistible convocation put into
effect by the weak, post–WW I process of modernization, which needed
to be more widely and competently implemented. At the same time,
however, that class had seen its advance contained by society’s archaic
structure, which opposed the process of modernization. Confronting
it, the provincial mestizo middle class articulates a social and political
critique that uses art and literature as instruments of diffusion and criti-
cal action, thus relying on indigenismo, but in reality expressing its own
mesticismo. (141)
Here, Rama presents what is incontrovertibly an agonic model of history.
For him, the mestizo’s social ascent from the brackish backlands and deso-
late sierras of Latin America takes the form of a long march during which
the mestizo slowly gathered the weapons necessary to battle for his empow-
erment. In Rama’s view, this empowerment is organized around little more
than the mestizo’s desire to incorporate himself into the preexisting social
hierarchy. His political validity as a self-determining agent in history is
bound to the destiny of his class. Thus, Mariátegui the man and public fig-
ure only confirm the mestizo’s single-minded objective to enter the official
nation and, once there, to tailor it in the image of his bipartite heritage. In
this view, the mestizo does not question the preexisting structure of the na-
tion. If anything, he reinvigorates it by adapting himself to its deep system
of values, even if he does change society’s superficial appearance.
The teleological underpinnings—implicit in the entire study but most
clearly revealed in Tranculturación narrativa’s final sections on the Peruvian
writer José María Arguedas—of Rama’s understanding of history largely
dictate this reading of early twentieth-century social upheaval. A veritable
juggernaut of historical interpretation, Transculturación narrativa never
loses sight of its motivations, either in its dexterous comings and goings
across the texts and events of a dozen nations’ cultures or in its numer-
ous incursions into disciplines as diverse as economics, sociology, history,
and literature. Rama’s self-appointed task is to pinpoint the essence of
Latin American culture, what he calls its espíritu or imaginary, as it has
existed over the course of the century. He explains, “What is investigated
in the novels of the transculturators is a kind of fidelity to the spirit which
is reached through the recuperation of the structures peculiar to the Latin
American imaginary, revitalizing these structures in new historical cir-
cumstances and not abandoning them” (123, emphasis mine).
The problem arises from the organizing principle that this quest gen-
erates in Rama’s reading of Latin American cultural history. For Rama,
this culture marches toward the increasingly pure manifestation of the
principles of transculturation that, in his understanding, already animate
it from its inception. Since this is not merely a tendency but rather the logic
which dictates the very purpose of history in the region, ideologies that do
not support it—that were not germane to the installation of the mestizo
and his eventual, active promotion of mixture—become invisible. Thus,
Mariátegui’s ideology of revolution—which, as we shall see, refutes the vi-
ability of the mestizo as an agent of social change—falls beyond the scope
of Rama’s outline of history.
Although he is deeply indebted to a number of Mariátegui’s other
analyses, Rama cannot position Mariátegui as anything other than a pre-
cursor to the great examples of mestizaje in the latter half of the twentieth
century. In Rama’s teleology, Mariátegui prepared the ground for those
who came after by introducing the mestizo into lettered culture, but he was
not himself, in his work and efforts, an example of mestizaje as understood
from the conceptual vantage point of transculturation. In Rama’s account,
the vanguard to which Mariátegui belonged was too concerned with jockey-
ing for power in the city to see beyond its own urban environment. Herein
lie the roots of Rama’s conviction that Mariátegui’s understanding of Latin
American culture, and therefore his proposals to change the continent’s
social reality through an indigenous-based revolution, were not only inad-
equate to the challenge of the day, but actually served to veil class struggle
by presenting its terms in the more apparent vocabulary of race, attached as
this concept was to the differentiation of the indigenous as a biologically de-
termined people. For Rama, Mariátegui’s ascendant middle class vaunts it-
self, in the form of the mestizo, over other sectors of the same society. This
mesticismo, as Rama calls it, seeks nothing other than to propagate itself like
some amorphous monster whose appetite is set on the farthest reaches of
the region itself. As Rama explains,
In that way of choosing some elements and preferring others, what we
register is the optic of a distinct culture, the mestizo’s, and its organizing
filters of reality. Two related factors occupied the primary place in that
reality: the realist and the economic ones, which are found in the texts of
Mariátegui. . . .
. . . The drastic imposition of peculiar interpretative filters of reality
onto other social groups is typical of social cultures of emerging social
groups, whatever their breadth, richness, or poverty. They interpret these
other groups according to these filters and later try to impose them, in
order that others appreciate these values. They thus propose a general
homogenization of the social body according to their own array of values.
In fact, mestizo culture argues for the mestizoization of all of Andean
society, including the indigenous remnants that it exults but to whom it
proposes a profound acculturation under its tutelage. This is the peda-
gogical function that the vanguards take up. (150–52)
For Rama, then, Mariátegui’s social activities betray a crude and over-
simplifying economics. Like the rest of his class, Mariátegui’s objectives are
assumed, in fact, to keep down those whose social situation he would seek to
better. His limited knowledge of indigenous cultures necessarily condemns
him to being eclipsed by those who know, and have experienced, more.
Thus, in Transculturación narrativa, Arguedas and his 1958 novel Los ríos
profundos, written at the crossroads of indigenous and Hispanic cultures,
mark the most developed example of mestizaje’s cultural production on the
march of Latin American culture toward achieving its true essence.10
However, while some members of the Andean vanguard—perhaps
best represented by Jorge Icaza in Ecuador and José Uriel García and Hil-
debrando Castro Pozo in Peru—did, as Rama suggests, actively propose
the inculcation of the indio under mestizo tutelage, certainly not all were
quite as enthusiastic or affirmative about the project of imposing not only
their identities but their histories and experiences as well.11 Many, in fact,
resisted this kind of “mestizoization” and thus contested the emergence of
mestizaje as a blueprint for modernity in the Andes. Mariátegui, the most
complex of the thinkers who threw his hat into the ideological debates of
the 1920s, was no exception. The stakes in reading Mariátegui against the
grain of Rama’s history, then, consist of unearthing how the most promi-
nent indigenista critic of the early twentieth century understood the role
of the indigenous not in the rise of the mestizo, but in the instauration of a
modern Andean utopia.
Born in 1894 in the provincial capital of Moquegua, Mariátegui spent

his childhood in poverty, particularly after the family was abandoned by
Mariátegui’s father. The conditions in which Mariátegui was raised, the
education he was given, and the opportunities that were available to him
were all extremely limited, given that he and his two siblings were barely
able to subsist on the meager pay his mother earned as a seamstress. An
accident at the age of nine left Mariátegui lame in one leg, and the search
for better medical attention, as well as the hope for better wages, led his
mother and her three children to the capital. Once in Lima, the severe eco-
nomic straits the family faced during Mariátegui’s early adolescence forced
him to leave school and begin work in the burgeoning newspaper industry
before he turned thirteen. Having found his place in the newspaper boom,
Mariátegui was, in part, formed by it. He worked his way up through every
possible level in the distribution and production of print journalism.12
Mariátegui’s trajectory from impoverished youth to polished auto-
didact, his forays into theater and criticism under his first masters, the
modernistas, and the exile that would lead him to Marx and paradoxically
reintroduce him to his own country are the subject of numerous studies.13
The scant information that exists regarding his knowledge of the Andes
and the indigenous peoples of its many regions comes from testimonies, in
particular from his various collaborators at Amauta. Emilio Romero, for ex-
ample, tells of regular meetings his mentor slated with him and Luis Valcár-
cel in order to interrogate them systematically on Andean reality. Natives
of the sierra and well versed in indigenous culture, they complied happily.
In interviews, Romero notes both Mariátegui’s desire for knowledge about
the Andes and how the critic meticulously studied his notes on indigenous
cultures (qtd. in Flores Galindo, La agonía de Mariátegui, 48).
Despite the exemplary biography of the early twentieth-century mes-
tizo that Mariátegui’s life traces out—born in the provinces, migrates to
the city, ascends socially not through education but through booming in-
dustry—in Mariátegui’s mature critical work we see few ideas as unpalat-
able to his intellectual sensibilities as that of the mestizo and his culture.
In his 1928 text Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, whose
separate articles had been in circulation as early as 1926, he writes,
Mestizaje, within the economic and social conditions existent among us,
does not only produce a new human and ethnic type but also a new social
type. If the imprecision of the first, due to a motley combination of races,
does not in itself constitute an inferiority and might even announce
the signs of a “cosmic” race in certain happy examples, the imprecision or
hybridity of the social type, through an obscure predominance of negative sedi-
ments, translates into a sordid and morose stagnation. In the mestizo neither
the white’s nor the indio’s tradition is prolonged; they both clash and are
sterilized.14 (313, emphasis mine)
The judgment Mariátegui pronounces deploys a biological metaphor: two
complementary but opposite parents produce a sterile offspring. Mariátegui’s
diagnosis neither jibes with the overwhelming presence of mestizos
and mestizo culture within the vanguard movement (César Vallejo and
Mariátegui himself, to name but two) nor positions him comfortably at
the forefront of a mesticismo bent on empowering itself, as Rama suggests.
What his analysis does do is highlight the incompatibility of two cultures,
two worldviews that, according to Mariátegui, share absolutely no common
ground. Instead of epitomizing their inevitable synthesis, the mestizo here
constitutes the symbol of their incompatibility in his inability to forge a
distinct history and culture from the parts he inherits. Rama entirely over-
looks such derisive comments regarding the inadequacy of the mestizo,
scattered throughout Mariátegui’s texts, and these have scarcely been read
in nuanced accounts of Mariátegui’s politics.15
Mariátegui’s insistence on the “social” in tipo social betrays his single-
minded concern for the social possibilities offered by a modernizing Peru.
His denial of the mestizo’s particular tipo social illustrates the critic’s concern
for the location of social types. His lack of education, his prejudices, and
especially the ease with which he was swept into the trajectory of a Western-
style modernization meant that, for Mariátegui, the mestizo was tied to
the task of purging the indio from the nation. From the mestizo’s location
at the core of industrialization, both as laborer and consumer, Mariátegui
concluded he would invariably fall in with a central modernization’s eradi-
cation of the local. Filled with diatribes against the product of racial mix-
ing, Mariátegui’s comments on the mestizo’s type are thus written against
precisely what Rama mistakenly perceived in Mariátegui himself: the easy
accommodation of the newly visible mixed race, and only that race, into the
preexisting hierarchy.
Unquestionably, the idea that cultural practices and social change are
inextricably linked was nothing new to Mariátegui. In the presentation of
Amauta, he writes, “Beyond what distinguishes them, all these spirits con-
tribute that which approximates and joins them: their will to create a new
Peru within the new world.”16 Mariátegui perceived a direct link between
the society that was to come and the intelligentsia that was to lead it, no
matter if through essay, pictorial art, narrative, or poetry. And in fact, as
we shall see, it is in Mariátegui’s own critique of contemporaneous poetry
that he establishes the parameters which inform his refusal of the mestizo
subject and constitute a major step toward a strategically idealized repre-
sentation of the indio.
As the thirty-two-issue run of Amauta demonstrates, Mariátegui was
far more concerned with the need for these intellectuals to think about the
problems Peru presented than with their thinking only within the Peruvian
tradition. He himself was adamant about the need for Peruvians in par-
ticular, and Latin Americans in general, to look toward Europe and its in-
tellectual tradition in order to find possible solutions to the inequalities of
Latin America’s reality. At first glance, Mariátegui’s enthusiasm for recent
European thought seems paradoxical in light of his critical stance toward
neocolonial investment and development. For the critic, however, the dif-
ference was clear: the acceptance of sophisticated critical frameworks was
not necessarily capitulation to a neocolonial relationship with central na-
tions. Indeed, Mariátegui credited European social theories with allowing
him to see the plight of Latin America, at the same time that he insisted
that those theories must also undergo transformations in accordance to lo-
cal reality.
The idea of a committed intellectual and artist, and from it the idea
for a journal that would stand at the forefront of Peru’s cultural and so-
cial reconstruction, came to Mariátegui during the years he spent in ex-
ile in Europe from 1919 to 1923 (Nuñez 26–35). These years are absolutely
pivotal to Mariátegui’s development and understanding of how cultural
practices—in particular cultural organs—function within societies un-

dergoing change, modernization, and renovation. Although relatively little
work has been done on this period of Mariátegui’s life, it is certain that he
had occasion to observe the genesis and development of many European
vanguard publications. In particular, as several historians have conjectured
from his travels in Italy and affiliation with members of the Italian Com-
munist Party, Mariátegui had access to Antonio Gramsci’s Ordine Nuovo,
as well as extensive information on the Russian Revolution, and it is per-
haps here that the Peruvian critic found the blueprint for a similar organ
in Peru.17
But no matter how well Mariátegui understood the need to borrow
from Europe in order to formulate an egalitarian modernity in Peru, he
also perceived with acuity that in the Andes, social renovation and revolu-
tion could not come from the same stratum of society that clamored for
it in the Old World. Early on, he assumed that any attempt to restructure
Peru and free it from the colonial traditions that riddled the republic must
include the indio, and indeed, must be based on his revindication. If this
discovery is the crux of Mariátegui’s and indigenismo’s social thought,
however, it does not initially go beyond a strategic use of the indio within a
Marxist model. In his reflections on the uses of literature, best exemplified
by his writing on poetry, Mariátegui tends to evade the possibility that the
indio himself might have, within his own culture and through the tools it
provides, a valid and useful way of criticizing imperial structures. In this,
Rama’s criticism holds, while Quijano’s insistence on Mariátegui’s voic-
ing of an authentic indigenous worldview seems groundless. Mariátegui
subsumes the indio into his own revolutionary discourse on the Andes, in
which the indio plays a key role. The socially acceptable and valued prac-
tice of literature is thus made to speak the figure of the indigenous while
at the same time silencing the indio’s own voice. In effect, in Mariátegui’s
critique, literature and the indio are absolutely inseparable in the envision-
ing of a local modernity.
Although Mariátegui propagated his agenda on many different fronts,
it was in contemporary artistic production that he found concrete proof
of what he imagined at the core of any Peruvian revolution—the espíritu
indígena—and its disruptive qualities. While the indigenista movement ex-
pressed itself through a variety of cultural practices, including narrative,
dance, and criticism, Mariátegui, schooled by modernismo and its aes-
theticizing conceptions of poetry, found its essence in verse and painting.
He emphatically stated over and over again, “The character of this [indigeni-
sta] tendency is not naturalist or folklorist; rather, it is lyrical, as Andean poetry’s

first attempts and forays prove” (Siete ensayos 305, emphasis in original).18 In
the course of his criticism, he would elaborate on examples of both arts,
but without question perceived the apogee of the movement in the poetry
of César Vallejo.
Two years Mariátegui’s elder, Vallejo continued writing until eight
years after Mariátegui’s death in 1930, yet published only two books of
poetry in his lifetime: Los heraldos negros (1918) and Trilce (1922). Also a
migrant from the Andes, Vallejo’s fate led him in an entirely different direc-
tion than Mariátegui’s. After exiling himself in 1922 in order to avoid arrest
for trumped-up charges stemming from a small-town feud, Vallejo never
returned to Peru. His early writings often address those themes specific
to the experience of the Andean migrant, but his later poetry, while still
concerned with the problems modernity posed, was accordingly more in-
fluenced by his international comings and goings. By the time Mariátegui
began to publish Amauta, Vallejo’s two books of poetry had already been
written and the poet himself was living in Paris.19 Nonetheless, Mariátegui
found in Vallejo’s writings that which he esteemed to be “the dawning of a
new poetry in Peru” [el orto de una nueva poesía en el Perú] (280).
Surprisingly enough, as a literary critic and as an advocate of vanguard-
ist production, Mariátegui was not at all concerned with the formal aspects
of Vallejo’s work. He did not rely on Vallejo’s highly experimental orthog-
raphy and meter to substantiate his assessment of the poet’s importance,
nor did he base his judgments on Vallejo’s departure from the traditional
content of poetry in Latin America before the twentieth century. In fact,
as his commentary on the poet in Siete ensayos makes explicit, Mariátegui’s
evaluation almost entirely ignores Vallejo’s work after Los heraldos negros.
This omission is made all the more strange because even though Vallejo’s
early poetry did depart from tradition in its content, if not necessarily in its
elaboration, the Vallejo who truly shocks, the one so often mentioned as the
founder of a new poetic tradition, is the Vallejo of the highly experimental
Trilce.
That Mariátegui was not interested in Vallejo’s experimentation empha-
sizes his agenda, one that the early Vallejo matched perfectly. Mariátegui, it
seems, overlooked the formal, highly visible qualities of this work in favor of
something far less tangible: the lofty and ambiguous espíritu indígena. Ac-
cordingly he pronounced: “Vallejo is the poet of a breed [estirpe], of a race.
In Vallejo we find, for the first time in our literature, the virginal expression
of indigenous sentiment. . . . His art does not tolerate the equivocal and ar-
tificial dualism of essence and form. Indigenous sentiment in . . . Vallejo is

something that flowers in the verses themselves, changing their structure”
(280).20 Here, Mariátegui insists that Vallejo’s work represents only one,
and no other, social subject. The language of purity—“virginal,” “flower,”
“breed”—goes a long way toward conveying Mariátegui’s thinking about
both poetry and the indio. More importantly, it also suggests the inher-
ent association between the two in the critic’s thinking. If Mariátegui is
certain that Vallejo’s work manifests the expression of a single race, he pays
no less attention to the construction of that race as organic and natural. For
Mariátegui, it is not Vallejo’s task or accomplishment to simply elaborate
upon indigenous themes and realities or portray them accurately, naturally,
or organically. The crux of the critic’s interpretation lies in his deep convic-
tion that Vallejo’s poetry is the equivalent of the indigenous essence, that
the “Andean poetry” which Vallejo represents is itself organically bound to
the indio in its genesis, for there can be no “dualism of essense and form.”
Strangely enough, no aporia exists between indigenous alterity and its ex-
pression in a Western cultural practice.
This naturalizing of Vallejo’s poetry—for purity and nature func-
tion synonymously in Mariátegui’s lexicon—represents the first step
in Mariátegui’s steady usurpation of it from any literary tradition, from
any history, and from any agency that is not directly linked to the indio.
Mariátegui is very conscious that Vallejo writes in a specific tradition and
language, and that inevitably his work will be interpreted as a development
in occidental forms of poetry. By no means does he fail to recognize Los
heraldos negros’ indebtedness to Western tradition. He does so, however,
only to immediately reclaim the book for another culture, one that cannot
be sullied by such a history, literary or otherwise. Mariátegui writes, “Clas-
sified within world literature, this book belongs in part (thanks to its title,
The Black Heralds) to the symbolist period. But symbolism does not pertain
to any one epoch. The indio . . . tends to express himself in symbols and
images. . . . In his art, Vallejo’s procedure corresponds to a state of mind”
(280).21
Note Mariátegui’s procedure. Through a series of discrete assertions, he
strings a line of reasoning from A to Z: symbolism has no specific history;
it is especially germane to the espíritu indígena; the indio expresses himself
in symbols; the creation of Vallejo’s art is a matter of the indigenous soul.
In the writings of a Marxist and a student of history such as Mariátegui,
this kind of tenacious dehistoricization and decontextualization can be ex-
plained only by his deep-seated need to separate the indigenous and the
poetry made here to equal it from any “contamination” by cultures linked

to imperialism. This misreading is particularly glaring given Vallejo’s elab-
oration of his poetry between the hermeneutic spaces of the Andes and the
cosmopolitan city. Whatever the perspective, it is very difficult to assign the
values of purity or homogeneity to the poet’s work.
The banishment of all other representational possibilities from Vallejo’s
poetry adheres to Mariátegui’s aversion to hybrid culture. Having cleansed
the poetry of its mestizo elements, Mariátegui proceeds to slowly abolish
not only traces of the poet’s culture but also of his authorship. Mariátegui
asserts, “The Quechua word and the vernacular turn of phrase are not ar-
tificially inserted into his language; in him, they are a spontaneous prod-
uct, a part of him, an organic element. It could be said that Vallejo does
not choose his words. His autochthonism is not deliberate. Vallejo does not
bury himself in tradition or cloister himself in history in order to extract
lost emotions from dark substrata. His poetry and his language emanate
from his flesh and his soul. His message is within him. Perhaps without
his knowledge or desire, indigenous sentiment operates in his art” (282).22
Mariátegui writes as if Vallejo were guided by a force that he cannot recog-
nize, but which constitutes the core of his writing. For reasons Mariátegui
does not explain, Vallejo’s (indigenous) soul and body, not his intellect, are
responsible for his verse. If the poet does not, as Mariátegui says, choose
his own words, then the critic has occasion to ascribe them to something
greater than individual sentiment or experience.
At root, the operation that takes place here is a double obfuscation.
On the one hand, the critic “hears” the voice of the indio in highly lettered
poetry written by a mestizo and thus does not have the need to perceive
an indigenous voice emanating from indigenous culture. On the other, the
indio’s essence becomes the message of Vallejo’s poetry, and so experiences
not bound to the indigenous—such as the mestizo’s—cannot be detected.
The radical delegitimization of authorship is in equal parts a denial of
the mestizo’s expression of his negotiations between the Andes and Lima
and a sedimenting of the indio’s right to claim a place in the nation. At this
juncture, Mariátegui does not relate that spirit to anything other than the
peculiar idea that the indio waits for revolution. As Rama notes, Mariátegui
here makes no specific references to the indio’s language or own culture. For
it is the spirit of revolution, and not necessarily of the indio’s culture, that
Mariátegui pursues. This pursuit will animate the indigenista polemic of
the following year, as we will see in the next chapter. That spirit has less
to do with the indigenous than it does with Mariátegui’s conviction that
in Peru, it is the indio who will stand in place of an urbanized proletariat

and spark socialist revolution. In one of Mariátegui’s typical maneuvers of
displacement, Vallejo the mestizo, a mere medium, is taken over by this
indigenous-cum-revolutionary soul. Undoubtedly, this displacement is fa-
cilitated by the fact of Vallejo’s biography. Of highland origins, he is thus
more easily made to represent, metonymically, Mariátegui’s racialized con-
cept of the region.23
The most telling moment in Mariátegui’s analysis of Vallejo’s work
comes when he cites the poet’s verses to illustrate the absence of mestizo
culture in works traditionally read as exemplars of a mestizo discourse.
Among the many poems that he cites, “Idilio muerto,” from Los heraldos
negros, provides at the very least an interesting testament to how Mariátegui
reads. He excerpts only the first two couplets:
Qué estará haciendo esta hora mi andina y dulce Rita
de junco y capulí;
ahora que me asfixia Bizancio, y que dormita
la sangre, como flojo cognac, dentro de mí.
[What is my Andean and sweet Rita, in reeds and berries,

doing at this hour;
now that Byzantium asphyxiates me, and my blood
grows drowsy, like weary cognac, within me.]
(qtd. in Mariátegui, Siete ensayos, 282)
In introducing these lines, Mariátegui pronounces “Nostalgia of exile;
nostalgia of absence” [Nostalgia de exilio; nostalgia de ausencia] and im-
mediately ascribes this nostalgia to the indigenous soul (282). To be sure,
Vallejo’s work does articulate a profound longing for times and places lost
to the speaker, but it is Mariátegui’s wholesale evasion of these signs on the
text’s surface that allows him to locate this sentiment in anything other
than the historical experience of the migrant speaker. The short couplets are
loaded with the distances modernization held in store for the migrant mes-
tizo: the cultural abyss between junco y capulí and cognac, the arduous jour-
ney between the Lima-like Byzantium and the Andes, and the anguished
longing of the migrant for the love he left behind. The couplets evoke the
estrangement of one world from the other, and the speaker’s estrangement
from both. In resemanticizing nostalgia as the defining quality in indig-
enous identity, Mariátegui converts absence into presence and thus avoids
the rifts that constitute the migrant mestizo’s experience of modernity.
For the constellation of motives that we have seen, Mariátegui attempts

to write over—and thus condemn to oblivion—a key event in twentieth-
century Andean history: the growing visibility and importance of mes
tizos. In thus effacing a possible mestizo culture, he (and herein lie the
stakes of his erasure) struggles to cast off a hybridity that banishes alter-
ity. The usefulness of Mariátegui’s criticism for future generations lies in
his identification of this mixed culture, symbolized in the mestizo, as an
analogue of capitalist culture itself. As he intuits, the nature—and dan-
ger—of capitalism in the Andes is its absorption of all social and economic
practices into a global market, where their critical usefulness becomes null
and void, since they no longer exist outside the system but have become
its very material. Thus Mariátegui irrevocably identifies the urban mes-
tizo and his culture with an acquiescence to the logic of capital, because
he is at once the agent and by-product of capitalism’s integration of Peru
into the global economy.24 Faced with the reality of rapid modernization
in the 1920s, Mariátegui searches its underbelly in order to find the dis-
parate groups, economies, and cultures that modernity brings into close
cohabitation. The potential conflict between the two opposed entities that
are the indigenous spirit and criollo, capitalist collaboration come to frame
Mariátegui’s articulation of revolution. Indeed, Mariátegui’s propositions
for a modern Andean society rely on the impossibility of fusing the two.
The only possible interaction between the sierra and the capital, between
indio and the gamonal or landowner, is limited to oppression in the past and
to revolution in the future.
It was clear to Mariátegui that Peru contained at least two different
cultures: the millenarian, though debased, culture of the Incas and that of
the Hispanic colonizers. Equally apparent was the idea that the mestizo had
none. Whether he knew it or not—and again, here it must be noted that
among the most “cultured” thinkers of the period we find mestizos such as
Mariátegui himself and Vallejo—his denial of a mestizo culture likely hob-
bled the real reach of his revolutionary vision. For, unlike previous moments
of revolt and uprising in the Andes, in the rapidly modernizing city of Lima
it would have been increasingly difficult for the working masses of mestizos
to identify and support a revolution based on an indigenous culture that
day by day, in the privatized experience of modernity, seemed further and
further away in the mountains. As the historian Alberto Flores Galindo has
shown, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revolts, it was quite com-
mon for disenfranchised rural or small-town mestizos to align themselves
with the indigenous population in struggle against the hegemonic whites.

Many such mestizos even went so far as to claim only their indigenous heri-
tage (Buscando 95–135). This tendency was not pronounced in the twentieth
century, and certainly not in the city.25 Importantly, Mariátegui would ad-
dress this blind spot in his theory through the agility of his practice, par-
ticularly in his organization of the working-class paper Labor. Within his
literary criticism, however, Mariátegui stuck to his racialized conjectures
on the inherent qualities of both the indio and the mestizo.
In his celebrated “El proceso de la literatura,” the concluding essay in
the Siete ensayos, Mariátegui dedicates a long section, “Las corrientes de
hoy: El indigenismo,” to the role of indigenista literature in modern Peru.
The very terms of Mariátegui’s conceptualization of the indigenous peoples
guide his choice of poetry as the vehicle par excellence through which the
indigenous spirit enters and disrupts that other society which opposes it.
Insofar as Mariátegui continues to conceive of literature, and in particular
poetry, as a space for the expression of pure emotion—and it would have
been considered as such at least from romanticism’s theorizations—the
lyric becomes the appropriate space where the indio may express himself, or
better yet, be expressed. This is because, in the terms in which Mariátegui
conceives of the indio, he is essentially and fundamentally ahistorical, a
timeless entity, undifferentiated by the ebb and flow of history. In the most
profound sense, because the indio represents the absolute, he has no histori-
cal dimension and is thus perfectly communicated in that least narratival
of arts, lyrical poetry.
To this end, Mariátegui’s language in describing the indigenous peo-
ples is highly illustrative:
Almost the only thing that survives from the Tawantinsuyo is the indio.
The civilization has perished, but the race has not. After four centuries,
the biological material of the Tawantinsuyo reveals itself as indestructible
and, in part, immutable.
Man’s metamorphosis in the modern period is record-breaking. But
this is a phenomenon peculiar to occidental civilization, which is, above
all, dynamic. It is no coincidence that this society has happened upon the
investigation of time’s relativity. . . . But there are moments when it seems
history comes to a halt. And a same social form endures, petrified, for
many centuries. The hypothesis, therefore, that the indio has spiritually
changed little in four centuries is not far-flung. . . . The dark profundity
of his soul has suffered almost no change. In the jagged highlands, in the
distant canyons where the law of the white man has not reached, the indio
follows his ancestral law.26 (307, emphasis mine)
More than any other factor—for it envelops all of them—difference
constitutes the key ingredient that the indigenous brings to the table. The
indigenous is clearly the antithesis, and the antidote, to “Western civiliza-
tion.” The flip side of Mariátegui’s description of the indio thus tells the
story of what is wrong with that civilization: if the indio is timeless, the
West is transitory, fickle in spirit, dominated by the unjust “law of the white
man,” and utterly unnatural. It is, in the end, the notoriously difficult ter-
rain of the Andean landscape that lends the indio his isolation from the
West and its history, and that defines the longevity of his culture. It is no
coincidence that Mariátegui’s theories regarding the indio’s lasting alterity
line up with historical explanations for the region’s feudalism: the difficulty
of penetrating the arid mountains has repeatedly been offered as the reason
for the area’s economic backwardness. So, in the Andes as elsewhere, mod-
ernization and nature have often been conceptualized as antithetical.
Nonetheless, within Mariátegui’s telluric imaginary, the image of An-
dean nature and the indio himself are inseparable. As we will see in the
chapter on the poet Carlos Oquendo de Amat, this is the case broadly across
literary practices. The fact that Mariátegui can extend the opposition of
capitalist modernization and the natural world to the indio is fortuitous,
for through the substitution that makes the indio stand in for nature, the
indio becomes capitalism’s opponent. The indio is thus made the repository
of those elements—tradition, nature, a communal ethos—that are most
oppositional and most threatening to an effacing neocolonial ideology.
It is not incidental that the ancestral law which the indio so zealously
guards is that of the ayllu, a traditional social unit from Inca times often
compared to a commune. Still in existence to this day, this principal ex-
ample of indigenous social structures offered Mariátegui a direct, and to
his eyes undeniable, link to the Marxist vision of a classless society. In fact,
this interpretation of the ayllu was standard in the period’s anthropologi-
cal discourse.27 Mariátegui eschewed all other deployments of Inca culture.
In the factions of indigenismo that nostalgically turned to pre-Columbian
times (some, such as Luis Valcárcel, going so far as to advocate an Inca-style
monarchy for contemporary Peru), he perceived the danger of an exoticism
that simply avoided the social problems of the twentieth century in favor
of an idealized past. The ayllu, on the other hand, symbolized for him a
social goal that was impervious to death and decay and that, like Marx’s
urban proletariat, would redeem Andean man and his society. The condi-
tions to which the indio had been subjected over the previous four centu-
ries only reinforced his belief: sealed in the tomb of a peripheral existence,
the indio—completely antithetical to the mestizo—had remained loyal to
a particular form of social organization. That this form was synonymous
with socialism’s ideal paradoxically allowed Mariátegui to claim classless
utopia as both the patrimony of the indios and of the period’s revolutionary
movements, wherever they might be. The suggestion of this shared pur-
pose, which did not overtly claim hegemony for either Marxist thought or
indigenous culture, lies just beneath the surface of Mariátegui’s conten-
tious characterization of indio and mestizo.
The agonic relationship is indeed the very form of Mariátegui’s dialec-
tics, which sought to bring these two cultures together in order to emerge
whole on the other side of revolution with the communism of the one and
the modernization/technologification of the other. But first indigenous cul-
ture must be a discrete entity as such, and at a moment in history when dis-
courses on the indio were only slowly gaining broader legitimacy and were
very often related to specific political interest groups, Mariátegui seizes
upon high lettered culture as the vehicle for legitimating the indio—his
indio—in the eyes of the nation.28 He focuses on poetry as a way to lend the
indigenous population, whose culture was largely unknown in the Peruvian
public sphere, a space in the national imagination. So Mariátegui promotes
a critical and strategic use of culture, though only in its lettered, European
forms. The assignment of the indio’s voice to the high cultural sphere of
poetry allows Mariátegui to declare the indigenous as already a part of the
modern nation; in fact, it allows him to claim the most vanguard cultural
production as indigenous.
The vision of an Andean Marxist revolution that Mariátegui predicted

must arise from the confrontation of a protean global capitalism and the
indigenous masses—this was, in fact, his final projection of modernity in
the Andes—rested on complex characterizations of the latter. Both a direct
outgrowth and reelaboration of the monolithic presentation of the indio in
his poetic commentary, Mariátegui’s later work was no doubt influenced by
his time spent as an activist and organizer of urban denizens, some of them
indios migrated from the highlands. In the years before his early death at
the age of thirty-five, his limited contact with these kinds of workers seems
to have intensified the critic’s belief that indigenous discourses contained
a valuable contribution to a critique of neocolonial relations between the

Andes and central nations.29 Mariátegui responded to this possibility by
emphasizing what he understood to be the fundamentals of that worldview.
This emphasis, though it insisted upon its direct authorization by a con-
temporaneous indigeneity, interestingly bore no mark of an understanding
of indigenous culture “from within,” as José María Arguedas would later
describe his own work.
As we saw in the introductory comments to this chapter, critics such as
Aníbal Quijano have praised Mariátegui for putting forth a concept of in-
digenous people that characterized them as prerational. As we have pointed
out, Mariátegui did deploy the representation of the indio in order to make
his call to revolution one that polarized his social reality. However, it should
not be lost on us that Quijano’s reading of Mariátegui rests upon the mak-
ing equivalent of an indigenous worldview with the pre- or antirational. For
Quijano, the condition of indigenous alterity necessarily indicates that the
indio’s worldview will not be rational. That is, prerationality becomes a per-
sistent marker of the indigenous in this reading.
At this point, we need to take a closer look not at the origins of this
conceptualization in Quijano, but in Mariátegui’s own work. Ample evi-
dence suggests that the notion of indios as revolutionary subjects, and
thus the idea of their diametrical opposition to the European and hispan-
ophilic society of the coast, permeated the air of early twentieth-century
Lima (Leibner; Flores Galindo, Agonía 39–54). As early as 1917, Mariátegui
himself reported on the indigenous uprisings in southern Peru, although
the twenty-three-year-old journalist was clearly not certain how to inter-
pret the events.30 Indeed, as both Dan Chapin Hazen and Augusto Ramos
Zambrano have shown in their works, the southern Andes saw the intensi-
fication of a complex “indigenous problem” in the early twentieth century.
Mariátegui refers to these uprisings constantly in his early articles, and
Flores Galindo has rightly pointed out that the critic’s political coming to
consciousness was spurred on by the avalanche of indigenous revolts in the
early twentieth century and by their effects on all areas of national life (Bus-
cando un Inca; La agonía de Mariátegui 41).
Moreover, a recently published testimony has provided tantalizing
evidence regarding Mariátegui’s social contact with indigenous people.
Although previous documents indicated that he relied mostly on the intel-
lectuals in his circle and studies for information on the indigenous popula-
tion, the autobiography of Mariano Larico Yujra indicates Mariátegui had
at least a professional relationship with several indios who worked for him.
These relationships, however, must not be idealized as moments of unmud-
died communication and cultural exchange between intellectual and indio.
Tellingly, Yo fui canillita de José Carlos Mariátegui recounts episodes wherein
Ezequiel Urviola, the agitator whom the founder of Amauta esteemed so
highly, explains his beliefs in utopia and revolution, often using Quechua
to express his views. These episodes are important because Urviola was not,
in fact, an indigenous person, but rather a mestizo indigenista from the
southern highland state of Puno who donned indigenous clothing in or-
der to agitate in the capital, as Ramos Zambrano points out in his brief
biographical sketch (Urviola 23–28). Mariátegui’s relationship with Urviola
demonstrates how very mediated through representations and representa-
tives of the indigenous Mariátegui’s imagined contact with the indio was.
Mariátegui himself testifies to his conversations with Urviola (Aquézolo
Castro 136). Larico Yujra reports that Urviola taught “all the History of the
Incas, . . . what Ama sua, Ama kella, Ama llulla [sic] was [the Incan code of
conduct, meaning ‘Do not steal, Do not lie, Do not be lazy’] , . . . and to sing
The Internationale” (Ayala 140). Could Urviola, well trained in anarchism
and Marxism by the time Mariátegui met him, have been an inspiration for
the critic to understand that indigenous messianic myth and Marxism were
fundamentally equal and parallel? It seems that, for Mariátegui, the exem-
plary coexistence of distinct visions in Urviola’s enunciation would have
been critical to the development of similar perspectives in his own thought.
In a sense, Urviola performs that which would later become Mariátegui’s
critique.
If Mariátegui did indeed take Urviola to be a genuine representative
of the indigenous race who had come down from the mountain as a repre-
sentative of his people, and if Mariátegui’s belief in a revolutionary spirit
was not anchored in direct experience of the indigenous but rather in news
reports in the Lima press, then it seems that his elevation of the indio, and
especially of his communication of the indigenous animating espíritu, must
be reconsidered. As Mariátegui himself would state repeatedly, his path to
the indio and to an understanding of the latter’s role in an authentically
Andean future was precisely through the “European ideas” of Marx. We
must add that the path he followed seems also to have led to an indigenous
body that was in fact composed of other, local texts. Somehow, the indios
that were present in his very daily activities lay beyond the cast of his own
cosmopolitan culture. For as the prologue to Luis Valcárcel’s Tempestad en
los Andes, one of the central works in the indigenista movement, demon-
strates, Mariátegui’s insistence on social change through revolution came
to be defined by a profound commitment to indigenous culture not as it
existed, but as it had been written up by other intellectuals.
In comparison to his other pronouncements on the indigenous spirit
from the realm of literary criticism, Mariátegui’s prologue to Tempestad em-
ploys a similar, but graver, register and, most importantly, situates itself in
an explicit constellation of historical events. In this prologue, the elements
of Mariátegui’s justification of a specifically Andean revolution are not gra-
tuitous rhetoric: terms such as “indigenous resurgence,” [resurgimiento indí-
gena], “global agitation” [la emoción mundial], “civilization and the alphabet,”
[civilización y el alfabeto], “process of material ‘Westernization,’” [proceso de
‘occidentalización’], and “of the Quechua land” [material de la tierra Keswa]
all correspond to events and concepts that influenced and shaped, nega-
tively or positively, Mariátegui’s own understanding of possible futures in
the Andes. I emphasize Mariátegui’s peculiar understandings because he
was by no means an orthodox Marxist. Thus, Mariátegui’s consideration of
indigenous uprisings (resurgimiento indígena), the October Revolution and
the movements it encouraged (la emoción mundial), modernization and its
bearing on Peru (civilización y alfabeto, proceso de “occidentalización” material)
disavow a facile imposition of a foreign revolutionary telos (say, the Com-
intern’s) onto Latin American reality, as would be the case for many other
Marxists of his time.31
These historical markers indicate the lettered audience for which
Mariátegui produces the revolutionary indio. He is highly invested in creat-
ing a model wherein the indigenous worldview encapsulates Marxist revo-
lutionary theory in its movement toward a classless society. Significantly,
Mariátegui’s articulation of this model makes no gesture to indigenous
culture “from within” but rather to other sources:
The highlands awaken gestating hope. A race unanimous in resignation
and renunciation no longer inhabits it. A strange gust of wind blows
through the highland village and fields. The “new indios” appear: here
the teacher, the agitator, there the farmhand, the shepherd, they who are
no longer the same ones as before. . . . The “new indio” is not an abstract
or mythic being whose existence is guaranteed only by the prophet’s
faith. We sense that he is living, real, active, and in the final stages of
this “highland film,” which is how the author himself [Valcárcel] defines
his book. What distinguishes the “new indio” is not education but spirit.
(The alphabet does not redeem the indio). The “new indio” waits. He
has a goal. That is his secret and his strength. Everything else in him is
superfluous . . . today the highland is pregnant with spartacuses.
The “new indio” explains and illustrates the true character of the in-
digenismo which has in Valcárcel one of its most passionate evangelists.
The faith in the indigenous resurgence does not come from a process of
material “Westernization” of the Quechua land. It is neither civilization
nor the white man’s alphabet that lifts the indio’s soul; myth and the idea
of a socialist revolution do. Indigenous hope is absolutely revolutionary.
The same myth, the same idea, are the decisive agents in the awaken-
ing of other ancient peoples, of other ancient races presently in a state of
collapse: Hindus, Chinese, etc. Universal history today tends as never
before to be organized by the same idea.32 (Aquézolo Castro 135–36)
Language similar to that Mariátegui used earlier in characterizing
Vallejo’s “indigenista” poetry pervades the prologue. Characterizations like
“grávida” (gestating), “preñada” (pregnant), and “ráfaga” (gust of wind) indi-
cate limiting associations of the indigenous to stereotypical visions of the
feminine and the natural. In her book on gender and modernity in the Bo-
livia, Marcia Stephenson has demonstrated the pervasiveness of these as-
sociations in Andean modernity.33 Over and above Mariátegui’s discussion
of Vallejo, the preface also includes key terms, such as “new indio,” which
clearly indicate that he is thinking of José Uriel García’s eponymous theory.
García published his El nuevo indio in 1930, but its articles had been in circu-
lation since at least 1927.34 García believed that the nuevo indio was, in fact,
a new Andean social subject that would take advantage of modernization
and thus leave the useless “indio viejo” behind.
Additionally, the prologue serves as a fine example of how thoroughly
Luis Valcárcel, whose book Mariátegui is introducing, inflects Mariátegui’s
discourse. Valcárcel’s Tempestad was nothing if not messianic in reference
to the indio. Accordingly, Mariátegui uses a language built around resur-
rection and regeneration. The terms rebirth, resurgence, resurrection, resusci-
tate, and revive crop up at key moments in his description of the indios. As
anthropologists and folklorists have shown and well-disseminated myths
such as that of the Inkarrí demonstrate, resurrection plays a critical role
in Andean understandings of the conquest and its aftermath.35 However, I
have found little evidence that Mariátegui was familiar with these myths,
other than through their overblown representations in lettered production
as described above.
The temptation to read José Carlos Mariátegui as a syncretic thinker

has dominated his reception in Latin America. Undoubtedly, his insis-
tence of the representation of so-called indigenous utopian beliefs and his
employment of Marxist critique contribute to a perception of his work as
an intermingling of the two. Such a strategy was geared, much like Mariá
tegui’s literary commentary, to position Mariátegui’s indigenismo as an
authentic representative of the indigenous and their culture. In this sense,
his vision of modernity in Peru relied upon the authority that the institu-
tion of literature granted him. Literature’s intense representativity, as Julio
Ramos has called it, lies at the core of this and other Andean traditions of
indigenismo in modernity.
It has been said to exhaustion that Mariátegui articulated an effective
Marxism because he filtered it though Latin America reality.36 Indeed, his
application of Marxist analysis to the feudal and modern sectors of Peru’s
economy in Siete ensayos and elsewhere, for example, fully reflects his at-
tempt at extending contemporaneous Marxism’s scope. But this is only part
of the story. Mariátegui’s writings inside and beyond the literary sphere saw
a development in his thinking that began to make his interpretive perspec-
tive more powerful by identifying local synonyms for Marxism. Among
the indigenistas, Mariátegui stands out because the movement did not lead
him, as it did so many of his fellow intellectuals who became interested in
the indio, to deny the validity of foreign theoretical models. He often and
rightly berated calls for an exclusive hermeneutics, authorized solely by the
fact of its localness. However, the cohabitation of both European critical
thought and the indio in his texts must not lead us to assert that Mariá
tegui’s calls for revolution somehow were an example of the egalitarian so-
ciety of which they dreamed. The representation of the indio, in the end,
cannot be taken to be identical with the indigenous peoples themselves.
My insistence on this point is particularly acute in the face of inter-
pretations that assign Mariátegui to an interstitial space between Marxist
revolutionary thought and Andean indigenous worldviews, such as Walter
Mignolo’s recent commentary on the Andean critic within the notion of
“border thinking.” Relying heavily on the privilege that an interstitial posi-
tion—the operative example is the border—provides to those who stand at
it, this paradigm posits a harmonic point where one tradition can dialogue
unproblematically with the other, as if, in this instance, the sheer alterity of
the Andean worldview did not make its compatibility with Marxist theory
immediately questionable. In his best-known critical works, Mariátegui as-
sociated the two by graphing the logic of the latter upon the former. Mig
nolo, in contrast, sees Mariátegui’s acquisition of European theoretical

tools as a “transcendence of territorial thinking.” In this model, the critic
who stands at the limits of different traditions is able to escape the particu-
lar optics imparted by particular cultures. In fact, his position outside of
them brings forth a new worldview, that of the border—precisely the type
of intermediary option that Mariátegui eschewed (140–41). There is little
transcendence, however, in Mariátegui’s perception of communist ideals
in Andean indigenous peoples. Rather, it is an especially deft configuration
of a subaltern culture by an urban, coastal Andean intellectual and thus is
very much part of local, lettered attitudes.
Mariátegui’s final words in the preface to Tempestad offer a compact
illustration of the complexities in his efforts to approximate the two tradi-
tions. He calls the book “the passionate prophecy that announces a new
Peru. And it does not matter at all that for some it is the facts that create the proph-
ecy and for others the prophecy that creates the facts” (Aquézolo Castro, empha-
sis mine).37 More than just a conciliatory gesture toward groups beyond the
cast of Marxism, Mariátegui’s insistence on the equality of history (the
facts) and myth (prophecy) seems to deauthorize the strict Marxist logic
of revolution at the same time that it welcomes an indigenous worldview
into the logic of the former. As Aníbal Quijano has asserted in his study of
Mariátegui’s work, myth as a mode of thinking “lay at the most profound
level . . . of [Mariátegui] the man” (Reencuentro 78). However, we must re-
member that the critic is referring to Valcárcel’s text as a prophecy and in so
doing is reiterating, quite forcefully, the preeminent position of the letter in
Andean society. Especially when he positions lettered culture in a tutelary
position to indigenous history, Mariátegui demonstrates the profound dif-
ficulty that indigenismo and its visions of modernity have in escaping the
long history of unequal power dynamics that structures Andean society.
ch a p t e r t wo
A MODERN ANDEAN CULTURE?

