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Incas Sí, Indios No: Notes on Peruvian Creole Nationalism and its Contemporary Crisis*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Cecilia Méndez G.
Cecilia Méndez G.
Affiliation:
doctoral student at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
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Abstract

This commentary article focuses on a crucial moment in the formation of Peruvian Creole nationalism: the 1836–9 Peruvian–Bolivian Confederation. Nationalist sentiments expressed through the anti-confederationist press, satiric poetry and pamphlets, glorified the Inca past while spurning the Indian present. During this period, a nationalist, essentially racist, rhetoric whose roots can be traced to the late eighteenth century, took shape. This rhetoric would provide the foundations of an ideology which has prevailed in Peruvian history. This rhetoric reached its peak in the twentieth century, while evolving into a historiographical discourse instrumental to the exercise of power and which is now in crisis.

Type
Commentary
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , February 1996 , pp. 197 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 Basadre, J., Perú: Problemay Posibilidad (Lima, 1979), p. 156Google Scholar. This, and subsequent translations from Spanish sources, are by Renzo Llorente.

2 ‘Our greatest misfortune was that our uppermost stratum never properly established itself. Who were the ones, indeed, who readied themselves to govern the newly born republic? Poor colonial aristocracy, poor silly Lima nobility, incapable of any idea or effort!’ Agüero, J. de la Riva, Paisajes Peruanos (Lima, 1969), p. 159Google Scholar.

3 The pretext for the famous question among Peruvian intellectuals ‘¿cuándo se jodió el Perú?’ (‘When did Peru get screwed?’) – taken from a novel by Vargas Llosa-expresses well the pessimistic convictions to which I am referring. Whoever starts from this question in interpreting Peruvian reality obviously presupposes ‘a screwed-up country’ (for a literal example of this approach see Batres, Milla (ed.), ¿En qué momenta se jodió el Perú? (Lima, 1990))Google Scholar. The criticism of Peruvian intellectual pessimism first issued from among the intellectuals themselves, for example as one of the concerns of Galindo, Flores (‘Independenciay Clases Sociales’, in Galindo, Alberto Flores (ed.), Independenciay Revolution, 1780–1840, vol. I (Lima, 1987), pp. 121–3)Google Scholar. In this particular text Flores Galindo refers critically to these tendencies, in what we might regard as a self-critical fashion – bearing in mind that in his Aristocraciay Plebe, which he had just written, he had himself embraced Riva Agüero's scepticism towards the elite and the notion of ‘un país sin salida’ (‘a country with no way out’). Nonetheless, the most devastating critical essay regarding defeatist visions in Peruvian historiography is to be found in Chocano, Magdalena, ‘Ucronía y Frustratión en la Conciencia Histórica Peruana,’ Márgenes vol. 1, no. 2 (1987)Google Scholar. Although I disagree with Chocano's treatment of Basadre (whose essayistic works she disregards), I know of no other historiographical essay whose innovation is of a comparable calibre. In a similar vein see Rochabrún, Guillermo, ‘Ser Historiador en el Perú,’ Márgenes, vol. 4, no. 7 (1991)Google Scholar; see especially pp. 131–6. To appreciate more fully the theme of Peruvian intellectuals and their fixation with ‘the elite’ a useful source is Meisel, J., The Myth of the Ruling Class: Gaetano Mosca and the Elite (Ann Arbor, 1962)Google Scholar.

4 In connection with the criteria of social classification for the oligarchical order see Nugent, G., ‘El Laberinto de la Choledad,’ manusc. (Lima, 1990), p. 42Google Scholar. [Published: Lima, 1992.]

