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  • Dancing Death: Performing Dispossession in Arguedas’ Los zorros
  • Annette Rubado

1. The People, Representation and Affect

Lo indio no puede ser más tomado en este momento ni desde el punto de vista racial, ni desde el punto de vista estrictamente de casta. Tomándolo desde un punto de vista estrictamente cultural, lo indio ya no es de ninguna manera la cultura prehispánica—eso creo que es obvio para todos nosotros—, ¿pero qué es lo indio, entonces?”

(Aníbal Quijano, qtd. in Guillermo Rochabrún 57)

Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano posed this question at an academic roundtable recorded at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (Institute of Peruvian Studies) in Lima in 1965. The implications of his question, including both how to interpret the “indio” and the relationship of intellectuals to “indios” resonated widely at the time of publication in the 1980s in the context of the war between the Shining Path Maoist rebels and the Peruvian government. The debate centered on how accurately the recently published novel Todas las sangres by José María Arguedas represented what literary critic Alberto Escobar claimed [End Page 318] was “una imagen total del Perú” (Guillermo Rochabrún 21). The “indios” Quijano asks his interlocutors to define exceed the categories these social scientists have at their disposal. The very inadequacy of the categories implies both the displacement of this group and the apparent need for new interpretative categories such as “campesinos explotados” (Rochabrún 40). This preoccupation with the problem of how to represent and interpret the displaced sectors of the population concerned not only the leading intellectuals of Peru at the mid-century, but arose in dialogue with other academic and political efforts to produce and map this population in the Americas at the time. Intellectuals, policy makers and government officials began to articulate theories of cultural and racial integration at the turn of the century as they sought to build democratic national identities and successfully compete on the world market.

Industrialization and urbanization accelerated throughout Latin America during the first half of the twentieth century leading to the freeing of settled persons from the social strictures and property relations that prevented them from fully participating in capitalist production. In Peru, between 1940 and 1970 fish and sugar industries on the coast oriented towards global trade “attracted a flood of migration from the sierra, where traditional subsistence economies eroded amid escalating social conflict that led to the internal occupation of a number of the highland regions by the Peruvian army” (Tulio Halperín-Donghi 332). The dispossessed peoples who were caught up in this “flood of migration” were the objects of intense critical attention by politicians, intellectuals and artists precisely because they were seen as either threatening to or the base for the “modern nation” depending on the way these deterritorialized groups were understood and thus represented.1

During the first half of the twentieth century the major political movements and theories of mestizaje, indigenismo and Marxism competed, and at times converged, in their attempts to define, represent and produce a “people” in Peru as the core of anti-imperialist, nation building projects. To produce this “people” they must resolve what they viewed as the problem of marginal groups, in Peru almost always defined as Indian or peasant. These groups were seen as either outside the modern production apparatus or exploited by it. Each of the movements and theories offered teleological accounts of what they [End Page 319] believed the deterritorialized individuals and groups should become. Proponents for mestizaje (Manuel Prado y Ugarteche, Jose de la Riva Agüero) envisioned them as future citizens and laborers. Marxist thinkers (José Carlos Mariátegui) saw them as becoming revolutionary agents conscious of their oppression. Indigenista intellectuals (Luis E. Valcárcel, Julio C. Tello) represented them as a utopian antidote to capitalism and modernization. Each in their own way sought to overcome and eradicate dispossession and to transform deterritorialized groups into a population that would fit into their imaginary of a unified, homogenous and static “people.”

Literary and cultural forms of imaginary integration of the culturally different and the popular (transculturation and magical realism) were enmeshed with the political projects in seeking to envision...

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