José Ángel Escalante and Indigenismo
at Odds
O
n February 3, 1927, the cusqueño politician and journalist José Ángel
Escalante (1883–1965) published an article that precipitated a series of
heated exchanges among Peru’s intellectuals. The public discussion
that would come to be known as the polémica del indigenismo, an overlooked
but highly significant chapter in the history of Latin American indigenismo,
took place during the course of 1927 and produced reverberations that were
felt in intellectual circles for years to follow. The majority of the participants
and the specifics of their contributions, however, were largely forgotten by
intellectual history (with some notable exceptions, such as Pablo Macera
and Nicola Miller’s commentaries [Macera “Reflexiones”; Miller 153–54]).
Escalante was one of those subsequently obscured.
The tension between Andean regional culture and nationalist discourse
played out in modern Andean intellectual production, here represented in
the polemic. This commentary on regional culture was absorbed into es-
tablishment politics, as we can see by exploring Escalante’s interventions
as a congressman in Peru. Through the contrast of “minor” Andean texts
and discourses, such as Escalante’s, to dominant indigenista perspectives as
52
a modern andean culture? ≈ 53
presented within the polemic, we can identify a critique that, at very early
dates, neutralizes the national and utopian (often national-utopian) models
that characterize a vast part of modern cultural production in the Andes,
such as the writings of José Carlos Mariátegui.1 As a common denomina-
tor, indigenismo’s dominant voices sought the inclusion of disenfranchised
indigenous peoples into a modern nation. As such, indigenista discourses
actively supported the extension of full citizenship to all Andean subjects
as part of societal modernization, and they tended to do so by focusing on
the indigenous population through decidedly political optics.
In particular, minor or lesser-known critiques within indigenismo
sought to reveal indigenous highland culture as an unfortunate casualty
of the drive toward utopian national models expressed in the goals of, for
example, political traditions such as Mariátegui’s Marxist-inflected revo-
lutionary indigenismo.2 Authors such as Escalante persistently presented
cultural forms pertaining to rural indigenous groups that were dissonant
with overwhelmingly political interpretations of indigenous and highland
subjects, sounding an alarm that permitted the costs of indigenismo to be
perceived. Furthermore, by forcefully inserting culture into a sort of face-
off with a nationalizing indigenista discourse, these critiques disrupted the
latter and so opened a discursive space within the organs of civil society
(such as the press) wherein cultural traditions foreign to dominant criollo
culture become visible. This visibility represents a radical shift toward the
possibility of indigenous culture representing itself, although any realiza-
tion of such a project in the last century would prove mercurial.
The polemic has been handed down to cultural history in a highly
selective version. The “definitive” compilation of the polemic’s texts was
edited by Aquézolo Castro and published in 1975, almost fifty years after
the fact. In his introductory note, Aquézolo Castro states that Luis Alberto
Sánchez, one of Peru’s most prominent twentieth-century intellectuals and
a key figure in the debates, guided him in putting together the collection
(8). As published, they very much favor a reading of the event as a row be-
tween Mariátegui and Sánchez, with the input of a handful of other nota-
bles, such as Manuel Seoane, Enrique López Albújar, Casimiro Rado, and,
surprisingly, the Paris-based intellectual Ventura García Calderón, who all
took part in the debate from various positions.
This list, however, also documents the bias with which the book La
polémica del indigenismo was edited, as even cursory research into the news-
papers and journals of the time reveals that the polemic included a full
range of intellectuals, from those affiliated with the Leguía government
54 ≈ a modern andean culture?
(then in power) to others that belonged to the leftist groups active far out-
side mainstream politics. A full list of intellectuals is therefore much lon-
ger, and their participation exceeded the calendar year 1927. The Guevara
brothers of Cuzco, the Boletín Titikaka group of Puno (including figures
such as Alejandro Peralta and Gamaliel Churata) and regular contributors
to La Sierra and Kuntur—all had a stake in the polemic. Nevertheless, even
the abbreviated list of intellectuals included in Aquézolo Castro’s “defini-
tive compilation,” reveals the highly diverse nature of the opinions on the
indigenista effervescence of the moment. For example, in his contribution
“El indio está de moda,” Roberto Mac Lean Estenós, a writer from Tacna
with a national profile, both lamented the pitiable state of the indio, whom
he judged to be entirely debased, and at the same time called for his re-
habilitation (Aquézolo Castro 103–4). Darío Eguren Larrea took the occa-
sion to incongruously comment on how badly dressed the indio appeared
in the Peruvian military uniform, surely in reference to the preponderance
of indigenous conscripts in the army. He closed his article, “El indio y otra
cosa más,” with a rather romantic paean to Andean music that he heard, fit-
tingly, at the Miraflores home of Escalante (104–6). It should be noted that,
whether positive or negative in what concerns their view of the indio and of
indigenismo, these authors shared the understanding that the indigenous
problem was inseparable from the construction of a modern Peru. That
these two writers published their works under pseudonyms perhaps points
to the unpopularity of such a notion among the general reading public.
Before discussing the specifics of Escalante’s participation in the po-
lemic, it is useful both to contextualize his contributions within a larger
historical arc of indigenismo across the long twentieth century and to put
forth some theses concerning the operative logic behind that trajectory.
The subordination of the indigenous to foreign logics in order to fulfill na-
tionalist designs (in Mariátegui, this takes the shape of a Marxist theory
of class struggle, but also in whatever form those logics may assume) turns
out to be a common occurrence in the Andes. Indeed, a hundred years of
indigenismo, from roughly 1880 to 1980, suggest that this subordination is
constitutive of the very substance of the region’s hopeful articulations of
progress. An array of cultural and political practices, indigenismo sought
the political and social vindication of the region’s indigenous peoples. De-
pending on whose definition one follows, indigenismo in the Andes is un-
derstood to have begun somewhere around the mid-nineteenth century,
to have flourished at the beginning of the twentieth century, and to have
continued on well into the 1970s, at least in its literary forms.3 Intellectuals
went to great lengths to imagine a nation that would count all of the region’s
subjects as equal citizens. Indigenismo’s myriad representations—in litera-
ture, visual culture, anthropology, social theory—functioned as a kind of
first step toward that desired inclusiveness.
However, as such, indigenismo’s goals over its hundred-year history
have not always, and perhaps never, coincided with its effects. Critics and
historians such as Ángel Rama, José Luis Rénique, and José Deustua have
amply addressed the kind of bait-and-switch that resulted from the exuber-
ant defense of the indio during the period of indigenismo’s effervescence in
the 1920s. In the early twentieth century, the middle classes, often recently
migrated from the provinces to the capital and other urban centers, raised
the banner of social change and staged a full offensive against the region’s
entrenched oligarchies in an effort to penetrate into privilege.4 Lo indígena
proved to be an invaluable footsoldier in this siege. Whether this advocacy
for the indio resulted in a substantially better lot for the actual indigenous
population is questionable, if not outright deniable. What remains star-
tlingly clear is that it was the indio’s promise to disrupt the status quo that
propelled a mestizo—in culture if not in biology—middle class into posi-
tions of power across Andean society.
In this paradox, the indio is the cause of or the excuse for, but never the
beneficiary of, social upheaval; evidence of this can be located at almost ev-
ery point in the area’s modern intellectual history. The cases of the intellec-
tuals Manuel González Prada (1848–1918) and Mario Vargas Llosa (1936–),
though disparate, serve as bookends through which to conceptualize how
the indigenous population has been divested of a self-determined presence
in modern Andean intellectual history at the moments when its existence is
held up as the opportunity for a reinvigorated national identity. The views
of these two iconic intellectuals on the indio, while ostensibly contradic-
tory, represent key formulations of an indigenous subject that Escalante in
1927 and others, like José María Arguedas in his novels of the 1950s and
1960s, sought to revise. This is all the more surprising because González
Prada was aligned with anarchism, while Vargas Llosa is a leading expo-
nent of neoliberalism; these ideological differences would seemingly place
them entirely at odds on the role of the indigenous peoples in the Andes.
In both cases, however, the need to harness the image of the indio in order
to produce a modern Peruvian nation effaces other conceptualizations that
might productively consider the incompatibility between indigenous alter-
ity and a cosmopolitan, Hispanic society. For both authors, the indio plays
a fundamental role in their vision of a fully realized modernity, understood
here as the emergence of an egalitarian society.5
González Prada’s vitriol against the oligarchic rule of the nineteenth
century cannot be divorced from the realizations he gleaned from the coun-
try’s ruinous participation in the War of the Pacific. As a formative moment,
the War of the Pacific and its aftereffects laid bare for González Prada the
material and ideological backwardness that aristocratic Peru had been sub-
ject to, and an agent of, since independence in 1824. The nation’s inability
to mount a substantial resistance to a modern Chilean military apparatus
and the absence of a political organization that could articulate anything
other than capitulation led directly to González Prada’s more iconoclastic
declarations, all of which stemmed from a deep desire to modernize in the
face of what he perceived to be Peru’s decay. Thus, in his canonical “Dis-
curso en el Politeama” (1888), he antagonized traditional Creole values and
the classes that held them: “¡Los viejos a la tumba, los jóvenes a la obra!”
[Old men to their graves, young ones to work] (González Prada 46). Peru’s
crisis as a national entity, triggered by the War of the Pacific, revealed the
need to repudiate the ruling classes; for González Prada this could only be
done by redefining who could belong to the group of cultural elites and to
the national citizenry more generally.
While the term modernization can be taken to indicate a wide array of
industrial, technological, and social transformations—and certainly it
also means this in the modern history of the Andes—within indigenismo
it tends to signal most emphatically the possibility of universalized citizen-
ship status and rights for all subjects in Peru. González Prada’s critique thus
centers not on the need for modernization to take on a full, material pres-
ence in the Andes—that campaign would, curiously enough, fall to Henry
Meiggs, the American railroad builder and developer who orchestrated the
demolition of Lima’s old colonial walls in 1870 in order to modernize the city
and the nation—but rather on a conceptual renovation that would permit
the implementation of a vigorous democracy in Peru. As such, González
Prada pointed to a corruption in the national body politic, from which he
understood all society’s ills to emanate. In his view, the oligarchy, and in
particular its feudal origins, which the essayist traced back to the colony,
lay behind Peru’s failure to establish a functional democracy among its sub-
jects and thus to modernize in the manner of northern nation-states.
It should also be noted that the critic’s outreach to the area’s indigenous
people was carried out under the necessity he perceived for a proper, and
thus novel, society in Peru. As he suggested in another essay on the topic,

“Nuestros indios,” the problem with Peru before modernity was much more
severe than simply the influence of colonial structures in the present day.
As he viewed it, the colony and the republic were almost synonymous, and
thus he understood history as relatively stagnant in his corner of the Andes
(Páginas libres 337). This stagnation stoked the urgency with which the critic
called for a new society in Peru.
González Prada’s cure to this ailment in the national body sought to
erase centuries of backwardness, which he understood as the legacy of a
colonial society ill-suited to the inclusive democracies promised by mo-
dernity. He infamously gestured toward the indigenous by invoking their
revolutionary zeal: “If the indio put his money into rifles and shells, if he
hid arms in a corner of his hut or in a hole, he would change his situation,
his property and life would be respected. . . . In short, the indio will redeem
himself through his own efforts and not through the humanization of his
oppressors”6 (343). González Prada’s words have been firmly associated with
the birth of modern indigenismo ever since.7 It is especially important to
note in his work that indios are evoked only as a way to correct the nation’s
errors and redress its failures, and thus have only this—and no other—
dimension. The insinuation that indigenous people could claim the nation
as theirs firmly placed a polemical idea at the center of a traditional, exclu-
sionary society. This notion would persist as the fundamental question in
Andean intellectual discourse over the course of the following century.
The case of Mario Vargas Llosa, and in particular the exposition of
his ideas on the future of Peru and the Andes published in a widely read
and notorious article in Harper’s Magazine in 1990, suggests the extent of
this question’s longevity. In his argument, Vargas Llosa insisted on a model
of modernization that—not without distortions—took González Prada’s
imaginings to one of their logical ends. The article, entitled “Questions of
Conquest,” was as remarkable for the intellectual who enunciated it as for
its content. A key figure in the Boom period of the 1960s that brought Latin
American literature to international attention, a major presence in contem-
porary Latin American culture, and perhaps the best-known novelist to
emerge from the central Andes in the last century, Vargas Llosa wrote the
article in the context of the Shining Path insurgency from 1980 to 2000 and
his own failed run for the presidency of Peru in 1990.
Firmly ensconced within the logic of neoliberalism and its policies,
Vargas Llosa’s article sought to assert a role for indigenous people in the
future of Peru, while at the same time pointing out their function in its
past. He pronounces, with somber regret, the loss of a culture that he views
as hopelessly retrograde:
Indian peasants live in such a primitive way that communication is
practically impossible. It is only when they move to the cities that they
have the opportunity to mingle with the other Peru. The price they
must pay for integration is high—renunciation of their culture, their
language, their beliefs, their traditions and customs, and the adoption of
the culture of their ancient masters. After one generation they become
mestizos. They are no longer Indians.
Perhaps there is no realistic way to integrate our societies other than
by asking Indians to pay that price. . . . If forced to choose between the
preservation of Indian cultures and their complete assimilation, with
great sadness I would choose modernization of the Indian population,
because there are priorities; and the first priority is, of course, to fight
hunger and misery. (52–53)
Unlike González Prada and Mariátegui, who had little if any physical
contact with indigenous Andeans, Vargas Llosa has entered into direct con-
tact with highland indigenous people and their culture, though this contact
does not in any way imply, particularly in this novelist’s case, a deep or
sympathetic knowledge. His trouble with indigenous culture thus does not
lie with recognizing the details of its existence, as might be understood to
be the case with previous intellectuals, but in coping with a culture that he
understands to be a continual stumbling block on the path to modernity.
This perceived incompatibility emanates from the belief—and this is not
necessarily gleaned from the indigenista tradition, although it does perme-
ate several important works in that tradition, including Mariátegui’s—that
indigenous cultures exist in a previous historical time and are thus incom-
patible with the modern.8 In this respect, Vargas Llosa’s attitude harkens
back to the distaste for the past and its traditions present at the inception
of the modern.
Vargas Llosa’s assertion about the innate incompatibility of indigenous
societies with Hispanic, modern ones springs, paradoxically, from his ab-
sorption of well over a century of scholarly and intellectual works that have
tended to emphasize the inherent difference, and so too resistance, of in-
digeneity to exploitative political and social structures in the Andes. The
propounding of this supposedly innate opposition of indigenous culture to
Western society, also present in the works of key figures such as Luis Val-
cárcel and Mariátegui, has been a cornerstone of indigenismo. Ironically,
then, Vargas Llosa, along with a slew of conservative intellectuals associ-

ated with him, such as Hernán de Soto, has inherited a leftist perspective
on the staunch alterity of the indio, has unquestioningly assumed its prem-
ises, and has sought to respond to it by obliterating the stronghold of this
kind of perceived indigeneity: culture.9 What Vargas Llosa states as an ob-
jective is an unspoken premise in previous critiques, as we will see.
In Vargas Llosa’s calculus, then, attaining modernization in all the
same national splendor that González Prada imagined in the 1880s becomes
fundamentally a cultural issue, insofar as Andean indigenous cultures, in
the vast variety of forms they have taken since the conquest, must be irre-
vocably replaced by a dominant Hispanic mestizo culture. It is important
to note that Vargas Llosa identifies this culture, “of the ancient masters,”
as specifically urban and Hispanic. It would be erroneous to target Vargas
Llosa as the originator of this idea; he is simply its most eloquent living
orator. The novelist’s insistence on the incorporation of the indio into the
national citizenry exactly mirrors the modernization of Peruvian society
that González Prada had clamored for, with the exception that in the face of
one hundred years of failed modernizing attempts, it focuses overtly upon
culture and not class or a too narrowly defined national identity as the ma-
jor obstacle frustrating the goal of total, quasi-utopian inclusion.10 Thus
Vargas Llosa finds it necessary to erase indigenous culture—he finds the
Quechua language particularly difficult to imagine as modern—in order
for the image of the all-inclusive nation to emerge.
It is against the backdrop of this 112-year trajectory that we return to
the 1927 polemic of indigenismo with which I began. The mechanics of this
will to include the indio in the nation are precisely at issue in Escalante’s
contribution to the polemic, provocatively entitled “Nosotros los indios.”
His article acerbically criticized the deluge of writing in favor of the indio
that had assumed great currency in Peruvian intellectual circles and in the
media—the two are often indistinguishable during the period—in the
1920s. It did so from a perspective that was perhaps unexpected but cer-
tainly prescient as to the politics of authenticity and authority that would
haunt indigenismo and many other discourses on autochthony in Latin
America over the course of the century.
As the title of his article suggests, Escalante grounded his at times
mocking criticisms in a conceit that pulled the rug out from under the indi-
genistas by valorizing the author’s own highland origins—he was born and
raised in the southern Andes—in speaking about the problem of the indio.
In fact, Escalante’s stratagem sought to conflate the indio with the sierra
and its culture; in so doing, through a transitive logic, he identified him-

self with indigenous subjects. This emphasis on the regional culture of the
southern highlands, which Escalante vaunted in his article, allowed him to
denounce from a position of epistemological authority those he considered
cosmopolitan charlatans: they, he argued bald-facedly, should at least know
about indios.
Surprisingly, none of the other participants in the polemic zeroed in on
the absurdity of Escalante, an upper-middle-class intellectual who owned
newspapers and who was an elected official in the Leguía government at the
time, presenting himself as a marginalized highland indio. Nor did any of
the participants in the polemic, for example, take direct issue with state-
ments such as this: “While we, in the beatific smile of the native highlander,
glimpse the opportunity to rehabilitate ourselves before History and to take
on the responsibility for our destinies, it is fashionable to speak of the indio
and to pity him with insulting piety, without taking the trouble to get ac-
quainted, much less to study us in our own context” (Aquézolo Castro 39).11
Escalante’s critique concerning the lack of organicity in indigenista
intellectuals’ relationship to their cause went more or less unheeded in
subsequent cultural developments, as did similar criticisms from a host of
other provincial intellectuals. They were eclipsed by the interventions of
the polemic’s two most vociferous and prominent participants: the Marxist
Mariátegui and his more centrist-minded counterpart, Luis Alberto Sán-
chez, an early proponent of cultural mestizaje in the Andes. Although the
polemic’s texts appeared in an array of publications, these writers published
their contributions in Mundial and Amauta, two limeño periodicals with a
national impact and international profile. These publications reflected an
array of progressive attitudes toward cultural and societal modernization.
At least in part, the ephemeralness of Escalante’s critique—which is
representative of a considerable portion of intellectual activity surround-
ing the polemic—was a question of the incompatibility of his terms with
the dominant indigenista discourse. If Escalante relied on a knowledge of
regional traditions and culture in order to define the indio, figures such as
Mariátegui and Sánchez deployed entirely different criteria. Their articula-
tion of the “indigenous problem” was unthinkable outside of the concept of
the nation. Thus, whereas Escalante attempted to define Andean highland
indios in terms of their culture—that is, as subjects capable of producing
distinct and autonomous cultural forms, such as agrarian rituals and the
Quechua language—dominant indigenista discourse and the polemic in
general defined these subjects overwhelmingly as political entities in a pro-
cess of integration into an imagined nation. Within this latter construct,

the realities of indigenous culture went largely unremarked. Escalante elab-
orates upon and makes of this absence the barbs of his critique.
At the core of Escalante’s intervention was the issue of self-representa-
tion and the means through which it should be carried out. As his slippery
use of the pronoun we suggests, and even though he uses it to collapse sig-
nificantly different social subjects, Escalante took as a point of departure
the position that indios, and not indigenistas, were in the best position to
represent indigenous interests. This position put Escalante into contention
with the most prominent articulation of the concept of self-representation
in what concerns the indios’ emergence into the public, which had been the-
orized by the mid-1920s by Mariátegui, widely regarded as the first Latin
American Marxist.
In Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, Mariátegui would
famously outline the future trajectory of indigenous literature: “Indigenist
literature cannot give us a rigorously truthful version of the indio. It must
idealize and stylize him. . . . This is why it is called indigenista and not in-
digenous. An indigenous literature, if it is to be, will arise when the indios
themselves are capable of producing it” (306).12 Mariátegui thus opens the
door to the possibility of a literature different from indigenista production,
which might also represent the indio, but in a truer fashion. Nevertheless,
the open-endedness of Mariátegui’s pronouncement sufficiently indicates
the critic’s inability or unwillingness to conceptualize precisely the terms
and conditions necessary for such a representational possibility. Mariá
tegui’s statement is as astute as it is confining. On the one hand, he recog-
nizes that in the 1920s the political movement to vindicate the indio has, at
best, a secondhand understanding of indigenous culture; on the other, he
limits the acquisition of that understanding to literature, and so truncates
possible access to indigenous culture through other means.
Within the polemic, and in response to Escalante’s rebuke, Mariá
tegui’s vision of indigenismo promised to topple gamonalismo, or large,
feudal landholding, and thus to foment radical progress in Peruvian his-
tory.13 Indigenismo was to do this by liberating the oppressed indios who
formed the base upon which gamonalismo was built. Mariátegui’s typically
utopian articulation of indigenismo’s role in Andean society left little room
for indigenous traditions and histories in the future of Peru. Thus, he did
not appeal directly to aspects of indigenous culture in his writing, and in
fact he looked to indigenous social groups only insofar as he could deploy
them to invoke communism.14
His critique, modeled on a teleology of revolution, was based on a pro-

found ahistoricism. For Mariátegui, as for many indigenistas, the indige-
nous population was immutable and had not fundamentally changed since
the conquest: “The biological material from the Tawantinsuyo [Incan em-
pire] reveals itself to be indestructible and in part immutable at the end of
four centuries” [El material biológico del Tawantinsuyo se revela, después
de cuatro siglos, indestructible, y, en parte, immutable] (307). Thus, the
indio’s alterity is defined, first, as his biological purity vis à vis the mes-
tizaje enacted by the colony and second, as diametrically opposed to the
Hispanic and colonial culture still dominant, in Mariátegui’s view, in Peru.
In turn, this placement allows Mariátegui to paradoxically view the indio
as a modernizing force, since his ontological antagonism to the colony and
the remaining, deeply entrenched colonial structures necessarily mean that
the indigenous will foment a modern Peru through revolution qua erasure
of the status quo.
The interventions of Escalante and others in the polemic suggest the
kernel of a kind of counterhistory of Andean modernity that has been
somehow forgotten or overlooked, but that has nevertheless persisted.
Within this other modernity, the process that seeks to define indigenous
subjects through their relationship to an imagined national entity is either
disrupted, rejected, or fomented. Escalante propounded the region and
denied the nation, at least as coastal intellectuals pronounced it. Whether
through social renovation and revolution or through cultural and political
policies of mestizaje, in the 1920s Mariátegui and Sánchez believed that the
nation was a panacea that could include, and so too revalidate, social sub-
jects that had been marginalized in Andean history and whose marginal-
ization was taken as the source of the Andes’ uneven modernity. Despite
their differences, Mariátegui and Sánchez shared the centralizing, nation-
alizing goals that the cosmopolitan intelligentsia of Latin America—the
ciudad letrada, in Rama’s words—hoped the indio would anchor.15 Their vi-
sion was inherited from González Prada but took on an emphatic, radical
articulation under the pressures of an increasingly global understanding of
the Andes. This global understanding arose, in part, from vanguard intel-
lectuals’ active contextualization of Latin America with respect to Europe
and the United States. This process occurred by bringing foreign concepts
and ideas to bear on the Latin American context, as Mariátegui’s imple-
mentation of Marxism exemplifies. Furthermore, we should not overlook
how the overwhelming presence of a material and foreign modernization
was made visible in the foreign products that flooded the Peruvian market,
from movies to cars and fine clothing.
In response to a position that lopsidedly understood the indigenous
population in terms of its political possibilities, Escalante unerringly fo-
cused on the dissonance between the indigenous question and the political
articulation that many indigenistas gave it: “If my sense of smell doesn’t
fool me, I think that this ‘amorous interest’—suddenly aroused among
certain circles of coastal [read limeño] intellectuals and journalists—to
redeem the ‘mother race’ from its ‘cruel servility’ and to ‘integrate it into
civilization and culture’ conceals a revolutionary leaning that wants to take
advantage of the indigenous masses’ exasperation and strength in order to
enthrone Bolshevik ideals and Soviet and communist forms of government
in Peru” (Polémica 48).16
Escalante’s criticisms go beyond a merely gratuitous form of Red-
baiting or of isolationist xenophobia, both of which they might reasonably
be assumed to be. In fact, Escalante’s critique—which is quite common
in the period’s press—puts its finger on the problematic way in which the
most progressive of intellectuals during the period tended to empty the
indio of any inherent meaning and fill him up, so to speak, with Marx-
ist and Marxian potential. Mariátegui’s famous articulation of the indio
as the stuff of Marx’s proletarian masses in the Siete ensayos represents the
best-known example of the indigenistas’ stylization of the indio, often at
the expense of a more complete understanding of the indigenous popula-
tion itself. One has the sense, in reading some of these indigenista texts,
that the indio’s utility for the cause far outweighed the need to know him.
Tristán Marof, a Bolivian critic closely allied to Mariátegui’s cause, coldly
put it thus: “The indio will create the revolution once he is enlightened”
[el indio creará la revolución una vez ilustrado] (“Situación social” 25). The
Peruvian José Uriel García, whose ultimate plans for the indio’s future did
not include Marxist revolution, nevertheless echoed Mariátegui’s view on
the matter of the indio’s function: “Today’s indio is, more than simply a
biological value, a spiritual possibility: mere clay in the formation of a new
kind of culture” (“Neo-indianismo” 1). The image is particularly powerful,
as it deflates wholly the indigenistas’ self-presentation as beneficent defend-
ers of the indigenous in favor a more Machiavellian rendering.
For Escalante and other intellectuals attentive to the manner in which
the highlands were portrayed by cosmopolitan critics, the problem with
these perspectives was the way in which, through a series of complex op-
erations, Mariátegui’s and Sánchez’s view of the indio came to represent a

version of highland society that was entirely identified with gamonalismo
at the expense of any other kind of cultural formation. This was the case in
the most sophisticated of indigenista critiques. Such a representation of-
fered an Andean society that, in its malignity—read its retrograde feudal
economic system—was all the easier to elide from the face of the future. In
other words, even as cosmopolitan indigenistas attempted to create an in-
clusive nation by calling for the betterment of the indigenous population’s
social position, they also viewed those same indigenous people as lacking
in a proper culture. Whether it was Sánchez’s mesticismo or Mariátegui’s
revolutionary utopianism, limeño intellectuals’ nationalist discourses co-
opted the indio and radically simplified the sierra.
Escalante’s resistance turned primarily on designating an entirely dif-
ferent object around which regional intellectuals might stake their claims to
social renovation and renewal. For Escalante, that object is made up of “cho-
las sewing green and blue threads into the shorn ears of the baby lambs . . . ,
[eating] freshly squeezed cheese, a ‘hyatta’ of fresh potatoes, drinking
corn chicha from symbolic ‘qqeros’ and ‘chuas’ . . . , all accompanied by the
rhythm of the ‘tinya’ and the crystalline voices of single Indian women . . .
and the appeasement . . . of dead ancestors” (Polémica 47).17
Two aspects of the cuzqueño journalist and newspaper owner’s descrip-
tion are notable: first, that he describes a typical Andean indigenous agrar-
ian ceremony wherein animals are marked; and second, that this ceremony
is not necessarily an Incan or past custom, but one that the indigenous
peoples practice in contemporary times. This last dimension of the descrip-
tion is especially noteworthy because, in texts such as Valcárcel’s Tempestad
en los Andes or César Vallejo’s Hacia el reino de los Sciris from 1928, the indio
tends to be denied coevality with his modern counterparts through a re-
peated and emphatic association with his own, usually imperial, past.
In all likelihood, Escalante speaks from direct experience with the cer-
emony he refers to, as it would have been common in the Cuzco region.18
Perhaps more important is the particular way in which Escalante, in this
section of his text and in others, refers to these customs as “ours.” Inevi-
tably, he too appropriates the indio as a symbol, but he does so in order
to represent the highland region in contradistinction to the cosmopolitan
erasures that extend a single national identity to all subjects in Peru, under
the banner of modernization. For Escalante, the term indio signifies any
highland culture, whether mestizo or indigenous, rural or urban.
As such, a sort of “indigeneity through proximity” lies at the core of
Escalante’s discourse. For him the indigenous population and the land are
inseparable, and the culture that springs from these two entities circulates
freely among all the residents of the sierra. In her incisive analysis of pho-
tography and the Cuzco indigenistas, Deborah Poole has pointed out pre-
cisely this insistence on indigeneity as a function of the purported spirit
of the highland landscape (179–87). José Uriel García’s concept of syncretic
tellurism, for example, resonates deeply with this attachment of culture to
land. In García’s El nuevo indio, the earth itself, not the persons who inhabit
it, preserves and communicates a people’s identity.
In the quotation above, Escalante promulgates a strategy of indigenous
representation that predates and perhaps announces what would become
a mainstay of representations of the indigenous population in subsequent
cultural production. His evocation of orality, significantly represented by
singing women and by the intercalation of Quechua words into the text, is
a cornerstone of the mature indigenista novels of José María Arguedas and
Manuel Scorza (1928–1983), for instance. Even as he reiterates problematic
associations of indios with the land, he is persistent in regarding the exis-
tence of native religions and rituals among highland indios.
Furthermore, the strategies that Escalante does not utilize reveal a
number of significant issues concerning his ideological position. As Ge-
rardo Leibner has amply documented in his fine book on the subject, the
concept of the ayllu—which Escalante does not invoke—was taken up in
the early twentieth century by many sectors of the political Left in the An-
des, in particular those intellectuals and activists aligned with anarchism,
Marxism, and other progressive politics. The term ayllu refers to an indig-
enous communal unit, usually with ties to a particular geographic place.
The ayllu, like other indigenous social formations, has undergone consid-
erable transformations since the conquest, but at the moment of indigenis-
mo’s apogee in the 1920s, it was taken to be a preserved remnant of Incan
society. Furthermore, leftists interested in fomenting social change in the
area, such as Mariátegui, interpreted the ayllu as a kind of pre-Marxist
communal form that could easily be adapted to the purposes of the revolu-
tion. Needless to say, the interpretation of the ayllu as inherently Marxist
relied more on a purposeful misconstruing of this traditional indigenous
social formation than on reality.19
Escalante does not engage in this sort of idealization. In fact, as the
above quotations suggest, his contributions to the discussions on indi-
genismo are wary of “Bolsheviks,” and an indication of this wariness can be
seen in his avoidance of the term ayllu. Instead, he relies on an idyllic, al-
most pastoral representation of the indigenous population. It is worth not-

ing that the work of historians such as Thomas Krüggeler has signaled that
Cuzco was the site of a growing consciousness about labor and its organiza-
tion in the early twentieth century. While Escalante’s vision can certainly
be understood to coincide with agrarian customs of the time, it also insists
on understanding the indigenous population as part of the countryside and
moreover as a source of happy, unalienated labor.
Unlike Mariátegui and the indigenistas, who instrumentalized the
indio in their criticisms of Peru’s feudal economy, Escalante and figures
such as the active local Cuzco intellectuals José Guillermo Guevara and
Manuel Villaizán utilized the indio to insist repeatedly on the peculiarities
of a highland culture that included a wide range of groups, ethnicities, and
classes. The indio morphed into an image of Cuzco and the regionalism
grounded in it. For Mariátegui and his cohorts, certainly still laboring un-
der the deep effects of nineteenth-century positivism and its offshoots, the
indio was best understood as a biological and racial construct, and his cul-
ture mattered little.20 What mattered most was his racial disposition toward
revolution. It was the indio’s race that led him to revolution, not his enlight-
enment. Escalante and others checked this by assuming a heavily cultural-
ist position that, although still checkered with racialist language, began to
define the defense of the indio as an understanding of his existence as a
cultural entity. This shift was achieved not only through efforts such as
Guevara’s vindication of “lo andino,” notably in his article “Oportunismo in-
digenista” in La Sierra of April 1927, but especially through highland elites’
insistence on a direct understanding and experience of highland indios.
The indio thus came to function in Cuzco intellectual circles as an emblem
of resistance to cosmopolitan culture. In this case, it is clear that the indio is
a discursive tool whose meaning differs depending on who wields it.
This being said, the importance of the contribution Escalante and his
colleagues made to indigenismo does not consist of an authentic represen-
tation of indigenous culture within a broader regional and national imagi-
nary. Like all indigenistas, Escalante and his cohort represented particular
images of indigenous people and their culture, and the deployment of these
rarely had anything to do with the goals of authenticity. Rather, their activ-
ities contributed by calling on the institutions of civil society—primarily,
newspapers and print media, but also the university—to consider serrano
culture as legitimate and separate. Escalante’s contribution to the polemic
is a first step in this direction. A similar predilection toward local culture,
rather than a nationalist model, as the basis for accessing indigenous cul-
ture exists in other highland indigenista works, such as García’s El nuevo

indio.
I do not mean to suggest that the voices that originated in the sierra and
identified themselves with serrano culture were somehow more authentic
than the limeño indigenistas, nor that they were wholly disinterested. The
reality is entirely to the contrary, especially in regard to Escalante, a deputy
under Leguía during the latter’s authoritarian government, and Guevera,
who also had close links to Cuzco’s gamonales. Escalante, in particular,
deployed his discourse on the indio in defense of the repressive Leguía gov-
ernment and whatever legislation Leguía passed regarding the indigenous
population during his tenure as president from 1919 to 1930.21
However, in terms of the region’s intellectual history, highland intel-
lectuals’ will to make present the culture of the sierra as part of the coastal
and national debates on the future of Peru seems, indeed, not only a pivotal
move but one that would be repeated, with mounting resonance, up through
the present day. In narrative, the already-mentioned works of Arguedas and
Scorza may be interpreted in this fashion. In the contemporary turmoil in
the Andean region, groups such as the CONAIE in Ecuador and Bolivia’s
Movimiento Indígena Pachakuti (MIP) and recent Movimiento al Social-
ismo (MAS) place culture in a combative position in relation to neoliberal
regimes and their reforms, even as they emphatically call into question the
notion of a cohesive nation capable of representing its so-called citizens.
Regional elites such as Escalante, in resisting coastal indigenismo’s mobili-
zation of the indio in the 1920s and 1930s—and at that moment in history it
would be possible to speak of the influence of Mariátegui’s Marxism as well
as Haya de la Torre’s nascent APRA—laid the groundwork for a consider-
ation of indigenous culture “from within,” which would have its greatest
literary exponent in José María Arguedas.
Escalante’s stubborn insistence on regional culture as grounded in no-
tions of indigeneity, put forth within a crucial debate on indigenous sub-
jects and the modern nation, calls into question the commensurability of
a utopian political discourse, here understood as nationalism, with a re-
gional and subaltern cultural identity. At its core, Escalante’s misgivings
about Marxism (Mariátegui) or mestizaje (Sánchez) sounded a conserva-
tive alarm, one that sought to preserve highland culture, to be sure, but also
to deploy it in the face of an overwhelming modernization that threatened
to erase or overwrite it. This will to conserve autochthonous—including
but not limited to indigenous—culture was by no means new in Latin
America. In the twentieth century it constitutes the centerpiece of the area’s
major attempts to define a proper identity that might bridge the region’s
diverse groups but also encompass its heteroclite history, as figures such
as the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz and the Dominican literary
critic Pedro Henríquez Ureña demonstrate in their distinct but compatible
investigations into subaltern culture in Latin America.22 These “cultural
preservation” projects often result in the wholesale invention of autochtho-
nous culture.
His initial attempts to draw attention to the cultural costs of indi-
genismo notwithstanding, later in his career Escalante would embrace a
politics that denied the importance of these initial interventions. In this
sense, Escalante’s participation in the polemic stands out all the more when
viewed in the context of his subsequent implementations of indigenismo.
Escalante’s case, understood in terms of his career as a public intellectual
and government politician, is thus instructive as to the contradictions that
dwell at the very core of indigenismo in the Andes. Escalante’s work within
the government during Leguía’s presidency and afterward tends to undo
his stress upon regional culture in the face of coastal cosmopolitan tenden-
cies, even as it serves as an indicator of the polemicist’s absorption into and
voicing of the state’s modernizing project.
Escalante’s interest in bureaucratic forms of indigenismo had already
begun by the time of the 1927 polemic. By 1912, for example, he was a mem-
ber of Pedro Zulen’s Asociación Pro-Indígena, an association that would
be hailed as a precursor in attempts to organize support for indigenous
peoples into a political movement.23 Escalante later became part of Peru’s
indigenista bureaucracy during Leguía’s regime, a circumstance presaged
already in his glowing support for Leguía in “Nosotros los indios.” His work
as a public official continued after the fall of the dictator in 1930, and his
political interests would never stray far from invocations of the indigenous.
As a member of the Cámara de Diputados, Peru’s house of representatives,
he represented his home province of Espinar in the department of Cusco,
where he and his family held land (Miller 153). He utilized this position to
continue to press a supposedly highland perspective on Peruvian reality,
but as we shall see, this perspective became marked by a profound associa-
tion with the goals of the modernizing state. Escalante realized this asso-
ciation while working for the government and particularly during a trip to
Mexico in an official indigenista capacity.
Given the international interest in the region’s indigenous peoples, it
does not come as a surprise that the first Congreso Indigenista Interameri-
cano was held in Pátzcuaro, Mexico, in 1940.24 Undoubtedly, Lázaro Cárde-
nas, president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940, served as a great inspiration for
the activities of the congress. Under his announced and zealous return to
the ideals of the Mexican Revolution, Cárdenas had undertaken a massive
land reform in order to modernize the Mexican economy. In so doing, he
had effectively targeted the structure that buoyed up the feudal organiza-
tion of landownership. This same feudal organization was viewed as the
most important system of economic oppression of Mexico’s indigenous
peoples. The parallel to Mariátegui’s unrealized calls for agrarian reforms
is inevitable. Additionally, Cárdenas had put into effect an energetic policy
regarding the education of the indigenous populations.25
The period of indigenismo’s effervescence was not restricted to Peru,
and it would be mistaken to think of indigenismo as either a uniquely or
originary Andean phenomenon. In other parts of the Americas, notably
in Mexico and Guatemala, but also in the United States, “the indigenous
problem” had become a prominent topic at the beginning of the twentieth
century. The Mexican Revolution, for instance, was viewed as a cornerstone
of any attempt to conceptualize what the reform of the social and political
status of the indio might mean. José Vasconcelos, for a time minister of
public education and also rector of National University in Mexico, serves as
an excellent example of how these attempts to vindicate indios increasingly
came to be framed through the lens of education. During his tenure as min-
ister, Vasconcelos famously attempted to introduce indigenous content into
public instruction, in order that education as an institution might serve
as a gateway into the modern nation for the disenfranchised indigenous
population. This emphasis on education as a panacea to indigenous prob-
lems, although not an invention of the twentieth century, would become
the most obstinate incarnation of institutional indigenismo in the twenti-
eth century.26
The conference ran from April 14 to April 24. Delegations from Ar-
gentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Ven-
ezuela, and the United States attended. José Ángel Escalante headed the
Peruvian delegation, which included such notable indigenista figures as
José Uriel García, José Antonio Encinas, Hildebrando Castro Pozo, and, cu-
riously, José María Arguedas. By all lights, it was a productive conference,
creating a number of policy suggestions that were to be communicated to
the governments of the nations involved.
Upon his return to Peru in August of that same year, Escalante did
just that before the house of representatives, and his speech was published
by the Peruvian government under the rather cumbersome title Exposición
ante la Cámara, del señor Diputado por Espinar Doctor José Ángel Escalante,
Presidente de la Delegación Peruana al Congreso Indigenista; pedidos que la de-
terminaron, y otras intervenciones.27 His report detailed the conclusions of the
conference in a narrative that envisioned a complex modernity that would
be animated precisely by the policymakers and intellectuals that the indi-
genistas had become. As the presence of Escalante, Encinas, Castro Pozo,
and even Arguedas intimates, by the middle of the century indigenismo
and indigenistas had become institutionalized within the state. This move-
ment of indigenismo from a discourse critical of the state and its policies to
one that now resided, at least in part, within state structures may indeed be
responsible for the tenor and goal of Escalante’s text. His report on the con-
gress provided not only the information that had been requested, but also
an overview of and a judgment on indigenismo’s earlier failings. It is worth
citing at length from his lament:
In Peru . . . , the indigenous problem was never correctly articulated.
Even we, the cuzqueños, have understood it only as a resounding fact
of injustice and cruelty. That is why our campaigns have always had
the tone of angry protest and of belligerent reaction against the indif-
ference of public authority and against the plundering politics of the
ruling classes and landowners. This attitude of ours became suspicious
to conservative elements and to the established press, which attributed
to us subversive purposes, separatist tendencies, and crazy desires of
restoring the Incan Empire. On the coast, the indio was a well-worn
topic of literary lucubrations and academic debates among intellectuals
and politicians, when he wasn’t the platform for election campaigns. . . .
Everyone recognized that the indio lived without guarantees and without
hope, and that it was necessary to do something to redeem him from
such a terrible situation. But in reality, in the end, we didn’t do anything
positive in his defense, with the exception of passing concerns. At this
very moment, there are still thousands of honorable and intelligent
people that think that the indio is irredeemable, that he is useless and
that it would be best to do away with him. Nothing practical and effective
was done until 1919, during Leguía’s government, when the Pro-Indígena
was founded and, somewhat later, the currently inexistent Directory of
Indigenous Education in the Ministry of Education. At most, laws, de-
crees, and resolutions that were always futile when up against the passive
resistance of public functionaries and predominant social elements. We
have settled for lyrical declarations in favor of “the oppressed race.” Our
Political Charter contains some articles created in succor of the indio and
of the indigenous community, but they are there without any efficacy or
potency.28 (33–34)
To say the least, Escalante skews his historical landmarks and white-
washes other historical points. The Pro-Indígena, for example, was founded
in 1909, many years before the date he assigns. Even more striking, how-
ever, is Escalante’s willful mischaracterization of the Asociación Pro-
Indígena’s nature. Explicitly planned as a private aid group in order to avoid
being tainted by what the association’s directors, among them Pedro Zulen
and Dora Mayer, understood to be a corrupt and corrupting government,
the group had at least initially maintained its distance from the Peruvian
government. Thus it had emphasized its independence in order to be able
to launch criticisms of, for example, the mounting penetrations of foreign
capital into the country and its adverse effects, in ventures such as mining,
on the indigenous population. Since Escalante had been associated with the
group at least from 1912, it would seem strange that he did not know about
this stance.29
If Escalante’s binding up of one of the central institutions of early
twentieth-century indigenismo with the government is problematic, so too
is his characterization of the reception that early twentieth-century indi-
genista calls for justice encountered in civil society. As we have seen in our
analysis of “Nosotros los indios,” Escalante has a penchant for a slippery use
of first-person pronouns, tending to recast himself easily into social roles to
which he may not have an entirely legitimate claim. The case is no different
here. Although Escalante claims that the powerful newspapers of the south-
ern sierra, and in particular Cuzco, “attributed to us subversive purposes,
separatist tendencies, and crazy desires of restoring the Incan Empire,”
here again the facts undermine his statements. Not only was Escalante the
owner of an important newspaper in Cuzco; he himself had, in “Nosotros,”
accused other indigenistas of wanting a return of the Incan Empire. These
attributes are foisted on others—in this case putative conservatives—just
as he acknowledges his critical position in the polemic decrying those intel-
lectuals who had little knowledge of the indio and yet used him to further
their own political views.
We need to understand Escalante’s shifting subject positions as more
than a purely opportunistic strategy; they are also a product of the modern
moment’s pressures on Andean intellectuals. Escalante’s slippery position-
ality can be interpreted as a product of the cultural and physical displace-
ments that are put into motion in any of his enunciations. An intellectual
from the provinces, Escalante seemed to realize only too well that he must
represent the sierra not only in a political capacity, but also in his very per-
sona. As such, Escalante becomes an active performer of what he believes
the sierra to be: not only the persistence of a regional culture, but especially
the figure of the indio. In this fashion, the indigenistas’ multifaceted de-
fense of the indio is transformed, in Escalante’s discourse, into a symbol
not of resistance to colonial and neocolonial structures but rather of the
appropriateness and readiness of the highlands for modernity. Thus Esca-
lante states:
It is time to correct ourselves and to propose the solution of the indig-
enous problem on the level of national realities and expediencies. Above
infertile lyricisms, the dire necessity of transforming our national
structure by taking advantage of the enormous indigenous masses—the
majority in Peru—and incorporating them into our daily lives as factors
of production and consumption imposes itself. . . . Those nations that
wish to emerge from colonial backwardness, to become important in the
concert of nations, and to be able to defend themselves from all foreign
aggression need to increase ceaselessly their production and to increase
also the acquisitive capacity of their populace. It is utopian to plan the
industrialization of a country while it does not have consumers for the
fruit of its industries, and it will not have consumers while the economic
capacity of the majority of its inhabitants is the same as zero.30 (35)
Eerily reminiscent of a neoliberal discourse on development, Escal-
ante’s path to a bright, First World future makes of the indio a sort of sine
qua non for achieving modernity, but only insofar as he is transformed into
both a provider of labor and, crucially, a consumer. This elaboration oc-
curs within a national framework, as the congressman repeats insistently.
The intricacies of the contradiction with his previous stance on indigenous
culture are worth pointing out: whereas Escalante has stressed the rural,
agrarian customs that are inaccessible to those coastal intellectuals that he
accuses of illegitimacy, he now pronounces a policy on the indio that would
effectively herald the demise of that agrarian indigenous culture. Interest-
ingly, within his report on the congress, he carefully sidesteps the issue of
culture by underlining its secondary position to economic concerns.
Now, while Escalante’s primary focus on creating consuming citizens
does indeed rest upon a declared concern regarding the underdeveloped
condition of the nation, and thus also upon its obverse, an imagined, fully
developed Peru, his articulation of this future seems to either willfully ob-
fuscate or unrealistically overlook precisely how such a modernization is to
take place. That is to say, as is evident from Escalante’s comments above,
the congressman imagines modernization within an entirely national
frame. Thus, he imagines that Peru will create “consumers for its indus-
trial products.” This conceptualization of development, and particularly
of technological and industrial development in Latin America, fundamen-
tally misunderstands what his fellow intellectuals had already grasped long
before 1940 (although this understanding may have been less patent in the
house of representatives to which his discourse was addressed): that the in-
flux of foreign capital often had a detrimental effect on the area’s masses, in
particular on the indigenous peoples.31
Escalante’s proposal can be explained away by citing his allegiance,
in the 1920s, to the Leguía government and its very friendly attitude to-
ward foreign investment—in fact, it was in the 1920s that investments by
the likes of the Cerro de Pasco Mining Corporation, which would become
so problematic in the labor history of the Andes, flourished. By all lights
his attitude continued thereafter. However, we must also take into consid-
eration the emphasis that Escalante and institutional indigenismo placed
on educational policies, as these are proposed as the mechanism through
which the indigenous population would be incorporated into the national
body. Indeed, half of Escalante’s report before the house is concerned with
the problem of indigenous education. As the congressman says, “The In-
teramerican Indigenist Congress has given this problem highest priority”
(43). In his speech on the topic, it becomes clear that education means the
acculturation of the indigenous population, and also that this is or should
be the highest goal for the current government. He labels the achievement
of such an education policy the highest form of “peruanismo” (52).
Escalante’s stance on the ameliorative powers of education on the Pe-
ruvian nation recalls Vargas Llosa’s remarks on the same topic. Moreover,
Escalante’s vision of modernization is overwhelmingly driven, as is Vargas
Llosa’s, by the desire to recreate a Western consumer society in the Andes.
Given his contradictory position on the place of indigenous culture within
an Andean modernity, my reading of his participation in the polemic, and
especially of the way Escalante deploys regional culture against national-
izing agendas, should not be taken as an attempt to rehabilitate one of the
period’s politically conservative intellectual figures. Rather, Escalante’s tra-
jectory marks an effort to trace the emergence and fortune of a discourse on
indigenous culture in the last century’s indigenista debates. It is one among
many. This emergent discourse, and its subsequent manifestations are cru-
cial to the area’s cultural history precisely because they allow us to perceive
the ways in which culture, understood broadly enough to take into account
native indigenous traditions, became a central concern in early attempts
to articulate a particularly Andean modernity. This concern, however,
did not prevent the indigenous population from being lost in the struggle
for influence between regional and coastal elites. Indeed, Escalante’s later
articulations of the role of the indigenous population in the Andes would
eclipse his earlier representations of indigenous culture and experience, to
say nothing of subjects, with a purely economic understanding of the in-
dio’s significance.
ch a p t e r t h r e e
(UN)HAPPY ENDINGS
Film, Modernity, and Tradition in
Carlos Oquendo de Amat
Peru is not only a social problem or political problem: it
is also an artistic problem. It is precisely on the artistic
plane where it has traditionally been more a problem and a
possibility.1
—Jorge Basadre, Perú: Problema y posibilidad, 1931
T
here is one particular trait of the lettered vanguard that appears
to be quite the opposite of the indigenista project, if not its annulment:
the cult of technology. The poetry of the historical vanguard, espe-
cially those texts produced early in the century, is rife with signifiers that
invoke both the idea of technological modernization and its materials, at
the same time that they intimate the desire to forget quickly and seamlessly
a chronic sense of underdevelopment.2 Recently, the Peruvian critic Mirko
Lauer has suggested that vanguard poets and intellectuals “gazed from the
technological density of the city in the direction of a personal rural past,
defined among other things by the absence of modern machines” (Musa
28). Lauer has taken up the study of new technologies in Andean avant-
garde cultural production and has suggested the extent to which machines
symbolized a path into modernity (141–46). Lauer’s and other critics’ com-
pilations of lesser-known vanguardists, such as Serafín Delmar, Enrique
Bustamante y Ballivián, and Alberto Hidalgo, confirm the widespread na-
ture of this phenomenon.3
75
76 ≈ (un)happy endings
Indeed, avant-garde authors across Latin America sang the virtues of