5 Among the Marxist-dependency interpretations causing the greatest impact in Peru had been Bonilla, H., Guano Burguesía en el Perú (Lima, 1974)Google Scholar; Cotler, J., Clases, Estado y Nation en el Perú (Lima, 1978)Google Scholar; and Yepes, E., Perú: Un Siglo de Desarrollo Capitalista (Lima, 1971)Google Scholar. Regarding independence, see the essay by Bonilla, H. and Spalding, K., ‘La Independencia en el Perú: las Palabras y los Hechos,’ in Bonilla, Heradio (ed.), LM Independencia en el Perú (Lima, 1972)Google Scholar. An alternative interpretation to dependency theory for the first phase of the Republic can be found in the solid study by Gootenberg, Paul, Between Silver and Guano: Commercial Policy and the State in Post-Independence Perú (Princeton, 1989)Google Scholar, and his more concise Tejidos y Harinas, Coraones y Mentes: el imperialismo de libre comercio en el Perú (Lima, 1989). Both works transform the dependency image of Peru's ‘dominant classes’ in the early republic. For a critical approach to Marxism-dependency theory starting from the rural milieu, see Thurner, Mark, ‘Republicanos” and “La Comunidad de Peruanos”: Unimagined Political Communities in Postcolonial Andean Peru’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 27 (1995), pp. 291–318CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Méndez, C., ‘Los Campesinos, la Independencia y la Iniciacion de la Republica: el caso de los iquichanos realistas, Ayacucho 1825–1845,’ in Urbano, Henrique (ed.), Podery Violencia en los Andes (Cuzco, 1991), pp. 165–88Google Scholar.

6 Historians of the stature of Riva Agüero, Nemesio Vargas and Vargas Ugarte have shown themselves to be benevolent, when not openly sympathetic to Santa Cruz and the Confederation, in their respective works of broad historical synthesis. Basadre appears more balanced, or variable, depending on which of his texts is cited. Nevertheless, neither the scholastic texts of recent decades nor the national museum ordinarily include these perspectives in their reconstruction of the period, and they tend to reproduce the chauvinistic tones characteristic of Santa Cruz's contemporary detractors, finding inspiration, perhaps, in the nineteenth-century works of Mariano Felipe Paz Soldan or in the pro-Salaverrista tradition inaugurated by Felipe Pardo.

7 Hill, C., The World Turned Upside Down. Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London, 1988), p. 379Google Scholar.

8 I have developed these points in greater detail in ‘Entre el mito y el objeto perdido: ¿Dónde está “lo andino”?’, Razón Diferente, no. 5 (1992), pp. 13–14, and 'República sin indios: La comunidad imaginada del Perú, in Urbano, Henrique (ed.), Traditión y Modernidad en los Andes (Cuzco, 1992), esp. pp. 15–17and 41Google Scholar.

9 Galindo, A. Flores, Buscando un Inca, ldentidad y Utopía en los Andes (Lima, 1987)Google Scholar.

10 Myth is the ideal system for the reproduction of an ideology, whatever it may be, and whatever the viewpoint from which the ideology would like to impose itself. The notion of a ‘mobilising myth’ which Mariátegui took from Sorel and in which Flores Galindo in turn found inspiration must, it seems to me, be reconsidered in post-Sendero Peru: a country far removed from that Aristocratic Republic in which Mariátegui and other avant-garde intellectuals of his time lived and wrote. Peru's recent experience has demonstrated that little separates a ‘mobilising myth’ from fundamentalism and an incitement to wholesale destruction.

11 Over half a century ago (1938) Benedetto Croce wrote a beautiful book devoted to reflection on the liberating role of historical knowledge. ‘Historiography liberates us from history’, he wrote. We might add: and from myth as well. Croce, B., La Historia Como Hazaña de la Libertad (Mexico, 1971), p. 35Google Scholar

12 On the trade war see P. Gootenberg, Between Silver and Guano and Tejidos y Harinas.

13 For a biography of Santa Cruz, see Crespo, A., Santa Cruz, el Cóndor Indio (Mexico City, 1944)Google Scholar.

14 The allusions to ‘Huanaco, Alexander’ appear in the rondeau ‘La Cacica Calaumana’, published in the newspaper El Coco de Santa Cruz (Lima, 25 09 1855)Google Scholar, later reprinted in the Salaverrista Para Muchachos. The octaves ‘La Jeta del Conquistador’ have been published in Monguió, L., Poesías de Don Felipe Pardo y Aliaga (Los Angeles, 1973)Google Scholar. The newspapers cited are found in the Oficina de Investigaciones Bibliográficas of the Biblioteca Nacional de Lima, with the exception of El Comercio, which has been consulted in the Instituto Riva Agiiero, also in Lima.

15 La Libertad Restaurada (Cuzco, 7 July 1841; reprinted from El Comercio, no. 609). The composition corresponds to a phase subsequent to the Confederation's defeat, when an incursion by Santa Cruz from the north was discovered, and we cannot be certain that it belongs to Pardo. However, the verses' meaning is faithful to the idea exemplified by the Lima satirist's rondeaux produced during the era with which we are concerned.

