The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-making in Spanish America, 1810-1930 (review)

José Vasconcelos, Mexico's revolutionary education secretary, was not impressed by prehispanic culture: he deemed Maya art "barbarous, cruel and grotesque" and dubbed Cortés the "father of our nationality." Sending him to present a statue of the last Mexica emperor at the independence centenary in Brazil was consequently a decision with a certain irony. The statue was not even Mexican; it came from Tiffany's. "Look, che," the Argentine delegate told him:

I think this [statue] is a gaffe because nobody around here knows who that Indian is … it's a mistake for your government to represent Mexico with a symbol that has no resonance in the rest of America….

The offended Vasconcelos replied with a long impromptu speech, in which a largely fictitious last emperor signified the end of the "lengthy colonizing of our spirits." When accused of making it all up, he replied "I am not making history; I am trying to create a myth."¹

Vasconcelos was not the first politician to cynically plunder the pre-Columbian past for nationalist/anti-imperialist tropes. If we are to believe Rebecca Earle, though, his history was better than that of the Argentine. The nationalism of the independence leaders was, Earle argues, "indianesque": across Spanish America Creole insurgents mined the prehispa nic polities and their cultures as a rich source of ready-made legitimacy. This is not news in Peru and Mexico, where there is a dense literature on the symbolic recycling of the great urban societies of the prehispanic period. Earle's work, based on a continentally-sized sample of lieux de mémoire, may however surprise other country specialists. This comparative study – which spans poems, stamps, place names, museum holdings, histories, flags, plays, rhetoric and public ritual – repeatedly challenges the commonplace that indigenous discourse and symbols were epiphenomenal to most early nationalism in Spanish America. Where few appropriate (and appropriable) symbols existed, cultural managers invoked a "pan-American pantheon" of Inkas, Mexica and Araucanians. Even Argentines became unlikely enthusias ts. Their currency was the sol, stamped with the Inka sun; the first national anthem called the new republic a renewed Inka patria; José San Martín's revolutionary society was named for the Araucanian chief Lautaro. A secret proposal at the 1816 Congress of Tucumán called for the creation of an Inka monarchy along the Río de la Plata. With such evidence Earle makes an original and convincing case for an overlooked, continent-wide ideology of Indian revival.

This did not endure long past the generation that improvised their way to overthrowing the colonial state. After 1821 the "Indian princess" of the first coins in Colombia was replaced by a toga-wearing woman's bust; in Peru, government iconographers scrapped a multitude of solar symbols. The shift away from indigenous themes was over-determined. There had always been powerful semiotic and logical tension between the privileged creoles of the late colony claiming the indigenous past for themselves. Extant indigenous societies were, meanwhile, conceptualised as a source of disorder, backwardness and fear. Finally, the independence leaders themselves provided (once conveniently dead) a more recent and affectively powerful set of "fathers of the patria." Indianesque nationalism consequently waned across the second half of the nineteenth century, as the politicians and writers who policed national culture moved the indigenous past from centre-stage into a supporting role in textbooks and museums. It was reincarnated in early twentieth century Mexico (where, in an exception to the regional pattern, it never really went away), in Peru, and (weakly) in Central America. The discourse was largely forgotten elsewhere, subsiding into an undercurrent of half-obscure symbols that only sporadically surfaced.

Case and chronology established, Earle's second major argument is that Spanish American elites pulled off this semiotic conjuring trick – appropriating the symbols of the indigenous past to justify modern state formation – by surgically separating that past from the indigenous present. The metaphorical ancestry that creoles and national elites...