the telegraph and airplane in the early twentieth century, as scholars inter-
ested in this cultural movement, such as Jorge Schwartz and Vicky Unruh,
have demonstrated. The poetry of the Mexican Manuel Maples Arce offers
an excellent illustration of the technophilia that permeated poetic language
and representation:
Urbe:
Escoltas de tranvías
que recorren las calles subversistas.
Los escaparates asaltan a las aceras,
y el sol, saquea las avenidas.
Al margen de los días
tarifados de postes telefónicos
desfilan paisajes momentáneos
por sistemas de tubos ascensores.
(Grunfeld 361–62)
[City:
Convoys of trams
that run through the subversive streets.
The shop windows assault the sidewalks,
and the sun sacks the avenues.
At the edge of days
price-tagged with telephone poles
momentary landscapes march
through systems of elevator tubes.]
In this fragment, from the book entitled Urbe published in 1924, we
can see an inclination toward the normalization of Latin American life as
an urban and cosmopolitan one. In fact, perhaps one of the most threat-
ening aspects of this cult of technology lies precisely in modernization’s
perceived insistence on homogenization. After all, the cityscape Maples
Arce describes could be set in any major urban center on the continent.
Poetry such as this thus constituted a double threat: first, it distanced itself
from the symbolic universe that made explicit reference to autochthony,
whatever the sort; and second, it seemed to make Latin American cultural
production indistinguishable from its avant-garde European counterpart.
The appearance was one of flagrant imitation. Indeed, Vallejo himself fa-
mously took this to be the case in an essay that railed against the presence
(un)happy endings ≈ 77
of machines in Latin American poetry (“Contra el secreto” 92–93). Seen as

an active ignoring or as a purging of the authentically Latin American, the
marked presence of technology and the technological more or less becomes
a blight on a poetic tradition that has been understood to address the dif-
ficulties of what precisely the Latin American experience of the twentieth
century means. From a historical perspective, this resistance to technology
is in fact quite suspect, for one might quite reasonably ask how moderniza-
tion and the multiple adaptations that the region’s individuals and societies
have constructed in its wake could be anything other than a quintessentially
Latin American experience. In dialogue with Carlos Alonso, we might ask
why this literary practice cannot also be read as a negotiation of a discourse
of Latin American identity (Regional Novel 14). Indeed, a substantial num-
ber of canonical novels in the twentieth century, such as Cien años de soledad
and El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, deal squarely with modernization in
its industrial and technological varieties.
Much in the same way that Arguedas’s novel El zorro foregrounds the
pressure that industrial technologies place upon the provincial culture of
Chimbote and the people who migrate there, avant-garde poetry that insists
on the technological has been understood as a discourse that goes beyond
an unthinking celebration of that technology. While I do not mean to turn
this poetry into yet another attempt to ground a version of a Latin Ameri-
can identity, I do read the machine and the massive shift it signals in Latin
American lived experience as both an indication and elaboration upon the
possibility of a modernity that can engage, rather then erase, a local cul-
ture, as Lauer has suggested (9–16). In a similar vein, Cynthia Vich has
studied the encounter between the avant-garde and indigenismo through a
concept she terms “indigenismo vanguardista,” following Mariátegui’s use of
the same term in the 1920s (187).
Maples Arce’s poem above enacts—as does a substantial part of his
poetic production—this sort of representation. In the text, trams and
pneumatic elevator tubes fill a city that is not the celebratory urban space
one would expect of a purely adulatory discourse; rather, it emanates fear,
violence, and harassment at almost every turn. The absence of any human
figures only exacerbates this uneasiness and suggests a dystopic figuration
of modernity. What if, then, the representation of technology is understood
as an attempt to negotiate the inevitable introduction of modernization into
the area, and thus also to come to grips with a “proper” modernity, viewed
as inherent to the region rather than as an artificial, foreign interruption?
That Latin America’s cultural production would reflect such a malleable re-
sponse to foreign influence is nothing new: it falls squarely within the array
of processes that cultural critics, from Pedro Henrírquez Ureña and Ángel
Rama to Néstor García Canclini after them have described as an active,
directed cultural intermingling.
This representation of technology is not just a direct documentation
of the onset of modernization in the area—a process well underway at the
beginning of the last century. Nor does the inclusion of the hallmarks of
technology—as we see in 5 metros de poemas, authored by the Peruvian Car-
los Oquendo de Amat—imply that the avant-garde had turned a blind eye
to Latin America’s peripheral and traditional cultures in favor of novelty.
Rather, it reflects an imagined modernity that could effectively and con-
ceptually negotiate the encounter between traditional and modern worlds.
In other words, the appearance of a cacophony of technological apparatus
in the poetry of the early twentieth century represents more than a passive
reception of foreign influence, a self-effacing (and self-hating?) desire to im-
itate, or a misguided attempt on the part of provincials to pass as modern.
Oquendo de Amat’s attitudes toward technology and modernization are
typical in their engagement with the historical moment. The inclusion of
technological objects in the poetry of the avant-garde originates in the real
historical introduction of these same items to Latin America, a fact that is
curiously undertheorized in the analysis of this body of work.
Taking Oquendo de Amat’s poetry as a space in which to consider the
encounter between local and foreign influences finds echoes in recent theo-
ries describing the mechanics of how modernity functions in peripheral
societies. Current elaborations of the concept of “alternative modernities”
dovetail nicely with the assertion that agency is involved in the ways Latin
American avant-garde literature, and culture more broadly conceived, ab-
sorbed the hallmarks of material modernization. As Dilip Gaonkar has
persuasively argued, the very idea of alternative modernities implies that
a single modernity does not hold sway over all points in geopolitical space,
and that, therefore, multiple versions of modernity appear at different
points on the globe. These modernities tend to respond to and contextual-
ize foreign influences and imports, even as they absorb them on a funda-
mental, structural level (17–18).
The notion of alternative modernities is both useful and limiting in the
context of Andean literary production, and in the case of Oquendo de Am-
at’s poetry in particular. Gaonkar compellingly and convincingly illustrates
the inevitability of modernity and its processes in every corner of the world,
and so puts forth that modernity can no longer be rejected or renounced
anywhere. This assessment resonates especially in this book, which under-

stands even indigenista discourse that sought to deny outright Western
modernization by returning to a preconquest Incan state as informed by a
profoundly modernizing logic. Furthermore, the “creative adaptations,” to
use Charles Taylor’s term, that emerge from the meeting between Western
and traditional cultures implies a conscious agency in certain subjects, in
this case writers and poets, who take it upon themselves to shape the re-
ality of modernization, with its messy and disconcerting appearance, into
concepts that might somehow be used to understand and even—perhaps
most importantly—implement a beneficial modernity in regions that are
not entirely, or even at all, Western. These adaptations amount to an inter-
rogation of precisely what constitutes the modern present, even though at
times they may fall prey to the noble but naïve attempt to mix and match a
modernity to taste.4
One of the limitations involved in the use of these terms lies in the ten-
dency to view mixture as a workable solution to the clash of cultures. Criti-
cal discourse on the hybridization of culture, and often also of race, has
a long history in Latin America, even though in recent years it has fallen
on hard times. As critics such as Carlos Alonso have observed with refer-
ence to transculturation—a concept that Fernando Ortiz originated—the
logic behind it seems also to operate at the expense of the weaker culture:
that is, the one that is being absorbed. In the advocates of transcultura-
tion Alonso perceives a willfulness to assign agency to the weaker partner
in this process of cultural mixture (Burden 27–28, 186). Alonso’s skeptical
eye is merited when considering the cultures that arise in the context of
modernization, as Latin American societies come into sharp contrast with
their counterparts at a more advanced level of industrialization and tech-
nological penetration. Far from leading to an immediate negotiation, as if
it were a dialectical process between its two constituent parts, modernity in
the Andes may indeed reveal an unwillingness to engage in the process that
would lead to a recognizable alternative modernity. I believe this refusal
animates Oquendo de Amat’s poetic work.
In 5 metros de poemas, the model of a voracious hybridization as a con-
cretization of modernity creates an anxiety in the poetic discourse that
destabilizes any reading of these poems as an expression of an alternative
modernity. Indeed, 5 metros may elaborate a reflection on modernity that
neutralizes the hopeful machinations inherent in the theory of alternative
modernities. This reflection on modernity may, in fact, be coterminous
with what the Peruvian critic Antonio Cornejo Polar has identified as a mi-
grant discourse, wherein hybridization, understood as a dialectical process,

does not occur and instead a stalemate at the level of cultural discourse
results (“Condición migrante” 275–76).
Born in 1905 to a well-established family in the southern Peruvian
department of Puno, Oquendo de Amat spent much of his childhood in
an Andean setting. His father died in 1912, and his family quickly fell into
financial instability. They fled to Lima, where Oquendo de Amat experi-
enced the frequent displacements that characterize an impoverished urban
existence. Little is known about Oquendo de Amat’s day-to-day life in the
capital, but Carlos Meneses makes it clear in his biography that Oquendo
de Amat did not hold down a job for any extended period of time, and that
he managed to live, albeit hand-to-mouth, largely thanks to his friends’
generosity. Meneses notes that the young poet had an acute interest in the
attractions of Lima’s burgeoning nightlife and that apparently he sacrificed
his diet in favor of his love of the cinema and other entertainments, all
more expensive than he could afford. His fascination with cinema led him
so far as to propose a popular magazine he hoped to devote exclusively to
this new art; he managed to find some funding, but the project never made
it to the first issue (43).5
At the age of eighteen, Oquendo de Amat began writing the poems
that would be published four years later as 5 metros. It was composed of
twenty-eight sheets of paper glued together into one continuous length
and then folded accordion-style into the dimensions of a book. The first,
subscription-funded edition of 5 metros fell short of its titular boast some-
what, reaching only a little over four meters when fully unfolded.6 Each of
its eighteen poems occupies one or, at times, two sheets, and at least five of
the poems are calligrams in the style of Apollinaire. Like Apollinaire’s ideo-
grammatic works, many of Oquendo de Amat’s poems are organized spa-
tially so as to mimic concrete forms or actions: a skyscraper, for instance,
is represented by vertical writing to emphasize the building’s uprightness,
while the falling of rain is suggested by verses lined up and down across the
page in imitation of falling droplets.7 Because of this repeated insistence
on visual imagery interspersed over the twenty-eight sheets, when opened
to its full length, 5 metros suggests an uncoiled film reel. In addition, the
woodcut on the cover page, scored in the heavy black lines characteristic
of the period’s indigenista etchings, introduces the text through the image
of four faces, two of which emerge from behind a curtain and resemble the
Commedia dell’Arte masks typical of the introductory leaders seen in early
film screenings (see fig. 1).
Figure 1. Cover of 5 metros de poemas, by Carlos Oquendo de Amat. Facsimile

edition. N.p.: 5 y medio editores, n.d.
The poet’s evident predilection for the cinema and its trappings is not
surprising, given the ubiquity of movies at the time. As Fanni Muñoz Ca-
brejo has described in her recent book, the early twentieth century saw the
wild growth of leisure practices across Lima’s social groups, but especially
among the urban masses (75–113). The activity of filmgoing stood as an
emblem of the encounter between peripheral societies and European and
especially North American cultural content. By 1927, the year in which
Oquendo de Amat published 5 metros, an estimated 95 percent of screen
time in South America was taken up by U.S. films. Early blockbusters such
as Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (1919) and The Kid (1921), Rudolf Valentino in
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), Nanook of the North (1924), and
The Phantom of the Opera (1925) held Latin American audiences spellbound.
There were relatively few films made locally, and their meager length could
not compete with the sheer volume of footage their North American neigh-
bors sent south (King 11).
Moviegoing in Lima was at an all-time high, and, after its inauspi-
cious beginnings as traveling cinema in the first decade of the century, it
had found a loyal clientele that crossed class lines, from the poor masses to
the ruling elites (Bedoya 40–42).8 According to the Peruvian film historian
Ricardo Bedoya, the mere presence of cinema itself signified to Peruvians a
new moment in their own history. The existence of the technology within
the nation spoke to “the growing greatness and wealth of the country, of the
Republic that founded itself again at that time, as well as to the prosperity
that would last many years, the fruit of collaboration with capital and tech-
nology that came from abroad, especially from North America, in order to
make us greater and more modern” (43).
Given the necessity for significant investment in order to support film
consumption in Peru, it follows that the flowering of film markets and film
viewing, especially in Lima, sprang out of the changes in the country’s po-
litical landscape. After the República Aristocrática (1895–1919), the Leguía
regime positioned itself antagonistically in relation to that predecessor by
spinning out a rhetoric of future wealth and foreign cooperation. Leguía
would liberate Peru from the backwardness spawned by the previous ad-
ministrations’ isolationist economic policies. Leguía did, in fact, open Peru-
vian markets to new foreign investments, and his policies were particularly
marked by a heretofore unheard of cooperation with the United States. In
May 1928, the Peruvian president documented the tone of that relationship
in a personal letter to Ernesto S. Hays, then president of Paramount Studios,
about his company’s recent release, Beau Geste. He called the film “a wonder
of beauty” and wished for “the greatest progress in the company’s activities in
this country” (Bedoya 48). By 1928, when his letter was written, Leguía’s well-
wishing had already become fact: the American film companies United Art-
ists, Paramount, Fox, and Universal Pictures had firmly established control
of distribution for most of the movie theaters in Lima. For the average Peru-
vian, criollo and migrant alike, filmgoing in the capital was most certainly a
lesson in North American, namely Hollywood, cinematic narratives.
The impact of these narratives, and particularly the potentially disso-
nant effect of the cultural premises they rested upon and communicated,
has been little studied. The films that Oquendo de Amat had access to—
Beau Geste, for example, aside from those listed above—were all narratival
works far removed from the experimentation that characterized contempo-

raneous European avant-garde cinema. Oquendo de Amat probably would
have had no access to works such as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Ameri-
can blockbusters relied upon editing or montage—as did Eisenstein’s ex-
perimental juxtapositions, only to very different effect—to link together
those images and sequences out of which the stories they told were based.
Thus, Hollywood movies strove to create convincing, and so too entertain-
ing, stories.9 While Oquendo de Amat may not have seen an editing table or
the splicing tools used to construct narrative sequences, based on his avid
interest in cinematic innovation we can assume that he knew something
about how these American films produced their “magic.” For Oquendo de
Amat, the act of gluing twenty-eight pieces of paper into one long reel could
have been meant to recall the means by which discrete images are joined
together by cinematic editing in order to create a cohesive whole. Indeed,
the filmstrip itself, before even being edited into the larger narrative of the
film, is already composed of such discrete units, glued together, as it were,
by the temporal recording of the camera.
The conceit and much of the significance of the form taken by the po-
emario, or collection of poems, rests in a reconfiguration of the artwork as
film lyric or lyric film, endowed with the capacity to record the experience
of an all-seeing eye whose integral and integrating vision spans from the si-
lent punas of the Peruvian highlands described in the poem “campo,” to the
frenzied, cosmopolitan activity of Antwerp presented in “amberes.” And
yet, in the context of 1920s Lima, the encounter of rural provincial life and
a cosmopolitanism fueled by foreign influence seem a recipe for contention.
Such conflictual encounters are at the core of the narrative Oquendo de
Amat glues together through the eighteen poems that make up his book.
In 5 metros, the moon, the arid punas, the highland lagoons—all come to
represent the Andean culture with which they are customarily associated.
Oquendo de Amat’s poems exclusively dedicated to these figures, such as
“aldeanita,” “compañera,” “madre,” and “poema al lado del sueño” are also
those written in the most traditional manner, with no experimentation in
either their spatial organization or in their content. When these Andean
figures, now symbolic of rural culture, do appear in spatially experimen-
tal poems, they adapt or are adapted to the new configurations of avant-
garde poetry that modern entities like the elevator and the skyscraper
orchestrate.
This lifting of the natural subjects and symbols usually connected to
lyric poetry out of the forms traditionally used to express them—the son-
net, for example—marks Oquendo de Amat’s attempt to negotiate between

his past and his present. It also represents the innovation for which 5 metros
has been remembered. Within the context of the avant-garde moment, lyric
poetry clearly gestures to the past. Acutely conscious of lyric poetry’s fate in
a time marked by the ascendancy of cinema, Oquendo de Amat writes the
greater part of 5 metros as if he believes that the hybrid form he has gener-
ated—the lyric film—will successfully repackage lyric poetry’s traditional
content for the modern age. What is perhaps most telling in regard to the
eventual outcome of this experiment is Oquendo de Amat’s insistence on
the technological as the form that can communicate the traditional, which
appears exclusively as content in those poems that describe the meeting of
local and foreign cultures.
The sheer voluntarism present in his poems tends to opaque the pre-
cariousness that modernization also entailed for subjects who, like the
poet, were swept along in its wake. 5 metros carefully and insistently docu-
ments this subjectivity, and it does so with little of the celebration initially
reserved for technology. Oquendo de Amat’s subject is not, as is the case for
Pablo Neruda, a heroic figure for whom history is graspable and commu-
nicable. Rather, Oquendo de Amat’s subject finds himself trapped in the
agon between the ubiquitous representatives of those two powerful, though
unequal, forces—traditional culture and modernization—whose fate is in-
distinguishable from his very own.
We can recognize this troubled subject as the migrant, whose presence
is implicitly or explicitly represented in the oeuvre of many Andean intel-
lectuals of the period, such as Jorge Basadre, Mariátegui, Pablo Palacio,
and César Vallejo. One might go so far as to say that the migrant is the
subjective concretization of the dilemmas of modernity in Andean history,
and surely in the histories of other regions as well. A typical example, Oqu-
endo de Amat’s migrant subject does not command the forces depicted in
5 metros. Perhaps like many migrants, he seems overwhelmed by his new
surroundings. The frantic activity of the modern city and the absorbing
nostalgia for the Andes take turns at eclipsing him instead. Yet in 5 metros,
the poetic voice actively engages with the circumstances and cultures that
come to bear in migration. This engagement takes the form of the migrant’s
creation of two distinct semantic fields: one that encompasses everything
that is identified with the city and modernization, such as technology and
urbanization, and another that groups together that which the migrant
leaves behind. This second semantic field, in Oquendo de Amat’s case,
groups together nature, the highland region, the mestizos and indigenous
peoples that inhabit it, and his own serrano childhood. This second field,
for Oquendo de Amat, represents a moment previous to modernity, much
as for the indigenistas the indio had represented a solution to undesirable
social transformations.
At the outset of 5 metros Oquendo de Amat deftly divests migration of
the possible positive qualities often mapped onto long journeys in the tradi-
tion of self-determination and the spirit of discovery. Instead he remaps
the journey that begins 5 metros as one of emotional abandonment. The pre-
modern Andean world, represented in the figure of a girl, ultimately bears
the blame for having put the poetic subject on the road down to his modern
and coastal counterpart. Thus, in the opening poem, “aldeanita,” he de-
clares: “aldeanita de seda / ataré mi corazón / como una cinta a tus tren-
zas” [silken village girl / I will tie my heart / to your braids like a ribbon].10
Threatened by loss, the lover tries to physically grasp the young woman’s
braids, unmistakably reminiscent of the highland india. As his language
turns into that of a child, replete with diminutives and verbal mistakes like
“bueno aventurero,” his plaint takes on a dependent aspect as well.11 At once
child and lover, the speaker experiences the hybrid love object/mother fig-
ure/country as the source of all his sustenance. This expulsion from the
Edenic state she represents initiates the process of exploration that typifies
the poetic subject’s subsequent experiences.
The second poem in the collection, “cuarto de los espejos,” is as im-
portant for what it omits as for the trauma to which it clearly testifies. At
no time does “cuarto” or any of the subsequent poems account for the dis-
placement from country to city. Instead, the site of modernization is por-
trayed as sudden and inescapable, trapping the subject who unwittingly
entered it:
Dónde estará la puerta? Dónde estará la puerta?
y siempre nos damos de bruces
con los espejos de la vida
con los espejos de la muerte
[Where is the door? Where is the door?

we always walk right into
the mirrors of life
the mirrors of death]
Oquendo de Amat invokes the poetic speaker’s acute despair at not be-
ing able to find his way out of a funhouse hall of mirrors. We cannot be
certain that the hall of mirrors is one of the diversions brought by mod-
ernization; without a doubt however, the hall constitutes a source of severe
disorientation and despair.12 Life and death lose their meaning here or at the
very best become synonymous, and the speaker struggles to make sense of
his surroundings. The glittering mirrors of modernity coincide with a new,
compartmentalized conception of time that subjugates the migrant: “ser de
MADERA / y sentir en lo negro / HACHAZOS DE TIEMPO” [to be made
of wood / and to feel in the dark / the axe blows of time]. Importantly, this
first contact is, in fact, a violent disciplining of the migrant’s wooden body.
Cornejo Polar has theorized the experiential conditions that lead to the
appearance of migrant discourse. Under this expansive and useful rubric,
the migrant always represents himself through a profoundly plural and con-
flictual discursivity that, in fact, defines him.13 In his final work, Cornejo
Polar sketched his unfinished and highly suggestive vision of the subjects
born of the vast migration undertaken by millions of Andeans in the twen-
tieth century. The critic put forward that the migrant condition—that is to
say, the discourses through which the condition is rendered detectable—is
present in all Andean migrants, be they the lettered poets of the historical
Andean avant-garde or the many nameless denizens of the shantytowns
that buttressed Lima at the end of the twentieth century. For Cornejo Polar
and for Arguedas, the deluge of indigenous migrants that arrived in the city
in the last century were—also—the ideal model for the migrant.
Cornejo Polar speaks of the nondialectical quality of migrant dis-
course, emphasizing the idea that no synthesis occurs between the dispa-
rate discourses that the migrant pronounces. He succinctly states in “Una
heterogeneidad no dialéctica”: “Migrant discourse is radically decentered,
as it is constructed around various and asymmetrical axes that are some-
how incompatible and contradictory in a nondialectical way” (841, emphasis
in original). The absence of a dialectic responds primarily to, and may in-
deed mirror, the coexistence of several historical times in the colonial pe-
riphery. Thus, the concept lends itself especially well to the interpretation
of social experience in modernity, characterized as it is by the simultaneity
of distinct temporal periods in a single geopolitical space.
In articulating the concept of the migrant condition, Cornejo is careful
to distinguish it from the model of mestizaje discussed in detail in chapter 1.
Mestizaje, he notes, has been characterized both by the celebration of the
union between two or more distinct cultural components and, importantly,
by the insistence that the resultant product is a harmonious one. It is worth
underscoring that this harmony is expressed precisely through an erasure of
the conflict that underlay the original meeting of the cultures that compose
mestizaje. As such, mestizaje turns out to be a sort of revisionist version
of the conquest. As Cornejo Polar says, the emblem of the mestizo in the
Andean cultural tradition is the Inca Garcilaso and his attempt to produce
a unified identity that drew on his plural heritage (“Condición” 272)
Migrant discourse departs radically from this model. It neither tol-
erates nor fosters mixture; on the contrary, its constitutive factor is divi-
sion. Under this light, the relationship between the migrant condition and
Cornejo Polar’s heterogeneity, one of the central concepts in Latin Ameri-
can critique in the last twenty-five years, becomes apparent. Like migrant
discourse, heterogeneity is animated by the radical incommensurability
of indigenous cultures with their Western, and especially Hispanic, coun-
terparts. The uneasy coexistence of these cultures and their worldviews is
the condition of Latin American societies and is markedly acute in Andean
ones. As Cornejo Polar describes it, heterogeneity as a cultural construct
results from cultural production of any sort that attempts to grapple with
this heteroclite reality.
Little wonder that Cornejo Polar’s primary example of a heteroge-
neous literature is indigenismo. Most typically, in indigenismo the referent
emanates from the indigenous, marginalized group, while the readership
and concrete form that the literature takes—the novel, short story, poem,
etc.—emanate from the dominant, Hispanic stratum. Thus, cultural prod-
ucts such as these hold at their center a rift that reflects the social divi-
sion in their context. In his description of heterogeneity, however, Cornejo
Polar argues for an understanding that exceeds the model found in classic
indigenismo, where content tends to be the limit of the indigenous influ-
ence. In authors such as Mariano Melgar, a poet, and especially José María
Arguedas, Cornejo Polar identifies the fashion in which heterogeneity also
functions—powerfully—at the level of form. Melgar casts his erotic po-
etry in the yaraví form, and in this Cornejo Polar sees the pressure that
an indigenous worldview and its expressive pathways exert on dominant
cultural forms. The yaraví is almost assuredly derived from a preconquest
Incan song form that was subsequently adapted to indigenous and mestizo
societies in the Andes.14 The significance of Melgar’s contribution to the
understanding of heterogeneity, then, lies not in the fact that he depicted
indios in his work, but rather that their cultural form, through Melgar’s
intervention, shapes a literary text (“Indigenismo” 108–9).
Oquendo de Amat’s case is diametrically opposed to Melgar’s. For
Oquendo de Amat, it is the influence of the avant-garde that provides the
overall form for his text. Thus, the influence of the calligram is unquestion-
able, as is that of texts such as Blaise Cendrars’s La prose du Transsibérien et
la Petite Jehanne de France, from 1913. This text unfolded in a similar way to
5 metros and included illustrations by Sonia Delaunay along the whole swath
of paper. In general, these avant-garde innovations from Europe shape
5 metros, although the latter must not be read solely as an attempt to channel
the new artistic innovations of the time. On the contrary, there is no reason
why Oquendo de Amat might not metaphorically use the avant-garde’s lu-
dic innovations with the materials and form of poetry in order to negotiate
the impact of modernization in the Andes.
Although I suggest it is best understood as a form of migrant discourse,
Oquendo de Amat’s book is nonetheless difficult to categorize, because its
distinguishing feature is a sort of infidelity with respect to the discourse
and to the phenomena of modernity. 5 metros insists, in a first instance, on
the lament in the face of modernization (this being a form of modernity
itself), then attempts to create a hybrid, and finally opts for a total separa-
tion of the cultural components in question. Thus, the issue of migrant dis-
course is at play at every moment in his text, but only as a subject of flux.
The central question that the text raises, then, is this: what are the re-
sults of the migrant’s attempt, in response to the very conflict that springs
from the juxtaposition of his experiences of past and present, to take upon
himself the reconciliation of modernization with a traditional, rural cul-
ture? I do not mean to contradict the assertion that migrant discourse turns
on an unbridgeable gap between cultures and experiences, as Cornejo Po-
lar makes clear in his dense yet limpid comments on Arguedas’s El zorro
in “Condición migrante.” Nevertheless, it seems necessary to consider the
migrant as a subject who not only exists in two “places” at once—past and
present, here and there, and even us and them—but who also constructs
himself through a tenacious struggle with the aporia that forms between
his multiple histories.
Indeed, it seems plausible to suggest that this aporia, and not simply the
presence of many experiences, propels the migrant’s bifurcated discourse.
This blank space in between experiences, whose edges are the untranslat-
ibility of one history into the terms of the other, stands also as the absence
of reconciliation. In his well-known essay on the topic, Silviano Santiago
describes Latin American literary discourse as a “space in-between”: that
is, neither entirely in the reality of Latin America nor in that of its colo-
nial progenitors (Space In-Between 26–31). Precisely that status of radical
dislocation, in the Brazilian critic’s view, leads the Latin American intel-
lectual “to speak against, to write against” (31). The void at the core of the
migrant subject functions in a similar way. It represents a challenge to the
separate discourses that constitute him, if only because, as silence, it dares
the migrant’s array of histories to, quite literally, speak it. In order to do so,
the migrant-poet must attempt to transform these histories so that they
may communicate the displacement and disconcertion—whether viewed
positively or negatively, or ambivalently—that constitutes the center of the
migrant experience.
Thus, the need to express the migrant’s rifts necessarily challenges the
epistemological limits of the worldviews with which he has maneuvered his
old world and his new. What forms these changes take belongs to a longer
study and in any case would vary from subject to subject and historical mo-
ment to historical moment. Nevertheless, the migrant may also be viewed
not as a static receptacle that holds various discursive forms, but rather as
actively attempting, with those cultural forms as his tools, to overwhelm
the constitutive rift at his center. The ebb and flow of attachment to, alter-
nately, his Andean heritage and a fascinating modernization in Oquendo
de Amat indicate precisely this challenge to the migrant condition itself.
Oquendo de Amat’s is very much a subjectivity that springs up from the
twists and turmoil of the present moment and is especially adept at navi-
gating the unevenness of modernity in the Andes.
Oquendo de Amat certainly shares the impulse toward utopia, but with
a difference: for him, the aporia at the center of the migrant’s identity and
poetic voice grows inordinately, blotting out the migrant himself. This in-
sidious growth demonstrates, inversely, the most important function that
the migrant’s discursive fabric has: keeping a loss of identity at bay. When
Oquendo de Amat, in the conceptual process that animates 5 metros, brings
his worldviews into close contact, he realizes that they destroy each other,
not because they must do so ontologically, but because the poet is unwilling
to suffer their transformations. Nostalgia intrudes.
The abandonment and confusion presented at the outset of 5 metros ges-

ture, in the language of trauma, to the migrant’s displacement. In response
to this loss, but also to the sudden presence of other ways of understand-
ing the migrant’s present, the literally spectacular synthesis of the natu-
ral world of the province and the bustling city found in the poem “réclam”
represents Oquendo de Amat’s most accomplished, if not necessarily con-
vincing, attempt to fill the stark rift between mountains and modernity.
Exclusion and marginalization have no place in this poem’s depiction of
twentieth-century Peru. In their stead, symbols of nature such as the sun

and the moon become both the beneficiaries of and the animating spirits
behind urban progress, finding themselves in situations as unnatural as
they are modern. The moon, in particular, is made to perform the driv-
ing ritual of modernization in Latin America and elsewhere: consumption.
“Hoy la Luna está de compras” [today the Moon is out shopping], the poem
announces, insisting upon the vibrancy of the present moment, the “today,”
in the new world of credit and punching time clocks. If “cuarto de espejos”
marked Oquendo de Amat’s momentary hesitation before the challenges of
modernization, the vigorous insertion of such an iconic part of the Andean
world into the equally iconic consumerism of modernization marks his first
optimistic attempt to coordinate nature and metropolis.
As we might expect, this optimism is anchored, in the poem’s three
central lines, by references to movies: “Se bota programas de la luna / (se
dará la tierra) / película sportiva [sic] pasada dos veces” [Programs are tossed
from the moon / (the earth is showing) / sporting movie shown twice]. Here,
film presents the world as the show to be presented and consumed, and so
also as a unified totality that turns out to be a product of modernity itself:
“(se dará la tierra).” This mise en abîme, emphasized by parentheses, reflects
back on Oquendo de Amat’s own method of using filmic metaphor to “cre-
ate” his totality, a Peru that functions according to two logics.
Oquendo de Amat’s faith and optimism find solid footing in the meta-
phor of cinema. As the historian Manuel Burga observes, cinema “made
one think of modernity . . . what Lima saw was the same as what was seen
in other places”; and he therefore suggests that “the movies played a role of
cultural leveler and homogeneizer,” pointing to just those egalitarian and
integrating qualities that Oquendo de Amat perceives (qtd. in Carbone 29).
As though film permitted a suspension of the global division of labor,
Oquendo de Amat imagines that its effect is a cultural and social perme-
ability that interrupts the usual flow of cultural goods and commodities
from the center to the periphery. Accordingly, “los perfumes abren albums
[sic] / de miradas internacionales” [The perfumes open albums / of inter-
national gazes]. The imported perfumes that are so indicative of Europe
and its luxuries here lure those European and American eyes to look back
toward Peru. The perfumes may come from abroad, but they are used to
make Lima’s inhabitants “produce” an attractiveness that is coveted on the
international market. So the gaze of Europe and the United States turns
to the Andes, while the Andes itself gazes at foreign films. This is Bishop
Berkeley with a proviso for modern times: to be is to be perceived interna-
tionally. If Peru can be integrated into the world as a producer of coveted

visual material, then it rightfully has a place at modernity’s table. In an
era when the production of consumer goods takes place overwhelmingly in
central nations, Oquendo de Amat insists on production at the periphery,
keenly aware of the stakes in such a shift.
Oquendo de Amat places the responsibility for the potential success
or failure of modernity in Latin America within the sphere of consump-
tion, but also gestures to poetry. As the final lines of “réclam” indicate: “un
ascensor compró para la luna 5 metros de poemas” [an elevator bought 5
meters of poems for the moon]. This transaction guarantees the complex
negotiations between the future’s onset and the premodern world’s per-
sistence. The relationship between technological advance and the world it
would erase—represented by the elevator and the moon, respectively—
becomes a cordial one. The elevator buys the poemario and bestows it upon
the moon. The simplicity of the act belies the complicated treaty Oquendo
de Amat imagines. For the giving of a gift suggests at the very least a pacific
relationship. It is this peace, one that does not negatively or violently enact
any encroachment, that Oquendo de Amat seeks between the Andes and
the metropolis. Indeed, it would not be too far-flung to say that a sort of
corrected first contact is imagined here. 5 metros’ presence as the go-between
testifies to the poet’s faith in the ameliorative power of culture, even as it
reiterates, at a critical moment, the ascendancy of consumption.
The fact that consumption acts as a kind of social custom that allows
this harmony is not without importance. As much as consumerism, and
the modern subjects it creates, lie at the core of modernization in Europe
and North America, in Lima in the 1920s one can reasonably assume that
many urban denizens had a different relationship to similar impulses to-
ward consumption. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the space
of the city became home to a wide variety of newly arriving cultures. While
many a transatlantic liner docked in El Callao to deposit a cargo of books,
newspapers, and journals from Europe, other smaller, more frequent fer-
ries used the same port to unload a cargo more ephemeral, if equally cul-
ture laden. For it was those small coastal ferries, much faster than any land
transport on the region’s bad roads, that provided the principal transport
for a huge influx of serranos from the Andes, and these migrants brought
with them not only their own literary traditions but also their distinct and
peculiar worldviews. These subjects, as might be expected, did not often
have the same power of acquisition as the dominant classes.
Lima, itself rapidly expanding and industrializing, was thus inhab-
ited by both new and venerable cultures and traditions. With each pass-
ing year these newcomers from the Andes would change the face of Peru’s
capital city, whose population nearly doubled between 1919 and the late
1920s. While the specific reasons for their arrivals varied, many were lured
by economic opportunity and consequently cultural and educational pos-
sibilities. The Lima of the 1920s was, in the words of one eyewitness, Luis
Alberto Sánchez, a “pandemonium of ideas, tendencies and origins” (Aqué-
zolo Castro 131). This reigning state of commotion had not been the case
during the incipient modernization of the late nineteenth century, when
Latin American urban centers had been neither as industrialized nor as
crowded.15 Within this context, consumption was not so much a reality as
it was a goal or status to be achieved by newcomers trying to lay a claim to
the city, and to modernity.
Is the pristine union, entirely without loss, imagined through consumer
consumption sustainable? Over the course of what remains of 5 metros,
“réclam” will reveal itself to be the apogee in Oquendo de Amat’s euphoric
estimations regarding not only a new Peru, but more specifically the in-
tertwined, mutually enabling roles played by traditional culture and tech-
nology in enacting that transformation. In no other poem is poetry itself
depicted as so deeply a part of consumerism, nor is the poet ever again
made to be either such a by-product or ally of modernization and its wares:
“Todos los poetas” [all poets], Oquendo de Amat declares “han salido de la
U. de la Underwod [sic]” [have come out of the U. of Underwood]. This af-
filiation will suffer reversals later, but here Oquendo de Amat victoriously
claims poetry for modernity, innocuously linked to the poet’s North Amer-
ican typewriter. Doubtlessly, there is also another, this time professional,
dream embedded in these images: that the Latin American writer might
exist socially and economically—that is self-sustainably—as just that.
5 metros expresses the optimism of “réclam” over the course of the seven
poems that follow it. In them, Oquendo de Amat tends to favor an erotic
theme, with “compañera,” “poema del mar y de ella,” “poema,” and “obse-
quio” all centered on the poet’s love interest. Nevertheless, the tenor of the
poems is unmistakably avant-garde: even in the one that does not have an
overt experimental format, “compañera,” avant-garde desires are commu-
nicated through diction. Thus, the love object is contextualized, positively,
among transatlantic liners and movie theaters. The truce between the natu-
ral, Andean world and the modern holds, however. As with other poems,
“compañera” insists on the conventional lyrical comparisons of woman to
nature and song.
In counterpoint to “réclam,” “new york” begins by unsteadying the

plot’s heretofore happy unraveling. This poem reveals a much more disqui-
eting picture of the relationship between modernization and the Andean
world, abandoning the more or less professed faith in technology found in
“réclam.” In the same cinematographic style that, through emblems, chron-
icles Oquendo de Amat’s encounters with modernity, this poem marks the
introduction of the principal symbol of Yankee progress, the skyscraper.
Here, the poet’s relationship to the twentieth century turns definitely
downward.
Los árboles pronto romperán sus amarras
y son ramos de flores todos los policías
CONEY ISLAND WALL STREET