16 See, for example, La Bandera Bicolor (Arequipa, 30 Mar. 1839), a Gamarrista newspaper which opposed the Confederation. Ramón Castilla likewise cried out against the ‘new ridiculous Macedonian’. See the pamphlet, El General de Brigada Ramón Castilla a sus conciudadanos (Quillota, 10 10 1836)Google Scholar.

17 In November, 1836 Santa Cruz received the insignia of Great Official of the French Legion of Honour from a representative of the French government in Peru. Pardo made fun of the ostentation with which Santa Cruz supposedly displayed this decoration, insisting that it was one of little rank. Monguió, Poesías, p. 402.

18 Cited in A. Tamayo Vargas, Literatura Peruana (Lima, n.d.), p. 533.

19 The version cited is as it appeared in Para Muchachos no.1 (10 Oct. 1835). In later versions the word ‘buscas’ appears as ‘boscas’.

20 ‘Letrilla’ in Para Muchachos (10 Oct. 183;).

21 See Basadre, J., Historia de la República del Perú, vol. 11 (Lima, 1983), pp. 2–3 and 17–35Google Scholar.

22 Monguió, Poesías, p. 306.

23 El Coco de Santa Cruz, 25 Sep. 1835.

24 See for example El Limeño, no. 5 (29 May 1834), an anti-liberal and anti-Santacrucista newspaper. Later, a similarly oriented and avowedly Gamarrista newspaper in Cuzco would praise those who had fought ‘to contain and punish the invading imbecile who dared to tread upon the sacred soil of the Incas.…’ La Libertad Kestaurada (23 May 1839). This very same organ denounced the despised caudillo who, it was said, ‘is in Guayaquil after having swamped the sacred land of the Incas with blood and tears, by dint of conspiracies and treacheries.…’ La Libertad Restaurada (18 May 1839; reprinted from a Guayaquil newspaper).

25 For Pardo, Peru must not fall into ‘such impure hands’ as those of Santa Cruz. See El Coco de Santa Cruz, 22 Sep. 1835.

26 Barrenechea, Raúl Porras, ‘Don Felipe Pardo y Aliaga, satírico limeño’, Revista Histórica, no. 20 (1953), p. 269Google Scholar; Basadre, J., La Iniciación de la República, vol. 11 (Lima, 1930), p. 45Google Scholar.

27 On this point see Basadre's refernces in his Historia and Monguió's ‘Introduction’ to Poesías. As regards Pardo, however, the brilliant essay by Porras cited above remains the crucial text.

28 Basadre, Historia, vol. 1, pp. 98 and 274–6.

29 Cited in Potras, ‘Don Felipe’, p. 261.

30 Ibid. p. 257. The phrase ‘operations of satirical arithmetic’ also comes from Porras.

31 For an example see the rondeau ‘Por delante y por detrás’, in reference to Salaverry, in El Fiera-Bras no. 5 (Cuzco, 29 Jan. 1836).

32 El Perú Boliviano (Lima, 18 April 1836).

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

35 We find abundant examples in El Comercio and La Libertad Restaurada. Felipe Pardo would come to liken the decisive Chilean intervention in the Confederation conflict to the expedition of liberation in 1820. For, claimed Pardo, if in those years the armies ‘went to break the yoke of a monarchy, [they] are now going to smash that of an obscure and vulgar petty tyrant, more intolerable, a thousand times more insulting for the peoples who must put up with him’. Cited in Porras, ‘Don Felipe’, p. 280.

36 I should make it clear that my analysis derives exclusively from the press produced in what is today Peru. It is possible that from the Bolivian side some sought to legitimate the Confederation project by appealing to the Tawantinsuyu's Altiplano origins. As Teresa Gisbert observes, Santa Cruz was the son of a cacica, unlike all of the liberators (and, we might add, unlike all of the important caudillos of the time as well), and as such ‘he enjoyed optimal conditions for carrying out the task.…of a [territorial] reconstruction of the inca empire’ Gisbert, T., Iconografía y Mitos lndigenas en el Arte (La Paz, 1980), p. 180Google Scholar. In the same text, Gisbert states that during this period ‘it was rumoured that Santa Cruz intended to make himself an Inca’ (ibid. p. 107). However, I am unaware of any evidence proving this intention, nor does Gisbert present any in her book. What is most probable is that these rumours, if they did indeed exist, came from some of Santa Cruz's Bolivian sympathisers, rather than from the caudillo himself, whose imperial paradigm was closer to Napoleonic France than the Incan Empire. It is, thus, additionally significant that Santa Cruz, though well equipped to adopt the Incaist rhetoric so immensely fashionable at that time, should evidently have chosen not to do so.

