Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991 (review)

Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991. By MARISOL DE LA CADENA. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiii, 408 pp. Cloth, $64.95. Paper, $21.95.

This is a gripping book on how and why all the people of the city of Cuzco practice a cruel and elaborate game of discrimination against each other. Everyone in Cuzco feels herself or himself the victim of cultural/racial discrimination, while at the same time, that same person feels an equally justified right to practice the very same against others. In an admirable and very readable book, de la Cadena forcefully presents the complex and intricate rules used to disparage others by associating them with indigenous cultural or racial traits and to elevate oneself through the adoption of mestizo categories. At the other end of the continuum, the mestizo categories are used to ascribe to oneself or to superiors. Marisol de la Cadena does a superb job in showing how Andean distinctions do not conform to dual and closed compartments of either-or choices, but are a matter of an excruciatingly complicated scale that adds or subtracts, in fine millimeter-like units, a negative degree of Indianness or positive mestizo-ness to a person's claim and counterclaim. The tokens in this game are not necessarily racial attributes, but ephemeral issues, such as respect, dignity, or authenticity that convey, to player and audience alike, degrees of "de-Indianization" (her term). The fight is thus over the control of the production of these performances.

Each token that is used to discriminate has a social and political history, which the author traces with admirable skill, perceptive insight, cruel ironic humor, and a keen eye for the telling detail. She is very perceptive in teasing enlightening material from the local archives and the writings of Cuzco scholars. The history of the shifting paradigms of the cultural and socially hegemonic definitions of Indian-ness and how they are contested is the best part of this wonderful book. We learn, for example, how Cuzco intellectuals at the turn of the century defied European concepts of race by defining it as a cultural (and therefore changeable) variable. We are told how these indigenístas (principally Luis E. Valcárcel and his successors) could therefore set themselves up as arbiters of the pathways, the necessary steps and the outward markers of successful achievement of de-Indianization. They did this by arbitrarily defining an Indian as a rural bumpkin, degenerated through exploitation, and mistreated by the "bad" rural mestizo (gamonal). According to local intellectuals, in a civilized place such as Cuzco, there were no "bad" Indians, and only "good" mestizos, direct inheritors of a classic "authentic and pure" Inca tradition.

Dominated by males and male images, local intellectuals set themselves up as hegemonic judges and gatekeepers of authentic cultural expressions of Cuzqueño culture, which distanced itself as far as possible from the denigrated Indian practices of rural areas. These intellectuals set the standards by which any performance (whether public or just social) could be judged as more authentic or more vulgar, and thus provoked a myriad of situations where claims to respect could be validated or dismissed. De la Cadena gives many examples. A wonderful section describes how the local elite created the festival of Inti Raymi, in which Cuzco intellectuals and the Ministry of Education controlled the contents, representations, and cast of these events. A lineage of "approved" performers of the key role, that of the Inca himself, monopolized the role because they were deemed to be the only speakers of the genuine royal language, Capac Simi. These performers were eventually challenged by others who claimed to know an even purer form of this language. Likewise, with the growth of tourism, town intellectuals cleaned up Indian indecencies and created the choreography, the dress, and the...