La lluvia es una moneda de afeitar La brisa dobla los tallos
de las artistas de la Paramount
[The trees will break their moorings

and all the policemen are bouquets
CONEY ISLAND WALL STREET

The rain is a coin for shaving The breeze bends the stems
of the Paramount starlets]
In stark contrast to representations in the preceding poems, the pre-
vious treaty between nature and technology is invalidated: trees free
themselves from concrete moorings, the police (with whom the poet had
constant difficulties) are neutralized by their transformation into flowers,
Coney Island’s mechanized amusements sit under a menacing rain, and
on Wall Street the breeze itself upstages Paramount by incapacitating its
actresses.16 In one fell swoop, the harmony imagined previously in “réclam”
is dispelled by these images that reference the conflict at the center of the
encounter between traditional cultures and modernization in Peru in the
twentieth century. The series of images above attest to the impossibility of
continuing to imagine a world that preserves the migrant’s originary cul-
tures as separate and untainted by the other.
The absence of a coherent ideological structure that might organize
resistance into a viable alternative to modernization is at least partially
responsible for this futility. Oquendo de Amat had not initially imagined
modernization as antithetical to that premodern world, but rather had con-
jectured it as the vehicle that would reinvigorate, extend, and secure the
Andes’ place within modernizing Peru, as the happy integration of figures
like the moon in “réclam” illustrates. The recognition that the problem that
the poet has set up for himself is unsolvable does not lead him to reconsider
his initial premises. Oquendo de Amat does not, for example, attempt to
redefine Andean culture as an aesthetic force that might reshape the form
of 5 metros. As Cornejo Polar highlights in reference to the poet Melgar dis-
cussed above, “the yaraví . . . despite its apolitical themes, realizes, on the
specifically literary dimension, the ideals of liberty and independence that
the neoclassic poetry can offer only in a thematic way” (“Indigenismo” 109).
Although the literary forms available to the period of the historical avant-
garde in which Oquendo de Amat wrote are radically distinct, Cornejo Po-
lar’s insight into the degree of expression of a local culture allowed by the
choice of autochthonous over imported forms stands. Oquendo de Amat,
unlike Melgar, persists in using an international, and thus dominant, liter-
ary form—in this case the avant-garde book of poems and its visual poetic
forms—rather than reshaping these forms to respond to the local culture.
At this point, then, Oquendo de Amat’s utopian project itself can be
seen as tracing out the trajectory of his refusal to tolerate the inevitable
transformations modernity leaves in its wake. In the image that “new york”
offers of the American megalopolis and its repression of nature through
organized leisure, the poet finds testimony to the transformative effects of
American industry. The central discovery here seems to be that the accu-
mulation of wealth lies at the core of industrialization’s edifice. “new york”
bluntly reveals a realization of the insistence on instrumentality and profit,
tellingly transmitted here through the soaring height of a skyscraper,
T
I
M
E
I
S
M
O
N
E
Y
that cuts vertically through the poem as no other line does. This dic-
tum, both in its spatial organization and its thematic content, orders and
animates the rest of the poem. The narrative told here involves the poetic
voice’s ascent up through an imagined skyscraper.
As he ascends capital’s edifice, the Latin American avant-gardist ac-
cumulates the understanding he will need to shed his initial economic and
cultural naiveté. For, already at the twenty-eighth floor, the strident idola-
try of technology and boundless progress professed by the European avant-
gardist Marinetti are lumped together with the ephemeral dance fad and
tabloid headline: “28 PISO / CHARLESTON / RODOLFO VALENTINO
HACE CRECER EL CABELLO / NADIE PODRA TENER MAS DE 30
AÑOS” [28th floor / Charleston / Rudolph Valentino lets his hair grow /
No one will be allowed to be older than 30]. Marinetti’s famous prohibition
from “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909) restricting life
to thirty years flitters here as just another passing product to be consumed.
In this one brief direct allusion to Europe’s first avant-gardists, avant-garde
practices suddenly and irreversibly become guilty of the economic sphere’s
predilection for the new and the inevitable disdain of the outmoded. In-
deed, futurism’s rallying cry, dated and out of place, becomes little more
than urban noise, disembodied and decontextualized, drifting up on the
poetic subject’s ride skyward.
Paradoxically, the skyscraper’s summit grants him a knowledge that his
more literally pedestrian poems do not. From the perception that “AQUI
COMO EN EL PRIMERO NADA SE SABE DE NADA / 100 piso” [here like
on the first floor nothing is known about anything / 100th floor], realized
at the one-hundredth floor, the speaker begins to understand the lessons
granted him by his recent ascent through the metaphorical representation
of modernization. As if he had embarked on a temporal as well as spatial
journey, the view from on high reveals to him the results of the struggles
he left on the ground floor. Nature’s previous offensive against moderniza-
tion’s agents turns out to be empty and suffers a resounding reversal. Tra-
ditional culture proves to be no match for the relentlessness of progress.
The productivity of factories disrupts the free flow of time (“El humo de las
fábricas / retrasa los relojes” [The factories’ smoke / slows down the clocks]).
Forest rangers tame and enchant the land’s rivers (“los guarda bosques /
encantan a los ríos”). The sacred moon becomes the stuff of a child’s game
(“Los niños juegan al aro / con la luna” [The children play hoop and stick
/ with the moon]). The natural world, symbolic of the rural Andean tra-
ditional values, is dispossessed of the agency it once wielded through the

conspicuous consumption privileged in “réclam.”
The insight into the pitfalls of modern culture, however, does not end
at the recognition of its incompatibility with the premodern Andean world.
Modernization’s insidiousness goes far beyond merely condemning the nat-
ural to lurk in the periphery, as the closing scene of “new york” suggests:
Y la mañana
se ve como una muchacha cualquiera
en las trenzas
lleva prendido un letrero
SE ALQUILA
ESTA MAÑANA
[And the morning

looks like any girl
with a sign attached to
her braids
THIS MORNING
FOR RENT ]
If in previous instances the intercalation of visual images, such as a

sign in this case, served to redefine the lyrical subject as one savvy as to
avant-garde innovation and experimentation and so allowed him to enact a
sort of modernization at the cultural periphery, this “for rent” sign, blocked
off in heavy black lines in the original text, signifies only loss for the poet
and for poetry. It disrupts and displaces the objects that the lyric holds
most dear, nature and the loved one. Thus, in one fell swoop, the Yankee
commodification that New York represents usurps the lyric image of the
morning and the romantic image of the lover—the same one, braids and
all, introduced in “aldeanita” at the beginning of the poemario—who si-
multaneously represents the traditional Andean world.
By the end of “new york,” modernization does not confine itself to
the simple “time = money” equation presented earlier in the poem. This
equation has, in fact, taken on monstrous proportions. Wealth, in effect,
achieves identity with all things. Love and nature fall within the dollar’s
cast, and with them the source of the lyric’s inspiration. But the prostitu-
tion of these cornerstones of the poet’s identity does not shatter his subjec-
tivity as significantly as does his final vision from atop the building. Here,
he can no longer see the mountains for the city. Having learned all he need
learn about modernity, his obstructed vision is as much the result of prog-
ress as it is of his own climb. It goes without saying that this global vision
from atop the building no longer includes nature; instead, the veneer of
consumption, in the form of advertisement, usurps its place.
Importantly, and in stark contrast to the earlier poems’ pronounce-
ments, culture broadly understood is now shunted from the privileged posi-
tion of mediator. It is not insignificant that this displacement takes place in
the industrial world’s metropolis par excellence. New York’s sterile ground
cannot foster the type of cultural practices—practices that do not menace
the presence of autochthonous ones—that might salvage Andean culture
in the face of modernization’s threat. Thus “new york” communicates the
realization that North American modernization cannot be separated from
the rampage of a consumerism that reduces everything, including culture,
to its own terms. If, within the confines of the poem, consumption seems
limited to the space of the metropolis, the suspicion that imagination alone
may be inadequate to the challenge of harmonizing the natural world of
the Andes with modernization’s logic is confirmed in the poem’s pitiable
presentation of nature’s subjugated state. The usurpation of autochtho-
nous traditions by foreign culture and foreign capital signifies the loss of
nature and, with it, Andean culture, indistinguishable in both Oquendo de
Amat’s poetics and in the world from which they are drawn. Having strug-
gled to forge such a harmony between sierra and city in 5 metros up to this
point, the poet loses his faith in the legitimacy of such a project. Oquendo
de Amat ultimately abandons the hope for the harmonious cohabitation of
these two worlds due to the horror at a homogeneous culture and the threat
of precisely such a homogenizing power in capitalism.
This aversion to the imposed homogeneity inherent in capitalism’s
advance leads to the poemario’s final attempts to purify each world of the
other. No other response is possible for a poetics invested in anchoring the
integrity of both worlds in an imaginative cultural production. The har-
mony between premodern and modern that Oquendo de Amat dreams of
can only function within a society where culture, be it high or low, main-
tains its autonomy and has not yet been usurped by the requirements of the
market. Once culture becomes subjected to the market’s instrumentality, it
can no longer represent a neutral space for the interaction between Andes
and city.
At the end of 5 metros, Oquendo de Amat beats a hasty retreat back
to the lyric and also to his own geographical origins. Significantly, two of
the final poems are entitled “madre” and “campo.” The latter of these, in
particular, tacitly refuses the possibility of engaging with modernization.
Absent are Oquendo de Amat’s by-now customary references to cinema,
car horns, or factories, and, with one glaring exception, the only remaining
actors in Oquendo de Amat’s imaginary are his lover and an idyllic natural
setting. Even nostalgia is banished, carried away by a train so that it can no
longer create a distance between the poet and the object of his affections.
Here, Oquendo de Amat’s resolution is as unsympathetic to the meetings
of different worlds as his first attempts at a utopian synthesis were eager:
“En el tren lejano iba sentada / la nostalgia / Y el campo volteaba la cara a
la ciudad” [on the far-away train / nostalgia was sitting / And the country
turned its face toward the city].
Whatever the poetic subject has spurned over the course of his failed
quest in order to build a harmonious modernity from modernization’s ca-
cophonic parts, he does not walk away untouched by the experience. For al-
though “campo” does stage a clean and relatively uncomplicated separation
of the two worlds, Andean and cosmopolitan, at the end of the poemario,
the poem compulsively reinstantiates one of 5 metros’ principal organizing
features. The titular countryside casts its gaze toward both the city and the
train that approaches it on the horizon, dissolving the physical union of
city and sierra that the migrant symbolized yet at the same time confound-
ing the poetic subject’s attempt to purge the natural, lyrical world of all
of modernity’s contaminations. The poetic subject finds himself bound to
a narratival device, the sweeping panoramic gaze, which suggests a filmic
closure. After all, the dissolution of the conflicts previously presented in
the poemario, as the protagonist looks on, is strongly reminiscent of just
such a happy ending.
In this penultimate poem, the train’s departure represents a hasty and
happy tying up of 5 metros’ narratival loose ends. However, and most impor-
tantly, the poetic subject who observes can no longer separate himself from
the totalizing gaze—the eye of the movie camera—that his own attempt at
creating a modernity has bequeathed him. It is as if the poetic subject’s ef-
forts in the realm of modernity over the course of the poemario have tainted
him as irrevocably modern. In the last instance, Oquendo de Amat’s stra-
tegic retreat falls short of returning him to the idyllic Andean world where
senses other than sight, and especially touch, reigned. It is thus, sullied and
seemingly condemned to once again take up his meditation on modernity,
that Oquendo de Amat ends 5 metros.17
For whatever reason—inexperience, a lack of interest, or simply an ab-

sence of opportunity—Oquendo de Amat does not deploy Andean culture
in an attempt to shape the contours of modernization in Peru. As we have
seen, in his poetry everything associated with the traditional world is an
object associated with the modern, rather than an interpreter of it. This
separation of the controlling subject as modernization and malleable object
as autochthonous culture, although finally untenable to the poet, is also the
dichotomy that Oquendo de Amat consistently articulates throughout his
text. The cohabitation of the modern and traditional that he imagines does
not foster, as first imagined, cohabitation; rather, it inescapably leads one
world to taint the other, to the loss of the weaker one’s identity, as Alonso
notes with respect to the dynamics of transculturation.
Certainly, we could question to what degree Oquendo de Amat wielded
an accurate and complete familiarity with the industrializing culture of
spectacle in which he seems so steeped. The deftness with which he ma-
neuvers the transformative powers of technology—both on the level of real
physical changes enacted in the city’s fabric as well as those other, more
ephemeral changes in the subject’s perceptions—however, unmistakably
suggests a sensibility that does more than merely worship technology. For
Oquendo de Amat does indeed learn much from film, enough to attempt a
radical solution to the historical moment’s challenge. He evidences a formi-
dable acuity in focusing on the critical capacities of the new cultural form
and especially in acquiring its technique, if only symbolically.18 Ultimately,
however, Oquendo de Amat’s easy absorption of a modern perspective so-
lidifies into the detrimental relationship vis à vis the Andes that he wants
to avoid.
Given this departure from theories of migrancy and heterogeneity that
presuppose the versatility and persistence of Andean culture, I would ven-
ture to comment on why 5 metros so disadvantages the local. Oquendo de
Amat does not effectively preserve Andean culture from oblivion, because
he cannot articulate it beyond the personal terms he so associates with lyric
poetry. Their profound significance for the speaker notwithstanding, the
Andean representatives that populate 5 metros are always already dissoci-
ated from the reality they are meant to represent. For they have less to do
with a highland cultural reality than they do with the personal nostalgia
that is their true source. Thus the sun, the loved girl, and the sierra are not
as embedded in the broad highland culture that they represent as they are
in an affective idiolect.
Without a strong discourse—a mythology or a political ideology,
for example, as is found in other intellectuals such as Vallejo and Argue-
das—to imbue them with a meaning that might, in turn, question and
reinterpret foreign capital’s role in Latin America, Oquendo de Amat’s rep-
resentatives are little more than mute tokens. They can neither contest the
Andes’ absorption and subsequent loss of alterity nor substantially trace a
path through the twentieth century that might identify autochthony as a
positive, dynamic value. The representation of the Andes in Oquendo de
Amat’s poetics finally rests only on the poet’s affective relationship to the
land and people that the metropolis, and modernizing Lima, forbid him.
Although modernization is responsible for their displacement in both time
and space, it is Oquendo de Amat who finally judges that modernity is too
rarefied an environment for Andean culture’s survival. In doing so, he al-
lows nostalgia to exile Andean culture to the past and so voids its validity
in the present and especially the future.
Unfortunately, the difficulty of finding any writings Oquendo de Amat
might have produced after 5 metros allows only conjecture as to the develop-
ment of his thought before his early death in 1936. Yet the facts of his bi-
ography, and in particular eyewitness testimonies, offer up the tantalizing
possibility that the poet did indeed persist in the challenge of seeking out
alternatives to the Andes’ neocolonial dilemma. As his biographers often
note, Oquendo de Amat dedicated the last nine years of his life after the
publication of 5 metros to the study of Marxism and to its expression in mili-
tancy. He seems to have abandoned poetry altogether and, in neighboring
Bolivia, instead immersed himself in the role of political activist, dissemi-
nating and teaching radical political thought to leftist groups there.
Both abroad and at home, Oquendo de Amat’s efforts at establishing
intellectual networks and organizing workers seem to have been carried out
largely without recourse to writing. His biographers emphasize his constant
oral communications with others, almost as if he had consciously chosen
to leave behind the written word. Nevertheless, Ayala’s recent biography of
Oquendo de Amat suggests that the poet in fact wrote social criticism for
various Bolivian newspapers during his stay in that country in 1929. Several
sources recount his imprisonment and torture in La Paz for his dealings
with communist groups there.19 In light of his affiliations, it seems that at
the end of his life the poet dedicated himself exclusively to the search for a
social solution to the dilemma he had outlined in 5 metros. Perhaps, for this
particular migrant, allowing one failed utopia to fall into oblivion allowed
the engagement with the promise of another.
ch a p t e r fou r
AN ASSEMBLY OF VOICES
Labor and the Publics of Print
I
n the flurry of critical and narratival works that the indigenistas
are best known for, such as Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación de
la realidad peruana, Valcárcel’s Tempestad en los Andes, and Enrique López
Albújar’s Cuentos andinos (1920), the conception of a modern Andean region
relies on a highly idealized version of the indio. As we have seen in chap-
ter 1, for example, Mariátegui relied essentially upon turning the indige-
nous population and their culture into an allegory, anchoring a narrative
in which the indio would necessarily foment a social revolution. Although
Mariátegui’s characterization of the indio in his literary and social criti-
cism may not have reflected the critic’s full understanding of Andean his-
tory, we can nevertheless read in it a powerful allegory that supports ample
and complex commentary on the position of intellectuals in relation to the
populations that they purport to represent.
The previous chapters have addressed the multiple strategies that intel-
lectuals themselves deployed for representing indigenous peoples and those
elements of the Andean world, such as nature and rural life, that were deeply
associated with them. In the cases of Escalante, Mariátegui, and Oquendo
102
an assembly of voices ≈ 103
de Amat—and also others such as González Prada and Vargas Llosa—the

indio, and the nonmodern highlands he is seen to inhabit, symbolize either
a potentially transformative social force; a stubborn, almost insurmount-
able obstacle on the way to modernity; or a safe harbor from the reordering
of Andean societies by the forces of modernization. Significantly, none of
these writers attempt to interpellate the indio directly. Furthermore, each
of their discourses configure the indigenous as separate and discrete from,
indeed almost as anathema to, other sectors of Andean society, as if indige-
neity were some sort of sealed compartment that the indio cannot escape.
This chapter turns to a newspaper from the 1920s, Labor, that directly
contradicted these tendencies. Under the direction of a group of intellec-
tuals led by Mariátegui, Labor sought to realize a social revolution by the
propagation of information. The very act of disseminating this informa-
tion, however, required a reconceptualization of the indio as he had previ-
ously been configured by indigenismo. An analysis of Labor reveals how the
newspaper sought both to call the indio to revolution and, as importantly,
to connect and identify the indio with other sectors of Andean, especially
urban, society.
What, then, is the allegory presented by the vision of the communitar-
ian, revolutionary indio?1 Precisely because of the idealization that config-
ures the indigenous population in Mariátegui’s critique—and it should be
reiterated that his perspective was the dominant one among leftist intel-
lectuals of the early twentieth century2—the allegory is a corrective one,
wherein the attributes of its principal figure are generated in opposition to
the perceived ills of Andean society. Thus, indigenous peoples’ penchant
for community in Mariátegui’s vision corrects a Western individualism,
particularly one geared toward consumerism, and in so doing rejects a pri-
mary feature of the transformation of Latin American economies at the
turn of the last century. The consumer culture that the increased variety
of consumer goods fomented could not have escaped Mariátegui. Further-
more, his allegory also warns against a future rife with citizens as consum-
ers rather than as members of a revolutionary, presumably nonconsumer,
society. Particularly at a time when capitalism was identified with the greed
of nameable magnates in Europe and the Americas, such as Ford, Patiño,
and Guggenheim, Mariátegui and others seized upon indigenous peoples
as a ready antidote to the dark side of the myth of the self-made man.3
But Mariátegui’s storying of the indio, as it were, exceeds a denuncia-
tion of the modern individual. Other crucial aspects in the critic’s char-
acterization, such as indigenous peoples’ ties to the Incan past and to the
104 ≈ an assembly of voices
landscape, were significant in offering an alternative to Peru’s neocolonial

development. The unbroken tradition that persisted within the indio, of-
ten argued through a biological reasoning, functioned to remind a criollo-
identified society that their cultural memory could not simply begin with
the republic. The indio was thus also transformed into the symbol of an
alternative memory and history, one that far exceeded the republic and
offered to link twentieth-century Peru with the preconquest period. José
Martí famously made a similar call in his foundational essay “Nuestra
América” by insisting that modern Latin Americans must found their edu-
cation in the indigenous cultures of the Americas.
Similarly, an emphasis on nature and landscape provided Mariátegui
with the opportunity to link the indigenistas’ transformative project with a
recognition of Peru’s forgotten regions. Typically dominated by the coast,
Peruvian culture in the nineteenth century had very rarely considered the
highlands as part of the national body. The limeño intellectual Sebastián
Salazar Bondy referred to this prejudicial view of Peru as criollismo. In this
way, indigenismo’s identification of the indio with the sierra functioned to
name and include another, particular geographic area in the nation. Viewed
from the perspective of autochthony, the binding up of the image of the in-
dio with the land itself permitted Mariátegui to insinuate the appropriate-
ness of his revolutionary project for Peru and the larger region, precisely
because in the critic’s understanding the backlands, and not the coast, were
the source of the true nation. This argument’s logic was necessarily recon-
dite and falls apart quickly under scrutiny. It eschewed too thoroughly the
presence of Hispanic language and culture in dominant movements for re-
newal, such as indigenismo itself. But it allowed Mariátegui and others to
locate an autochthonous yearning for revolution in a real physical space.
Beyond the revision of notions of space and history, Mariátegui’s brand
of indigenismo also corrected a major flaw in dominant Creole society: the
attachment to traditions actively identified as Hispanic, rather than to lo-
cal ones. Interestingly, the indigenistas’ strategy of attaching hopes for an
Andean modernity to an originary culture closely resembles figures such
as the conservative José de la Riva Agüero’s (1885–1944) insistence that
Peruvian culture must return to its Hispanic roots in order to survive the
instability of modernity. Both Riva Agüero and Mariátegui evoked the
nation’s origins as an antidote to the instabilities they perceived in their
contemporary moment. For Riva Agüero, Peruvian society had been cast
onto the sea of foreign influence by modernizing forces. He put forth that
Peruvian culture had, since independence, been far too attentive to French
and other non-Hispanic European cultures and that this constituted a dan-
gerous errancy. In texts such as El carácter de la literatura en el Perú indepen-
diente (1905), Riva Agüero lobbied for the recognition of Peruvian culture’s
natural affinity to the peninsular madre patria, Spain. As such, Riva Agüero
also provided a fascinating, albeit retrograde, solution to the problem of ne-
gotiating modernity in the region. In his vision, the hierarchy of the colony
itself must be recreated in cultural terms alone, thus bringing order to the
chaos of foreign influence and autochthonous upsurge that modern Peru
had become. Hispanic culture, as that of the madre patria, must underlie any
Peruvian society. Riva Agüero’s was, in a sense, an antimodernist stance, as
he wished to redeem Peru from the French and European influence it, along
with the rest of Latin America, had flirted with since at least the advent of
modernism à la Rubén Darío and most probably since independence, as
Doris Sommer has suggested (13–16).
In contradistinction but through a similar reasoning, the indigenistas’
approach sought to locate indigenous tradition, as they understood it, at
the foundation of modernity in the Andes. As we have seen above, however,
the indigenistas imagined an indigenous culture in response and in relation
to their understanding of the dominant Hispanic, Creole society. For the
purposes of this chapter, this differential configuration of indigeneity is
crucial, as it is precisely what is eroded by the desire of the most left-leaning
of the indigenistas to understand Peru in terms of class. The effect of this
desire for a broad, Marxist-oriented reading of class in Andean society is
the dynamic that motivates the newspaper Labor.
Before entering directly into a discussion of Labor and the circle that
produced it, however, it is useful to discuss further the literary configura-
tion of the indigenous population within which Labor was born. Viewed by
no less a critic than Mariátegui as a canonical text in indigenista aesthetic
production, Enrique López Albújar’s (1872–1966) collection of stories Cuen-
tos andinos (1920) serves well to illustrate the equal degrees of fascination
and repulsion that the indigenous population created in lettered culture. In
either case, and judging from the success of Cuentos andinos, coastal intel-
lectual society was incapable of turning away from the spectacle. Critics of
indigenismo, such as Tomás Escajadillo, have afforded this writer a canoni-
cal place in Peruvian literature, citing the realism of his representations of
the indigenous (99).
López Albújar worked as a judge in various parts of Peru, and his work
was marked in particular by a stay in the highland province of Huánuco
around the time his stories were published. As well as any classic indigeni-
sta text, Cuentos andinos on the whole demonstrates the peculiar specter
that the indio embodied in the heyday of indigenismo: not at all himself,
but rather the distorted caricature of those who represented him. While
critics such as Castro Urioste have ascribed an effort to create a multicul-
tural image of Peru in López Albújar’s texts, his stories seem to have less
interest in allying different groups than in underlining their incompatibil-
ity (159–60).
For example, López Albújar’s story “Ushanan-jampi” centers on the
titular indigenous institution of justice. In the tale, the indigenous commu-
nity of Chupán must deal with the thievery of one of its members, Conce
Maille. Importantly, at no time in the story (written by a judge, we may
recall) does the possibility of justice from outside indigenous society ap-
pear. This omission allows López Albújar to stress both the independence
and isolation of indigenous culture from the dominant Hispanic society.
This separateness comes with a price, as Conce Maille exemplifies: when he
is ritually exiled from the community, he cannot live outside and returns in
defiance of his sentence. As López Albújar states: “If expulsion is an affront
for any man, for the indio, and an indio like Cunce [the author transcribes
its Quechua pronunciation] Maille, expulsion from the community signi-
fies all possible affronts, it is the sum of all pains before the loss of all that is
good” [Si para cualquier hombre la expulsión es una afrenta, para un indio,
y un indio como Cunce Maille, la expulsión de la comunidad significa to-
das las afrentas posibles, el resumen de todos los dolores frente a la pérdida
de todos los bienes] (50).
Over the course of the story, and indeed the book, López Albújar con-
tinues to demonstrate this admiration for indigenous justice. Tales such as
“El campeón de la muerte,” which focuses on a hired gun to whom indios
turn for justice, continually underline and even praise a system that seems
devoid of corruption. Thus, there is never any doubt as to guilt or execution
of punishment. In the author’s stories, the indigenous community makes
no mistakes and is driven only by the need to protect itself against infrac-
tions. In his capacity as a judge, López Albújar is perhaps understandably
impressed with this institution’s clarity of purpose and function.
However, admiration is not the only attitude toward indigenous cus-
toms. The conclusion of “Ushanan-jampi” reveals the underside of the posi-
tive fascination communicated in both the López Albújar text and in much
of literary indigenismo in general. At the end of the story, the community
has no choice but to enact the ushanan-jampi on Conce Maille. This involves
dismembering his body publicly, nailing the criminal’s intestines to his
family’s door, and leaving his unburied body to rot in public. While this
sort of unfettered violence is closely associated with indios in other stories
as well, here it is striking precisely because it is a communal act. In fact, it
is exactly the indios’ communal nature that makes the act more violent, as
any one of them could not carry out the punishment individually.
The savagery of the final act in “Ushanan-jampi”—which is a recur-
rent motif attached to indigenous peoples in Cuentos andinos—serves as a
lynchpin in the strategy of representing the indio in a wide array of lettered
practices in the early twentieth century. Ventura García Calderón’s story
“El despenador” (1924), for example, tells of the commonplace execution of
the infirm among indios, and Alcides Arguedas’s essay Pueblo enfermo (1910)
presents the indios as degenerate and prone to violence among themselves.
Extreme actions, such as the eating of an adversary’s heart in “Campeón
de la muerte,” serve as an index of the unbridgeable distance between His-
panic and indigenous societies. The incompatibility of one group with the
other is thus symbolized by the indio’s inability to adapt to any culture but
his originary one. Just as Conce Maille cannot live outside his community,
in another story, “El licenciado Aponte,” the protagonist who denies his in-
digenous heritage in order to Hispanize suffers death, the narrative sug-
gests, because as an indio he cannot and should not leave behind his culture
(83–84).
If the imagined insularity of indigenous culture that López Albú-
jar conjures sounds familiar, it is because similar ideas are expressed in
Mariátegui, Valcárcel, Oquendo de Amat, and a host of other intellectuals
from the period. In Mariátegui, as we have seen, the insistence on the fixity
of the indio takes the shape of an emphatic denial of mestizaje. The projec-
tion of stasis onto indigenous communities takes on particular importance
in the early twentieth century. By comparison, it does not have the same
presence in late nineteenth-century work. In Clorinda Matto de Turner’s
works, for instance, there is an acute consciousness of the indio’s ability to
absorb new cultural attitudes and to inhabit Hispanic cultural spaces. This
is the case in Matto’s indigenista novel Aves sin nido (1889) and also in the
novel Herencia (1895).
The concept of stasis seems to be promulgated and emphasized only
partially in response to the circulation of radical social critiques, such as
Marxism. Certainly, revolutionary discourses tended, through their lens,
to polarize the social actors and dynamics that they brought into focus in
the Andes. But such discourses were available too in the nineteenth cen-
tury, particularly through anarchism, as in the case of Manuel González
Prada. The attribution of stasis to the indigenous peoples in the early twen-
tieth century may well have been a response to the instability created by a
modernization that was at full gallop. We can also comprehend it as a cor-
relative to the pointedness that mesocratic intellectuals wanted to conjure
in their critique of the traditional upper classes. In this way, the stasis of the
indigenous becomes both a safe harbor in the choppy waters of moderniza-
tion and a way to sharpen middle-class, provincial intellectuals’ criticism
and threat to the status quo. At the same time, however, the concept tended
to isolate indigenous peoples from the larger political body and from no-
tions of historical change.
This stasis was part of a telluric understanding of indigeneity, a cen-
tral aspect of indigenismo in the Andes. In his study of indigenismo, Favre
has defined tellurism as “a diffuse current of indigenismo that attributes the
formation of the nation to the action of natural forces and that makes of
the indio, the original product of these forces to which he is subjected, the
most authentic representative of nationality” (59). This identification of the
indigenous with nature fomented understandings of Andean indigeneity as
unchanging and ultimately ahistorical.
Within the massive mobilization of the concept of indigeneity that
characterized indigenismo, relatively few intellectuals questioned or even
considered the tutelary relationship between intellectual and indio that in-
digenismo and concepts such as tellurism implied. In this, Mariátegui was
an exception, as his oft-cited vision of the historical location of indigenista
practice between a past indianista literature and a future indígena literature
illustrates. He argued, “Indigenista literature cannot give us a rigorously
true vision of the indio. It must idealize and stylize him. It is still a mestizo
literature” [(la) literatura indigenista no puede darnos una versión riguro-
samente verista del indio. Tiene que idealizarlo y estilizarlo. Es todavía una
literatura de mestizos] (Siete ensayos 306). If his pronouncement about his
colleagues’ contemporaneous writings was accurate, however, it was no less
so for his own practice. As discussed in chapter 1, Mariátegui’s representa-
tion of the indigenous population was orchestrated through an insistence
on a handful of characteristics that allowed indigeneity to be idealized as
revolution itself but whose approximation of intellectuals to a legitimate
indigenous culture was questionable.4
While the critic was aware of the active construction of an indig-
enous subject that dwelled at the core of indigenismo, he seems not to
have considered fully the uneven dynamic of power that animated these
representations. In fact, within works such as Siete ensayos, the indigenista
intellectual’s motives for taking up the cause of the indigenous population

are not at all theorized. That is to say, while the role of the highland indig-
enous population in constructing an egalitarian modernity takes central
stage in his commentary, the social subjects that propounded these per-
spectives—the mestizos Mariátegui mentions—are neither contextualized
nor explored. The reason for this absence seems to lay in the immense faith
that Mariátegui and others placed in the figure of the intellectual himself.5
We should be clear: Mariátegui and others such as Valcárcel do cen-
trally address the mestizo in their works, usually in negative terms, as we
have seen in chapter 1. When the mestizo is mentioned, it is often as a social
subject produced by a Western-style modernization, or by a degradation
of the two races that generate him, or both. Thus, the mestizo is evoked in
order to envision a problematic, either historical or racial in nature. On the
other hand, mestizo intellectuals are not scrutinized as mestizos; the status
of intellectual seems to trump this racial and cultural identity, and thus
does not come up when addressing the large number of mestizos who were
cultural producers during the period.
The importance of the figure of the intellectual cannot be understated
in the study of the Andean region, not can it be separated from the single
attribute that defines him: command of the letter. Antonio Cornejo Polar
has put forth a persuasive and engrossing account of the circumstances
under which writing is introduced into the Andes, and he has argued for
the paradigmatic significance of the encounter in Cajamarca between
Atahualpa and the Spanish conquistadores. In the opening to his Escri-
bir en el aire, wherein he engages broadly with the issue of heterogeneity in
Andean culture, Cornejo Polar reviews various sources describing the en-
counter in Cajamarca, with the goal of understanding how this founding
moment in Andean history reverberates and configures subsequent inter-
actions between social subjects in the region (25–50). By way of conclusion,
he declares: “What is essential, then, is that writing enters the Andes not so
much as a system of communication but rather within the horizon of power
and authority, almost as if its only possible meaning were Power. The book
itself, as has been said, is much more a fetish than a text and much more a
gesture of domination than an act of language.”
Cornejo’s powerful interpretation of this foundational moment and the
insistence that in the Andean context power is bound up in the symbolic
value of writing complicates understandings of the intellectual’s role in
representing indigenous peoples, precisely because power, and not commu-
nication, seems to lie at the core of the dynamic between letrado and indio.6
Although the subjugation of Atahualpa at Cajamarca is historically remote,

and it would not be possible to speak in that historical context about modern
indigenismo, one can speak about the exclusion that the letter enacts. That
is to say, writing was a technology that even at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century was not available to a vast majority of the region’s indigenous
population and that was part and parcel of the legal, political, and social
system that had oppressed subaltern social subjects since the conquest. In
the 1920s, this technology continued to exclude as fundamentally as before,
albeit through a mechanism permeated with a greater ambiguity. It should
not be lost on us that most indigenous peoples could not read Mariátegui’s
or any of the other indigenistas’ texts, nor other printed materials, for that
matter. This fact signifies that by its very constitutive factor—that is, by
reason of its being a lettered project—indigenismo from the outset could
not include in its dialogue the very subaltern subjects it sought to represent.
In view of this fact, Cornejo Polar’s proposal that “the book itself is much
more a gesture of domination than an act of language” may reasonably be
thought to be valid for indigenista lettered production, if not necessarily for
all works that fall under this category.7
Needless to say, while this exclusionary dynamic may hold true for the
majority of indigenista production, it is important to note that the condi-
tions for the introduction of writing into the Andes do not dictate its subse-
quent use, or at least not all of it. As Juan Ulises Zevallos Aguilar has noted
in his fine book on indigenista vanguard practices in the 1920s, lettered
production at the time was also deeply interested in and committed to—
often in contradictory ways—attempts to create horizontal, egalitarian
links to indigenous communities.8 These strategies took the form of tra-
ditional lettered approaches to subaltern subjects, such as through an-
thropology, for example. But they also used nontraditional approaches,
such as inserting lettered production into the real, physical spaces of the
indigenous population. As Zevallos Aguilar suggests, these crossings into
indigenous societies were most available to regional intellectuals such as
those grouped around Boletín Titikaka, an indigenista avant-garde periodi-
cal whose creators had close contact with indigenous communities in Puno,
spoke Quechua, and were known to participate in oral cultural and perfor-
mance events in indigenous communities. This proximity to the subalterns
that intellectuals sought to represent led to the concept of a nación étnica
that, in Zevallos’s terms, experimented with these types of strategies in or-
der to create, or at the very least explore the possibility of, such an egalitar-
ian community (61).
The motivation behind Labor was clearly egalitarian as well, in the

sense of the nationalist modernization that we find in José Ángel Escalan-
te’s later work. However, while the paper may have responded to a perceived
need for equal citizenship for all Andean subjects, the ways in which Labor
initially configured the relationship between intellectuals and subalterns
did not necessarily stress this equality. By the time of Siete ensayos’s pub-
lication in 1928, when Mariátegui’s reflections on Andean modernity had
reached their maturity, his notion of the intellectual was developed and
specific. In his introduction to his fellow indigenista Valcárcel’s Tempestad
en los Andes, Mariátegui ratified a somewhat grandiose vision of the intel-
lectual with the words “he is not . . . a professor but . . . a prophet” (Aqué-
zolo Castro 134). For Mariátegui, the separation of the intellectual from the
nation’s traditionalist bases—especially the university—was crucial. His
definition thus deliberately ruled out writers based in the Creole elite, such
as Riva Agüero, precisely because these intellectuals were perceived to dwell
within the cloistering walls of the academy. Mariátegui insists on the intel-
lectual as prophet because this articulation distances him from the domi-
nation associated with the university in Andean history.
This view of the university, specifically the Universidad Nacional
Mayor de San Marcos, is upheld by the Left’s creation, in 1921, of the Uni-
versidad Popular Manuel González Prada. Started up by Haya de la Torre
and his fellow students as a part of attempts to reform the country’s educa-
tional system, the UPMGP catered to the popular classes and had a strong
content of social renovation. It is no coincidence that Mariátegui was one of
its early professors (Klaiber 700–2). As we have intimated above, however, a
separation of the letter from a legacy of domination would prove more dif-
ficult than simply refusing its traditional institutions.
While on the one hand Mariátegui repudiated the traditional bases
of power and the relationships between dominant classes and subalterns
that they symbolized, he nevertheless offered novel, if not unproblematic,
ways of positioning the intellectual vis à vis the indio. He thus explicitly
argues for the intellectual’s position of leadership in relation to the indig-
enous population of the Andes, but does so both by invoking a troublingly
chiliastic language of prophecy and by reinforcing traditional exclusions.
In this figuration, the intellectual takes on the form of a religious figure,
like the priest, whose history is long and conflictive in the Andes (indeed,
it is the bishop Valverde who first brings the “word of God” to Atahualpa
in Cajamarca) at the same time that he maintains dominion over the letter,
which is deemed extraneous to the indigenous population. While we must
take into account the rhetorical flourish with which Mariátegui writes, this
highly significant passage is nevertheless important for understanding
just how far the transformations enacted in the space of Labor represent
an evolution beyond the stalemate of revolutionary indio versus Hispanic
society.
My contention concerning Labor rests on the hypothesis that in order

to make inroads into the formation of an egalitarian society in the Andes,
indigenista lettered practices, as reflected in Mariátegui’s and López Albú-
jar’s characterizations above, had to explore strategies that enacted commu-
nication instead of resting on representation. As we have noted, the history
of indigenismo tends to highlight precisely the ways in which the cause for
the indigenous population was, consciously or not, co-opted by the meso-
cratic intellectuals who penned these discourses. While this is certainly the
case, it remains necessary to insist on the exceptions to this historical rule,
as they allow us both to delineate the limits of a standard indigenismo as
well as to understand the indigenista period in its complexity. In some in-
stances, indigenista discourse, such as that in Labor, proved to be ductile
enough to resolve some of the contradictions within which it was engen-
dered, but not before undergoing significant transformations.
Labor was meant to appear on a biweekly basis, as its subtitle Quin-
cenario de información e ideas announced. However, only ten issues of the
newspaper appeared, erratically, between November 1928 and September
1929. Especially in 1929, the paper saw itself plagued by economic troubles
as well as the zealous attention of Leguía’s censors (Flores Galindo, Agonía
57–69; Tauro 17). Conceived of by Mariátegui and his editorial group as an
extension of the work already taken up in Amauta, Labor nevertheless was
meant to circulate among quite a different audience than its more intellec-
tually minded and mesocratically anchored predecessor. As the anonymous
editorial note declared on the front page of its first issue on November 10,
1928,
In any case, Labor does not need a special plan. It is an extension of the
work of Amauta and its publications. It aspires to be a newspaper of wide
circulation.
Its publication responds to the urging of many of our friends in Lima
and in the provinces who want our cultural work to penetrate into more
extensive layers of the public. The magazine [Amauta] is not enough to
meet this desire. This is why we have given this newspaper life.9
As the editorial presentation demonstrates, Labor was conceived within

the framework of the journal Amauta. The idea of extension meant, quite
literally, that no significant departures were taken from the journal’s in-
tense focus on local Latin American and international events and issues.
As the editors indicate, the publication of Labor was aimed at taking the
particular sort of high culture represented in Amauta to the masses. In or-
der to accomplish this, there seems to have been at the outset but one sig-
nificant strategy: price. At the end of 1928, Amauta sold for 60 Peruvian
centavos a copy, while Labor cost 10 centavos.10 Presumably, the lower price
would have been much more accessible to limited budgets.
With the exception of informational articles on and announcements
about local union and other prolabor organizations, the first issue of La-
bor incongruously offered a proletarian readership fare quite similar to its
high-brow precursor. Indeed, it included interviews of intellectuals such as
André Breton, Waldo Frank, and Jean Cocteau on the topic of proletarian
literature and art, as well as a lengthy article on the affinities between Ro-
main Rolland and Tolstoy (3–4).11 This attention to European intellectual
culture was very much a hallmark of Amauta. While no work has been done
on the reception of Labor among its target audience, we can conjecture that
interviews with European cultural luminaries may have been dissonant
with the standard fare of comparable newspapers, such as El obrero textil and
El nudito. In any case, even a quick overview of Labor’s first issue leads to
the conclusion that a fair amount of sophistication, in the form of exposure
to contemporary debates about art and political theory, would have been
necessary to understand the articles mentioned above.
The first issue was not limited to offerings of cosmopolitan culture,
however. True to the spirit of Amauta, it dedicated a significant amount
of space to Latin American as well as local works. Thus, an overview of
the changes in Mexico after the death of Álvaro Obregón, written by Martí
Casanovas, sought to inform the Peruvian public about the status of the
Mexican Revolution (1–2). Given the impact of its revolution, this attention
to Mexico was not uncommon in the period’s press. Neither was it strange
to see the reproduction of a Diego Rivera work accompanying the article on
Mexico, as Rivera’s illustrations had been common fare in Amauta for sev-
eral years. One other celebratory article, in defense of the Mexican intellec-
tual José Vasconcelos and the revolution, appeared in the same issue (2–6).
Not surprisingly, indigenista production also took a prominent place
in this first foray. Both Mariátegui and Gamaliel Churata (1897–1969), a
leader in the indigenista Boletín Titikaka group in Puno, presented extensive
pieces. Churata, whose contribution consisted of a series of vignettes en-

titled “Mañanas collas” (5), was a pivotal figure in Puno, where he anchored
diverse indigenista activities. To say the least, Churata was a challenging
writer, as his plurigeneric masterwork El pez de oro (1957) demonstrates.12
“Mañanas collas” lies in the vein of this later work, particularly insofar as
an absence of a coherent narrative is evident: in it he describes indigenous
customs like the mitmaq (an Incan system of labor migration and coloniza-
tion); recounts the death of a venerable indigenous leader at the hands of
treacherous mistis, a term that refers to whites and mestizos; and portrays a
florid courtship between two young indigenous highlanders. Other than the
apparent focus on aspects of indigenous culture and history, there seems to
be no connection between the vignettes. Furthermore, they borrow freely
from the language of the culture that they refer to: Churata uses words of
Quechua and Aymara origin that we can safely assume would have been
fairly obscure even to knowledgeable readers in the urban centers where La-
bor was distributed. In Lima, they must have caused puzzlement among the
working-class readership.
Mariátegui’s contribution, “Sobre el problema indígena,” is excerpted
from his Siete ensayos and takes the form of a historical overview of the in-
digenous peoples’ subjugation in Peruvian history (6). Part history lesson
and part manifesto, the text concludes with a call for indigenous peoples
to take responsibility for their own fate. As he says, “A people made up of
four million men, when conscious of its numbers, never despairs about its
future” (6). The call to arms nakedly pronounced in Mariátegui’s closing
remarks is in keeping with his revolutionary discourse, and indeed, with
that of other radical, working-class press periodicals published contempo-
raneously.13 What is most interesting about the publication of this excerpt
in the debut issue of Labor is precisely the assumptions it makes about its
audiences. In this case, the mismatch between what seems to be a call to
arms directed at rural indigenous populations and a Spanish-language, ur-
ban readership whose concerns would have been far afield from the land
reform that Mariátegui propounds stands out starkly.
The seeming lack of coordination between texts and audiences in both
Mariátegui and Churata’s pieces can be explained by the desire to bring
two disparate constituencies, rural and urban workers, together. This desire
is entirely in line with Mariátegui’s stated goals. Thus, both works firmly
set forth the newspaper’s strategy concerning indigenismo: it must have a
prominent place in daily circulation and it must serve an educational func-
tion with respect to urban masses. However, the works also illustrate a sig-
nificant problem of indigenismo when it went beyond more specialized,

intellectual venues such as Amauta and Boletín Titikaka. As a discourse
of social renewal, indigenismo was meant to rouse indigenous peoples
and their protectors, as Mariátegui’s comments above indicate. But when
indigenismo’s exhortations were directed at the urban working classes, a
significant aporia between readers’ experience and the overwhelmingly ru-
ral situations to which the texts referred became apparent. How was indi-
genismo to be presented to those who did not share its central concerns, nor
any of the experiences and social institutions to which it made reference?
This question is the crux of the reorganization and transformation of
Labor over the course of its brief run. At the core, the concern is one that
forces a radical revisioning of how indigenismo represents its subjects. For
the indigenistas, indigenous subjects were to be presented in the trappings
of a particular culture, as Churata’s text demonstrates. This invariably
meant the indigenous peoples were tied symbolically to highland geogra-
phy, to the Quechua language, and to rural customs. Indigenismo in this
way tended to stress forcefully the alterity of the indigenous with respect
to Western modernity, whose premiere space in this context was the capi-
tal city of Lima. This strategy, which functioned well within critiques that
sought to ground the idea of revolution in the inherent resistance of the
indio to dominant, metropolitan cultures, evidently had a different impact
in a newspaper that sought to unite distinct sectors of the working class.
In other words, the radical difference that intellectuals celebrated in the
indigenous largely undermined the idea that urban working-class subjects
might understand indios as allies in social reform. Instead, this strategy
exoticized and distanced the indigenous from other groups.
Thus, because of its stated goal of interpellating and unifying one sub-
ject in revolution, Labor had to distance itself from the strategies of indi-
genismo in its most current forms and devise a discursive product, as it
were, that might imagine a continuity between rural and urban. This sepa-
ration of these two geographic but especially cultural spaces was precisely
what Labor, in its first manifestation, was in danger of exacerbating: the so-
called rift between sierra and city. Regional intellectuals, such as Luis Val-
cárcel and the indigenistas that clustered around him in Cuzco, had been
particularly eloquent in their rejection of coastal influence and in particu-
lar of the idea that the cultural models emanating from the coast were coin-
cident with or should overshadow those of the mountains. As critics such as
Deborah Poole and Marisol de la Cadena have demonstrated, the manner
in which Valcárcel and others insisted on variously configured indigenous
influence in highland culture made the sierra an entity apart, be it at the

level of history, language, or psychology (Poole 179–94; de la Cadena 64–
68). Indeed, the specificity of serrano culture necessitated, in the worldview
of cusqueño indigenistas, an autochthonous intellectual caste that might
elaborate upon and best represent this region.14 While regionally minded
thinkers rejected a deployment of the indio that would make him represent
broad concepts such as nation and class, Labor’s editorial policy turned pre-
cisely to the issue of how to animate the figure of the indio so that he might
be articulated through these very concepts.
In any case, the representation of the indigenous was not the only as-
pect of the newspaper that would be transformed. Labor’s first issue had no
news dealing with daily events in Peru. Rather, commentary on national
topics tended toward instructive overviews and reflective essay, much as
they did in Amauta. Perhaps in light of the standard practice in other, plen-
tiful working-class papers during the period, this editorial policy decision
was quickly overturned after the debut, with issue 2 offering little in the
form of cosmopolitan intellectual culture.15
Labor was, indeed, one in a wide selection of newspapers that vied for
influence among the working class in the first three decades of the last
century. Nowhere was the intense upheaval of the moment as evident as
in Lima. Internal migration and European immigration grew to meet the
demand for industrial workers in the capital, causing the population to
boom and urban living conditions to deteriorate. Fueled by the subsequent
demand for class justice and even social revolution, Lima witnessed an
explosive growth of its working-class press. While they did at times make
reference to race, these publications chose to foreground class issues and
consequently did not represent suitable vehicles for the formulation of the
modern Latin American subject that took the area’s complex racial dynam-
ics as their exclusive focus.16
Thus in 1920s Lima, recently arrived migrant mestizos from the prov-
inces and European immigrants protested living conditions in the working-
class press or prensa obrera.17 Their papers and broadsheets served as the
organs for Marxist and anarchist social reform movements that held un-
derstandably critical views of Peruvian modernization and that saw in the
city the theater where they could play out their hopes for the transforma-
tion of society (Blanchard 148–72). In indigenista literature of the 1920s and
1930s, this portrait of the city rarely appears, as these writings tended to
omit that some of the most important calls for social reform came from ur-
ban denizens not aligned with indigenismo. Likewise, indigenista literature