37 Regarding manifestations of racism towards Gamarra, see Basadre, Historia, vol. II, p. 291. Without question there existed a Gamarrista nationalism, one not always compatible with Pardo's nationalism. While it was obvious that for Pardo and other Creoles nationality radiated out from Lima, for Gamarra the centre lay in Cuzco. Nuances aside, both of them contended for the legitimacy of the legacy of the Inca past. As a cuzqueño, Gamarra had greater rhetorical possibilities for laying claim to the cultural heritage of Manco Capac and, therefore, to the position of ‘founder’ of ‘Peru’. Lima's Creoles encountered greater difficulties in legitimating this symbolic appropriation of the imperial past. But in response to these difficulties they produced a grander and more complex ideology. For this analysis the Gamarrista press produced in Cuzco turns out to be particularly rich, as does the entire range of newspapers published at that time in Lima.

38 See, for example, de la Riva Agüero, J., ‘La Historia en el Perú’, in Obras Completas, vol. IV (Lima, 1965), p. 487Google Scholar. According to Basadre, ‘Caesarism’ was at that time one of the characteristic attitudes of ‘caudillism’: ‘.…those colonels, those generals felt.… the totemic influence of Napoleón’. Basadre, La initiatión, vol. II, p. 116.

39 For relations between liberals and the plebe see Walker, C., ‘Montoneros, bandoleros, malhechores: criminalidad y política en las primeras décadas republicanas’, in Walker, Charles and Aguirre, Carlos (eds.), Bandoleros, abigeos y montoneros: criminalidad y violencia en el Perú, siglos XVIII–XX (Lima, 1990)Google Scholar.

40 See C. Méndez, ‘Los campesinos, la Independencia’.

41 Basadre, Historia, vol. II, p. 119.

42 Calderón, F. García, Diccionario de la Legislación Peruana, vol. II (Paris, 1879)Google Scholar. (See entry for ‘Yanallay’).

43 For a history of El Comercio see Martínez, H. López, Los ISO Años de El Comercio (Lima, 1989)Google Scholar.

44 Anderson, B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1990)Google Scholar.

45 A foreign observer eloquently described the popularity attained by the new newspaper: ‘What do you think El Comercio contains? From distant provinces comes the bickering of the prefect, the governor, the customs officer; everything is allowed within it. …Do not believe that only great men read it; the artisan, the worker of every class saves for El Comercio and the poorest looks for it on loan. He who does not know how to read listens, speaking up, like the rest, between commentaries’. Cited in Basadre, Historia, vol. II, p. 296.

46 See Gootenberg, Between Silver.

47 de Trazegnies, F., La Idea de Derecho en el Perú Republicano del siglo XIX (Lima, 1980), pp. 30–4 and 41–8Google Scholar.

48 Gerbi has expressed well the spirit of nineteenth-century thought: ‘Progress towards civilisation, the dogma of illuminism, tends towards and then loses itself within biological evolution. The problem of the savage, a historical and philosophical problem, is transformed into the problem of man, understood in the naturalist sense as a species or race’. Gerbi, A., Viejas polémicas sobre el Nuevo Mundo (Lima, 1946)Google Scholar.

49 Bakhtin, M., La Cultura Popular en la Edad Media y el Renacimiento (Barcelona, 1971), p. 17Google Scholar. (Both this and the following citation from Bakhtin are translations from the Spanish edition, R. LL).

50 Ibid.

51 Nugent, ‘El Laberinto’, p. 8.

52 Monguió, Luis, 'La Ilustración Peruana y el Indio, América Indígena, vol. 45, no. 2 (1985), p. 350Google Scholar.

53 We find this expressed with excessive clarity in an official opinion of the Sociedadde País, Amantes del, in response to the letter from a reader suggesting the advantageousness of a union between the ‘two republics’: ‘We have established… that we consider a union and common society of the Indian and the Spaniard impossible, for a great difference in characters and a most notable distance in the energy of souls militates against it…’ Following other arguments, they add: ‘all of these and some other distinctions, which can be seen in every Indian in one way or another, even if they adorn themselves and clean themselves up, are so many more differences that naturally obstruct that conceived or proposed union…’ El Mercurio Peruano, vol. 10 (1794), p. 264Google Scholar and 277 (facsimile edition: Lima, 1966).

