Los rostros de la plebe (review)

This brief selection of works by Peruvian historian and essayist Alberto Flores Galindo (1949-90) is designed to make his incisive, engaged, and elegant writing accessible to the broader Spanish-speaking world. After the ongoing publication of his complete works in Peru and the impending publication of his masterpiece (Buscando un Inca) in English, the volume confirms Flores Galindo's stature as one of the most important progressive intellectuals of the late twentieth century in Peru, and perhaps in all of South America.

For this, Magdalena Chocano (a student and research assistant of Tito's during the mid-1980s and now an accomplished historian in her own right) selected chapters and essays written or published between 1980 and 1989. During this last decade of his life, Tito broadened his earlier structuralist-Marxist approach to focus on ideas, mentalities, utopia and myth, racism, conflicting political projects, and power. As the title suggests, the editor wanted to highlight Tito's focus on the social and cultural agency—indeed, creativity—of the plebe, the common man and woman in Peru's rural landscapes, mines, sweatshops, factories, offices, and prisons.

The first chapter, "Europa y el país de los Incas: La utopia andina," appeared as the introduction to Buscando un Inca (which was awarded the Casa de las Americas Prize). It is a brilliant, elegant, and erudite essay on the continuities and breaks in the Andean worldview from the pre-Incaic civilizations until today. In Andeans' ever-changing and creative responses to the disaster of the conquest and the massive social, political, and cultural disruptions it entailed, Flores Galindo traces the rise of utopian projects that idealized the Incas and called for their restoration. Flores Galindo was among the first writer to emphasize the change and adaptability of Andean cultural formations, especially through the impact of Christian linear eschatology. The memory of the Incas, and the projects to recreate a just order in the Andes, varied tremendously between various epochs and various social groups working toward those ends. They can take on exclusivist, aristocratic, or messianic forms, but (in the best of cases) they rally Andeans' creative energies toward an all-embracing, forward-looking, and revolutionary vision that incorporates European concepts into an imagined just Andean society.

The second chapter, "Los rostros de la plebe," formed part of Flores Galindo's doctoral dissertation, published as Aristocracia y plebe: Lima 1760-1830 (Mosca Azul 1984). He draws a rich, multifaceted portrait of the lives of the "plebeians" of Lima and its countryside during the last half century of the colonial era: the work experiences, diversions, family relations, and strategies of resistance practiced by slaves, artisans, and day laborers. Juxtaposing these plebeians' creative struggle for life against the negative stereotypes that Lima's aristocratic elite held of them, Flores Galindo emphasizes the atomistic, fragmentary nature of the plebe, which made it difficult to forge a broad-based anticolonial struggle at the heart of the viceregal regime.

The next three chapters deal with the twentieth century, especially the decade of the 1920s (which was so critical in the development of diverse cultural and political projects of popular inclusion and democracy) and the violence of the 1980s. For the 1920s, Flores Galindo once again juxtaposes the elite's racist and paternalist visions of native Andeans with popular movements and the rise of socialist, indigenista, and Aprista visions of Peru. He sees a growing contrast between a forward-looking Andean utopia, which could create a democratic, multicultural society through socialism, and messianic, authoritarian movements that perpetuated the repressive and exclusivist power constellations that Peru had accrued during the colonial and postcolonial eras. His discovery of a heterodox José Carlos Mariátegui, subject of the fourth chapter, was at the very core of his own understanding of the political and cultural project necessary for a just and democratic Peru. As the final chapter, the editor has...