eschewed the city.
At least in part, this refusal to acknowledge explicitly working-class
positions on modernization may have stemmed from that class’s unsuit-
ability for the indigenista project. All evidence points to the working class’s
refusal to identify itself primarily in racial terms. Although papers such as
El obrero textil (1919) in Lima often supported the struggle for racial equality
within the Peruvian nation, they offered much more space to the interna-
tional struggle of the proletariat.18 Undoubtedly, if the critics privileged the
project of an indigenista nationalism, the working-class press countered by
assuming a transnational, workers’ identity in titles such as El obrero textil
(1919), El nudito (1919), and Solidaridad (1925).19
Indigenismo perhaps unavoidably took an altogether different stance
toward the issue of race in Peru. The indigenistas’ treatment of the indio
was substantially different from the romanticizing and exoticizing ten-
dencies of nineteenth-century literary production in Latin America. In
this way, indigenista critics seized upon the representation of the indio in
order to better define themselves in opposition to their predecessors. The
indio quickly became the primary tool in registering everything that was
wrong with nineteenth-century Latin American society and all that was
right with the new society envisioned by indigenismo: while the former was
artificial, imitative, European, and elitist, the new society indigenista crit-
ics proposed was natural, original, autochthonous. Indeed, this turn in cri-
tique had a significant predecessor in the vociferous critic González Prada.
His essays, in particular “Discurso en el Politeama,” “Perú y Chile,” and
“Nuestros indios,” clearly began to understand the indio as the lynchpin
of any possible social change in the Andes. While in these works González
Prada would famously call for the indigenous population to take up arms
and transform the society that oppressed them, he also exhibited a striking
absence of knowledge concerning real indigenous communities.
The separation of the figure of the indio from empirical knowledge
about his way of life provides the conditions for the sign indígena to take
on proportions that overshadow its referent. As in other indigenista cri-
tiques, in González Prada’s work, the figure of the indigenous becomes
filled up with a revolutionary meaning, to the exclusion of other kinds of
knowledge. Similarly, in works like Mariátegui’s “Nacionalismo y van-
guardismo” (1930), later criticism invested race with an inherently critical
capacity. At a historical moment when thinking about the urban masses,
from both within and without, began to utilize the concept of class in its
articulations, the indigenistas’ strategic positioning of representations of
the indigenous tended to deemphasize the role that class could have in de-
fining the nation.
The result is a schism of sorts between working-class press discourse
and indigenista writings. This rift operates mostly through omission. For
example, though Mariátegui and other indigenistas were well aware of or-
ganized labor movements in Lima, and indeed often participated in their
activities, there is scant evidence in their writings that they were aware of
the many newspapers and more articles dedicated to reflecting on what one
face of modernization—industrialization—meant in Peru. The indigeni-
stas’ insistence on the new national subject’s indigenous racial qualities
marginalized the largely mestizo—in culture, if not race—and European
urban dwellers that were agitating for revolution in their own backyards. In
his indispensable book on class dynamics in republican Peru, Julio Cotler
has documented the depth of working-class efforts to throw off oligarchic
and neocolonial forms of domination in the early twentieth century (199–
226). Cotler locates Labor among these manifestations of resistance (219).
Importantly, the newspaper’s claiming of class as an important conceptual
tool in the construction of a novel paradigm of national identity inherently
contested indigenismo’s racialized national subject.
The beginnings of this shift in Labor fell into line with Mariátegui’s
critique of feudalism as presented in his many essays and in the Siete en-
sayos. In issue 3, for example, an intellectual associated with the Amauta
group, Abelardo Solís, wrote an article entitled “El problema agrario pe-
ruano: La comunidad indígena” that focused on the struggle of indigenous
subjects against large landholders, or gamonales (3). As was typical of in-
digenismo during the period and even afterward, Solís lauded the com-
munity, or ayllu, in terms of its resistance to the powers that attempted to
subjugate the indio.
Differing from a critique that strictly focused on the ayllu’s vitality in
resisting the large estate and its interests, however, this treatment contex-
tualized the ayllu within the terms and experience that would have reso-
nated with the experience of Labor’s audience. So Solís states, “In reference
to our Communities, it is possible to think of them as imperfect agricul-
tural unions that are capable of leading an effective agrarian movement”
[Tratando de nuestras Comunidades, cabe pensar en que ellas pueden ser
consideradas como imperfectos gremios agrícolas, capaces de llevar a cabo
un eficaz movimiento agrario] (3). The paternalism expressed in the posses-
sive pronoun is common in the indigenista writing of the time; what is not
so common is the effort to liken indigenous structures to political strate-
gies of the moment. It is true that Mariátegui had imagined the indigenous
ayllu as a prime revolutionary subject in the Andes, but Solís’s strategy
forces this vision into the context of the urban working class. Contrary to
Mariátegui’s perspective on the radical difference of the indigenous and his
culture from the (usually mestizo) subject associated with the city, Solís
suggests that urban and rural responses to exploitative regimes may indeed
be analogous. Furthermore, it should also be taken into account that Solís’
intervention was published alongside articles such as the anonymous “Del
sindicato de oficio al sindicato de producción” and F. Halls’s “Breve histo-
ria del movimiento cooperativista en Inglaterra,” whose titles indicate their
focus on topics that Labor’s editors thought most of interest to a politicized
working class.
By issue 4, the shift marked by Solís’s article had been concretized
through a notable change in the paper’s content.20 A pronounced focus on
social and labor movements in Peru and Latin America had developed. Art
and culture, except for the occasional excerpt from Latin American novels
and a wealth of woodcuts, had taken on particular manifestations in Labor’s
pages. The choice of novels and visual art was not arbitrary. The selections
of narrative often sprang from the large number of novels that critiqued the
social and political reality of the time. Among them, Martín Luis Guzmán’s
El águila y la serpiente on the Mexican Revolution and José Eustasio Rivera’s
La vorágine on the rubber trade in Colombia stand out. These choices high-
light the usefulness for imparting a critical attitude toward the status quo
that intellectuals believed was part of reading particular kinds of novels—
especially realist ones. On the other hand, the always-increasing presence
of visual art served to attract an audience that, if it was literate, was often
only functionally so. Many visual selections stressed revolutionary values
by representing or referring to events such as the Mexican Revolution. Di-
ego Rivera was a favorite.
In lieu of high cultural commentary, the social science–oriented writ-
ings of figures such as Solís, Luis Araquistáin, Eudocio Rabines, Tristán
Marof, and Ricardo Martínez de la Torre appeared alongside coverage of
such national events as the strikes at the textile center of Vitarte (Labor 5,
8). In this manifestation, the intellectual’s object of study was no longer
the aesthetic object or its function, but rather the events of contemporary
life itself. Thus, these articles tended to focus on the current government’s
reactionary policies, the exploitation of miners by foreign corporations, and
nationalization of industries and labor politics, to name but a handful of

topics. Labor had effectively left behind the stress on the centrality of cul-
ture and cultural production that was a hallmark of Amauta. However, as
the discussion below indicates, high cultural objects continued to play a
fundamental role in the elaboration of Labor’s critique.
Issue 4 also presented front-page coverage of one of the worst labor di-
sasters of the decade. The “catastrophe of Morococha” occurred on Decem-
ber 5, 1928, and led to widespread coverage and lively debates across a range
of national newspapers. The details of the accident made it the perfect ob-
ject of criticism for left-leaning writing: the Cerro de Pasco Mining Corpo-
ration, an American concern with huge landholdings in the Peruvian sierra,
had known for some time that a disaster was imminent and did nothing to
protect the lives of the miners. In fact, according to reports, the series of
tunnels under the Morococha lagoon had been leaking for some time before
the accident and had already claimed one life when a small burst occurred
in one of the tunnel walls in early November 1928 (Flores Galindo, Mineros
54–55). When the bed of the lagoon gave way on December 5, it inundated
the tunnels, instantly killing at least thirty miners and trapping dozens
more. By December 6, only one day later, the government had responded
by sending in troops from Lima in order to quell any eventual uprisings.
The mining company denied any wrongdoing in the accident.21
For intellectuals, the accident provided a textbook example of the ex-
ploitation systematically carried out in the region by North American and
European interests. As Julián Petrovick, a member of the Amauta group,
darkly sentenced, “The Yankee is the master; the Peruvians are flesh to be
exploited” [El yankee es el señor, los peruanos, carne de explotación] (La-
bor 6, 4). As much as any other factor, including an interest in increasing
sales, the accident at Morococha seems to have galvanized that part of the
Amauta group committed to social issues to combine theoretical sophistica-
tion, expressed in Marxist and anti-imperialist critiques, with analysis of
current news items.22
The article on the Morococha disaster, written in the urgent tone of
just-breaking news, also presented a telling and novel use of art objects. The
front-page article was illustrated by two details taken from Diego Rivera’s
murals. Entitled “El funeral de las víctimas proletarias” and “Salida de los
mineros del trabajo,” the frescoes show workers at a mine and at a funeral,
respectively. Both represent indigenous subjects. In the first, a mass of peo-
ple witness the digging of graves by a few of their number. These men are
bent over in the foreground, shovels in hand, while men and women look
on. In typical Rivera fashion, the solidarity and community of the mass is
signaled by the physical similarity of the figures, particularly in their facial
features. The second image, smaller and located at the top right area of the
page, shows three men. Two of the men have their backs to the viewer and
stand on either side of the central figure, dressed in white. The two faceless
men seem to be frisking or otherwise inspecting the central man’s body,
and the differences in positions between the three is marked by the fact that
these two are dressed in dark uniforms, suggesting their occupations as po-
licemen or guards. The central figure, his dark skin standing out against his
simple white shirt, has his arms outstretched in a Christlike stance.
The representational strategy is complex and draws on a number of se-
mantic fields. Before an audience of literate and semiliterate urban workers
in Lima, the images could not fail to invoke the ideology of community
and class unity that was a cornerstone of working-class identity and its or-
gans. The mass of figures at a funeral, all alike, all united in one purpose,
was presented in order to foster this recognition. Furthermore, the second
image’s direct invocation of Christian iconography must have been reso-
nant with an overwhelmingly Catholic audience. It channels the sacrificial
Christ, harassed by the company men who double as Roman guards.
Illustrations seem to have been chosen deliberately, in the place of pho-
tographs. The Morococha accident occurred well before the appearance of
the first article on the topic in Labor, and indeed, photographs were the order
of the day in the Lima dailies, such as the paper of record El Comercio. While
it is likely that photographs of the disaster were too expensive to acquire or
had simply been exhausted as illustrations by December 22, when the first
Labor article was published, the choice of Rivera’s frescoes resonates with
decisions concerning the articulation of the working class that the news-
paper would make at later points. For instance, both reproductions sound
deep notes along the lines of both socialist and Catholic discourse among
a working-class audience, at the same time that they equate this socialism
and Catholicism with the indigenous population. “Salida de los mineros del
trabajo” especially seeks to foster a semantic overlap between class struggle,
indigenista politics, and Catholic conceptions. Indeed, it may not be go-
ing too far to say that the reproduction foments precisely the kind of myth
that Mariátegui imagined would be most useful in a revolutionary Andean
politics.
The significance of this shift away from aesthetic readings of art ob-
jects to their referentiality within a complex array of social conditions in
the Andes—agrarian, industrial, rural, urban—created the possibility for
a more encompassing representation of the region’s reality than had previ-

ously been possible in Labor or indeed in other newspapers and journals of
the time, including Amauta. Amauta in particular had presented images of
the indigenous as aesthetic objects, and it was often difficult to understand
these as denunciations of particular social conditions.
Another of the pivotal contributions of the Morococha coverage was
the fact that it relied heavily, and in the case of Labor especially, on anony-
mous eyewitness coverage. The use of testimonials, while present elsewhere
in working-class press, was practically nonexistent in organs run by explic-
itly indigenista groups and by intellectuals more generally. Amauta, for
example, published none, nor did Boletín Titikaka from Puno. In a straight-
forward way, then, the inclusion of testimonials opened up what had been
an exclusively intellectual space to the voices of other, less authoritative
sectors of society. Importantly, the appearance of testimonials and the con-
comitant disappearance of aesthetic criticism from Labor did not mean the
former took the place of the latter. Never did the editors take up a testimo-
nial as material for analysis, nor did they succumb to an anthropological
approach. They thus avoided creating an obvious epistemological hierarchy
between the intellectuals who published in the newspaper and the activists
and workers who reported their experience through it.
What is most significant about the inclusion of these testimonials in
Labor is precisely their coincidence with the newspaper’s larger goals. The
writers lack neither sophistication nor awareness of their position within a
national and international context. In fact, the writers demonstrate a high
degree of organization, knowledge of law, and a keen reliance on civil soci-
ety. For example, in the coverage of the Morococha disaster, Labor stressed
on-site reports from anonymous writers with an intimate knowledge of the
Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. In a letter dated December 22, 1928,
and written from the highland town, a writer who identifies himself only as
an “informant” [informador] writes in order to “clarify some facts that some
want to hide concerning the true causes of the lamentable accident” [es-
clarecer algunos hechos que quieren ocultarse, sobre las verdaderas causas
que dieron origen al lamentable suceso] (Labor 4, 1). In his explanations of
the complex ways in which the mines operate and sustain themselves, he re-
marks, “Also in order to cut costs, the Company has established mine labor
using the ‘contract’ system. The contractor, who in this situation plays the
role of a small landowner, exploits indigenous workers’ strength by subject-
ing him [sic] to hard work in order to make a profit. In turn the contractor is
exploited by the Yankee Company” (2).23
Though schematic, the writer demonstrates a critical knowledge of

the chain of exploitation as it filters down from the American mining con-
cern to the local laborers. Furthermore, the author makes explicit parallels
between the new economy, based on the extraction of primary materials
by foreign companies, and the traditional Andean economic system. So a
knowledge of the colonial landowning system and its organization around
forced labor of the indigenous population, still in effect in the first half of
the twentieth century, permits the author to understand and explain the ef-
fects of modernization in the Andes. Although this does not have the depth
of his analytical critique, it is worth noting that Mariátegui did precisely
this in his analysis of Latin America and particularly the Andes, for ex-
ample in his “El problema de la tierra” in the Siete ensayos. Like him, this
anonymous writer is able to comprehend not only the cohabitation but also
the codependency and mutual benefit of international extractive capitalism
and local, feudal gamonalismo.
The citation is not devoid of glaring examples that demonstrate the
plurality of the world about which the author writes: even as he uses the ra-
cial and cultural term indios to describe the miners affected by the disaster,
he also makes gestures to a larger identity, one based on an internationalist
and communist language, such as his reference to the “unprotected work-
ing class [desamparada clase obrera].” This shuttling back and forth between
Peruvian reality and the international Left’s political concepts, between a
feudal economy and a capitalist one, begins to appear less rare than the ac-
colades that Mariátegui’s writings received for similar navigations might in-
dicate. Writings such as the Morococha informant’s suggest that the ability
to negotiate between two traditions and two bodies of knowledge extended
to larger parts of the population than those represented by Mariátegui and
his fellow intellectuals.
What is more, the report witnesses the emergence of a new terminol-
ogy that reflects the demands of the moment. Cotler has referred to the late
1920s and the 1930s as the beginning of the “class struggle,” due in large
part to the class consciousness of urban workers (227–73). It is impossible
to know if the increased communications that came with modernity, the
steady growth in the numbers of working-class subjects, and the subsequent
vigor of their identity, the origins of an important percentage of the urban
working class in rural society, or simply the realization of class solidarity
led to this signal birth. The term “obreros indios” suggests any of these, and
it evidences the emergence of a crucial social subject in discourses of social
change in the twentieth-century Andes. In the phrase, the rural and the
urban, the racial and the cultural, the modern and the traditional come
together. Krüggeler has suggested a similar phenomenon is indicated by the
term “obrero quechua” in 1920s Cuzco (185). While this may have been inci-
dental to other revolutionary strategies of the moment, Labor’s elaboration,
its very project, turned on this issue of wedding class critique to indigenista
discourse. Indeed, the designation of workers as indios continued in subse-
quent articles. Issue 5, for instance, openly indicated that urban working-
class workers must support and identify with their rural counterparts (1).
A comparison of the anonymous letter to a prominent leftist critic’s
view of mining in the Andes, also published in Labor, is instructive. Tris-
tán Marof, the outspoken cultural and economic critic from Bolivia, writes
about mining practices in his country in his article “Bolivia y la nacional-
ización de sus minas”: “While the small mining property disappears, the
large-scale operation appears showing its claws and tearing wealth from the
mountains of Bolivia’s territory in order to transport it abroad. After sell-
ing their holdings, the small mine owners, with no capital, are transformed
into contractors, that is, in the service of big capital and against the wage
earner” (Labor 7, 1).24
Less given to racial or cultural terms, Marof describes the differences
between colonial forms of small mining and large-scale modern mining to
highlight similar systems of exploitation that operate on radically disparate
scales. For Marof, the influx of capital means the exploiters of yesterday,
“los pequeños propietarios,” take an intermediary position between workers
and multinationals. Through these observations, Marof traces a history of
Latin America that reads the fluidity between the colonial and modern peri-
ods as synonymous with an ever-greater exploitation of natural and human
resources by ever-greater capital. His heavily economic and internationalist
critique, nevertheless, shares points in common with the anonymous letter
presented above. The description and characterization of the acquisition
of labor for the mines echoes—though it does not exactly replicate—the
critique articulated in the previous text. The similarities, of course, suggest
the availability of this sort of leftist analysis through various means dur-
ing the period: newspapers, lectures, workers’ group meetings, and so on.
But most importantly, the coverage of Morococha and other commentary
on mining demonstrated Labor’s efforts to cope with a specifically Andean
reality by submitting an international working-class critique both to the
pressures of regional working conditions and local subjects of the popular
classes.
Labor’s porosity to those voices that were far removed from the public
sphere quickly became formalized in its pages. It created two special sec-
tions, “La voz de los pueblos” and “El ayllu,” which ran intermittently in
the last five issues and focused on indigenous problems. These sections had
a dual purpose: to shed light on the experience of the popular classes out-
side the capital and, as the both titles indicate, albeit differently, to create
a designated venue for testimony from peripheral subjects. For instance, a
letter writer who self-identified by signing as “un pequeño comerciante” in is-
sue 5 related in detail the tribulations that the popular classes experienced
in the regions of Supe and Pativilca, on the coast north of Lima and near
the larger town of Huacho. The shopkeeper’s complaint is notable for the
singular mix of attitudes toward large landowners, modernization, and in-
digenous rural workers that it puts into play. The brunt of his argument,
much to the contrary of Labor’s central, more radical critique, is that small
business, and in particular commerce, must be allowed to flourish in these
regions. Currently, he states, “the haciendas, with their generally feudal
methods, kill the energies of these [urban business] populations” [(las) ha-
ciendas . . . con sus métodos feudales en general, matan las energías de
estas poblaciones (urbanas comerciantes)] (5). In order to make his case, he
stresses the stagnation in economic possibilities that is the condition for all
groups excepting the landowners, and he particularly signals the plight of
indigenous rural workers. Interestingly, the letter ends in an upbeat tone as
modernization is invoked: in speaking of the train that will soon traverse
the countryside from Huacho to Barranca. He enthuses, “Let the train’s
whistle awaken these populations to a new life, reminding them that they
have the obligation to work and improve!” [¡Que el pito de la locomotora . . .
despierte a estas poblaciones a una nueva vida, recordándoles que tienen la
obligación de trabajar y mejorar!] (5). The valorization of work is also evi-
dent on other pages of Labor. This writer’s valorization has its limits, how-
ever, as his blithely happy reception of the train, modernization’s symbol
par excellence, demonstrates. While Labor thought positively about indus-
trialization, it only did so as necessary step toward revolution.
This ideologically divergent contribution to Labor marks the paper’s
availability to different viewpoints. The author’s uncritical celebration of
modernization, without attention to the economic and social structures of
power that will not be transformed through the introduction of new technol-
ogy into the Andes, points to the validity of lettered discourse in accessing
and representing subaltern perspectives in the interests of political consen-
sus. We see here a hewing away of the letter from its traditional venues and
wielders. The formation of this political consensus, or a particular sort of
consciousness among the laboring classes, is Labor’s goal. The function that
I assign here to lettered discourse has been noted by critics of Latin Ameri-
can testimonial literature, as we will see.
Indeed, in a way that did not occur within the majority of other cul-
tural production typically associated with indigenismo, Labor made the in-
clusion of testimony a highly significant factor in its transmission of ideas.
While the bulk of indigenismo was predicated upon the representation of
indigenous alterity by nonindigenous writers, Labor’s editorial decisions
exemplified an important counterstrategy in how this representation might
occur. Indeed, as Marc Becker has shown in his study of indigenous protest
in Ecuador in the early and mid-twentieth century, the printed press served
as an important source for gleaning how the indigenous responded to and
therefore understood their struggle (“Comunas” 550). Indigenous demands
before injustice were also at the core of the fascinating phenomena of the
indigenous leaders known as caciques apoderados in Bolivia, studied by
Laura Gotkowitz (Revolution 46). As Gotkowitz states, by 1917 these leaders
effected a “highly coordinated diffusion of grievances throughout all lev-
els of government, sympathetic newspapers, and their own bulletins” (46).
While this activity likely indicates a higher level of political organization
than that behind letters published in Labor, it similarly points to the crucial
engagement of indigenous protest with print media and thus suggests that
the cases I analyze here are by no means isolated ones.
This engagement leads us to understand the Labor letter cited above
as an instance of testimonial literature. In fact, the letter evinces the four
components that Elzbieta Sklodowska counts, following Jean François Lyo-
tard, as prerequisite in any testimonial enunciation: addressee, addressor,
language, and the referent or case. Furthermore, also according to her cri-
tique, this letter points not to an individual experience but rather to a com-
munal one (87).
In her definition and critique of the testimonial mode, centered on the
work of Miguel Barnet, Sklodowska meditates upon what she considers to
be an all too ready reading of testimonial literature as the means of direct
access to real subaltern subjects. She takes George Yúdice and John Bever-
ley’s readings as examples of this understanding (97–99). In point of fact,
Sklodowska makes a convincing case for not, as she puts it, naturalizing
subaltern subjects through the textual reproduction of their oral stories.
This is perhaps the sharpest point in her critique: that critics who celebrate
subaltern discourse have forgotten to pay attention to that discourse’s in-
ner fissures and deeply contradictory dynamics. In short, critics who push
testimonio’s transparency forget its kinship to fiction, and thus unjustifiably

privilege its perspectives on reality.
In Beverley’s work, on the other hand, the Lacanian notion of the Real
grants testimonial discourse its power, as testimony effectively communi-
cates—but does not represent—the Real. This concept should not be con-
fused with reality, which could not be more different from it; in Beverley’s
definition, the Real is that which resists representation and is thus what
emanates from the experiences of violence, pain, hunger, and deprivation
(135). In his view, the Real is supplementary to the testimonial text and not,
nor could it be, inherent within it (137). For testimonial to function in a way
that remains politically viable, Beverley insists that it must not be trans-
formed into literature. The moment that testimonio inhabits the realm of
the literary, it becomes part of the hegemonic apparatus. The category of
literature, which Beverley resists and on which Sklodowska insists, occupies
a central, decisive role in these debates and in the theorization of testimony
as a discursive formation.
In the context of Labor and its examples of testimony, both of these ar-
guments smack of the institutional and disciplinary context in which they
are enunciated. First, it bears pointing out that both critics tend to think
about testimonial in terms of the book form, and particularly in terms of
the isolation and singularity that the book form visits on a discourse and
an audience. The book implies specific forms of circulation that are, as Sil-
viano Santiago has signaled with respect to Brazilian modernista fiction, not
always wide and quite often reduced to a particular social group or groups
(79–83). Indeed, the testimonial debates seem to have relied overwhelm-
ingly on book-length texts that circulated as such, no matter how promi-
nently or obscurely.
Thus, reflections upon subaltern representation as reflected in this vein
of criticism—to my mind the most lively and incisive discussion on Latin
American subalternity—tend to take place under the sign of the book and
its authorship, whether it be Rigoberta Menchú, Elizabeth Burgos Debray,
Miguel Barnet, Gregorio Condori Mamani’s or any of the other figures in
this corpus of texts. The question of who is the author of these texts, in the
sense of who it is that originates the information that each testimonio ar-
ticulates, is the fundamental issue that animates the discussion. Thinking
about testimony has understandably arisen in response to the books that
testimonial literature introduced; however, the testimonial mode may be
found in, and undergoes alterations through, other lettered practices.
In the newspaper, testimony is not singular, nor is it isolated; on the
contrary, it has a clearly hierarchical relationship to other texts and es-

pecially to editorial presence. The letter cited above, and other textual
examples like it, exceed the category of literature as both Beverley and
Sklodowska understand it. Let me be clear: while I agree that these texts
in fact fit very well within the ways in which testimonial literature is itself
characterized, I argue that they neither seek to escape literature and thus
become nonliterary through the opening of a portal onto the Real of sub-
alterns, nor do they require being understood as literary acts that are the
elaboration of their primary enunciators and especially their editors. This
latter view, Sklodowska’s, absorbs texts into a literary corpus and tends to
isolate them from their historical circumstances, not to mention their po-
litical possibilities.
Once testimonio does not stand primarily as a series of fissures that
problematize the enunciation of subaltern discourse itself, the ways of un-
derstanding what a testimonial might mean in terms of political action
shift considerably. I cannot refute the ways modern testimonio has been
characterized in current debates. Rather, I wish to stress the multivocality
of a text like Labor and in particular to stress the implications of this multi-
vocality on subaltern representation. An analysis of Labor should not center
on a single authorial voice and must instead understand it as a textual space
within which several authorial and editorial voices make themselves pres-
ent. While these voices are regulated by the strictures imposed by Labor’s
stated political allegiances, they nevertheless demonstrate a high degree of
discursive diversity. This diversity is presented not in the interests of point-
ing out the singularity of a particular individual or group experience, but
rather to characterize one large class subject that bridges experiential and
cultural differences. Therefore, although they differ significantly in the ex-
periences that are related, the brunt of Labor’s representational efforts must
be understood as the proposition that voices such as the shopkeeper’s and
the Morochocha informant’s must be read as being spoken in solidarity.
This multivocality and discursive diversity arises as a direct result of
Labor’s circulation and of its imagined purpose. While the audience for tes-
timonio is often better educated and of a higher class than testimonial sub-
jects, as the international circulation of texts such as Yo, Rigoberta Menchú
demonstrates, Labor’s reach was profoundly local. In his introductory edi-
torial statement on Labor, Mariátegui differentiated the newspaper from
the intellectual journal Amauta: “Here, Amauta is increasingly becoming a
sort of doctrinal magazine. Labor, which on the one hand is an extension of
the work of Amauta, on the other hand tends to be a sort of informational
newspaper. As information, particularly in our case, cannot be understood

in the narrow sense as a reporting of events, but must rather be understood
as a reporting of ideas, Labor has the obligation to provide its audience with
a comprehensive enlightenment [ilustración integral] concerning contempo-
rary issues and movements. A doctrinal journal does not acknowledge this
obligation” (Labor 2, 2).25
Written early in Labor’s publishing run, the statement indicates that
the newspaper was launched with a top-down strategy in mind. Mariátegui
conceives of the newspaper as “enlightening” the masses. We could, in fact,
find proof of this attitude in the editorial decisions made in Labor’s first
issues. In its wording above, it is richly ambigious. However, taken from
the perspective of later issues, and in particular those that offer testimony
in the sections “La voz del pueblo” and “El ayllu,” Mariátegui’s statement
of policy takes on another meaning. If the statement is to be believed in its
capacity to organize Labor, then the inclusion of diverging voices is an effort
to make the urban working class recognize itself in sectors of society that
are culturally, socially, and geographically remote from it.
What does it mean to present working-class subjects with testimonial
voices that emanate from nonurban experience? What does it mean to in-
clude these testimonies alongside or within coverage of news events and
also political commentary from a leftist perspective? On the one hand, this
variety makes of Labor a polyphonic space wherein different sorts of dis-
courses—journalistic, personal, theoretical—are leveled and coexist. On
the other hand, however, it must be kept in mind that the editors of Labor
omitted particular kinds of writing early in the newspaper’s run. In issue
5, for instance, news articles such as “Las condiciones de trabajo en las mi-
nas” and “Contra el juego,” on the difficult working conditions in the min-
ing industry and the pejorative effects of gambling in Peru on the working
class, respectively, sit alongside commentaries on the detrimental effects
of mutualism among Peruvian workers and on contemporaneous politics
in Uruguay. With the exception of one article by George Bernard Shaw on
the Kellogg Pact, the issue provides news and information pertinent only
to Latin America and the Andes. The Shaw article stands as the exception
that proves the rule: while previous numbers had had many articles by Eu-
ropean luminaries on non–Latin American and non-Andean topics, issue 5
and the issues that follow it had very few.
Next to these sorts of articles, testimony added an important dimen-
sion. Testimonial discourse offered a biographical or autobiographical slant
not found in the newspaper’s other texts. This often emotional content in-
vited identification at the same time that, importantly, it functioned as a

supplement to Labor’s informational and critical writings. In these pages,
diverging discourses came together, but they did so in order to encourage the
reader to associate these texts through their ideological underpinnings.
Issue 5 also provides a good example of this sort of readerly encour-
agement. In the section “La voz de los pueblos,” the anonymous editorial
note states, “The documents that we publish below contain—especially the
first one, which we have not edited—the most serious denunciations of . . .
the Montesinos landowners” [Los documentos que publicamos a continu-
ación contienen, sobre todo el primero, cuya redacción no hemos tocado,
las más graves denuncias sobre . . . los caciques Montesinos] (5). Entitled
“El terror de los caciques Montesinos en provincia de Grau,” the document
in question is nothing less than extraordinary both in the information it
provides concerning gamonalismo’s abuses and in its formal and discursive
strategies. It takes the form of a letter written by Pablo Ñauri to one Juan
Francisco Pazos Varela, national representative for Grau province in the de-
partment of Apurímac. Ñauri is a self-identified indigenous person from
the town of Coyllorqui.
Ñauri inaugurates his letter under a self-conscious invocation of tes-
timony. He begins “I, Pablo Ñauri, vecino of the town of Coylorqui [sic] in
the province of which you are the dignified representative, present myself
and speak before you with all due respect” [Pablo Ñauri, vecino del pueblo
de Coylorqui de la provincia de la que es usted su digno representante, ante
usted, con el debido respeto, me presento y expongo] (5), after which he re-
lates his complaint. The author’s approach to Pazos Varela’s authority is
deeply deferential at the same time that it demonstrates an understanding
that his testimony must be supported by claims to his narrative’s authentic-
ity. Thus, he states his name and, importantly, also his town of origin.
What follows are twelve points that—more or less in chronological
order beginning from a point twenty years before the letter is written—
outline and provide examples of the atrocities committed by the Montesi-
nos family against the indigenous people on the gamonales’ estate and in
the surrounding areas. Ñauri describes what could be a textbook case of
gamonalismo: the identification of the Montesinos clan with authority
itself in the province, and thus their absolute impunity; the landowners’
systematic destruction of indigenous peoples’ proof, mostly in the form
of paperwork, of landownership; the collusion between the local law and
church officials with the Montesinos family; and the cruelty and inhuman-
ity that the landowners direct at any indio (5–6).
Ñauri is acutely aware of his supplicant position. He indicates first the

vulnerability of the indios: “What are we to do if 99 percent of us are illiter-
ate, if before our very eyes walk judges and authorities rubbing elbows and
in union with these hoodlums [en mancomunación con estos bandoleros]? To
whom can we complain about so much misfortune and ill fate? We have
cried and complained for four centuries” (5).26 Regardless of the factual sta-
tus of his claims, Ñauri over and over again attempts to ingratiate himself
to the authorities he addresses, as his introduction and other comments
indicate. For example, he states more than once that only President Leguía
can save his community (5–6). Certainly, this strategy is meant to elicit pity
and a protective response, as it underlines the defenselessness of indigenous
peoples by calling upon long-standing tutelary attitudes of the government,
and particularly Leguía’s administration, toward them.
Furthermore, and especially at the beginning of his account, the
writer demonstrates a knowing control of a clear and concise Spanish. This
command of language is important, of course, because it is the singular
condition of addressing power. At the same time, we can point out several
junctures at which—one is the use of the informal term mancomunación
instead of mancomunidad—this command becomes unstable. For instance,
at times Ñauri uses forms of expression foreign to formal writing, as when
he relates that Alejandrina Montesinos had demanded that Julián Hurtado
be arrested, “saying to him, aha, so you too had come to stir things up”
[diciéndole con que también habías venido a vivar] (6). The intercalation of
a clearly oral form of address and the lack of transcription of the reported
enunciation into a more writerly form through the use of quotations likely
indicates the proximity of the speaker to an oral culture.
The testimony also contains a glimpse into the usefulness of print in
these cultures. As Ñauri narrates the events that are closest to the present,
he indicates that the reason for a recent attack on the community is, in fact,
the circulation of a bulletin or broadsheet (6). Entitled “Las horribles pe-
nalidades,” he reports that it listed all the injustices that Montesinos had
committed against the area’s indigenous community, and indeed Ñauri
lists some of these in his letter. Thus, though these indios are illiterate, they
make use of print culture—a boletín or bulletin—in order to disseminate
information. Undoubtedly, in order for this dissemination to take place,
the broadsheet’s content must have been recited, as it were. It should not
be lost on us here that “Las horribles penalidades,” in its purpose to dis-
seminate the truth about injustice, functions as an analogue to Labor itself,
albeit in different circumstances.
According to Ñauri, the broadsheet is precisely the trigger that has led
to his own current state of persecution. As in testimonial works, the writer’s
fate is inextricably bound up with that of his community or group, and in-
deed is an emblem of it. After the assault on Coyllorqui, the author is taken
captive by the Montesinos’s henchman, beaten and tortured and, along
with his wife and small child, left to die in the countryside. At that point,
he says, he received aid from passing cattlemen who took pity on him. He
relates his escape from the grip of the Montesinos family, which occurs,
nevertheless, at the expense of having to leave his wife and child behind.
Finally, he stresses that the litany of atrocities he has listed, including those
visited upon him, are just part of “the immense number of crimes commit-
ted by these eternal enemies of the indigenous race” (6).
Ñauri’s account does not, however, end by solely affirming his equiva-
lence with the entirety of his race. At the end of a horrific account of the
injustices, including murder, rape, and torture, Ñauri’s communication is
signed “by me and by Enrique Huyhia who does not know how to sign his
name. A. Salcedo y S. —Agustín Siqueios. —Pablo Aury—By my mother
who does not know how to sign her name, Dolores T. widow of Orós. Felipe
S. Villasante. —Octavio Orós. —By my mother who does not know how
to sign her name, Lucía Bustamante. Cirilo Guillén B. —Pedro S. Mejía.
—Luis Mejía. —Mariano Mejía. —Santiago R. Chalco” (6).27
The communication, insofar as it represents the complaints of a small
cluster of families, seems to come from the traditional Andean social for-
mation, an ayllu. In the letter’s narrative, family names and ties of kinship
repeatedly come up. In what concerns the signatures, the highlighting of
those in the group who do not know how to write indicates the existence
(numerically underrepresented in this letter, although we should not con-
fuse the ability to sign one’s name with complete and competent literacy)
of a population that does not have access to representation in Peruvian so-
ciety. The letter’s body and signatures thus mark a pivotal moment for in-
digenous subaltern communities in Latin American modernity, a moment
that has often been repeated in the last century. It represents their emer-
gence from oral Quechua to written Spanish, and as such signals in lettered
discourse the generation of a space where those erased from Andean society
might begin to speak themselves back into history. This stands as a central
accomplishment in Labor.
If indeed the above-cited letter and others like it represent the emer-
gence of the subaltern indio’s voice in society, then Mariátegui’s prediction
concerning the eventual rise of a literatura indígena effectively plays itself
out in this publication, with an important exception. Mariátegui’s initial

conceptualization posited literature understood in its traditional forms,
such as poetry and narrative, as the optimal space for the indio’s appear-
ance. The usurpation of literature’s privileged position by an organ of civil
society—a working-class newspaper—would seem to be more than sim-
ply an easy shift in venue. Indeed, the question would have to be asked: is
Labor’s indigenous subject, plural, contestatory, and motivated by political
and social gains, possible in Mariátegui’s earlier schema? Certainly, such
a subject fits with difficulty into the representation of the indigenous—
soulful, despairing, ahistorical—that Mariátegui found in Vallejo. As
one of Mariátegui’s final efforts, the opening of Labor’s space represents
a profound reenvisioning of the strategic usefulness of literature in the in-
digenista project. At the very least, Mariátegui’s move away from literary
indigenismo and toward popular press marks an awareness of marginalized
populations’ lack of access to literature.
Furthermore, accounts of injustice in the countryside, and in particu-
lar of the victimization of the weak by the powerful, could not have avoided
reverberating with the impoverished masses versus exploitative upper-
class ideology that animated much of leftist thinking in Labor and across
working-class organizations in Peru. This function, ultimately, represents
the core strategy of a working-class newspaper that sought to grapple with
and incorporate indigenismo into its discourse. Ñauri’s letter, and other
commentary on the indio, facilitates an identification of the semifeudal
landed estate system with urban capitalist industrialization and by exten-
sion makes the indio an analogue of the worker. Labor sought to impart
precisely that equivalency—a desired solidarity, really—to broad swaths
of the dispossessed in both city and the Andean sierra.
ch a p t e r f i v e
PHOTOGRAPHS AT THE EDGE

Martín Chambi and the Limits of Lettered
Culture
T
his book has turned on the conceit that representations of the
indigenous in lettered culture in the early twentieth-century Andes
articulated possible local modernities while presuming to portray in-
dios and their culture. The sound and fury of historical indigenismo—to
be distinguished from later manifestations, such as the so-called neoindi-
genismo of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—somehow skirted the interior life
of indigenous persons that later figures, such as José María Arguedas or
Miguel Angel Asturias, would absorb into and portray through their work.
The privileged, lettered position that these intellectuals assumed, and from
whence their authority to speak for others emanated, largely accounts for
this reticence before an indigenous worldview and its possibilities for shap-
ing cultural objects that might reflect meaningfully on Andean society and
history.
Thus, the lettered city waged a fierce battle for continued validity
through indigenismo, the heteroclite claims and conflicts inherent in the
movement notwithstanding. None of these claims or debates, from the
most radical to the most conservative, ever sought to contest the primacy of
134
photographs at the edge ≈ 135
the letter and its sphere of influence and activity as the exclusive space for
communicating indigeneity. Marisol de la Cadena, for instance, has amply
documented and continues to study the elaborate centralization of power
in both the figure of the intellectual and in his production in Cuzco in the
early twentieth century, and more recently Yazmín López Lenci has inves-
tigated the density of intellectual production among regional indigenistas
during the same period. De la Cadena’s book Indigenous Mestizos takes a
dark view of the possibilities for indigenista discourse to do anything other
than re-create traditional power structures, albeit with modifications (131ff).
López Lenci, on the other hand, points to several renovations of key institu-
tional structures, such as the university, that the indigenistas were involved
in during the same period (Paqarina 232–48). Both of these readings of in-
digenismo as centrally a lettered movement lend themselves well to under-
standing the enormous paradox at its core.1 As a movement that sought to
reshape Andean societies by the inclusion of the vast swaths of the margin-
alized indigenous population into the present and future, and despite ef-
forts such as those of the editors of Labor, indigenismo nevertheless refused
to relinquish its tutorial attitude toward those it sought to protect.
This rather stubborn paradox at the center of indigenismo takes an-
other shape when the institution of the letter, and thus also the intellectuals
allied to it, is contextualized within a broader cultural production. Indi-
genismo was by no means limited to poetry, criticism, narrative, and other
forms of writing, but instead left a large impact in painting, music, perfor-
mance, and other nonwritten aesthetic production. Jacqueline Barnitz, for
example, has outlined the rich history of painterly indigenismo across the
Andean nations (88–101). Indeed, one could say that indigenismo’s breadth
was matched by its visual counterpart, as Javier Sanjinés implies in the Bo-
livian context (70–82). While the study of this large array of cultural works
lies beyond the purposes of this book, it is useful to take up photography as
a way to reflect on indigenismo beyond the limits of lettered practices and,
by extension, as a way to understand the contours of lettered discourse in
the early twentieth century.2
The choice of photography, and of the photographer Martín Chambi,
is not arbitrary and indeed bears some explaining, given the many bodies
of work that could be understood under the rubric of indigenista visual
culture. Even among the important figures creating visual images in the
early twentieth-century Andes—among them the well-known painters José
Sabogal, Camilo Blas, and Julia Codesido—Chambi stood out both at that
moment and since. His photographs appear in a variety of publications from
136 ≈ photographs at the edge
the period, including Variedades, a mainstream magazine sponsored by the

Leguía regime that boasted a wide local circulation. His images were said to
have been circulated internationally, to Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina (Pen-
hall 106–7; López Mondéjar 18). In particular, his photographs were often
used as illustrations in texts that referred to indigenous life and culture,
such as the early twentieth-century Cuzco guidebook I will discuss later.
In what concerns his activity in the city of Cuzco, where he estab-
lished himself as a professional photographer, Chambi’s presence is at once
greater but also more diminished in respect to the indigenista intellectuals
with whom he was associated. His archives demonstrate that he produced
an enormous amount of photographs during the period, both as a hired
photographer and for his own purposes. In particular, many of the indi-
genistas of the period appear in his photographs, including Luis Valcárcel,
José Uriel García, and others. We do not know precisely what relationship
he had to these figures, although critics such as Poole have suggested close
ideological ties (190–94). Given Cuzco’s small size, it is likely that Chambi
both had a collegial relationship with them and worked for them in an offi-
cial capacity. López Mondéjar’s sources suggest that Chambi was in regular
contact with intellectuals and artists in Cuzco (22).
Certainly, his work seems to have drawn the attention of the indigeni-
stas. Roberto Latorre, editor of the indigenista journal Kosko, judged in
1925: “It is an exceptional case of artistic taste and skill in the execution
and knowledge of art photography that we encounter [in] señor Martín
Chambi. . . . All of his landscapes, all of his works of art are a gathering
of beauty. They emanate a profound aesthetic feeling” (Penhall 106).3 José
Portugal, a critic with close ties to the indigenistas in Lima and in Cuzco,
judged Chambi to be “an artist of pure Aymara blood” in a review of one of
the photographer’s shows in 1927 (López Mondéjar 22).4 These comments
attest to the prominence of Chambi’s ties to the indigenista establishment
and thus constitute one of the reasons why both past and present criticism
has contextualized him within indigenismo.
One reason I have chosen photography as a counterpoint for lettered
culture is that this technology and its position within the Andean world
provide fascinating points of tension with writing. Andean indigenismo
sought to chart pathways into modernity, but often did so by insisting that
those characteristics of the indigenous population most strongly associated
with the nonmodern be, in fact, the motors of this transformation. At least
to the same degree as writing, photography as a practice for communicat-
ing the indigenous placed this contradiction in the forefront, as its pres-
ence in spaces for intellectual exchanges, such as newspapers, magazines,

and books, was ubiquitous at that moment. Furthermore, photography also
had an enormous presence as a commercial activity and proliferated rap-
idly across Latin American cities (Levine 27–28). Thus photography was
actively put to the service of indigenista theorizations, but it also harbored
the possibility of undoing the very representational protocols at the core
of indigenismo. While I emphasize these second, oppositional qualities in
Chambi’s photographs, I do not make these claims for all photography at
the time. Furthermore, my arguments in this chapter closely follow Cham-
bi’s nonstudio practice as the site for his contestatory production.
Chambi did produce images that adhered to indigenista representa-
tional strategies, such as the well-known “Tristeza andina” (fig. 2) from
1933. In that almost certainly staged photograph, the viewer sees a barefoot
Indian wistfully playing a quena, or Andean flute, while a llama stands at
his side. A majestic mountain landscape is visible in the background. The
photograph does much to associate the Indian with the land, in an iteration
of tellurism, even as it locates him very far from anything visibly modern.
The image falls into the genre of the pastoral, and as such it is driven by
idealization and romanticization. In its intent, the photograph parallels
Mariátegui’s earlier insistence, as analyzed in the first chapter, that the in-
Figure 2. Martín Chambi, “Tristeza andina,” 1933. Archivo Fotográfico Martín

Chambi.
digenous spirit is essentially emotive and profoundly detached from his-

torical change.
In this chapter, I have chosen not to focus on Chambi’s indigenista
works, such as “Tristeza andina,” precisely because they are, on the whole,
consistent with the lettered texts I have discussed previously. They are
largely reiterative of the ideological trappings in which indigenismo steeps
the indio. Instead, here I dwell on photographic images whose representa-
tional impact tends to undo indigenismo’s fixing of indigeneity both as a
key building block in an Andean future and, often in the same fell swoop,
as inherently antithetical to modernity. Thus, the images I address may
contain indios, such as Chambi himself or others, within their visual fields,
but they do not do so while deploying typical indigenista representational
constraints.
These images demonstrate and at the same time expose the strategies
through which indios and other highland Andean subjects can be repre-
sented beyond indigenismo. Without an indigenista optic, some of these
subjects are barely recognizable as indios, and indeed this is the point.
Precisely the preponderance of these sorts of images, taken of, by, and in
collaboration with indigenous subjects, forces us to consider the conceptu-
alization of indios and indigeneity beyond the agency of elite intellectuals.
In these images we find evidence of indigenous subjects in deep engagement
with the contemporaneous historical moment and so too with the elabora-
tion of an alternative cultural modernity. These are modern indigenous
subjects, less symbols of a possible modernity than actors in its messy and
inevitable emergence. As discussed in this chapter, then, Chambi’s pictures
offer productive ways to communicate the subjects indigenismo sees only
as indios.
There is ample evidence in Chambi’s expansive oeuvre that the photog-
rapher often went against the grain of received representational strategies.
The dynamics of his images stand as a fine example of his craft’s critical
possibilities. He consistently organized his pictures around complex visual
tensions. This is the case for many of his pictures, and not just for those
that capture indigenous figures and their culture. For example, the portrait
“Novia en la mansión de los Montes” (fig. 3), taken in Cuzco in 1930, depicts
a young woman, presumably of the prominent Montes family, in her wed-
ding gown. In the image, Chambi chooses to photograph the serious bride
from some distance so that he can contextualize her among the opulent
trappings of the family mansion. She stands in the middle of the photo-
graph and, though she looks directly at the photographer, her face is half
Figure 3. Martín Chambi, “Novia en la mansión de los Montes,” 1930. Archivo