54 For an analysis of Enlightenment discourse on the American Indian see Gerbi, A., La Disputa del Nuevo Mundo: Historia de una polémica 1750–1900 (Mexico City, 1982)Google Scholar.

55 Rowe, John, ‘El Movimiento Nacional de siglo XVIII’, Revista Universitaria, no. 7 (1954)Google Scholar. It is reprinted in Galindo, Alberto Flores (ed.), Túpac Amaru II, 1780, Antología (Lima, 1976), pp. 13–53Google Scholar.

56 Juan, Carlos Estenssoro F., ‘Discurso, música y poder en el Perú colonial’, unpubl. MA thesis, Pontificia Universidad Católica (Lima), 1990, vol. III, p. 533Google Scholar. In another text Estenssoro shows how a typically Indian musical genre, the yaraví (or song for the death of the Inca), was divested of its original political connotations upon being adopted by the Creoles after Túpac Amaru's revolt. J. C. Estenssoro F. ‘Modernismo, Estética, Música y Fiesta: Elites y Cambio de Actitud Frente a la Cultura Popular en el Perú, 1750–1850’, in Urbano (ed.), Tradición, pp. 181–95.

57 ‘Recent studies on the revolution of Túpac Amaru confirm its nationalist significance, already admirably shown by Riva Agüero. For it included not only mestizos, but also Creoles. It did not have the character of an exclusively indigenous rebellion…’ Belaúnde, V. A., Peruanidad (selections) (Lima, 1968), p. 94Google Scholar.

58 ‘The Indian of the coast and the sierra… had, as an essential characteristic, a traditional instinct, a sense of adherence to acquired forms, a horror of change and sudden alteration, a desire for the perennial and a perpetuation of the past, which manifests itself in all of his actions and customs…’ Barrenechea, R. Porras, Mito, Tradición e Historia en el Perú (Lima, 1969), p. 21Google Scholar.

59 ‘It is worth noting that the subdelegates, priests, tax collectors and other functionaries did not permit the indigenous youths to dress with decency: one often saw that, with the pretext of any slight misdeed, they were ordered, after being savagely flogged, to remove their stockings and shoes and made to tread through mud, while being told that they must not dress like Spaniards, because the baize and rawhide sandals were reserved for them. On being asked the reason for such injustice, they replied that the indigenous folk who dressed like Spaniards became proud and disobedient: this was the common opinion of the leaders in the years around the time of independence’. Choquehuanca, J. Domingo, Ensayo de estadística completa…del Departamento de Puno (Lima, 1833), p. 69Google Scholar. In some places oral tradition has perpetuated this opinion of the elites, captured so well by Choquehuanca, at the time delegate from Puno, in phrases such as: ‘indio de jerga buen indio, indio de paño, mal indio, indio de casimir Dios me libre’ (‘an Indian in sackcloth, a good Indian; an Indian in wool, a bad Indian; an Indian in cashmere, God forbid!’). I owe this information to Arturo Tineo and Jeffrey Gamarra, in Ayacucho.

60 See especially Pardo's, ‘Opera y Nacionalismo’, in El Espejo de Mi Tierra. Periódico de costumbres, no. 2 (Lima, 1840)Google Scholar.

61 Regarding the Pardo-Segura polemic see the brief but penetrating observations of Calderón, Ventura García in Del Romanticismo al Modernismo, poetas y prosistas Peruanos (Paris, 1910), pp. 11–12Google Scholar.

62 Degregori, C. I., Blondet, C. and Lynch, N., Conquistadores de un nuevo mundo. De invasores a ciudadanos en San Martín de Porres (Lima, 1986)Google Scholar; Golte, J. and Adams, N., Los Caballos de Troya de los invasores. Estrategias campesinas en la conquista de la gran Lima (Lima, 1990)Google Scholar.

63 See Mar, J. Matos, El desborde popular (Lima, 1985)Google Scholar.