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Chapter Two: A Modern Andean Culture? Jos
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52 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 buthighlysignificantchapterinthehistoryofLatinAmericanindigenismo, 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. ThetensionbetweenAndeanregionalcultureandnationalistdiscourse played out in modern Andean intellectual production, here represented in the polemic. This commentary on regional culture was absorbed into establishment 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 A MODERN ANDEAN CULTURE? José Ángel Escalante and Indigenismo at Odds ChApTer Two 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 denominator , 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 revolutionary 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 faceoff 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 realization 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 between Mariátegui and Sánchez, with the input of a handful of other notables , 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 newspapers and journals of the time reveals that the polemic included a full range of intellectuals, from those affiliated with the Leguía government [54.163.62.42] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:08 GMT) 54 ≈ A modern AndeAn CulTure? (then in power) to others that belonged to the leftist groups active far outside mainstream politics. A full list of intellectuals is therefore much longer , 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 “definitive 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...