Fotográfico Martín Chambi.
hidden. The photograph’s emphasis lies not on individualizing features

but instead on her flowing gown and its full train, and especially on the
perfectly symmetrical structure of the house that surrounds her. On first
viewing, the image seems ingeniously constructed in order to bring atten-
tion to the bride in the foreground who, because she is not in a symmetrical
position, breaks the visual balance of the photograph and thus calls atten-
tion to her figure.
However, the image is not as symmetrical as it first appears. To the
right, in the shadows that are more pronounced in that space, there sits a
wizened old lady in a wicker chair. She is dressed entirely in black and faces
the camera. The contrast could not be more striking: whereas the bride in
the center of the photograph stands erect, with abundant flowers before her,
the other woman sits hunched over, her hands limp, empty, and clearly vis-
ible. Her diminished and deteriorated appearance directly contradicts the
stately presence of the bride in the foreground. Whatever the reasons for
the old woman being there—she may be a servant or an older relative—she
recalls nothing if not a memento mori that undoes the auspicious present of
the photograph. This contradiction arises from both the thematic but espe-
cially the compositional aspects of her presence in the portrait.
In this example, Chambi has firm compositional control. In other pho-
tographs, the nature of the subject favors the inclusion of accident. The ap-
pearance of the arbitrary within the frame of the photograph is perhaps best
understood as an inherent quality in certain forms of photography, par-
ticularly those shot outside of the studio, where the demands of time and
lighting preclude complete compositional control. Nevertheless, though the
specific figures and objects in his informal photography may have been be-
yond his authorial control, it is significant that Chambi never shrank from
photographing in uncontrolled contexts.
In fact, the last images attributed to him are those of the earthquake
that hit Cuzco in May 1950 (López Mondéjar 28). These images, though
framed and chosen by Chambi, nevertheless represent the profound chaos
into which the city was plunged in the aftermath of the disaster. It is not
without interest that Chambi, who made his living from studio and other
hired photography, would choose to end, or at the very least significantly
reduce, his production following these pictures that he seems to have taken
in order to attest to a communal and urban reality. As Abigail Solomon-
Godeau has suggested in her study of European and American photo-
graphic history, in the early twentieth century photography nurtured a
distinctly documentary leaning. This leaning “embraced—and indeed el-
evated to an ethical principle—the notion of photography as evidentiary
truth” (188). The arbitrary capture in Chambi’s images, then, may well have
responded to this documentary impulse in at least this part of his work.
The tensions, inconsistencies, and contradictions that Chambi so often
displayed in his photography were not alien to his biography and are per-
haps typical of Andean subjects raised in the turmoil of a modernizing soci-
ety. Although he is likely an unusual case, Chambi’s life illustrates well the
possibilities that the acquisition of technology and its techniques offered to
marginalized persons. Born in 1891 in the small village of Coaza in south-
ern Peru, his early years made him a subject of displacement motivated,
importantly, by the foreign company Santo Domingo Mining Corporation.
A wealth of literature—contemporaneous, scholarly, and fictional—has at-
tested to the devastating effect of extractive industries such as mining on
local, Andean communities.5
An Aymara indigenous person whose family had been dedicated to ag-
riculture, Chambi experienced contact with the mining industry not only
as the first in a series of migrations typical of modernization’s exigencies in
Latin America, but also as indicative of that other face of a capital influx
that is all too often overlooked: the agency that marginal subjects demon-
strate vis à vis the circumstances with which they come into contact. At the
mines, Chambi learned from the company photographer the rudiments of
that technology. This knowledge fomented other displacements that, to be
sure, were the results of the migrant’s persistent search for economic stabil-
ity and, by extension, for a place within less-than-welcoming social hier-
archies. In his teens, Chambi’s interest in photography led him to travel
to the city of Arequipa, where he sought and won an apprenticeship at the
Vargas studio, under the well-known arequipeño photographer Max T. Var-
gas. In Arequipa he gained the skills necessary to establish himself as an
independent professional and, importantly, began to show his photographs
in public, winning a prize in a local contest for one of them.
Having mastered this technology, he made the fateful decision to mi-
grate to the Cuzco region sometime between 1917 and 1920. In these years,
Chambi seems to have set himself up in Sicuani, a small town known for
its wool production and trading. In Cuzco, his gifts as a photographer were
amply rewarded by a public that had a keen interest in the novel technol-
ogy.6 In turn, his photography business provided him with economic sta-
bility—and it should be underscored that few of the renowned producers
of literature in Peru in this period were ever so solvent (one need only think
of Vallejo’s pitiable employment as a clerk, Mariátegui’s constant finan-
cial problems, or Arguedas’s long, poorly paid tenure as a postman)—to
facilitate his cultural production. In these artistic pursuits he elaborated
ceaselessly on the contradictions that constituted his, and others’, life ex-
perience. He maintained a high level of activity until 1950, after which he

seemingly retired from photography, creating very few images. He died in
obscurity in 1973.
Chambi’s ability to fix his position within Cuzco society arose from his
skill in photography, but it also resulted from prevalent attitudes toward
this new technology and by extension, toward the men who practiced it. As
Deborah Poole has described in her discussion of another photographer of
the period, Juan Manuel Figueroa Aznar, cusqueño elites interested in cul-
ture tended to deny that novel technologies were valid methods for creat-
ing art. Art in the visual realm was thus conceptualized in a very painterly
fashion, and the mark of the artist valued all the more precisely because
it was nonmechanical. Poole convincingly argues that Figueroa Aznar, de-
spite the fact that he relied intensely on photography and was indeed highly
inventive within that practice, did not assume a public persona as a pho-
tographer but rather as a painter (175–76). In fact, even when he did show
photographs in a public venue, Figueroa Aznar chose to hand-paint indi-
vidual prints, a practice common in nineteenth-century Europe, and thus
mark the highly technical process of photography with a final, and heavily
significant, painterly gesture (174).
This refusal—at least among some sectors of Cuzco’s elite—to con-
sider photography as a cultural practice of the same level and importance
as the traditional arts bears importantly on Chambi. In fact, given his close
relationship with artists and intellectuals in Cuzco, we must assume that
Chambi had some knowledge of the attitudes that Poole describes. Indeed,
the differentiation between artists and photographers must have been ap-
parent to Chambi from his first presence in Cuzco, as in 1920 he shared
studio space and collaborated with Figueroa Aznar. Unlike his friend, how-
ever, Chambi did not marry into the upper class of Cuzco and therefore had
to support himself through his trade. Thus his skill, while not parlayed into
production meant for Cuzco’s small visual-arts circuit, did serve to estab-
lish him as a successful artisan with a clientele among the elites. By most
accounts, his portraits for the middle and upper classes of the city allowed
him to become firmly grounded in the middle class himself (López Mon-
déjar 16).
As Thomas Krüggeler has outlined in his article on the topic, relations
between indigenistas, working-class groups, and the indigenous population
in the early twentieth century were complicated and often contradictory. At
the end of the nineteenth century, the groups were not given to collabora-
tion and indeed tended to maintain a distance from one another. Skilled
workers known as master artisans, for instance, were likely to mark their
difference from those they considered indios through discrimination and
were, in fact, regularly accused of serious abuses against indios (180). This
distaste for the indigenous likely stemmed from the conceptualizations
that marked urban workers as the vanguard of industrial modernization
and thus symbols of the coming modernity that the new economy would
bring. This vision of urban workers, lodged within workers themselves, was
buoyed up by a binary opposition with the indigenous population, which
was thought of as rural, certainly, and also as backward (164, 176).
Until Leguía’s oncenio, the same master artisans—and by extension
the working-class groups that they led, such as the Sociedad de Artesanos
del Cuzco, founded in 1870—had difficult relationships with indigenista
intellectuals. As Krüggeler describes it:
Cooperation with indigenistas could only go so far without putting these
crucial social ties at risk. When students went beyond describing the
great Inka past of Cuzco and began criticizing the contemporary repres-
sion of the Indian by rural gamonales (bosses), many artisans did not fol-
low. After all, a student could elaborate on the problem of gamonalismo
at length without provoking serious reactions. But for craftsmen who met
with hacendados in the city council and at the shooting-stand, this was a
delicate topic, one they refused to touch. Also, a university student could
recite the writings of González Prada at length and it sounded academic,
but from the mouth of an artisan it could easily sound subversive.
(179–80)
The Cuzco that Chambi encountered upon his arrival must have
been deeply marked by this separation between urban working class and
indigenistas, and this circumstance suggests the importance of his initial
contact with the city’s social structures through art, as represented in his
relationship with Figueroa Aznar. This contact with the art world, limited
as it was, facilitated the close interactions that Chambi seems to have had
with indigenistas.
Furthermore, the great photographic activity that Chambi engaged in
during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s occurred during a period in which there
was a much closer relationship between indigenistas and workers. Although
distance still existed between the two social actors, the growing presence
and solidity of the Cuzco working class led this latter group to separate
itself from its traditional allegiance to the landowning elites and to pro-
nounce critiques that understood the hacendados’ deep ties with incipient
urban modernization (184). Working-class groups, including urban wage

earners and rural peons, allied themselves to indigenistas, who provided
sharp critiques against gamonalismo (Deustua and Rénique 85–91). Given
Chambi’s markedly indigenista images, it is reasonable to infer that he was
part and parcel of this general rapprochement between workers—especially
artisans—and indigenista intellectuals.
Chambi’s exposure to different social actors—indeed, his intimate
cohabitation with them and their claims in the social sphere—appear in
his work through depictions of labor and class. Several photographs, such
as the self-portrait “Chambi trabajando en su estudio de la calle Marqués,
junto a su equipo de ayudantes” (fig. 4), taken in 1935, show a willful self-
construction as an artist. The photography in question shows Chambi be-
fore an easel, with a fine paintbrush in hand. He is touching up the portrait
before him, and in the spaces immediately next to him, other portraits
stand to reveal the master’s work. They all depict people in fastidious upper-
class dress, phenotypically whiter than the majority of Cuzco’s populations
and certainly whiter than the photographer himself. Significantly, all six
of the photographs shown in this picture are portraits, and all, save one,
show a full frontal or three-quarters view of the sitter. The style is typical
of portraiture. If the portraits are any indication, Chambi’s main effort in
this photograph seems to consist in outlining the sitters’ features, perhaps
coloring the images and through these techniques creating emphasis.
Given Chambi’s pensive and focused position before his work on the
easel, one might imagine that this image, first and foremost, wishes to com-
municate the continuities between Chambi’s activity and painting. The fa-
mous self-portrait “The Artist in His Studio” (1855) by the French realist
painter Gustave Courbet articulates a similar spatial logic, with the artist
occupying a prominent central position while others seemingly exist in his
orbit. This logic may also be enacted here, but it also bears mention that the
other works that surround Chambi emphasize his ability to produce them,
and to do so in a serial fashion. The abundance of labor for the creation of
these portraits is not limited to the posed, reflective presence of Chambi
at the center of the photograph; rather, the intensity of labor behind these
portraits is suggested by the two female assistants to Chambi’s far left and
by the male assistant to the right. A Fordist production line comes to mind.
The two women on the left, divested of individuality both by their black
smocks and by their identical postures before identical worktables, suggest
a labor that is very unlike the artistic one the head photographer is engaged
in. Similarly, the male assistant to the right, who is bent over with his back
figure 4. Martín Chambi, “Chambi trabajando en su estudio de la calle

Marqués, junto a su equipo de ayudantes,” 1935. Archivo Fotográfico Martín
Chambi.
to us, does not mimic the photographer either. He seems to be either tinker-
ing with or preparing an airbrush for use. The airbrush was a common tool
in the period’s photography, and a tank of gas with its gauge and hose are
clearly visible in the picture.
On the whole, this photograph communicates the capacity to produce
portraits in a way that paired the aestheticized, “artisitic” touches that the
elite might demand from any portrait with the kinds of labor-intensive,
team production that might be expected of factory-produced goods. This
photograph, like others, insists in a contradictory yet compelling way
on photography’s position and relevance to both technological and high-
cultural expectations. Particularly for a photographer who sought to place
his work in a market dominated by modernizing yet regional elites, this
seems a prudent and savvy strategy. It goes without saying that this image
intimates an alternative understanding of the artist, one that allows mod-
ern technology to be included in his array of techniques.
His reliance upon middle-class portraiture for his livelihood notwith-
standing, Chambi also turned out a considerable number of images of in-

digenous subjects—whether of indios or of representations of indigenous
culture or history—that we might in a first instance call indigenista images.
The existence of these images does not, of course, have to be understood as
a denial or refutation of Chambi’s portraiture business. Indeed, in certain
instances, his indigenista photographs are embedded within the service re-
lationship Chambi had with elites. The book Cusco histórico, published in
Lima in 1934 and edited by the sugar-plantation owner and collector Rafael
Larco Herrera, included many of his photographs. The book was published
both as a celebration of Cuzco and as a sort of travel guide and promotional
text for potential and actual visitors. The father of the well-known arche-
ologist Rafael Larco Hoyle, Larco Herrera explicitly thanks Chambi in his
introduction to the book, because Chambi’s photographic collection was
used to represent many of the sites in Cuzco and in the surrounding area.
Furthermore, the editor’s introduction reveals that a veritable who’s who of
cultural and social elites in Cuzco and elsewhere with links to indigenismo
had participated in the book: Luis Valcárcel, José Sabogal, Carlos Ríos Pa-
gaza, Figueroa Aznar, and Camilo Blas (7–8).
The book contained over five hundred illustrations, counting the mid-
dling quality reproductions of photographs, paintings, and drawings. It is
indicative of their status as anonymous illustrations and not artwork that
none of Chambi’s photographs carry an attribution. The same is not the
case for paintings, the reproductions of which are clearly attributed in all
instances. All texts are also clearly attributed. Though many of his better-
known images are quite noticeable even from a quick glance through the
text, both the goals of the book and its classification of photography as
illustration did not allow the photographs to be taken as anything more
than documentation. In and of itself, Cusco histórico—with its involved and
authoritative relation of Inca history by the indigenista Luis Valcárcel, its
ample depiction of indigenous culture through indigenista representations,
and its at times touristic attempt to communicate the region—stands as a
complex object through which to study both the driving forces and idiosyn-
crasies of indigenismo. In this book, photographs gesture solely to an indio
that exists in an idealized moment prior to the modern one.
The location of Chambi’s practice at a specific, inferior position with
respect to lettered cultural discourses of the moment frames and energizes
the contradictions in the compositions. A book like Cusco histórico outlines
precisely this sort of relationship, as in it photography is instrumentalized
as a tool for scientific, mostly anthropological and archeological, observa-
tion. This usage overwrites the photographs through the authority of the
accompanying text. For example, to mention but two images, both “El indio
y su llama” (1930) and “Cargador de chicha en Tinta” (n.d.) are included
in the book under the section “Cusco virreinal: Paisajes, pueblos, tipos,
costumbres” (278, 279). These photographs are well known in the Chambi
oeuvre: the first presenting a view of an indio in a natural landscape and
the second depicting Miguel Quispe, a labor organizer in the Cuzco region,
in traditional dress and engaged in seemingly jovial labor. The images are
invested in deploying idealizations of indigenous subjects by emphasizing
the indios’ synonymy both with nature and with their animals, on the one
hand, and their intrinsic propensity to work, on the other. The editor of
Cusco histórico chose these photographs because they dovetailed with a folk-
loric understanding of indigenous life. Given the turmoil in the form of
indigenous uprisings, organization, violence, and other types of resistance
that mark the contemporary moment, this book expressed a deep anxiety
about a changing indigenous population (Deustua and Rénique 69–81).
The location of photography as a cultural and technological practice
within a social context turns out to be of paramount importance in the case
of Chambi, and perhaps in every case. These considerations on the location
of photography within a constellation of competing cultural practices—
and especially in relation to lettered production—inflect every individual
photograph. Contexts represent precisely the reasons why Chambi’s pho-
tographs are able to represent anything to begin with. By this I don’t mean
how, technically or mechanically, cameras are able to produce images of
the real, but rather how social contexts exist to imbue photography with
the capacity to make meaning. In his work on Latin American photogra-
phy, Robert Levine has provided ample empirical evidence regarding the
varied functions of photography in relation to the different affiliations that
a given work has to the social body. In this way, he has noted, for instance,
the uses of cartes de visite and of police photography in nineteenth-century
Latin America (24–32).
Furthermore, John Tagg, in his studies of the history of photography
in Europe, has made the case for a careful contextualization of photography
alongside other cultural practices and institutions in order to reveal how
photographs construct meaning. In The Burden of Representation, he asserts,
“What alone unites the diversity of sites in which photography operates is
the social formation itself: the specific historical spaces for representation
and practice which it constitutes. Photography as such [h]as no identity.
Its status as a technology varies with the power relations that invest it. Its
nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents that define it

and set it to work. Its function as a mode of cultural production is tied to
definite conditions of existence, and its products are meaningful and leg-
ible only within the particular currencies they have” (63).
Tagg’s arguments are grounded in the very particular circumstances of
photography in Britain and France at the end of the nineteenth century—
the context his study addresses. To wit, both the intensification of its tech-
nological processes and the vigor and ubiquity of photographic practices
across the social body lead Tagg to assert two large areas of photographic
activity: the artistic and the scientific. In the Andes, however, we do not find
the same degree of acute industrialization and secure bourgeois cultural
domination on which Tagg predicates the formation of these two spheres.
Instead, these institutions are relatively weaker, and photography in Cham-
bi’s case must be understood within a much more fluid field. Chambi’s work
cannot be neatly assigned to artistic practice alone, and thus it resonates in
other areas as well, such as trade and tourism.
This is demonstrated in two portraits that are located outside the
confines of either formal upper-class portraiture or instrumental lettered
production concerning visual images. These two virtually identical photo-
graphs provide an interesting counterpoint to indigenismo and its modern
projects, as they engage actively and fully in a number of conceptualiza-
tions of modernity.
The first image, entitled “Primera motocicleta de Mario Pérez Yáñez”
(fig. 5) and taken in 1930, provides an excellent example of Chambi’s pro-
clivity for placing contradictions at the center of his photographs. A man,
decked out in riding gear, sits atop an American-made motorcycle in what
seems to be one of Cuzco’s poorer neighborhoods. This seems likely be-
cause, unlike other images of central Cuzco from the same period, there
are no electric lights, overhead cables, paved roads, or any other sign of the
many advances the city had undergone by 1930.
The second, depicting exactly the same location from a similar but not
identical perspective, is entitled “Autorretrato en motocicleta” (fig. 6) and
was almost surely taken on the same day as the first image. It shows the
photographer dressed up in a sharp suit, complete with sunglasses and an
English cap. Though his shoes are dusty, everything else about him seems
polished and planned, right down to his rather suggestively daring position
atop the motorbike.
Although little has been written about these two photographs, an in-
terview with Teo Allaín Chambi, the photographer’s grandson, revealed the
figure 5. Martín Chambi, “Primera motocicleta de Mario Pérez Yáñez,” 1930.

Archivo Fotográfico Martín Chambi.
figure 6. Martín Chambi, “Autorretrato en motocicleta,” 1930. Archivo

family history behind them. According to him, the sportsman Pérez Yañez
was a friend of Chambi’s, and he, flush with pride in his new motorcycle,
invited Chambi out to see it. Chambi took the opportunity to bring his
camera and take portraits of his friend and himself.7 Thus the photographs
are inscribed in the personal dynamics of friendship even as they, both
through the process of photography and the presence of the motorcycle,
gesture openly to the larger context of technological modernization.
Viewed as documentation, the first of these photographs supports
observations regarding the active self-representation that middle-class
mestizo subjects embarked on at the time, and especially the strategies that
they took up to engage fully with the possibilities of social ascent promised
by the moment. The motorcycle that Pérez Yañez rides, and its prominent
Peruvian flag, lobby for an amalgam of the mestizo and technology that
take the form of an athletic, vigorous nationalism. Likewise, Pérez Yañez’s
pristine—one might say sanitized—outfit and his unflinching stare away
from his immediate context succinctly put forth another way in which,
through neglect and denial of what surrounds him, modernity could be
represented. In either case, the portrait stands as a sort of monument to the
transformative possibilities of modernity in the Andes, understood through
technology and consumption. Also in both cases, ideas of the modern are
linked only to the figure in the foreground, but are also defined by their op-
position to whatever lies in the background.
The self-portrait—which it likely is not, as someone else seems to have
taken the picture—raises similar issues while neatly implicating Chambi in
these considerations, thus placing at the forefront the role of the photogra-
pher and photography itself in these elaborations. Most acutely in the case
of Chambi, the promise of a modernizing society seems undeniable in the
thoroughly cosmopolitan figure that he cuts. Tellingly, nothing in his self-
representation points to his indigenous or rural roots.
It is worth contrasting the modern subjects that these two portraits
evoke to a local, immediately adjacent example of indigenista lettered prac-
tice. Around the same time that the pictures were taken, the leading indi-
genista Luis Valcárcel’s influential text, Tempestad en los Andes, proposed
a radically different avatar for the modern in an attempt to provide the
theoretical conditions needed for the realization of progress. Valcárcel’s en-
gagement with archeological tours, with Incan theater, and with the promo-
tion of Cuzco as a cultural center put him at the forefront of the effort to
create a peculiarly modern culture for the highlands, as Tamayo Herrera
points out (Indigenismo cuzqueño 185–97). As Tempestad described it, this
new national and regional culture of which he was the spokesperson was
to be accomplished by the messianic presence and energies of the indige-
nous peoples in a return to preconquest splendors. Written as a series of
stories, vignettes, and essays, Tempestad announces a return to the Incan
Empire and in this fashion dovetails with the multiple discourses, such as
the Pachacuti and the myth of the Inkarrí, that have predicted restoration
of indigenous power through a sudden transformation.
It would be naïve to believe that Tempestad represents simply a closed
system that is not elsewhere equally imbricated in the rest of Valcárcel’s and
the indigenistas’ activities more generally. How else to understand his insis-
tence that the essence of indigeneity lay not in the present but in a remote
past, locked in the biological matter of the indigenous population itself?
In typical fashion, Valcárcel expresses indigeneity in close relationship to
concepts of the natural:
The centuries passed; for the Race it was yesterday. The spent fields
awaken from their sleep of stone. There is a slight fluttering of wings;
quietly a slow dragging of caterpillars is sensed; something like the deaf
prelude of a faraway symphony. Nature lives its springtime miracle.
The shapeless mass of the dead peoples also moves and all the sepul-
chers become wombs for the New Life.
There is a springtime miracle of the races.8 (20)
This conception of the indigenous as a spirit hermetically sealed in the
earth itself allowed, after all, the creation of a role for those who would de-
scribe the coming transformation, precisely as Valcárcel did. If a new life—
that of a messianic indigeneity—is coming into existence, then Valcárcel
understands himself as a midwife to it.
What that cloistered indigeneity demands is precisely the modern sci-
entific discourse—archaeology and anthropology, in Valcárcel’s case—that
could verify and especially speak on its behalf. This conceit is commonplace
in indigenista writing, and it is what makes Labor such an important coun-
ter. While the indigenous population is described as a powerful force, it is
always invariably mute. This silence, in turn, makes demands on the intel-
lectuals that wish to represent it. In Valcárcel’s case, speaking for it requires
both a modern, scientific, and academic procedure and the necessary pub-
lic institutions to carry out this work of objectification. It is no coincidence
that the rise of Valcárcel and the indigenistas occurs at the moment of the
rise of the modern university in Cuzco, under the American rector Alberto
Giesecke.9 In Valcárcel’s career and work, this modern institutional culture
rests upon the object of knowledge and speculation that is indigeneity. Here
too, then, it is an imagined nonmodernity, even antimodernity, that para-
doxically comes to assure the existence of modernity in the Andes.10
Certainly, we could make similar observations in other spheres and
glean more about lettered culture’s peculiar articulations of modernity.
It is worth stressing that the example I cite above originates in hegemonic
processes linked to the letter, in this case literature, but also the university.
Tempestad noisily predicts an indigenous revolution, at times presenting it
as bloody and at others as peaceful. Read from the perspective of other in-
digenista and nativist discourses that populated the Andes and the rest of
Latin America at the time, Valcárcel’s propositions strike a familiar note.
The Mexican José Vasconcelos, for instance, had propounded a similar, rev-
olutionary ascendancy of the cosmic race in his (in)famous La raza cósmica,
from 1925. Situated among other texts, then, Tempestad may reasonably be
understood as another, notable example of revolutionary discourse based
on the alterity of indigenous peoples. However, the social context within
which Valcárcel writes, and the position of privilege that he writes from,
cast a different light on Tempestad’s effectiveness. Indeed, as both his bi-
ography and studies on the indigenista luminary suggest, Tempestad and
other writings existed within a social structure that in almost every respect
contradicted the revolutionary voicings of the treatise.11
Valcárcel’s own position as an upper-class intellectual who married
into landed wealth, as well as his preeminence in academic institutions,
are not the best indicators of these contradictions. In the chapters of her
book that directly address the Cuzco intelligentsia of the early twentieth
century, Marisol de la Cadena recounts the obsession that these figures had
with hygiene practices among the lower classes. In particular, de la Cadena
points to the ruling classes’ efforts, through the passage of municipal laws,
to sterilize and sanitize the Cuzco marketplace (68–72). The idealization
of the indio into the living representation of the glorious Incan past was
also threatened by the daily presence of indigenous people in the often
dirty markets and, in particular, by what this presence entailed. Integral
to modernization, migration to urban centers—and we should remember
that this fate was also Chambi’s—unavoidably modified the culture of the
protagonists of such a shift. Thus the lettered classes’ call for sanitation,
and their dogged attempts to recast the marketplace and its vendors in the
hygienic, white-aproned, and licensed image that they conceived, signified
an attempt to shape the reality of a modernizing Cuzco to their own ideo-
logical ends. While there is no historical record of Tempestad inspiring a
revolution among indigenous people, we may plausibly understand it to be

one in a long line of lettered edicts that sought to conceptualize and also to
shape indigenous people in favor of interests foreign to their own.12
This brief commentary on one particular indigenista text illustrates
the seeming difficulty of articulating a discourse critical of a social status
quo from within a society’s central institutions. A revolutionary discourse
like Tempestad’s appears to have been effectively nullified as a discourse of
social change—which it presented itself as—by the exigencies of its con-
text. While it preaches social change, it drives home the need for the indig-
enous population to be taken in hand by intellectuals and by the class these
intellectuals represent.
While I cannot and do not discount the possibility for social change
through indigenista discourse, its continuous reassertion of traditional
dynamics between subalterns and their tutors cannot be ignored. In the
Andes, where class and ethnic strife has always been present actively or
latently, it is possible nevertheless to imagine and to document cultural
discourse that escapes the profound contradiction that we witness in Tem-
pestad. This critical effectiveness ranges from the possibility of inciting real
disruptions in the social fabric to providing alternatives to the visions that
the ruling social groups and in particular the lettered have of Andean soci-
eties and their futures. The latter is achieved in Martín Chambi’s images.
In this region, but also in other areas of Latin America, then, it would
be possible to measure the critical effectiveness of cultural discourse accord-
ing to its distance from the traditional institutions of power, whether these
are seen as organic to a weakening land-based oligarchy or to an upstart
export bourgeoisie in early twentieth century, as we saw with Labor. While
Tempestad lies close to these socioeconomic groups, with the attendant ef-
fects on its critical possibility, obviously this is not the case for all lettered
production in the Andes. For example, José Carlos Mariátegui’s writings
on what he called the neocolonial nature of the Peruvian state vis à vis its
indigenous populations came to light in a variety of periodicals of very lim-
ited distribution. One could argue that Mariátegui’s was an attempt to re-
locate “truth as power,” as Foucault would say in “Political Function of the
Intellectual,” in the parallel print organs, such as Amauta and Labor, that
he set up to counter the state’s institutions. Mariátegui, as we have seen in
this book, inhabited quite a different position in the social body than did
Valcárcel. While he must still be understood as a member of the lettered
class, his allegiance and proximity to the institutions that maintained the
status quo was distanced, to say the least.
Mariátegui’s activities within the booming world of print journalism,

but also at its fringes, are good to keep in mind when addressing photogra-
phy and its practitioners in Cuzco. Photography such as Chambi’s might be
thought, in a first instance, to function analogously to peripheral lettered
production like Mariátegui’s in the early twentieth century, insofar as it
is located quite far—in Chambi’s case metaphorically and literally—from
the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes and the salon culture of Lima, two
significant representatives of the hegemonic visual culture in Peru. So, just
as Mariátegui’s critiques should be understood in their distance from the
traditional institutional position of a mainstream indigenismo in order to
begin to grasp the full array of the former’s critical and discursive possibili-
ties, photography as practiced by Chambi must be placed at a distance from
but also in relation to the work of painters such as the indigenistas José
Sabogal and Camilo Blas, a comparison that is indeed striking because of
their radically divergent portrayals of Andean subjects. In the continuum
of visual culture, Sabogal and Blas created the visual analogue of lettered
indigenismo, as works such as “Varayoc indio” from 1925 demonstrate.13
The mentioned divergence demands an account of visual culture that
somehow addresses the nettlesome differences between painting and pho-
tography, in both their technological and material aspects. While both vi-
sual and print cultures engaged the representation of indigenous subjects
in their works, the range of possibility available to each was quite distinct.
Where marginal print culture was continuous in its media and material-
ity with its wealthier forms, in these aspects photography represented an
acute departure from the visual practices that had come before it but that
were practiced contemporaneously. From its inception, photography was
characterized as an affront to and challenge against artistic genius, and
by extension individual creativity, as Walter Benjamin has asserted in his
foundational “Short History of Photography.” This situation arose precisely
because it was a technical and chemical procedure that, no matter at what
stage in the evolution of photographic processes, signaled an overwhelming
technologification of image-making. The new technology seemed to excise
the hand of man. The modernizing tendency implicit in photographic re-
production determined, in early twentieth-century Cuzco, its place within
aesthetic production. Photography’s allegiance to technology was deeply
problematic to local indigenistas, who were generally suspicious of new
technologies’ detrimental effects on local culture. As Poole has outlined,
this suspicion resulted because technology was closely associated with
modernizing trends from Lima, the city viewed by highland intellectuals

as Cuzco’s rival (175–76).
As no less an indigenista than José Uriel García described it in El nuevo
indio (1931), the only acceptable modern culture for many Cuzco indigenis-
tas was prescribed by a vision of the ameliorative effects of a high, aestheti-
cized culture. In García’s view, this model was encapsulated in the nuevo
indio, essentially a mestizo who eschewed “negative” aspects of the indig-
enous way of life. These negative aspects generally were associated with the
contemporary indio, who was viewed as a product of degeneration. Thus,
for García—and Valcárcel as well—the possible visions of modernity in
the Andes, be they a return to the Incan Tawantinsuyo or the emergence of
a mestizo figure that absorbed supposedly indigenous qualities in an urban
intellectual lifestyle, did not tend to make space for the effects of the ma-
terial processes of modernization on real Andean subjects. These subjects
milled about the modernizing reality of Cuzco at the time but usually en-
tered indigenista texts only in idealized form. Not so in photography.
Cusqueño indigenismo differed markedly from its most critically
savvy versions on the coast—and here, principally, Mariátegui’s—which
sought to wed the future to nationalist discourse. In Cuzco, the new mod-
ern subject was thought to be best articulated as a construction of a regional
subjectivity. Thus, European technologies—photography included—were
viewed as interruptions of an independent Andean progress toward the
modern expressed as a purely local phenomenon. Unlike European avant-
garde groups, who by 1930 had embraced photography as an expression of
the modern itself, in Cuzco photography was very much relegated to a hir
able skill, not indistinct to its reception in Europe eighty years earlier. One
might well surmise, given his humble origins and especially his connec-
tions to a rural indigenous ancestry, that Chambi had access to photogra-
phy precisely because of his marginal ethnicity, and not in spite of it.
To return to the paired portraits of Pérez Yáñez and Chambi, in them
we can discern this conflicted relationship between lettered indigenismo
and photography. However, I do not mean to generalize that this critical
position of photography with respect to one dominant lettered institution
is the case for all photos in the early twentieth century. It would not be a dif-
ficult task to find, for example, “official” photography, such as police photos
or anthropometric pictures, that not only allied themselves with hegemonic
institutions but also aided these in realizing their organization of society.
A contemporary of Chambi’s who was based in the nearby town of Sicuani,
Avelino Ochoa, produced such images for the local police and military. An-
other notable photographer working in the mining town of Morococha, Se-
bastián Rodríguez, dedicated a large part of his work to documenting and
advertising the modern, mechanized progress introduced into the region by
the much-maligned Cerro de Pasco Mining Corporation.
My argument with respect to Chambi’s photos is that they are coun-
terhegemonic in two ways—to two degrees, as it were. First, on the level
of their central subjects, they put forth a forceful rebuke to the modern
Andean subjects formed only by high culture. Clearly, in these images it is
technology and the cholo, or urban person of indigenous background—or
maybe the technologified cholo—that is being elaborated as a possible, vir-
ile, and assertive social subject. This is the case not just for the heroic Pérez
Yánez; it is also the case for Chambi, where the motorcycle serves as an ana-
logue of the camera: that is, modern and, importantly, not in the domain
of dominant social actors, as has been described. Pérez Yáñez and Chambi
may hope to stress their importance with these pictures, but they are not
of the same class as Escalante and Valcárcel, for instance. Here technology
takes on an iconographic dimension that symbolizes, fervently, the power of
modernization to include ostracized social subjects in the future—indeed,
to recast these subjects in its own image. One has only to think of the differ-
ence between these portraits of modern adventurers and those staid ones of
upper-class individuals Chambi produced in his professional studio work.
If this were the only level on which these photographs dissented from
a dominating indigenismo’s ideologies, they would attest to a complex, if
limited, struggle between two groups that can be defined both through race
and class. However, although these photos obviously focus on the figures in
the forefront, the images encompass a complex background as well. Indeed,
it is notable that neither of these two figures considers the context that
surrounds them. In contradistinction to much photographic production
of the period, in which archeologists are often pictured scrutinizing digs
and ruins, thereby focusing the viewers’ attention on valued artifacts, these
two figures look beyond their immediate surroundings. Their outward-
directed gazes in “Primera motocicleta” and “Autorretrato” signify a rift,
real and desired, between what the foreground figures symbolize and what
the background represents. In this instance, when we speak of the mod-
ernized mestizos’ rejection of their unmodern surroundings, these images
must be understood as the active construction both of a photographer but
also of a particular social subject struggling to emerge by marking its dif-
ference from the surrounding context.
The power of these pictures, however, is not limited to this more or

less active and conscious construction of the modernized mestizo in the
foreground. As we have noted, that figure, in the two versions we see here,
seems all the more modern by virtue of his contrast with the background
and what it represents. There, the denizens that share the space of Cuzco
at that historical moment are clearly visible, if not focused upon: children
with bare feet and ragged clothing, women dressed in long skirts carrying
heavy loads, men wearing ponchos and battered hats, and others simply
squatting in the stone streets. These subjects demonstrate no possession
of modern goods, nor are they characterized by them. On the contrary, the
curiosity many of them demonstrate before the scene marks their distance
from modernization’s possibilities, embodied here in the motorcycle but
also in the fine dress and accessories of those who sit upon it. Obviously,
they also gawk at the wealth that exceeds and excludes them.
Within the field of representation of these particular portraits, the
background belongs to the arbitrary capture that seems unavoidable in this
sort of on-site photographic practice. But the background’s arbitrary na-
ture cannot simply be ignored. Photography, at least of this sort, relies on
a physical world to produce its images, and those referents often exceed the
photographer’s capacity to suppress them. So meaning emanates, too, from
the figures in the background, obscured as they are by distance, movement,
focus, and lighting. All stand in counterpoint with the active construction
of identities in the foreground.
Their presence can be understood to function as a foil. Such a reading,
however, would fail to consider the extent to which their presence mocks
and undoes the pictures’ intended purpose. These shadowy figures persist
in the photograph as a reminder not only of the resounding absence of tech-
nology in their existence, as the rustic buildings and dirt roads that they
walk on suggest. They also recall and echo the race, and in Chambi’s case,
the origins, of the pictures’ central subjects: the majority, mostly children
and women, have clearly indigenous features and wear the ponchos, polle-
ras (long skirts), and llicllas (mantels) typical of Andean rural life. While
the portraits’ main subjects compete with dominant indigenista paradigms
of modernity’s ideal subjects in the Andes, here the tension between back-
ground and foreground operates forcefully as a reminder of social and cul-
tural inequalities that persist.
In the history of photography in the Andes, this reminder is no small
thing: if one looks at these two pictures, it becomes apparent that the arbi-
trary capture of these figures and the impoverished world that they inhabit
tenaciously denies the discourse on modernity proposed optimistically in

the foreground by the photographer. By extension, because those figures
bring a poor urban indigenous existence into sharp focus, they also deny
discourses that emanate from lettered indigenismo. Both those strategies
for articulating modernity rely on the erasure, or at the very least the active
ignoring, of contemporaneous impoverished urban subjects, often of indig-
enous origins. These subjects, marginalized as they are, are also by default
a part of modernity and are indeed involved in their own process of becom-
ing modern, even as they seem only to be onlookers. As Aníbal Quijano
and others have suggested, modernity is a phenomenon that by the twenti-
eth century takes shape everywhere, albeit in different ways (140–41).14 Pho-
tography’s viability as an oppositional cultural practice in the Andes lies
precisely in the possibility of its formulating this sort of critical memory
in opposition to the more fluently ideological propositions of lettered indi-
genismo (and also of other discourses that sought to claim the modern for
particular subjects, such as the Spain-centric Hispanism of José de la Riva
Agüero).
One final image richly illustrates the possibilities of such photogra-
phy, a photograph that Chambi took in the Cuzco courthouse in 1929. It
places a group of six indigenous persons, who sit waiting in an innocuous
room, in the middle and foreground of the picture. They are surrounded
by a diversity of objects and motifs: a grandfather clock, florid carpeting,
carved wooden furniture, sunny windows, and, perhaps most ominously,
by several men who seem very clearly not to be of their race or class. In this
picture, figures in modern dress inhabit the background and thus invert the
positions of the people in the portraits we have studied above.
Beyond its function as a portrait, the motive for the picture has been
difficult to ascertain. The title, “Campesinos indígenas en el juzgado”
(fig. 7), offers some clues. Could these be indigenous representatives sent
to make demands for justice in the provincial capital of Cuzco? Are they
part of the social upheaval in rural areas that was noted by indigenismo?
Are they at the courthouse for some other purpose? Are they related to each
other, or are they strangers simply waiting together? A recent interview sug-
gests that these indigenous subjects were photographed by Chambi because
they were to go on trial for the murder of a prominent landowner, although
this account has not been confirmed.15
The photograph’s availability to the most charitable tendencies in in-
digenismo is writ large across its surface. The slightly bowed heads, the
slouched shoulders, and the destitute yet profoundly human expressions on
figure 7. Martín Chambi, “Campesinos indígenas en el juzgado” 1929. Archivo

the subjects’ faces evoke pity and compassion. These qualities surely would
have bolstered that faction of the indigenistas who employed such imagery
in their written representations while continuously arguing for the indio’s
improvement by invoking his humanity, denied by the racism of his oppres-
sors. In this sense, the photograph functions to communicate indigenous
people across the gulf of their alterity, universalizing them for the viewer.
But the details of their appearance in this photograph also animate an-
other important response, both in indigenismo and more broadly. For the
humiliation and fragility that the subjects in this picture transmit can also
be understood to originate in the historical and social contexts that are also
present visually. In this way, the poverty of their dress, their bare feet, and
their expressions of worn resignation have to do not only with an active,
voluntary racism, but also with a comprehensive destitution that signals
more than the oppression of one group by another. Through this lens, these
figures stand as a testament to a constitutive problem in Andean societies:
the unevenness of modernity and of the distribution of its benefits.
For intellectuals such as Mariátegui, García, Valcárcel, Sánchez, and
others, this perspective on the destitute and disenfranchised indigenous

population that inhabited their same historical moment is decisive. It in-
forms their critiques, but only insofar as the indigenous subjects in the
twentieth century, who were subjects of migration, urbanization, and the
clash of cultures generated in these phenomena, became obstacles that
had to be overcome through transformation. This broad characterization
of early twentieth-century Andean lettered production seeks to encapsu-
late critical discourses of radically different sorts, as were Mariátegui’s and
Sánchez’s, for example. However, the difference in the proposed solutions
notwithstanding, these discourses took as their point of departure an in-
dio that must be ameliorated, a notion that seems crucial to grasping the
motivation behind the history of ideas that indigenismo represents in the
region.
We do not know whether Chambi’s intent in taking this picture lines
up with the treatment of contemporary indios by the majority of Andean
intellectuals of the period. It is possible to see, however, the ways in which
the understanding I have ascribed to indigenismo might be cited in the
photograph. It might be taken too easily as a reason to impose modernity
on those who seemingly need it.
Formally, however, “Campesinos indígenas” offers a rich, dense array
of visual cues that tend to belie its condition as a mute piece of evidence
and in particular to undo the social dynamics that underlie this condition.
If anything, what is at stake in this image’s representation is exactly the
relationship—or one of the possible relationships, perhaps the predomi-
nant one—of the lettered to the indigenous. After all, the picture darkly
but clearly locates four other figures, beyond the seated and standing in-
dios, in its visual field. Further from the foreground, and phenotypically
whiter than the indios, they are most significantly defined by their dress
and grooming. All wear suits and sport neatly cut and combed hair. The
two figures to the left seem especially comfortable in the courthouse. They
sit at a desk and work distractedly. In all cases, these four figures starkly
differentiate themselves from the picture’s other subjects through their ex-
pressions. Not a trace of anxiety or fear can be found in their faces. At least
one of these figures, the leftmost, has been identified as a district attorney
named Máximo Vega Centeno.16
Whatever the real relationship between these two distinct groups, the
obscured men’s easy body language indicates that they are at home in the
physical space, which is filled with objects that define them as modern, or
in any case more modern than the indios. Some of these objects would not,
strangely enough, be understood as modern in other contexts: neither writ-

ing, nor pens, nor eyeglasses are typically representative of modernity in a
North American or a European context. In Peru, however, these objects im-
ply the institutions from which modernity must emanate, those that have
taken the role of midwives to the modern: education and law. As such, all
the trappings in the photograph—the elaborately decorated rug, the heavy
wood furniture, the neatly wallpapered walls, and especially the grandfa-
ther clock that towers over the entire scene—define one side of the tension
that lies at the core of the photograph.
All these details taken into account, viewing this photograph as an al-
legory that coordinates intellectual and indio is not the most fruitful inter-
pretation. This option is attractive, as the presence of lettered and peasants
and the clear, yet troubled, relationship between them immediately sug-
gests the sort of social dynamics at the core of indigenismo. Isn’t the indio
during this period, and in this cultural production, a thing imagined by
lettered masters and thrust into the light of the public sphere? However, to
read the photograph in this way tends to legitimate an authorial perspective
that locates its meaning in a narrative that perpetuates itself by making an
object, a malleable content as it were, of indigenous people.
I do not deny photography’s condition as a practice that crafts cultural
products, nor its accidental, yet profoundly intrinsic, function as a witness.
Although we do not know the exact reason that this photograph was taken,
we do know that Chambi documented other events, such as archeological
outings, family ceremonies, and others worthy of note. In these ways too,
then, Chambi was concerned, whether as a service or for his own purposes,
with documenting historical moments and the subjects that dwell in and
are expressed through them. It is precisely this sort of documentation,
which may trump discourse, that is at stake in this photograph.
After all, the picture does not gravitate toward an insistence on the two
parties that make up its whole. On the contrary, the background figures
are precisely that; though ominous, they are obscured not only by darkness
but also by the contrast with the indios, who sit in a crisp light that distin-
guishes each of them, that individualizes those that were usually thought
of as part of an inhuman mass. Lest my reading be taken as of a kind with
lettered attempts to deploy the indigenous in favor of a lettered discourse,
I insist on this photograph as a representation of the indigenous subjects
themselves, not as objects to be pitied or symbols to be overcome, but rather
as historical subjects that resist and demand a space in modernity. Herein
rests the value of this picture: that it depicts indigenous people within an
alien, hostile space, a room and institution that is the legacy of hundreds of
years of colonialization and yet attributes to them a stubborn presence with
the quality of human dignity and defiance. Whatever the circumstances,
one cannot help but conclude that these indios are experiencing modernity
and have made it their own—in some incomplete way perhaps, perhaps in
a miniscule measure, but they have claimed it as part of their experience.
And this is a long way from understanding them as nonmodern.
I would like to close this chapter with one obvious detail that charac-
terizes both this photo and all of Chambi’s photography, and that directly
engages the lettered production I have addressed in previous chapters. To
my knowledge, in no instance does a Chambi image put forth the idea of a
revolutionary indigenous culture, not does it even articulate a single indig-
enous person as a revolutionary. This fact is all the more striking because,
in his vast work, Chambi did photograph indigenous leaders that were in-
terpreted by indigenistas as being revolutionaries, such as the rural labor
leader Miguel Quispe. Chambi’s oeuvre includes at least two images of this
public figure.
The contrast between the treatment of such figures in photography
and in literature could not be more striking. The works of Mariátegui and
Valcárcel and others delved intensely into the past and evoked brilliant fu-
tures when addressing figures such as Quispe. Chambi’s photography, on
the other hand, generally resisted the creation of broad utopias through its
images. On the contrary, as our analysis above has emphasized, his photo-
graphs have an intensely presentist prejudice. This synchronic penchant re-
fuses a revolutionary imagination that denies the present through a future.
By extension, in the Andes, it allows photography to represent the indig-
enous in modernity in a way that eludes the letter.
c onclusion
Reading Indigenismo,
Writing the Indio
A
recent article on the current dynamics of indigenous political
representation in Ecuador and Bolivia resonates deeply, in my view,
with the circumstances I have commented on in this book. In the text
in question, the political scientist José Antonio Lucero recounts how two
indigenous organizations, the FEINE (Ecuadorian Evangelical Indigenous
Federation) and the CONAMAQ (National Council of Ayllus and Markas
of the Qullasuyo), have augmented their abilities to represent indigenous
peoples by carefully maneuvering notions of Indian ethnicity that have in-
ternational purchase (52). In so doing, these social organs have effectively
traded on, with varying degrees of success, notions of indigeneity in order
to access resources and advantage. Lucero details how indigenous peasants
in Bolivia have seized the opportunity created by new legislation revital-
izing the ayllu in order to claim land and other rights. In turn, they have
been assisted by international actors such as NGOs that, since the 1990s,
have taken an interest in reconstituting traditional indigenous forms like
the ayllu that they perceive to be key features of indigeneity. Indeed, Lu
cero makes a point of signaling how economic and administrative support
163
164 ≈ reading indigenismo, writing the indio
for traditional forms of social organization is actually enticing indigenous

peasants to relearn ayllu traditions that had been lost (47–48).
In the upsurge of indigenous empowerment that has undoubtedly
taken place in the Andes in the last few years, Lucero’s study presents a
caution. He relays two critiques commonly made in Bolivia concerning
CONAMAQ, which organizes the revitalized ayllus: “it is a new set of elites
and not representatives,” and “it is a new elite that, like the old elite, just
wants to get money” (48). In other words, and citing the Aymara sociologist
Esteban Ticona: “It is clear that the new indigenous representation makes
possible the birth of a new elite that in theory is traditional, but in practice
reproduces external elements” (cited in Lucero 48).
In this context, the act of representing carries with it the implicit
threat of not representing faithfully. Rather than lament this circumstance
in the case of early twentieth-century indigenistas, or for that matter in
the case of indigenistas of more recent vintage, I have taken Lucero’s proce-
dure as instructive. What matters here is the internal logic—political and
cultural—of such representations and what it allows us to understand not
about indigenous peoples, but rather about the lettered and, indeed, the
dynamics of representativity in Latin America.
Two notions have generally been used to frame lettered indigenismo
to date. The first, from the perspective of literary studies, is the idea that
indigenismo as a discursive practice can be found primarily, or is best il-
lustrated, in high literary representations, including, of course, the novel,
but also the short story and the poem. In contrast, I interpret indigenismo
through a more ample, more fluid range of lettered practices, not in order
to deny the importance of high literary genres, but rather to contextualize
these forms in a continuous field of deeply related practices such as those es-
tablished in journalism, the essay, legal doctrine, popular representations,
and so forth. The list of potentially relevant fields is almost limitless. Ex-
posing the relationship between literature and broader lettered production
allows us to better grasp the cultural logic of lettered interventions within
the particular parameters of Andean societies and to better situate these
efforts within their complete ideological contexts.
As such, and through analyzing journalism, social criticism, and edi-
torial policy alongside readings of poetry and short stories, we must under-
stand indigenismo in the diversity of its expanded field. I have chosen not
to follow Mirko Lauer’s helpful division of indigenismo into two wide areas
of practice, which he terms indigenismo sociopolítico and indigenismo-2, in or-
der to differentiate political works from aesthetic practices (Andes imagi-
reading indigenismo, writing the indio ≈ 165
narios 33–37). This book does not distinguish between the two, not because
they cannot be distinguished, but rather because I am suspicious that the
commonalities that bring these discursive formations together at the con-
ceptual level are greater than the differences that marked them as separate
in the moment of their historical deployment. Lettered culture elaborated
indigeneity in the service of progress, and divisions of indigenismo into
political and aesthetic practices tend to obfuscate significant continuities
across those arenas. My sense is that viewed accordingly, the archive of in-
digenismo will prove itself still insufficiently explored, and a great wealth
of material from the movement’s heyday will likewise yield to investiga-
tion. The scholarship of Laura Gotkowitz, Gerardo Leibner, Yazmín López
Lenci, and Marc Becker is immersed in this important task. A first contri-
bution of this book, then, is to conceptualize indigenismo from the vantage
point of this expanded, if overlooked, production.
The second framing notion that motivates my study is the assumption
that, at the center of its discourse, indigenismo is actually about the indio. I
instead understand indigenismo as primarily a way of thinking about mo-
dernity, and thus I have not focused on the degree of verisimilitude that
various texts achieve in their representations of the indigenous. This per-
spective on indigenismo is not in and of itself new; indeed, Efraín Kristal
forcefully articulates this principle in his study of the relationship between
indigenista narrative and urban political discourse in The Andes Viewed from
the City (5–7), an idea that has been taken up by several studies since. I enter
into dialogue with this trajectory of thought in understanding indigenismo
as a specific attempt to eschew social underdevelopment and escape the
condition of coloniality that the indigenistas saw all around them, but no-
where so perfectly distilled as in the indigenous peoples that they studied.
In the introduction I articulated a working definition of modernity as the
effect of local responses to social democratization, technologification, and
the importation of foreign ideological apparatuses. But in conclusion, it
seems important to note that modernity is also helpfully understood in the
Andean context through precisely a kind of negative dynamic, wherein the
modern is pitched as an escape from a persistent and pervasive coloniality.
As such, indigenismo’s claims are properly understood to be anticolonial
and offer a way to access an often utopian postcolonial society.
The desire to escape coloniality resulted in a profound identification
between the indigenistas’ representations of indigenous peoples and their
culture, on the one hand, and the ideological constructs that they, as intel-
lectuals, disseminated in order to imagine a modern Peruvian nation, if
not also a unified Andean region. As the discourse of progress and futurity
tended to overshadow, indeed to dictate, how indigeneity should be articu-
lated, this identification increasingly took the form of an obfuscation. This
dialectic illuminates the tensions between modeling modernity and imag-
ining a particular subaltern subject.
There are several implications that emerge from this focus. I would
like to address some of these by way of conclusion, if only because they
should be clearly stated in order that they not be exaggerated beyond their
scholarly intent and purchase. The first and most important of these rests
in the assumption that, because indigenista intellectuals demonstrate in
their discourse a consistent need to make the indigenous coincident with
the writing of modernity in the region, they could not possibly have repre-
sented the indigenous population in any sort of accurate, trustworthy—
read objective—way. Furthermore, following this idea, one might assume
that indigenistas did not know anything at all about Andean indigenous
reality, but rather made it up or ignored it for their own instrumental and
discursive reasons. The second of these is what is perhaps the most reduc-
tive but also the most difficult to dispel of the implications that may ema-
nate from this study: that the indigenistas merely used the indigenous for
their own purposes, usurping their voice in a manner regrettably frequent
in Latin American, indeed in global, history. This last implication, because
of its ubiquity in the history of subalterns in Latin America, is also, admit-
tedly, a fundamental premise that the book takes as a point of departure.
Those interested in exercising the negative judgment that these analy-
ses make possible may certainly do so, and, at least to a limited degree, such
a judgment may find support in this study. After all, in following other
critics of indigenismo I have understood the movement skeptically in what
concerns its primary claims to representativity. However, I have pointedly
not focused on denying indigenismo’s representativity, and in fact my text
does not readily sustain such an argument. I have not, for example, tested
the indigenistas’ approximations of indigenous culture against a record of
other, competing accounts. Nor at any point have I, in an act of factual
contradiction, tried to give a verisimilar notion of what the culture and so-
ciety of indigenous peoples really were in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. I have
not documented the “internal” worldviews of indigenous peoples, a project
more properly central to indigenista and neoindigenista discourses in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Neither have I embarked upon an at-
tempt to reconstruct indigenous society at the time, which is the purview of
other valuable disciplinary perspectives and projects.
reading indigenismo, writing the indio ≈ 167
Instead, I deal here with the efforts of the lettered to represent indig-
enous culture and with their reasons for so doing. Beyond a judgment of
the impact that these efforts may have had on real populations—and it
is indubitable, as Laura Gotkowitz’s work on indigenismo in Bolivia indi-
cates, that these effects were real and profound—this focus allows us to see
the contours, the limitations as it were, of Andean lettered representations
(“Dominion” 137–41). This subject runs through all these chapters and is an
explicit topic of the last.
My sense is that research into the accuracy of indigenista representa-
tions, broadly conceived, would, in fact, reveal neither a total ignorance—
as Leibner’s work asserts—nor a complete usurpation to the point of
detriment, as Becker argues in his study of Ecuadorian indigenistas (“Indí-
genas” 13–14). The majority of the figures that I address in these pages may
have worked under very serious limitations to their epistemological con-
structions and approaches to the indigenous, but these conditions are a far
cry from total ignorance. For example, it should not be overlooked that the
beginning of the last century saw significant strides in the development of
modern archeology and anthropology in the region, as Sara Castro-Klarén
has studied revealingly in “The Nation in Ruins” (186–94). For instance,
Julio C. Tello (1880–1947), widely regarded as the father of modern Peru-
vian archeology, did much to institute scientific procedures in his discipline
and to expand the material bases for a knowledge of regional indigenous
peoples’ past and present.
The question concerning the depth of the indigenistas’ knowledge,
I submit, misses the point. It takes for granted the nature of knowledge
and its impact on the nuances of the relationship between lettered and
indigenous. This figuration of knowledge animates what is a profoundly
positivistic mode of understanding, where more knowledge, understood
quantitatively, permits a more faithful representation. In the context of this
book’s subject matter, such a perspective has the effect of either dismissing
or accepting, or some mixture of both, these literary texts.
Viewed in hindsight and according to these reflections, then, this book
can be divided into two movements.1 The first three chapters focus on the
writings of Mariátegui, Escalante, and Oquendo de Amat, who, broadly
speaking, tried to correct the inadequacies of colonial society by valorizing
indigeneity through proxies, whether these be the indio, his culture, or the
highland landscape to which he was intimately tied. Each in his own way,
but often through the implementation of foreign ideological and formal in-
novations such as Marxism and avant-garde aesthetic practices, sought to
transform the figure of the indio into a constant that would not only sur-
vive the processes of modernization but would eventually become a deposi-
tory of a proper identity and culture that the indigenistas could identify as
national and regional.
As a result, in the minds of the elites responsible for configuring the
parameters of the public sphere, and so too the opinions it disseminates,
indigenous people became further isolated from any agency in the real pro-
cesses of modernization, all the while still made to play a key role in concep-
tualizations of that modernization’s impact. Even proposals that insisted
on the integration of the indigenous population into the Peruvian nation,
such as Escalante’s calls for economic development, relied upon notions of
these same people that stressed their existence first as the labor that would
build the new nation and, secondarily, as the bodies that would consume
the goods it produced. In this case and in the others, the indio became a
sort of sacrificial offering that afforded safe passage into the prosperity and
true independence of a realized modernity.
Without taking an idealizing stance, the second half of this book pro-
vides a counterpoint to the conceptual isolation surrounding the indio
and indigeneity by discussing interventions that, while deeply informed
by and contextualized within the contours of indigenismo as an intellec-
tual and political platform, nonetheless exceed the modus operandi that I
have sketched above. Strict representations of the indio per se do not, after
all, take a primary role either in the photography of Martín Chambi or in
the working-class newspaper Labor. On the whole, however, both of these
projects remain similarly and intensely interested in indigeneity and do
represent it in their engagements with what modernity and modernization
might mean. They, however, do so by interpellating the indio to agency, by
offering us perspectives on indigenous peoples in the circumstances and
experiences that connote their own appreciation of and dwelling within
modernity: or, in other words, by offering representations that express
indigenous people’s own agency as social actors, not objects. Thus, these
works indicate to us, as so much cultural production must, the efforts of
subaltern subjects to exceed the status of being represented and instead to
represent themselves. I do not understand self-representation to be a utopian
achievement, nor am I unaware of the pitfalls of advocating for it. However,
I do, along with Lucero and Ticona, welcome the significant departure it
entails from a wholesale representation of others and the new sets of ques-
tions it might allow us to ask.
Notes
Introduction: Indigenismo, Modernity, Indigenismos, Modernities

1. Elizabeth Monasterios has very recently put forth a compelling argument
to the contrary. She notes the persistence, and indeed resurgence, of a worldview
exterior to modernity in the Andes, in particular in the work of members of the
Andean avant-garde such as Gamaliel Churata. See her “Uncertain Modernities:
Amerindian Epistemologies and the Re-Orienting of Culture.”
2. I have drawn heavily in this brief overview of indigenismo from a previous
article of mine. See Coronado, “Indigenismo.”
3. All translations from the Spanish are mine unless otherwise indicated.
4. I take the opportunity to thank an anonymous reader of an earlier version
of this book for reminding me of this current in Cornejo Polar’s later thought by
providing me with this citation.
Chapter 1: The Revolutionary Indio

1. For history of the period, see Halperín Donghi and Cotler, especially 185–226.
2. Martín Fierro (Argentina), Revista de Avance (Cuba), Hélice (Ecuador), and
Actual (Mexico) are but a few of the magazines that were published at the time. For
a fuller view of these publications, see Osorio.
3. En el escritorio de José Carlos discutíamos una tarde el título de la revista
futura José Carlos, Basadre y yo. El mayor problema era que el título debía de ser
algo integral. Basadre sugería algo relacionado con la época republicana, que es
el verdadero crisol de razas, Mariátegui defendía la cuestión de autoctonía, ya
enamorado del vocablo amauta. Amauta apareció.
4. El título no traduce sino nuestra adhesión a la Raza, no refleja sino nuestro
homenaje al Incaísmo. Pero específicamente la palabra Amauta adquiere con esta
revista una nueva acepción. La vamos a crear otra vez.
5. No podemos aceptar como nuevo un arte que no nos trae sino una nueva
técnica. Eso sería recrearse en el más falaz de los espejismos actuales. Ninguna
169
170 ≈ notes to pages 29–33
estética puede rebajar el trabajo artístico a una cuestión de técnica. La técnica

nueva debe corresponder a un espíritu nuevo también. Si nó [sic] lo único que
cambia es el paramento, el decorado. Y una revolución no se contenta de conquis-
tas formales.
6. See Denis Sulmont, El movimiento obrero en el Perú, for commentary on the
working classes; see Juan Günther Doering and Guillermo Lohmann Villena,
Lima, for an account of physical changes and population shifts in the city during
the period (223–62).
7. One of the main agents behind this change was Leguía himself. Leguía’s
government was certainly not the first in Peru to negotiate with foreign invest-
ment. However, patterns of investment during his regime were markedly different
from the first incursions of foreign investment capital in the early nineteenth
century. No longer were the British and the French interested in developing
mining and fertilizer production. Although large-scale investment was still the
standard, American foreign capital directed itself toward the space of the city, and
it is there that it had its greatest influence on the fabric of the nation. As Tulio
Halperín Donghi has eloquently mapped out in his history of contemporary Latin
America, the requirements and opportunities created by the new, twentieth-
century industries resulted in a migration boom, with people from the provinces
moving to urban centers all over Latin America (158–59).
The historical moment saw great changes in the Peruvian social landscape,
including the opening up and blossoming of new professions. In addition to
the positions created directly by the opening of trade offices, shipping firms,
export and import agencies, and those formed by the need to build the city’s new
neighborhoods, Lima’s human growth made possible and necessary the presence
of an entire lettered class. Journalists, lawyers, clerks, and teachers all became
fundamental to the changing city’s needs. That class made its living in the vast
administrative and bureaucratic processes that new business interests imported
along with their merchandise, but it also, and perhaps most importantly, sought
to meet (often at a profit) the needs of the other, unlettered masses which were
quickly forming in Lima (Miller 65–67).
8. See Sanjinés’s introduction for a tracing out of mestizaje’s ascendancy
in twentieth-century Bolivia, in particular his comments on the writer Franz
Tamayo (16–28).
9. I am thinking of a broad range of works, including Mario de Andrade’s
Macunaíma, Fernando Ortiz’s Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, José
Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica, and José María Arguedas’s Los ríos profundos. I am
aware that the versions of mestizaje and hybridity that these texts propose or enact
are of widely different sorts.
10. This narratival Arguedas who writes in Spanish about his Quechua-
European heritage most draws Rama’s attention. That other Arguedas, the one
who writes in Quechua and looks to the future and to revolution, does not fit
into Rama’s teleology of heterogeneity. It is in Rama’s exclusion of texts such as
Katatay that we see the great cost of the criticism of heterogeneity, for it requires
notes to pages 34–39 ≈ 171
that cultures be mixed, and that the hybrid that springs from them exist, if not
precisely in harmony, then at least in accord with a particular historical moment.
The concern with adequately interpreting and representing the present moment
both forces a reconstruction of the past and, even more dangerously, usurps the
possibility of reflecting upon the future. Of the other discourses, of those that do
not share a commitment to the gradual development and revelation—in the end
the same thing—of the Latin American espíritu, heterogeneity guards its silence.
11. I am referring to the alternately subtle and blatant representational
strategies proffered in works such as Arguedas’ Raza de bronce (1919), Hidelbrando
Castro Pozo’s Nuestra comunidad indígena (1924), Uriel Garcia’s El nuevo indio
(1930), and Icaza’s Huasipungo (1934). See Carlos Franco’s work on Castro Pozo for
a study of the idiosynchratic turns socialism takes in this author’s work.
12. See Rodríguez Pastor. A later chapter, on the working-class paper Labor,
will address the role of newspapers during the period.
13. See Chavarría, Rodríguez Pastor, and Nuñez, for example.
14. El mestizaje—dentro de las condiciones económico-sociales subsistentes
entre nosotros—no sólo produce un nuevo tipo humano y étnico sino un nuevo
tipo social; y si la imprecisión de aquél, por una abigarrada combinación de razas,
no importa en sí misma una inferioridad, y hasta puede anunciar, en ciertos
ejemplares felices, los rasgos de la raza “cósmica,” la imprecisión o hibridismo
del tipo social se traduce, por un oscuro predominio de sedimentos negativos, en
una estagnación sórdida y morbosa. En el mestizo no se prolonga la tradición del
blanco ni del indio: ambas se esterilizan y contrastan.
15. For examples, see Chang Rodríguez and Vicky Unruh, “Mariátegui’s
Aesthetic Thought.”
16. Pero por encima de lo que los diferencia, todos estos espíritus ponen lo
que los aproxima y mancomuna: su voluntad de crear un Perú nuevo dentro del
mundo nuevo. El movimiento—intelectual y espiritual—adquiere poco a poco
organicidad.
17. Nuñez makes these interesting conjectures in his study, especially 7–37. For
other accounts of Mariátegui in Europe, see Rouillon 57–69 and Messeguer Illán
61–79.
18. [E]l carácter de esta corriente no es naturalista o costumbrista sino, más bien, lírico,
como lo prueban los intentos o esbozos de poesía andina.
19. See Oviedo’s annotated chronology in Obra poética for further details on
Vallejo’s life.
20. Vallejo es el poeta de una estirpe, de una raza. En Vallejo se encuentra, por
primera vez en nuestra literatura, sentimiento indígena virginalmente expresado.
. . . Su arte no tolera el equívoco y artificial dualismo de la esencia y la forma. El
sentimiento indígena en. . . . Vallejo es algo que se ve aflorar plenamente al verso
mismo cambiando su estructura.
21. Clasificado dentro de la literatura mundial, este libro, Los heraldos negros,
pertenece parcialmente, por su título verbigracia, al ciclo simbolista. Pero el
simbolismo es de todos los tiempos. El indio . . . tiende a expresarse en símbolos e
imágenes. . . . El procedimiento [de Vallejo] en su arte corresponde a un estado de

ánimo.
22. La palabra quechua, el giro vernáculo no se injertan artificiosamente en
su lenguaje; son en él producto espontáneo, célula propia, elemento orgánico. Se
podría decir que Vallejo no elige sus vocablos. Su autoctonismo no es deliberado.
Vallejo no se hunde en la tradición, no se interna en la historia, para extraer de su
oscuro substractum perdidas emociones. Su poesía y su lenguaje emanan de su
carne y su ánima. Su mensaje está en él. El sentimiento indígena obra en su arte
quizá sin que él lo sepa ni lo quiera.
23. Ample criticism contradicts Mariátegui’s reading. Most notably, as critics
such as Jean Franco and Antonio Cornejo Polar have demonstrated, Vallejo’s poet-
ics were born from his considerable and often traumatic experiences at the core
of modernity in the Andes. Vallejo’s trajectory from the small Andean town of
Santiago de Chuco to Lima, his stints as the “lettered” clerk at a sugar plantation
and as a tutor for a wealthy landowner’s children, and his often anguished reflec-
tion on the Andean world from the space of the city: all these traits exemplify the
experiences that the twentieth century’s rapid and uneven modernization held
in store for all those who, mostly out of economic necessity, ventured beyond the
Andes’ highland valleys. Those who, like Vallejo, chose to go beyond the limits of
a world whose borders were made at once more fordable but also more pronounced
by the urban center’s progress, did not simply leave that world and its traditions
behind at the port where they more often than not made their first pied à terre in
the city. At least in the early Vallejo, the negotiation between these two spheres,
carried out so that the dim but persistent fire of the one might not be violently
and terminally eclipsed by the electric brilliance of the other, was paramount. See
Franco, César Vallejo and Cornejo Polar, Escribir en el aire 235–45.
24. Mariátegui judges harshly: “Within an urban, industrial, and dynamic
atmosphere, the mestizo quickly makes up the distances that separate him
from the white man, until he assimilates to Western culture. . . . the mechanical
workings and the discipline of [European civilization] automatically impose
their habits and concepts on him. . . . For the man from the mestizo masses . . .
Western civilization represents a confusing spectacle, not a feeling” [Dentro
de un ambiente urbano, industrial, dinámico, el mestizo salva rápidamente las
distancias que lo separan del blanco, hasta asimilarse a la cultura occidental. . . . la
mecánica y la disciplina de (la civilización europea) le imponen automáticamente
sus hábitos y sus concepciones. . . . Para el hombre de poblacho mestizo . . . la
civilización occidental constituye un confuso espectáculo, no un sentimiento]
(Siete ensayos 313–14).
25. Some important exceptions exist, however, within the indigenista move-
ment. A case in point is the mestizo lawyer from Puno taken as an example of a
revolutionary indio, Ezequiel Urviola, discussed later in this chapter.
26. Lo único casi que sobrevive del Tawantinsuyo es el indio. La civilización ha
perecido; no ha perecido la raza. El material biológico del Tawantinsuyo se revela,
después de cuatro siglos, indestructible, y, en parte, inmutable.
La metamorfosis del hombre bate récord en el evo moderno. Pero éste es un

fenómeno peculiar de la civilización occidental que se caracteriza, ante todo,
como una civilización dinámica. No es por azar que a esta civilización le ha
tocado averiguar la relatividad del tiempo. . . . [Pero] hay épocas en que parece
que la historia se detiene. Y una misma forma social perdura, petrificada, muchos
siglos. No es aventurada, por tanto, la hipótesis de que el indio en cuatro siglos
ha cambiado poco espiritualmente. . . . el fondo oscuro de su alma casi no ha
mudado. En las sierras abruptas, en las quebradas lontanas, a donde no ha llegado
la ley del blanco, el indio guarda aún su ley ancestral.
27. This point of view was propounded by Louis Baudin in L’empire socialiste
des Inka, which Mariátegui had in his private library. My thanks to Jean Franco
for indicating the existence of this text to me. For a very helpful partial list of
Mariátegui’s library, see Vanden 127–52. For a discussion of Mariátegui’s use of
the concept of the ayllu, see Leibner’s study.
28. For a comprehensive history of the political uses of indigenismo in Peru,
see Kristal.
29. Ayala’s biography of Larico Yujra, an indigenous person who worked under
Mariátegui as a distributor of Amauta and Labor, contains several anecdotes
concerning the critic’s contact with urban workers in the late 1920s. In particular,
and startlingly, Larico Yujra notes that Mariátegui was actively seeking to find
translators that could carry his Marxist message into the highlands in Quechua.
30. In the newspaper El Tiempo, April 24, 1917, Mariátegui writes, “And if we
direct our gaze to the map we will find that the indios, who because of the general
Rumimaqui’s words dream of their dynasty’s restoration and of their symbolic
mascaipacha [an emblem worn by the Inca, symbolic of his dominion over the
empire], have risen up in arms and show their aggressive fists to the mestizos
who dare to subjugate and oppress them.” [Y si dirigimos la mirada al mapa nos
encontramos con que los indios que, por virtud de la palabra del general Rumi-
maqui sueñan con la restauración de su dinastía y de su mascaipacha simbólico se
han levantado en armas y les muestran los puños agresivos a los osados mestizos
que les sojuzgan y oprimen.]
31. The First Buenos Aires Communist Conference in 1929 clearly demonstrates
this tendency. The paper Mariátegui presented there concerning the importance
of race in Latin America, coauthored with Hugo Pesce, clearly contradicted the
Communist Party line. See Flores Galindo, La agonía de Mariátegui, 17–36, 93–110.
32. [L]a sierra amanece grávida de esperanza. Ya no la habita una raza unánime
en la resignación y el renunciamiento. Pasa por la aldea y el agro serranos una
ráfaga insólita. Aparecen los “indios nuevos”: aquí el maestro, el agitador; allá
el labriego, el pastor, que no son ya los mismos que antes. . . . El “nuevo indio”
no es un ser mítico, abstracto, al cual preste existencia solo la fe del profeta. Lo
sentimos viviente, real, activo, en las estancias finales de esta “película serrana,”
que es como el propio autor [Valcárcel] define a su libro. Lo que distingue al
“nuevo indio” no es la instrucción sino el espíritu. (El alfabeto no redime al indio.)
El “nuevo indio” espera. Tiene una meta. He ahí su secreto y su fuerza. Todo lo
demás existe en él por añadidura. . . . hoy la sierra está preñada de espartacos.
El “nuevo indio” explica e ilustra el verdadero carácter del indigenismo
que tiene en Valcárcel uno de sus más apasionados evangelistas. La fe en el
resurgimiento indígena no proviene de un proceso de “occidentalización” material
de la tierra Keswa. No es la civilización, no es el alfabeto del blanco, lo que levanta
el alma del indio. Es el mito, es la idea de la revolución socialista. La esperanza
indígena es absolutamente revolucionaria. El mismo mito, la misma idea, son
agentes decisivos del despertar de otros viejos pueblos, de otras viejas razas en
colapso: hindues, chinos, etc. La historia universal tiende hoy como nunca a
regirse por el mismo cuadrante.
33. The role of gender in the processes of modernization has been studied in
depth by Stephenson in several chapters of her book Gender and Modernity in
Andean Bolivia. For an overview, see her introduction.
34. I believe García first presented his theory of the “nuevo indio” in an article
entitled “El nuevo indio,” included in the first issue of the short-lived indigenista
magazine Kuntur, published in Cuzco.
35. A wealth of literature exists on the topic. See José María Arguedas and
Josafat Roel Pineda, “Tres versiones del mito de Inkarrí”; Nathan Wachtel, The
Vision of the Vanquished; Regina Harrison, Signs, Songs, and Memory in the Andes;
Frank Graziano, The Millenial New World; and Mercedes López-Baralt’s excellent
study El retorno del inca rey.
36. Germana, Messeguer Illán, and Rouillon for instance, reiterate this point
in their separate studies of Mariátegui’s socialism.
37. [L]a profecía apasionada que anuncia un Perú nuevo. Y nada importa que
para unos sean los hechos los que crean la profecía y para otros sea la profecía la
que crea los hechos.
Chapter 2: A Modern Andean Culture?

1. On manifestations of utopia in the Andes, see the historian Flores Galindo,
Buscando un Inca. His study is particularly useful in that it considers utopia in
both popular articulations and intellectual discourse. See also Kapsoli Escudero.
2. Mariátegui founded Peru’s Communist Party in 1928, while Victor Raúl
Haya de la Torre, Mariátegui’s one-time friend and later rival, founded the
Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) in 1924 while in exile in
Mexico. The two parties have been leading actors in twentieth-century Peruvian
politics.
3. Kristal’s The Andes Viewed from the City continues to provide the most useful
account of indigenismo in the Andes.
4. I am referring to the literary critic Ángel Rama’s seminal Transculturación
narrativa en América Latina and Deustua and Rénique’s Intelectuales, indigenismo
y descentralismo en el Perú, 1897–1931. While their interpretations of this particular
history of class dynamics are convincing, much work remains to be done on the
kinds of alliances that were formed between individual intellectuals, intellectual

groups, and working-class and indigenous organizations in the early twentieth
century.
5. While I realize that I invoke Habermas’s notion of modernity as an unfin-
ished project that should be completed, I depart from that articulation insofar
as here I speak within the parameters of one region, the Andes, and do not make
claims to a global project, as the German philosopher does.
6. Si el indio aprovechara en rifles y cápsulas todo [su] dinero, si en un rincón
de su choza o en el agujero escondiera un arma, cambiaría de condición, haría
respetar su propiedad y su vida. . . . En resumen, el indio se redimirá por sus
propios esfuerzos, no por la humanización de sus opresores.
7. Clorinda Matto de Turner’s dedication of her novel Aves sin nido (1889), a
major work of indigenismo, to González Prada marks his early importance for
social and political renewal and renovation.
8. A relevant text to this point is Fabian’s Time and the Other. The temporal
othering of indigenous peoples is a constant, to this day, in lettered production.
9. On the links between indigeneity and culture, it would be useful to study
recent political empowerment movements in Ecuador and Bolivia, such as the
CONAIE (Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador) and the
Movimiento Indígena Pachakuti organizations, which have deployed indigenous
culture in order to check free-market reforms, even as they have deployed that
same culture in an effort to gain clout within the establishment. The recent
mass demonstrations and strikes against the French-owned water company and
the privatization of gas companies are excellent examples, both Bolivian. The
CONAIE Web site (http://conaie.nativeweb.org) is a good source for information.
In light of recent indigenous uprisings across the Andes, characterized by different
degrees of organizational complexity, Vargas Llosa’s rather dire reading of
indigenous peoples’ backwardness and of the inflexibility of their cultures seems
much more imbricated in a complex denial of indigenous political resurgence than
we might suspect at first.
10. Gabriel García Márquez would say, “of solitude.” It is worth noting that
solitude, in his well-known novel Cien años de soledad, also functions as an expres-
sion of an incomplete and probably impossible modernity: Macondo is character-
ized by its inability to exceed its regional condition, as well as the uselessness of
the instruments of modernization in the town, notably technological ones such as
trains and photography. For this writer of the Boom, as for others of this group,
such as Vargas Llosa, the depiction of a failed modernization is paradoxical;
while the content of the novels puts these representations into fiction, the novels
themselves benefit from the modernization evident in the internationalization of
Latin American literature.
11. Mientras nosotros atisbamos, en la serranía nativa, sonriendo beatífica-
mente, la oportunidad de rehabilitarnos ante la Historia y asumir la responsabili-
dad de nuestros destinos, está de moda hablar del indio y compadecerelo, con
insultante piedad, sin tomarse el trabajo de conocernos, ni menos estudiarnos en

nuestro propio medio.
12. La literatura indigenista no puede darnos una versión rigorosamente verista
del indio. Tiene que idealizarlo y estilizarlo. . . . Por eso se llama indigenista y no
indígena. Una literatura indígena, si debe venir, vendrá a su tiempo. Cuando los
propios indios estén en grado de producirla.
13. The term gamonalismo comes from gamonal, a word used to refer to large
landholders in the Andes. The latter term comes from gamón, an asphodel that
kills off other plants through encroachment. Burga and Flores Galindo note
several sources for this etymology (106).
14. The critic Leibner has studied Mariátegui’s use of the concept of the ayllu,
or indigenous social unit, as a model for a classless society (93–132).
15. See Rama, La ciudad letrada, especially the sections on the modernization
and political radicalization of the intellectual class, 71–134.
16. Si mi olfato no me engaña, creo yo que en este “amoroso interés” que les
ha nacido a ciertos círculos de intelectuales y periodistas costeños por redimir
a la “raza madre” de su “cruel servideumbre” e “integrarla a la civilización y la
cultura,” palpita una tendencia revolucionaria que quiere aprovecharse de la gran
masa indígena, de su exasperación y de su fuerza, para el entronzamiento [sic] de
ideales bolcheviques y formas de gobierno soviéticas y comunistas en el Perú.
17. [L]as cholas [pasando] aretes de hilos verdes y azules por las peladas orejas
[de los corderillos] . . . , [comer] queso fresco, recién aprensado, y ‘hyatta’ de papas
nuevas, y beber chicha de maíz en sendos ‘qqeros’ y ‘chuas’ simbólicas . . . , [el]
compás de la ‘tinya’ y de las cristalinas voces de las cholas solteras . . . [y el] tener
propicios a los ‘Auquis’ y a los ‘Machus,’ los antepasados muertos. [Hyatta, also
huatya, refers to the cooking of potatoes in the embers of a freshly extinguished
fire, or under the earth with heated stones. A Quero or qiru is a wooden cup. A chua
is a wooden plate. A tinya is a small Andean drum. My thanks to Karin Ramírez
Cuadros and Iván Ramírez for their assistance with these translations.]
18. It is also possible that Escalante was exposed to this sort of rural indigenous
activity through the Peruvian Mission for Incan Art of the 1920s. The mission
organized field trips into the area surrounding Cuzco in order to document
local traditions and in so doing exposed many middle-class intellectuals to the
possibility of an indigenous, as opposed to Hispanic, cultural heritage. The
mission was the brainchild of Albert Giesecke, a North American who was
appointed as Director of the University of San Antonio de Abad, the largest
and oldest university in Cuzco, in 1910. Among his students and colleagues, he
counted the indigenista writer Luis Valcárcel and the photographer Juan Manuel
Figueroa Aznar. Little work has been done on Giesecke’s place at the origins of
Cuzco’s indigenista movement. A recent study on the topic is López Lenci’s El
Cusco, paqarina moderna.
19. Leibner’s already-cited work is indispensable for an understanding of the
usage of the term ayllu among Andean progressives.
20. Marisol de la Cadena includes a fascinating discussion on the role of prac

tices of “racial thinking” in indigenismo in her book Indigenous Mestizos, 14–19.
21. The Ley de Conscripción Vial, from 1922, is an especially nefarious example
of the sort of legislation Escalante supported. Laws like it marked the period of
Leguía’s government.
22. I am speaking about Ortiz’s Contrapunteo cubano and Henríquez Ureña’s
“Utopía de América.”
23. See Arroyo Reyes’s “La cruzada indigenista,” an informative article on the
association.
24. Originally, the congress was scheduled to be held in 1939, in Bolivia.
However, due to fallout from the Chaco War (1932–1935), Bolivia was not able to
organize the conference. Though hostilities in the Chaco War ceased in 1935, a
treaty was not signed until 1938.
25. The effects of Cárdenas’s policies on landholding society are depicted in
Rosario Castellanos’s Balún Canán.
26. José Antonio Encinas, an early advocate of the possibilities of education
in addressing indigenous problems, published numerous texts on the topic in the
early 1920s. Interestingly, he was the schoolteacher and mentor for several key
figures in the avant-garde indigenista Boletín Titikaka group.
27. This text consists of a transcription of Escalante’s report before the house,
as well as a number a number of other speeches. It will be referred to as the
Exposición hereafter.
28. En el Perú . . . , la cuestión indígena nunca fué debidamente planteada.
Nosotros mismos, los cusqueños, la hemos estimado tan sólo como un hecho
clamoroso de injusticia y crueldad. De ahí que nuestras campañas hayan tenido
siempre un tono de airada protesta y de reacción beligerante contra la indiferencia
de los poderes públicos y contra la política expoliadora de las clases dirigentes
y de los propietarios de las tierras. Esta nuestra actitud se hizo sospechosa ante
los elementos conservadores y la gran prensa, que nos atribuyeron propósitos
subversivos y hasta tendencias separatistas y locos anhelos de restaurar el Imperio
Inkaiko. En la Costa, entre los intelectuales y los políticos que desconocen del
indio fue tema socorrido de elucubraciones literarias y debates académicos,
cuando no plataforma de campañas electorales. . . .
Todo el mundo reconocía que el indio vivía sin garantías y sin esperanzas y que
era necesario hacer algo para redimirlo de tan clamorosa situación. Pero, en rea-
lidad, en el fondo, y excepción hecha de pasajeras preocupaciones, nada positivo
hicimos en defensa suya. Ahora mismo hay todavía miles de personas honradas
e inteligentes que creen que el indio es irredimible, que no sirve para nada y
que sería mejor acabar con él. Hasta 1919, en que, con el gobierno de Leguía, se
fundó la Pro-Indígena y luego la Sección de Asuntos Indígenas del Ministerio
de Fomento y, más tarde, la hoy desaparecida Dirección de Educación Indígena
en el Ministerio de Instrucción, nada práctico y efectivo se hizo. A lo más, leyes,
decretos y resoluciones que siempre fueron letra muerta ante la resistencia pasiva
de los funcionarios públicos y los elementos sociales predominantes. Nos hemos
conformado con declaraciones líricas en favor de “la raza oprimida” [sic]. Nuestra
Carta Política contiene algunos artículos en amparo del indio y de la comunidad
indígena que ahí están sin eficacia ni virtualidad alguna.
29. See Arroyo Reyes.
30. Ya es tiempo de rectificarse y plantear la solución del problema indígena en
el plano de las realidades y conveniencias nacionales. Por encima de infecundos
lirismos, se impone, a tono de la evolución económico social del Mundo, la
necesidad premiosa de transformar nuestra estructura nacional, aprovechando las
enormes masas indígenas, que son mayoritarias en el Perú, e incorporándolas en
nuestro régimen de vida como factores de producción y de consumo. . . .
Los pueblos que desean salir del atraso colonial, cobrar importancia en el
concierto de las naciones y estar capacitados para defenderse de toda extraña
agresión, necesitan aumentar sin tregua su producción y aumentar también la
capacidad adquisitiva de sus pobladores. Es utópico planear la industrialización
de un país mientras no tenga consumidores para el producto de sus industrias, y
no tendrá consumidores mientras la capacidad económica de la mayoría de sus
habitantes sea igual a cero.
31. See Arroyo Reyes for a history of the critique of foreign capital in the
Andes. Arroyo’s text is of particular interest because it situates Escalante within
one of the earliest groups, the Pro-Indígena, that articulated criticisms of
company such as the Cerro de Pasco Mining Corporation. Additionally, other
authors from the period, such as Mariátegui and Tristán Marof, were quite aware
of the detriment that foreign capital-fueled industrialization presented to local
populations and were vociferous in their denunciations of it.
Chapter 3: (Un)Happy Endings

1. El Perú no es sólo un problema social o un problema político: es también un
problema artístico. Es precisamente en el plano artístico donde tradicionalmente
ha sido más un problema y una posibilidad.
2. It would be interesting here to continue thinking of technique, and the
technology it so often requires, as a strategy to combat “underdevelopment” in
the region. One has only to reflect on how films such as Tomás Gutiérrez Aléa’s
Memorias del subdesarrollo juxtapose avant-garde filmic technique to the—in this
case Cuban—underdevelopment of class consciousness in order to realize that
advanced technology is still understood as a possible solution to Latin America’s
quest for a proper aesthetics.
3. Lauer’s Musa deals with this topic thoroughly. For a good compilation of
Latin American avant-garde literature that includes poetry focused on technology,
see Grunfeld’s anthology.
4. Charles Taylor expounds on this notion in his essay in Alternative Moderni-
ties.
5. The journal would have been called Celuloide.
6. According to José Luis Ayala, the edition was printed very slowly from the
month of December 1927 well into 1928 (Oquendo 169–76).
7. For some critics, the experimentation in the form of 5 metros constitutes the
poem’s value within the history of Latin American literature. See, for example,
Ortega’s assessment that Oquendo is “the most important example of the avant-
garde in Peru” (151).
8. On cinema’s inauspicious beginnings in Peru, see Bedoya’s accounts of show-
ings in remote areas of the sierra.
9. This difference between diegetic film practices and nonnarratival, avant-
garde production is at the core of film theory. For historical debates, see Mast and
Cohen 77–138.
10. All citations from 5 metros de poemas are taken from Jorge Eslava, Voz de
ángel, in which Oquendo’s book-object is included in a facsimile edition. The pages
of this facsimile edition, like those of the original, are unnumbered. Similarly, in
most cases it is not possible to give line numbers.
11. Peruvian poet Jorge Frisancho, unpublished essay on 5 metros de poemas.
12. In Latin American literature of the last one hundred years, the trope of
the carnival and its entertainments has often been used to signify moderniza-
tion, budding or developed. See, for example, José Martí’s “Coney Island” and
Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, in particular the early section on
Melquiádes and the gypsies.
13. For fuller theorizations of the migrant condition, see Cornejo Polar’s
“Condición migrante” and “Una heterogeneidad no dialéctica,” as well as the very
suggestive “Apertura” in Escribir en el aire. See also Bueno’s deft engagement with
Cornejo Polar’s idea in “Heterogeneidad migrante.”
14. José María Arguedas, in his article “La canción popular mestiza e india en
el Perú,” comments on the indigenous origin of the yaraví (46).
15. See Doering and Lohmann Villena, Lima, for comparisons of late nineteenth-
and twentieth-century Lima.
16. Ayala collects testimonials that recount beatings and torture heaped on the
poet (166).
17. Harmuth brings up the possibility that the final poem, “poema al lado del
sueño,” with its nonsensical verse, represents a (late) attempt at a new language on
Oquendo’s part (282).
18. In “La máquina como metáfora,” Bueno provides an excellent description of
the Latin American avant-garde’s habitual symbolic appropriation of moderniza-
tion. He includes enlightening commentary on Oquendo.
19. For details of Oquendo’s last years and his stay in Bolivia, see Ayala,
especially 211–18 and 293–300.
Chapter 4: An Assembly of Voices

1. See Robert Gooding-Williams’s useful discussion of allegory in Look, A Negro!
especially the first chapter. Gooding-Williams’s analysis of the ways allegories are
constructed around the bodies of racialized others roughly parallels indigenistas’

discourse on indios that I discuss here.
2. For an excellent review of the idealization of indigenous peoples in the early
twentieth century, see Leibner.
3. It would not be incorrect to align Mariátegui’s reading of indigenous peoples
with Rousseau’s canonical version of the noble savage, but only insofar as both
provide a construct through which to identify and critique modern Western
culture. However, this comparison is sustainable only in the most general terms,
as unlike the French philosopher, Mariátegui was well aware, despite his mytholo-
gizing tendency, that modernity was a goal to be achieved in the Andes and that
the indio he articulated was a means to this end rather than a resistance of it.
An interesting point of difference arises in this turn in Andean cultural
production during the period. At the same moment, on the other side of the
continent, Roberto Arlt’s Erdosain in Los siete locos (1929) was also reacting to the
prevalence of the self-made man, in the form of the inventor, by recasting himself
in that image. Arlt’s and Erdosain’s at least partial indoctrination into, but also
critical stance toward, this figure may signal a critical difference in River Plate
and Andean cultural models. The former seems to lack an Other which the latter
finds in the indio; thus, the first would seem to more easily process this difference
through absorption—even if failed—into a modern identity, while the latter is
able to create a site—the indigenous—that resists it.
4. As is known from his biography, Mariátegui himself had only had very
limited travel, at most a few weeks, into the highlands.
5. I do not mean to argue that the lack of reflection on this topic is a condition
of intellectual production of the period, as it is discussed in some of the period’s
most significant works. In fact, and although written under vastly different
circumstances, César Vallejo’s late work in España, aparta de mí este cáliz is
compulsive on the topic of the intellectual and his role in relation to the common
man that he often represents.
6. Julio Ramos’s study is a fundamental contribution to the analysis of lettered
discourse and power in modern Latin American letters.
7. Critics such as Favre have insisted in any case on the ties that indigenismo
creates between indigenous subjects and indigenistas (8–9). Most recently,
Estelle Tarica has carefully studied indigenista novels as attempts to create the
ideological models for solidarity between mestizos and indigenous peoples. See
her forthcoming study “Intimate Indigenismo.”
8. Zevallos Aguilar makes this case, especially in his conclusion (133–35).
9. “LABOR,” además, no necesita un programa especial. Es una extensión de la
obra de “Amauta” y sus ediciones. Aspira a ser un periódico de gran difusión.
Su publicación obedece a instancias de muchos de nuestros amigos de Lima y
provincias que quieren que nuestra obra cultural penetre en capas más extensas
del público. Para satisfacer este anhelo no basta la revista. Damos, por esto, vida a
un periódico.
10. By way of comparison, Valcárcel’s book Tempestad en los Andes cost 2 soles
(200 centavos) Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos was priced at s./2.80.
11. The article was entitled “El problema de la literatura y el arte proletarios:
Encuesta international de ‘Monde’”.
12. See Bosshard and Huamán Villavicencio on Churata.
13. Both Pareja Pflucker and Sánchez Ortiz have provided broad overviews of
the working-class press in Lima in their studies.
14. See Poole’s book, in particular chapter seven, on the photography of
Figueroa Aznar. She comments broadly on Cuzco’s indigenista movement during
that time, and notes in particular various constructs, including the waylachu and
the nuevo indio, deployed by these intellectuals in order to encapsulate the area’s
culture.
15. I base my observation on what is typical in the working-class press of the
time on review of newspapers in both the Instituto Riva Agüero’s collection and
the Biblioteca Nacional’s Hemeroteca, both in Lima. Furthermore, see also Pareja
Pflucker and Sánchez Ortiz’s works.
16. On early twentieth-century labor history in Peru, see Sulmont.
17. For a broader perspective on the working class, see Blanchard.
18. See Sánchez Ortiz and his analysis of Obrero textil.
19. As mentioned above, these newspapers are in the collections of the
Biblioteca Nacional and the Instituto Riva-Agüero at the Pontificia Universidad
Católica del Perú in Lima.
20. Labor 4 has no date, although Tauro suggests that it was published on
December 29, 1928 (18).
21. For coverage of the disaster, see Labor 4 through 6. For additional informa-
tion of the Cerro de Pasco Corporation and its operations in Peru, see Krujit and
Vellinga, as well as Flores Galindo’s study (53–57).
22. The Amauta group seems to have been evenly divided between those who
valued aesthetics above all and those more interested in politics and social history.
See Núñez 103–4 and Basadre 196.
23. Por economía, también, la Empresa ha establecido los trabajos de la mina
por el sistema de “contratas.” El contratista que desempeña en este caso el papel de
pequeño gamonal y explota las energías de los obreros indios sometiéndolo [sic] a
rigurosos trabajos para ganar, es explotado a su vez por la Empresa Yankee.
24. Mientras que la pequeña propiedad minera desaparece, la gran explotación
asoma mostrando sus garras, arrancando riqueza de las montañas de la tierra
boliviana, para transportarla al extranjero. Los pequeños propietarios de minas,
sin capital, después de vender sus pertinencias, se transforman en contratistas, es
decir, al servicio del gran capital y contra el asalariado.
25. Entre nosotros, “Amauta” se orienta cada vez hacia el tipo de revista de
doctrina. “Labor” que, de una parte es una extensión de la labor de “Amauta,” de
otra parte tiende al tipo de periódico de información. Su función no es la misma.
Como la información, especialmente en nuestro caso, no puede ser entendida
en el estrecho sentido de crónica de sucesos, sino sobre todo como crónica de
ideas, “Labor” tiene respecto a su público obligaciones de ilustración integral de

cuestiones y movimientos contemporáneos, que una revista doctrinal desconoce.
26. Nosotros ¿qué hacer si somos analfabetos en un 99 por ciento, si por
nuestro ojos pasan jueces y autoridades, codeándose y en mancomunación [sic]
con estos bandoleros? ¿A quién quejarnos, tanta desgracia y fatalidad? Lloramos y
lamentamos hace cuatro siglos.
27. Por mí y por Enrique Huyhia que no sabe firmar. A. Salcedo y S.—Agustín
Siqueios. —Pablo Aury— Por mi madre que no sabe firmar, Dolores T. viuda de
Orós. Felipe S. Villasante.—Octavio Orós.—Por mi madre que no sabe firmar,
Lucía Bustamante. Cirilo Guillén B.—Pedro S. Mejía.—Luis Mejía.—Mariano
Mejía.—Santiago R. Chalco.
Chapter 5: Photographs at the Edge

1. It should be noted that both de la Cadena and López Lenci’s work, however,
exceed a singular focus on lettered culture.
2. A future project will focus centrally on photography in the early twentieth-
century southern Andes.
3. Cited in Penhall. She states that the citation comes from an article “El
fotógrafo Chambi” but does not include the issue of Kosko (1924–25) in which it
appeared.
4. López Mondéjar indicates that Portugal’s review, “Un artista de pura sangre
aimara,” was published in Kuntur, November 1927.
5. For example, Manuel Scorza’s pentalogy of novels, La Guerra silenciosa,
describes in broad view the trials and tribulations of communities struggling
against the Cerro de Pasco Mining Corporation in the middle of the last century.
See also Flores Galindo’s study of this company’s miners in the early twentieth
century, Los mineros de la Cerro de Pasco.
6. The precise dates and details of Chambi’s biography vary from source to
source. Penhall and López Mondéjar provide coherent and convincing narratives
of his life.
7. Teo Allaín Chambi, the photographer’s grandson, communicated this
information to me in an interview in Cuzco on June 21, 2005.
8. Pasaron los siglos; para la Raza era ayer. Los agotados campos se desentume-
cen de su sueño de piedra. Hay un leve agitar de alas; quedamente se percibe un
lentísimo arrastrarse de orugas; algo como sordo preludio de lejana sinfonía. La
naturaleza vive el milagro primaveral.
La masa informe de los pueblos muertos se mueve tambien y todos los
sepulcros tornaránse matrices de la Nueva Vida.
Hay un milagro primaveral de las razas [sic].
9. López Lenci has written on Giesecke and his influence, but much more
remains to be done on this professor and administrator’s influence on the Cuzco
indigenistas. See her Paqarina 86–90.
10. With respect to modern academic culture, I understand that this may be
the case at many global sites and in many cultures.
11. De la Cadena is particularly devastating on this point, as she clearly outlines
how Válcarcel existed within a world of relative wealth and privilege that upheld
typical racial and class distinctions. See Indigenous Mestizos, especially 53–55.
12. There is plenty of historical evidence that suggests Tempestad was
influenced by several indigenous revolts in the southern Andes in the early
twentieth century. Deustua and Rénique have provided a compelling account of
the influences of the indigenous on Cuzco intellectuals in their book, especially
chapter three.
13. Barnitz has pointed out how the Peruvian case stands out among other
Andean national painting. She argues that in Peru, painting did not take on a
critical role with respect to society, while painting in Ecuador, for example, was
strongly critical of the indio’s subjugation (93).
14. See also Gaonkar. For an example in Andean culture, see the testimonio of
Gregorio Condori Mamani, which is rife with instances wherein a marginalized
indigenous migrant subject copes with modernization and technology, thus
demonstrating his own conceptualization of modernity’s meanings.
15. The information was gleaned in an interview with Antonia Vega Centeno in
Cuzco on June 16, 2005.
16. From the interview cited above with Antonia Vega Centeno. Máximo Vega
Centeno was her father.
Conclusion: Reading Indigenismo, Writing the Indio

1. I am thankful to Josef Barton for revealing to me, with characteristic
intelligence and generosity, this particular structural feature of this study.
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index
Note: Page references in italics refer to illustrations.
El águila y la serpiente (Guzmán), 119 Anderson, Benedict, 12

“aldeanita” (Oquendo de Amat), 83, 85 The Andes Viewed from the City (Kristal),
Alegría, Ciro, 6 165
Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Andrade, Mario de, 170n9
Americana (APRA), 7, 174n2 APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria
Alonso, Carlos, 18, 19, 77, 79, 99 Americana), 7
alternative modernities, 19–20; ac- Aquézolo Castro, Manuel, 53–54
ceptance of technology and, 76–78, Araquistáin, Luis, 119
150; in Chambi photography, 22, 138, Aréstegui, Narciso, 6
148–50, 153, 155–62; contexualization Arguedas, Alcides, 6, 13, 171n11
of foreign influences in, 78–79; Arguedas, José María: claims of
critique of concept, 79; Mariátegui on, representativeness, 46; and Congreso
103–5; Oquendo de Amat on, 78–80, Indigenista Interamericano, 69–70;
93–100 constructions of indio, 14–15, 55,
Amauta (journal): as counter to institu- 65, 134; Cornejo Polar on, 16, 18; on
tions of power, 153; as identitarian culture of Latin America, 170n9;
project, 29; influence of, 26; and Labor, economic circumstances, 141; essays
112–13, 128–29; Mariátegui essays in, on indio culture, 107; heterogeneity
27–28, 36; Morococha catastrophe in, 87; on modernization, 77; Rama
coverage, 122; naming of, 26–29 on, 32, 33, 170n10
“amberes” (Oquendo de Amat), 83 Arlt, Roberto, 180n3
Andean mythology, 49, 151 Arroyo Reyes, Carlos, 178n31
Andean nature/landscape: and “Arte, revolución y decadencia”
indio spirit, 44, 49, 64–65, 108, 151; (Mariátegui), 27–28
Mariátegui’s coopting of, 104; in “The Artist in His Studio” (Courbet), 144
Oquendo de Amat, 83–85, 89–90, Asociación Pro-Indígena, 11, 68–69
92–98 Asturias, Miguel Angel, 134
195
196 ≈ index
Atahualpa, 109, 111 Breton, André, 113

authenticity. See representativity “Breve historia del movimiento coopera-
autochthony of indio spirit: in Chambi tivista en Inglaterra” (Halls), 119
photographs, 137; efforts to preserve, The Burden of Representation (Tagg),
67–68; indigenista focus on, 116, 117; 147–48
Mariátegui on, 27, 44, 104; Oquendo Burga, Manuel, 90
de Amat’s inability to rescue, 100; and Bustamante y Ballivián, Enrique, 75
stasis of indio culture, 108; technology
and, 76; in Vallejo, 40 caciques apoderados, 126
“Autorretrato en motocicleta” (Chambi), “El campeón de la muerte” (López
148–50, 149, 155–58 Albújar), 106, 107
Aves sin nido (Matto de Turner), 6, 107, “Campesinos indígenas en el juzgado”
175n7 (Chambi), 158–62, 159
Ayala, José Luis, 100 “campo” (Oquendo de Amat), 83, 98
ayllu: Escalante’s avoidance of term, 65; capitalism: impact of foreign capital on
and indio protest, 132; Left’s coopting indigenous peoples, 73, 120, 124, 141;
of, 44–45, 65, 103; Mariátegui on, indio as opponent of, 44; mestizo and,
44–45, 119; revitalization efforts, 42; Oquendo de Amat on, 97–98. See
163–64; Solís on, 118 also consumerism
El carácter de la literatura en el Perú
Barnet, Miguel, 126, 127 independiente (Riva Agüero), 104–5
Barnitz, Jacqueline, 135, 183n13 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 68–69, 177n25
Basadre, Jorge: on mestizos, 30; migrant “Cargador de chicha en Tinta” (Chambi),
figure in work of, 84; and molding of 147
national identity, 13, 29; and naming carnivals, in Latin America literature,
of Amauta, 27, 29; on Peruvian art, 75 179n12
Baudin, Louis, 173n27 Casanovas, Martí, 113
Becker, Mark, 126, 165, 167 Castro-Klarén, Sara, 167
Bedoya, Ricardo, 82 Castro Pozo, Hildebrando, 7, 34, 69–70,
Beigel, Fernanda, 31 171n11
Bell, Daniel, 22 Castro Urioste, José, 106
Benjamin, Walter, 154 catastrophe of Morococha, 120–23
Beverley, John, 126–27, 128 Cendrars, Blaise, 88
Blas, Camilo, 135, 146, 153 Cerro de Pasco Mining Corporation, 73,
Boletín Titikaka (periodical), 54, 110, 113, 119, 122, 156, 182n5
122, 177n26 Chambi, Martín: biography, 136, 141–42;
Bolivia: indigenous empowerment in, in Cuzco, 136, 138, 140, 141–42, 144,
163–64, 175n9; indio uprisings, 10; and 146–50, 157–59; importance of,
War of the Pacific, 8 135–36; ties to indigenistas, 136, 143
“Bolivia y la nacionalización de sus Chambi, Teo Allaín, 148–49
minas” (Marof), 124 Chambi photography: alternative
border thinking, Mignolo on, 50–51 modernities in, 22, 138, 148–50, 153,
index ≈ 197
155–62; attitude toward technology class consciousness, dawning of in Peru,

and art, 144–45; constructions of 123–24
indio, 168; in Cusco histórico, 146–47; class politics, incompatibility of
depictions of labor and class, 144; indigenismo with, 21–22, 118–20
distance from institutions of power, Cocteau, Jean, 113
153; indigenista works, 137–38, 146–47, Codesido, Julia, 135
158–59; oppositional qualities, 137, 138; colonialism, modernity as escape from,
representational strategies, 138–40; 24, 165
self-portraits, 144–45, 145, 148–50, Comité Pro-Derecho Indígena Tawant-
149; social context of, 148 insuyo, 9
“Chambi trabajando en su estudio de la communal identity, indigenista concep-
calle Marqués, junto a su equipo de tions of, 11–15
ayudantes” (Chambi), 144–45, 145 communal identity of indio, 106; dark
Chile, and War of the Pacific, 6, 8 side of, 107; Left’s recasting of, 44–45,
Churata, Gamaliel, 12, 54, 113–14, 169n1 65, 103
Cien años de soledad (García Márquez), 77, Communist Party of Peru, 174n2
175n10, 179n12 “compañera” (Oquendo de Amat), 83, 92
5 metros de poemas (Oquendo de Amat): CONAIE (Confederación de Naciona-
on alternative modernities, 78–80, lidades Indígenas del Ecuador), 67,
93–100; cinematographic aspects 175n9
of, 80, 83–84, 90–91, 98; conception CONAMAQ (National Council of Ayllus
of modernity in, 17–18, 21, 78–80, and Markas of the Qullasuyo), 163–64
89–100; manuscript description, 80, “Condición migrante” (Cornejo Polar), 88
81; migrant figure in, 84–86, 88–91; Condori Mamani, Gregorio, 127, 183n14
nature in, 83–85, 89–90, 92–98; Confederación de Nacionalidades
rural-urban rift in, 83–87; rural-urban Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE),
rift, attempted healing of, 88–100; 67, 175n9
technology in, 21, 78, 84, 92–95, 99; Congreso Indigenista Interamericano,
visual imagery in, 80. See also specific 68–70, 73
poems conquistadores, introduction of writing,
cinema: impact on Latin American 109
culture, 82–83; introduction to Latin constructions of indio. See indio,
America, 3, 81–82; in Oquendo indigenismo constructions of
de Amat, 80, 83–84, 90–91, 98; as consumerism: Mariátegui’s rejection of,
symbol of modernity, 90 102–3; Oquendo de Amat on, 90–92;
El Circulo Literario, on Peruvian as unifying cultural force, 91–92. See
government, 8 also capitalism
class: in Chambi photography, 144; Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar
indigenista deemphasis of, 116–18; (Ortiz), 170n9
Labor’s conceptualization of indios Contribución a una legislación tutelar
through, 21–22, 118–20; Marxism’s indígena (Encinas), 11
focus on, 105. See also working class
198 ≈ index
Cornejo Polar, Antonio: on heterogeneity, “Del sindicato de oficio al sindicato de

15–18, 26, 87; on introduction of writ- producción” (anon.), 119
ing to Andes, 109, 110; on mestizos, Descartes, René, 4
86–87; on migrant discourse, 79–80, “El despenador” (García Calderón), 107
86–87; on poetic form, 87, 94; on Deustua, José, 7, 55, 174n4
Vallejo, 172n23 “Discurso en el Politeama “ (González
Cotler, Julio, 118, 123 Prada), 6, 56–57
Courbet, Gustave, 144
criollismo, 14 economic reform in Peru: cultural impact
critical works, seminal indigenismo of, 9; impetus for, 8; and indio living
works, 7 conditions, 10; under Leguía, 8–9, 82,
“cuarto de los espejos” (Oquendo de 143, 170n7; modernization and, 2
Amat), 85–86, 90 Ecuador: demographics, 10; indigenous
Cuentos andinos (López Albújar), 105–7 empowerment in, 163–64, 175n9
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism Ecuadorian Evangelical Indigenous
(Bell), 22 Federation (FEINE), 163
cultural discourse, measuring critical La educación: Su función en el Perú social
effectiveness of, 153–54 en el problema de la nacionalización
Culturas híbridas (García), 20 (Encinas), 11
culture, defined, 3. See also indio culture education: indigenista views on universi-
Cumandá (Mera), 5 ties, 111; indigenous problem and,
Cusco histórico (Larco Herrera, ed.), 69, 73
146–47 Eguren Larrea, Darío, 54
Cuzco: Chambi in, 136, 138, 140, 141–42, “El terror de los caciques Montesinos en
144, 146–50, 157–59; class conflict in, provincia de Grau,” 130–32
142–44, 152–53; labor movement in, Encinas, José Antonio, 11, 69–70, 177n26
65–66 Escajadillo, Tomás, 105
Cuzco earthquake of 1950, Chambi Escalante, José Ángel: acknowledgment
photographs of, 140 of indio coevality, 64; adoption of
Cuzco indigenistas: characteristics of, nationalism, 72–73; conception of
155; construction of modernity, 155; indio culture, 53, 64–66; conception of
insistence on knowledge of indio, 66; modernity in, 20–21, 70, 72–74; and
and regionalism, 11, 12, 65–66, 155 Congreso Indigenista Interamericano,
69–70, 73; on education, 73; Eguren
Darío, Rubén, 105 Larrea and, 54; emphasis on indio
Davies, Thomas, 10 culture, 66–67; Exposición ante la
Debray, Elizabeth Burgos, 127 Cámara, 69–70; on foreign cultural
The Decline of the West (Spengler), 7 introductions, 63, 65; ideological
De la Cadena, Marisol, 9, 115–16, 135, 152, coopting of indio, 64–65, 167–68;
177n20, 183n11 on ideological coopting of indio,
Delaunay, Sonia, 88 63–64; on indigenistas’ ignorance
Delmar, Serafín, 75 about indio, 59–61; on indio policy,
index ≈ 199
70–71; on indio self-representation, ogy, 176n13; Mariátegui’s opposition

61; knowledge of indio, 64, 176n18; to, 61, 63; Solís on, 118; worker/
marginalization of, 60–61; and indigenista alliance against, 144
polémica del indigenismo, 52, 53, 59–60, Gaonkar, Dilip, 19, 22, 78–79
68, 71; political career of, 67, 68, 73; García, José Uriel: biography, 174n33; and
public opinion, 68; regionalism of, Congreso Indigenista Interamericano,
20–21, 62, 65, 66, 67–68, 72 69; ideological coopting of indio, 63;
Escribir en el aire (Cornejo Polar), 17, 109 on indio attachment to land, 65; on
España, aparta de mí este cáliz (Vallejo), indio transformation, 22, 34, 159–60;
180n5 on modernity, 155; and new indio,
European intellectual tradition, 22, 49, 65, 66, 155, 171n11, 174n33;
Mariátegui’s relationship to, 36–37, 45 regionalism of, 66; as subject of
Exposición ante la Cámara (Escalante), Chambi photography, 136; on tutelage
69–70 of indio, 171n11
García, María Elena, 9
Fabian, Johannes, 175n8 García Calderón, Ventura, 53, 107
Favre, Henri, 6, 7, 108, 180n7 García Canclini, Néstor, 20, 78
FEINE (Ecuadorian Evangelical García Márquez, Gabriel, 77, 175n10,
Indigenous Federation), 163 179n12
Figueroa Aznar, Juan Manuel, 142, 143, Garcilaso de la Vega (El Inca), 5, 87
146, 176n18 Giesecke, Albert, 151, 176n18
First Buenos Aires Communist Confer- González Prada, Manuel: on communal
ence, 173n31 identity, 12; ideological coopting of in-
Flores Galindo, Alberto, 42–43, 46 dio, 117; indigenismo movement and,
foreign capital, impact on indigenous 8; on indio culture, 107–8; influence
peoples, 73, 120, 124, 141 of, 6, 10; knowledge of indio, 58, 117;
foreign cultural introductions: Escalante on modernization, 55–57; nationalist
on, 63, 65; modernization and, 3; agenda of, 55–57; radicalism of, 143;
and nationalism of indigenistas, 62; on War of the Pacific, 8, 56
Oquendo de Amat on, 97–98; and Gotkowitz, Laura, 126, 165, 167
rise of indigenismo, 7. See also cinema; Gramsci, Antonio, 37
technology La Guerra silenciosa (Scorza), 182n5
Foucault, Michel, 153 Guevara, José Guillermo, 65, 67
“The Foundation and Manifesto of Guevara brothers of Cuzco, 54
Futurism” (Marinetti), 95 Gutiérrez Aléa, Tomás, 178n2
Franco, Jean, 172n23 Guzmán, Martín Luis, 119
Frank, Waldo, 113
“El funeral de las víctimas proletarias” Habermas, Jürgen, 4
(Rivera), 120–21 Hacia el reino de los Sciris (Vallejo), 64
Halls, F., 119
Galindo, Flores, 182n5 Haplerín Donghi, Tulio, 170n7
gamonalismo: abuses by, 130–32; etymol- Haya de la Torre, Victor Raúl, 111, 174n2
200 ≈ index
Hays, Ernesto S., 82 ity; heterogeneity theory; migrant

Hazen, Dan Chapin, 46 discourse
Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 68, 78 indianista, romanticized portrayal of
Los heraldos negros (Vallejo), 38, 39–40, 41 indio, 5
Herencia (Matto de Turner), 107 indigenismo: broad range of text types in,
heterogeneity theory, 15–18, 26, 87, 170n10 7, 15, 164–65; contribution of periodi-
Hidalgo, Alberto, 75 cals and poetry to, 15; Cornejo Polar
Hispanic tradition: Mariátegui’s rejection on, 87; disjunction between goals and
of, 104; role in Peruvian society, 104–5 accomplishments, 11, 55; goals of, 1, 11,
“Las horribles penalidades,” 131–32 53, 54–55, 56; historical arc of, 55–59;
Huasipungo (Icaza), 6, 171n11 ideological tensions within, 136;
Hurtado, Julián, 131 incompatibility of class politics with,
21–22, 118–20; on incompatibility of
Icaza, Jorge, 6, 34, 171n11 indio and modern culture, 58–59,
ideological coopting of indio: in Andean 103, 107; institutionalization of, 9,
history, 54; in Escalante, 64–65, 70–71; Leguía government and, 9; as
167–68; Escalante’s critique of, 63–64; lettered movement, 134–35, 164–65;
in González Prada, 55–57; by indigeni- non-lettered production, 135–36;
sta, 11, 17–18, 54–59, 63, 117–18, oppositional character of, 5–6, 9;
166–67; by mestizo middle class, 55; origins of modern movement, 5, 6–7,
in Oquendo de Amat, 167–68; by 8; pre-20th century manifestations
Valcárcel, 152–53. See also Mariátegui, of, 5–6; underlying agendas of, 11;
José Carlos, ideological coopting of uneven power dynamic in, 108–10;
indio vs. indianista, 5. See also indigenista;
“Idilio muerto” (Vallejo), 41 indio, indigenismo constructions of
El Inca. See Garcilaso de la Vega indigenismo vanguardista, 77
Incan Empire: early defenders of, 5; indigenista: attitude toward modernity,
efforts to revive, 70, 71, 79, 151 19–20, 23–24, 115–17, 154–55; concep-
Incan Empire as indigenista inspiration: tion of communal identity, 11–15;
and denial of indio present, 64, 155; constructions of indio as conception
for Mariátegui, 27–28, 42–44, 47, of modernity, 1–2, 13, 15, 17–18, 104–5,
62, 103–4; for Valcárcel, 44; vs. indio 165, 167–68; ideological coopting of
reality, 152. See also ayllu indio by, 11, 17–18, 54–59, 63, 117–18,
incompatibility of indio and modern 166–67; knowledge of indio, 34–35,
cultures: border thinking and, 45–48, 59–61, 166–67; Leguía govern-
50–51; as common notion in Peru, ment and, 9; nationalism of, 60–62;
46; indigenistas’ belief in, 58–59, 103, on photography, 154–55; relationship
107; Labor’s efforts to remedy, 21–22, with working class, 142–44. See also
103, 112, 114–16, 118–26, 129–30; Cuzco indigenistas; intellectuals
Mariátegui on, 35, 42, 45; Oquendo de indigenous empowerment movement,
Amat on, 78–80, 93–100; Vargas Llosa 163–64, 175n9
on, 58–59, 175n9. See also heterogene- Indigenous Mestizos (De la Cadena), 135
index ≈ 201
indio: defined, 1; living conditions, 10; indio present: Escalante’s recognition

mestizoization of, 33–34; political of, 64; indianista denial of, 5, 64, 155;
mobilization of, 2, 10–11; population, Mariátegui’s efforts to legitimize, 45;
10; as prerational, 25–26, 46; as vs. Incan glory, 152
product of Andean nature, 44, 49, indio role in revolution/social change:
64–65, 108, 151; relations with working indigenistas on, 168; Mariátegui on,
class, 142–43; timeless spirit of, 37, 40–45, 61–62, 103, 180n3
39–40, 43–44, 62, 107–8, 137–38, 151; indio self-representation: in Chambi
and War of the Pacific, 8. See also ayllu photography, 138, 148–50, 155–62,
indio, indigenismo constructions of: in 168; Escalante on, 61; in Labor, 21–22,
Arguedas (José María), 14–15, 55, 65, 125–33, 168. See also indio lettered
134; in Chambi, 168; as conception of practice
modernity, 1–2, 13, 15, 17–18, 104–5, indio visibility, polémica del indigenismo
165, 167–68; as focus of indigenismo, and, 53
14–15; in Labor, 21–22, 103, 115, 118–20, “El indio y otra cosa más” (Eguren
168; in Mariátegui, 20, 38–44, 61–62. Larrea), 54
See also ideological coopting of indio; “El indio y su llama” (Chambi), 147
representativity individualism, Mariátegui’s rejection
indio, pre-indigenismo constructions of, 103
of, 14 Indología (Vasconcelos), 7
indio culture: Arguedas (José María) Inkarrí, myths of, 49, 151
on, 107; disruption of nationalist dis- Intelectuales, indigenismo y descentralismo en
course, 53–54; Escalante’s conception el Perú (Deustua and Rénique), 174n4
of, 53, 64–66; Escalante’s emphasis on, intellectuals: focus on national identity,
66–67; as foundation of indigenista 29; indigenismo valorization of, 109;
new order, 104–5; González Prada on, modernity as discursive strategy of,
107–8; intellectuals’ views on, 105–7; 3; tutorial attitude toward indio, 11,
Oquendo de Amat on, 107; Oquendo 33–34, 51, 108–12, 134–35, 151, 153;
de Amat’s efforts to reconcile with views on indio culture, 105–7. See also
modernity, 89–100; violence in, indigenista
106–7. See also autochthony of indio
spirit; incompatibility of indio and Jameson, Frederic, 4
modern cultures; timelessness of Jaramillo Alvarado, Pío, 7
indio spirit
El indio ecuatoriano (Janamillo Alvarado), Kapsoli, Wilfredo, 7
7 knowledge of indio: Escalante and, 64,
“El indio está de moda” (Mac Lean 176n18; González Prada and, 58, 117;
Estenós), 54 highland elite’s insistence on, 66;
indio lettered practice: in Labor, 21–22, indigenista and, 34–35, 45–48, 59–61,
125–33; Mariátegui prediction of, 16, 166–67; Mariátegui and, 34–35,
61, 108, 132–33; progression toward, 16 45–48, 61–62, 173n29, 180n4; Vargas
Llosa and, 58
202 ≈ index
Kristal, Efraín, 6, 7, 165 Levine, Robert, 147

Krüggeler, Thomas, 65, 124, 142, 143 Ley de Conscripción Vial, 9, 177n21
Kuntur (periodical), 54 “El licenciado Aponte” (López Albújar),
107
Labor (newspaper): audience for, 112–13, Lima: as cultural center, 13–14, 81–82, 90;
128–29; censors and, 112; competition, growth of lettered class, 170n7; and
116; conception of modernity in, modernization, 56; population growth
17–18, 21–22; constructions of indio, in 1920s, 29, 91–92, 116; working class
21–22, 103, 115, 118–20, 168; content press, 116
change over time, 115–16, 118–22; Lima la horrible (Salazar Bondy), 13–14
contents of first issue, 113–14; as literature, and identity, 14
counter to institutions of power, López Albújar, Enrique, 53, 105–7
153; efforts to connect indio to larger López Lenci, Yazmín, 135, 165
society, 21–22, 103, 112, 114–16, 118–26, López Mondéjar, Publio, 136
129–30; egalitarian motivation for, Lucero, José Antonio, 163, 168
111; indio self-representation in, 21–22, Lyotard, Jean François, 126
125–33, 168; and mestizo mobilization,
43; mismatch between readership Macera, Pablo, 52
and message, 113, 114–15; Morococha Mac Lean Estenós, Roberto, 54
catastrophe coverage, 120–23; political Macunaíma (Andrade), 170n9
agenda of, 103; publication history, “madre” (Oquendo de Amat), 83, 98
112; “La voz de los pueblos” and “El Mallon, Florencia, 8
ayllu” sections, 125, 129–32 “Mañanas collas” (Churata), 114
Lacan, Jacques, 127 Manrique, Nelson, 8
land reform, under Cárdenas, 68–69 Maples Arce, Manuel, 75–76
Larco Herrera, Rafael, 146 Mariátegui, José Carlos: and Amauta,
Larco Hoyle, Rafael, 146 27–29, 36–37; biography, 34–35,
Larico Yujra, Mariano, 46–47, 173n29 173n30; economic circumstances, 141;
Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 6 as example of mestizo ascendancy,
Latorre, Roberto, 136 30–33; and Labor, 21, 43, 103, 112,
Lauer, Mirko, 7, 15, 75, 77, 164, 178n3 113–14, 128–29; library of, 173n27;
Leguía, Augusto B.: economic policies, migrant figure in works of, 84;
8–9, 82, 143, 170n7; Escalante and, 67, polémica del indigenismo and, 53;
68, 70, 73; and indigenismo, 9; indio prologue to Temestad en los Andes,
reliance on, 131; instability of national 47–51; as seminal indigenismo figure,
identity under, 29; and Variedades, 136 7; on trajectory of indigenismo
Leibner, Gerardo, 15, 65, 165, 176n14 literature, 16, 61, 108, 132–33; on
lettered practice: egalitarian uses of, Vallejo (César), 38–42. See also Siete
110–11, 125–26; as exclusionary ensayos de interpretación de la realidad
practice, 110, 111–12; introduction peruana
to Andes, 109. See also indio lettered Mariátegui, José Carlos, and indio:
practice awareness of indigenistas’ distance
index ≈ 203
from indio, 61, 108; on ayllu, 44–45, on social uses of art, 27–28; unique
119; construction of indio, 20, 38–44, features of Marxist vision, 48, 50
61–62; on incompatibility of indio Marinetti, Filippo T., 95
and modern cultures, 35, 42, 45; on Marof, Tristán, 21, 63, 119, 124
indigenous population, 10; on indio Martí, José, 104, 179n12
need for amelioration, 159–60; on Martínez de la Torre, Ricardo, 21, 119
indio role in revolution, 37, 40–45, Marxism: coopting of ayllu concept,
61–62, 103, 180n3; knowledge of indio, 44–45, 65; focus on class struggle,
34–35, 45–48, 61–62, 173n29, 180n4; 105; ideological coopting of indio,
on prerationality of indio, 25–26, 63; introduction to Latin America, 3;
46; on timelessness of indio culture, Mariátegui reliance on, 37; and rise of
39–40, 43–44, 62, 107; on treatment of indigenismo, 7
indigenous people, 10 MAS. See Movimiento al Socialismo
Mariátegui, José Carlos, ideo- Matto de Turner, Clorinda, 6, 107, 175n7
logical coopting of indio: ideological Mayer, Dora, 9, 71
purposes underlying, 37, 40–41, Meiggs, Henry, 56
43–45, 48–51, 61–63, 103–5, 167–68; Melgar, Mariano, 87, 94
misrepresentativity of, 20, 25–26, Memorias del subdesarrollo (Gutiérrez
28–29, 45–46, 50 Aléa), 178n2
Mariátegui, José Carlos, ideology of: on Menchú, Rigoberta, 127
alternative modernities, 103–5; and Meneses, Carlos, 80
Communist Party of Peru, 174n2; Mera, Juan León, 5
consequences of rejecting mestizo mestizo: ascendancy of as focus of Latin
culture, 42–43; on cultural practices American historians, 30–34; and
and social change, 36, 45; distance capitalism, 42; ideological coopting of
from institutions of power, 153–54; indios, 55; Mariátegui on, 35–36, 40,
excising of mestizo element from 42, 109, 172n24; reconciling of cultural
Vallejo, 40–42; on goals of indi- tensions in, 86–87; role in revolution,
genismo, 20; ideological influences 42–43; self-representation, 150
on, 47, 49; on incompatibility of Mexican Revolution, Peruvian interest
indio and modern cultures, 35, 42, in, 113, 119
45; on indigenismo, 18; on indio role Mignolo, Walter, 50–51
in revolution, 37, 40–45, 61–62, 103, migrant: aporia at center of, 88–89; as
180n3; on mestizo culture, 35–36, image of modernity dilemma, 84; in
40, 42, 109, 172n24; nationalism of, Mariátegui, 84; in Oquendo de Amat,
29, 53, 60, 62; on poetry as essence 84–86, 88–91; unresolvable tension
of indigenismo, 37–38, 43; political in, 86–87
agenda of, 29–30; rejection of existing migrant discourse: Cornejo Polar on,
social order in Peru, 103, 104; relation- 79–80, 86–87; in Oquendo de Amat,
ship to European tradition, 36–37, 88–89
45; revolutionary dialectic of, 45; on Miller, Nicola, 52
role of intellectual, 108–10, 111–12;
204 ≈ index
Los mineros de la Cerro de Pasco (Flores El mundo es ancho y ajeno (Alegría), 6

Galindo), 182n5
mining industry: impact on indio, 141; “Nacionalismo y vanguardismo”
Labor on, 120–24 (Mariátegui), 117
MIP (Movimiento Indígena Pachkuti), National Council of Ayllus and Markas
67, 175n9 of the Qullasuyo (CONAMAQ),
Mitchell, Timothy, 23 163–64
modernity: context and, 18–19; national identity, intelligentsia’s focus
definitions of, 3–4, 165; as escape from on, 29
colonialism, 24, 165; Habermas on, nationalism: of Escalente, 72–73;
4; monolithic conceptions of, 22–23; Escalente’s critique of, 67–68; of
Riva Agüero on, 104–5; technology González Prada, 55–57; of indigenis-
in Latin American art and, 77–78; tas, 60–62; of Mariátegui, 29, 53, 60,
unavoidability of, 3, 4–5, 18. See also 62; in polémica del indigenismo, 52–53;
alternative modernities; incompat- of Sánchez, 62; of Vargas Llosa, 55; vs.
ibility of indio and modern cultures regionalism, 11–12, 21
“Modernity: An Incomplete Project” nature. See Andean nature/landscape
(Habermas), 4 Ñauri, Pablo, 130–32, 133
“Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin Neruda, Pablo, 84
America” (Quijano), 25 new indio, 22, 49, 65, 66, 155, 171n11,
modernity, indigenista conceptions of: 174n33
constructions of indio as, 1–2, 13, “new york” (Oquendo de Amat), 93–97
15, 17–18, 104–5, 165, 167–68; Cuzco “Nosotros los indios” (Escalante), 59–60,
indigenistas, 155; Escalante (José 68, 71
Ángel), 20–21, 70, 72–74; García (José novels, seminal indigenismo works, 6–7
Uriel), 155; González Prada, 55–57; “Novia en la mansión de los Montes”
Oquendo de Amat, 17–18, 21, 78–80, (Chambi), 138–40, 139
89–100; plurality and dynamism of, El nudito (newspaper), 113, 117
19–20, 23–24; Vargas Llosa, 57–59 “Nuestra América” (Martí), 104
modernization: definitions of, 2–3; Nuestra comunidad indígena (Castro Pozo),
gender and, 174n33; indigenista 7, 171n11
interpretation of, 56–57, 154–55; and “Nuestros indios” (González Prada), 57
political mobilization of indio, 2, El nuevo indio (García), 22, 49, 65, 66, 155,
10–11 171n11, 174n33
Monasterios, Elizabeth, 169n1
Montesinos, Alejandrina, 131 Obregón, Álvaro, 113
Mörner, Magnus, 10 obrero quechua, 124
Morococha catastrophe, 120–23 obreros indios, 123–24
Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), 67 El obrero textil (newspaper), 113, 117
Movimiento Indígena Pachakuti (MIP), “obsequio” (Oquendo de Amat), 92
67, 175n9 Ochoa, Avelino, 155–56
oncenio, 9, 143
index ≈ 205
“Oportunismo indigenista” (Guevara), 66 poetry: contribution to indigenismo,

Oquendo de Amat, Carlos: biography, 15; as essence of indigenismo, 37–38,
80, 100–101; familiarity with cinema, 43; heterogeneity in form, 87; and
82–83; ideological coopting of indio, legitimation of indio, 45
167–68; influences on, 87–88; poetic polémica del indigenismo, 52–54
form, 87–88, 94, 99–100; on statis of Poole, Deborah, 65, 115–16, 136, 142,
indio culture, 107. See also 5 metros de 154–55
poemas Portugal, José, 136
Ordine Nuovo (periodical), 37 “Primera motocicleta de Mario Pérez
Ortega, Julio, 179n7 Yáñez” (Chambi), 148–50, 149, 155–58
Ortiz, Fernando, 67, 79, 170n9 “El problema agrario peruano” (Solís),
118–19
El Padre Horán (Aréstegui), 6 “El problema de la tierra” (Mariátegui),
Palacio, Pablo, 84 122
Pavlevitch, Esteban, 21 “El proceso de la literatura” (Mariátegui),
Pazos Varela, Juan Francisco, 130 43
Peralta, Alejandro, 54 La prose du Transsibérien et la Petite Jehanne
Pérez Yáñez, Mario, 149, 150, 156 de France (Cendrars), 88
periodicals, contribution to indigenismo, Pueblo enfermo (Arguedas), 13, 107
15
Peru: demographics, 10; emergence of “Questions of Conquest” (Vargas Llosa),
socialism, 7; indio uprisings, 10, 46; 57–58
Leguía economic reforms, 8–9, 82, Quijano, Aníbal: on Mariátegui, 25–26,
143, 170n7; treatment of indios, 10; 37, 46, 51; on production of modernity,
and War of the Pacific, 8. See also War 22–23, 158; on unavoidability of
of the Pacific modernity, 3
Peruvian Mission for Incan Art, 176n18 Quispe, Miguel, 147
Pesce, Hugo, 173n31
Petrovick, Julián, 119 Rabines, Eudocio, 119
El pez de oro (Churata), 12, 114 Rado, Casimiro, 53
photography: characteristics vs. painting, Rama, Ángel, 31–33, 37, 40, 55, 78, 174n4
154–55; cusqueño attitudes toward, Ramos, Julio, 14, 50
142, 145, 146, 154–55; ideological Ramos Zambrano, Augusto , 46
tensions within, 136–37; impact on La raza cósmica (Vasconcelos), 152, 170n9
Latin America culture, 141–42; social Raza de bronce (Race of Bronze; Argue-
context of, 147–48. See also Chambi das), 6, 171n11
photography reason, fragmentation of in modernity, 4
“poema al lado del sueño” (Oquendo de “réclam” (Oquendo de Amat), 89–91, 92,
Amat), 83 93, 94
“poema del mar y de ella” (Oquendo de regionalism: of Cuzco indigenistas, 11, 12,
Amat), 92 65–66, 155; in Escalante, 20–21, 62, 65,
206 ≈ index
66, 67–68, 72; of García (José Uriel), Sanjinés, Javier, 135

66; indigenismo and, 11–15, 21; vs Santiago, Silviano, 88–89, 127
nationalism, 11–12, 21 Santo Domingo Mining Corporation, 141
Rénique, José Luis, 7, 55, 174n4 scholarly works, seminal indigenismo
representativity: Arguedas (José María) works, 7
and, 46; of indigenista figure of indio, Schwartz, Jorge, 75
14, 15–17, 20, 166; in Latin America, science, as voice of indio, 151–52
164; of Mariátegui construction of Scorza, Manuel, 65, 67, 182n5
indio, 20, 25–26, 28–29, 45–46, 50. See self-representation. See indio self-
also ideological coopting of indio representation
republic era, conceptualizations of, 29 Seoane, Manuel, 53
resurrection, in Andean mythology, 49 “Short History of Photography”
revolution/social change: indigenistas on (Benjamin), 154
indio role in, 168; indio as excuse for, La Sierra (periodical), 54, 66
55–59; indios’ lack of benefit from, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad
55; Mariátegui on cultural practice peruana (Mariátegui): conception of
and, 36, 45; Mariátegui on indio’s modernity in, 17–18, 20; construction
role in, 37, 40–45, 61–62, 103, 180n3; of indios in, 20, 61–62; on effects
Mariátegui on Peruvian revolutionary of modernization, 122; excerpts in
dialectic, 45; mestizo role in, 42–43; Labor, 114; Marxist analysis in, 50;
political mobilization of indio, 2, on mestizo culture, 35; on role of
10–11. See also ideological coopting of indigenista literature, 43; on role
indio; modernization of intellectual, 108–9; as seminal
Ríos Pagaza, Carlos, 146 indigenismo text, 7
Los ríos profundos (Arguedas), 33, 170n9 Los siete locos (Arlt), 180n3
Riva Agüero, José de la, 104–5, 111 Sklodowska, Elzbieta, 126–27, 128
Rivera, Diego, 119, 120–21 “Sobre el problema indígena”
Rivera, José Eustasio, 119 (Mariátegui), 114
Rodríguez, Sebastián, 156 social activism, as characteristic of
Romero, Emilio, 34–35 indigenismo, 5–6
Rosman, Silvia, 13 social context, of photography, 147–48
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 180n3 socialism, emergence in Peru, 7
social reform, as goal of indigenismo, 11
Sabogal, José, 27, 135, 146, 153 Sociedad de Artesanos del Cuzco, 143
Salazar Bondy, Sebastián, 13–14, 104 Solidaridad (newspaper), 117
“Salida de los mineros del trabajo” Solís, Abelardo, 118–19
(Rivera), 120–21 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 140
Sánchez, Luis Alberto: on indio need for Sommer, Doris, 105
amelioration, 159–60; on Lima, 92; on Soto, Hernán de, 59
mestizos, 30; and naming of Amauta, Spengler, Oswald, 7
26–27, 29; nationalism of, 60, 62; and Stephenson, Marcia, 49, 174n33
polémica del indigenismo, 53
index ≈ 207
subjectivity, modernity and, 4 Universidad Popular Manuel González

surrealism, introduction to Latin Prada, 111
America, 3 universities, indigenista views on, 111
Unruh, Vicky, 75
Tagg, John, 147–48 Urbe (Maples Arce), 75–76
Tamayo Herrera, José, 7, 150 Urviola, Ezequiel, 47, 172n25
Tarica, Estelle, 180n7 “Ushanan-jampi” (López Albújar), 106–7
Tauro, Alberto, 28
Taylor, Charles, 79, 178n4 Valcárcel, Luis: biography, 152, 176n18;
technology: acceptance of, as negotiation conception of modernity, 44, 150–53,
of modernity, 76–78, 150; and aesthet- 155; and Cusco histórico, 146; denial of
ics, 178n2; Chambi photography and, indio present, 64; ideological coopting
144–45; impact of cinema on Latin of indio, 152–53; indigenismo of,
American culture, 82–83; impact 49; on indio need for amelioration,
of photography on Latin America, 159–60; on indio transformation, 22;
141–42; indigenistas’ views on, 154–55; Mariátegui and, 34, 49; on mestizo,
in Latin American art, 75–77; and 109; rejection of modern society,
modernization, 2; in Oquendo de 115–16; as subject of Chambi photogra-
Amat, 21, 78, 84, 92–95, 99 phy, 136; on timelessness of indio
Tello, Julio C., 167 culture, 107, 151. See also Tempestad en
tellurism, 108. See also autochthony of los Andes
indio spirit Vallejo, César: biography, 38, 41, 172n23;
Tempestad en los Andes (Valcárcel), 22, denial of indio present, 64; economic
47–51, 64, 111, 150–53, 183n12 circumstances, 141; Mariátegui on,
testimonial literature: in Labor, 125–33; 20, 38–42; migrant figure in, 84;
theorizing of, 126–28 purity of poetry, 39–40; on role of
Ticona, Esteban, 164 intellectual, 180n5; on technology in
Time and the Other (Fabian), 175n8 Latin American art, 76–77
timelessness of indio spirit, 39–40, Valverde, Vincente de, 111
43–44, 62, 107–8, 137–38, 151 Vanguardia (journal), 27
Tord, Luis Enrique, 7 Vargas, Max T., 141
Transculturación narrativa en América Vargas Llosa, Mario: on incompatibility
Latina (Rama), 31–33, 174n4 of indio and modern cultures, 58–59,
transculturation, critique of, 79, 99 175n9; knowledge of indio, 58; on
Trilce (Vallejo), 38 modernization, 57–59, 175n10;
“Tristeza andina” (Chambi), 137, 137–38 nationalism of, 55
Variedades (magazine), 135
“Una heterogeneidad no dialéctica” Vasconcelos, José, 7, 69, 113, 152, 170n9
(Cornejo Polar), 86–87 Vega Centeno, Máximo, 160
Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Vich, Cynthia, 77
Marcos, 111 Villaizán, Manuel, 65
208 ≈ index
visual culture, indigenista, 135–36 relations with indigenistas, 142–44;

La vorágine (Rivera), 119 relations with indio, 142–43
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 22–23 Yo fui canillita de José Carlos Mariátegui

War of the Pacific: González Prada on, 56; (Yujra), 47
and national identity, 12–13, 29; and Yúdice, George, 126
origin of indigenismo, 6, 8
Weber, Max, 4 Zevallos Aguilar, Juan Ulises, 110
working class: incompatibility with El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo
indigenista project, 116–18; Labor’s (Arguedas), 77, 88–89
efforts to connect indio to, 103, Zulen, Pedro, 9, 11, 68, 71
112, 114–15, 115–16, 118–26, 129–30;

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The Andes Imagined

Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas

the andes imagined

Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Introduction Indigenismo, Modernity, Indigenismos,

1. Cover of 5 metros de poemas, by Carlos Oquendo de Amat, n.d. 81

Beyond my own institution, I must thank many scholars who in their

a wide range of indigenista work as a commentary on and reaction to the

Finally, by modernization I also mean to invoke the arrival and eventual

an antimodernization agenda. Indeed, history is full of examples of people

1941. However, as central as these novels have been to our understanding of

This effervescence, of course, did not arise in a void. As my attention

tenure as president from 1919 to 1930, an eleven-year period known as the

rights be recognized (Gotkowitz, Revolution 69–100; Becker, “Comunas”

of social organization with society’s advances is not solely a hallmark of the

of these, criollismo, which designates the culture of Creoles, or Peruvians

indigenistas mobilized both lettered discourse and lettered institutions in

My account departs substantially from what is perhaps the most impor-

This study relies on the notion that at a given historical moment, in a

(Burden vi). Accordingly, the context of indigenismo in the early twentieth

modernization. Said another way, while the cultural production studied

tellectuals’ subordination of regional cultures to a utopian national iden-

and thus constitutes a turning point in the configuration of lettered institu-

Whether it be Mariátegui’s strident emphasis on and central position of the

THE REVOLUTIONARY INDIO

real—rational, that is—proposal for Peruvian society of the time, which

Mariátegui’s critique between intellectual discourse on indigeneity and

modernization took at the time, he intuited a democratization and eco-

To be sure, few figures have been as important as José Carlos Mariátegui

Born in 1894 in the provincial capital of Moquegua, Mariátegui spent

practices—in particular cultural organs—function within societies un-

sta] tendency is not naturalist or folklorist; rather, it is lyrical, as Andean poetry’s

tificial dualism of essence and form. Indigenous sentiment in . . . Vallejo is

poetry made here to equal it from any “contamination” by cultures linked

in Peru, it is the indio who will stand in place of an urbanized proletariat

[What is my Andean and sweet Rita, in reeds and berries,

For the constellation of motives that we have seen, Mariátegui attempts

with the indigenous population in struggle against the hegemonic whites.

The vision of an Andean Marxist revolution that Mariátegui predicted

a valuable contribution to a critique of neocolonial relations between the

The temptation to read José Carlos Mariátegui as a syncretic thinker

nolo, in contrast, sees Mariátegui’s acquisition of European theoretical

A MODERN ANDEAN CULTURE?

thus novel, society in Peru. As he suggested in another essay on the topic,

then, Vargas Llosa, along with a slew of conservative intellectuals associ-

and its culture; in so doing, through a transitive logic, he identified him-

cess of integration into an imagined nation. Within this latter construct,

His critique, modeled on a teleology of revolution, was based on a pro-

erations, Mariátegui’s and Sánchez’s view of the indio came to represent a

most pastoral representation of the indigenous population. It is worth not-

ture exists in other highland indigenista works, such as García’s El nuevo

Indeed, avant-garde authors across Latin America sang the virtues of

of machines in Latin American poetry (“Contra el secreto” 92–93). Seen as

anywhere. This assessment resonates especially in this book, which under-

grant discourse, wherein hybridization, understood as a dialectical process,

Figure 1. Cover of 5 metros de poemas, by Carlos Oquendo de Amat. Facsimile

works far removed from the experimentation that characterized contempo-

net, for example—marks Oquendo de Amat’s attempt to negotiate between

[Where is the door? Where is the door?

The abandonment and confusion presented at the outset of 5 metros ges-

twentieth-century Peru. In their stead, symbols of nature such as the sun

tionally. If Peru can be integrated into the world as a producer of coveted

In counterpoint to “réclam,” “new york” begins by unsteadying the

20. Marisol de la Cadena includes a fascinating discussion on the role of prac