The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity (review)

Indigenismo, the Latin American intellectual movement of the first half of the twentieth century that purported to help the indigenous population, has received much scholarly attention. The indigenismo movement was especially strong in Peru, the focus of this study. The author argues that this movement was an attempt by intellectuals to integrate the indigenous population into modern society between 1920 and 1940. This argument is implicit in a number of other studies on this topic; what is most valuable about this work is that it serves as an excellent introduction to some of the most important personalities as well as lesser lights who espoused indigenismo in Peru.

The book favors in particular José Carlos Mariátegui, the famous Marxist author and one of the progenitors of this movement. Jorge Coronado argues, quite accurately, that Mariátegui's intellectual project was to use European critical theory to understand and help the Peruvian Indian. Mariátegui posited that the Indian had a revolutionary potential because of the Inca past that he saw as very similar to an ideal communist regime. Indeed, Mariátegui assumed that even many of the contemporary practices of indigenous communities were similar to socialism. Interestingly, Coronado shows that Mariátegui had little direct knowledge of the Andean highlands but instead relied on a number of (mainly mestizo, i.e. non-indigenous) informants who had their own axes to grind. Thus, Mariátegui's conception of the Indian as the representative of the Andean spirit in contraposition to artificial capitalism was based in part on César Vallejo, an important Peruvian poet who himself was mestizo and who idealized Andean peasants. This, the longest chapter of the book, is quite revealing. I just wish the author had taken into account Mariátegui's intellectual journey to see how the most important twentieth-century Peruvian thinker developed his ideas rather than looking at Mariátegui's body of work as a whole without distinguishing how his thoughts changed over time.

The following chapter examines José Angel Escalante, a critic of Mariátegui's leftist interpretation of the Peruvian Indian. Escalante argued that the leftist indigenistas used Indians to advance their own agenda of modernization rather than help any real Indians. Instead, Escalante, who became an important official in the dictatorial Augusto B. Leguía regime (1919-1930), argued for a more cultural interpretation and taking the Indian as he/she was, rather than superimposing either the Inca past or a Marxist interpretation. For Escalante, education was the key, which of course also would bring the Indian into the modern nation, a similar goal to that of the leftist indigenistas.

One of the positive aspects of Coronado's approach is that he looks at different kinds of media. In another chapter, the author analyzes film and poetry in the person of Carlos Oquendo de Amat. Oquendo de Amat, a member of a well-to do family in the southern highlands, is famous for having written a series of poems titled Cinco metros (Five meters), published as a long, foldout book that looked like a movie reel spooled out. Coronado asserts that Oquendo de Amat was suggesting modernity through this different presentation, to imitate the new technology of movies from the United States that had arrived in the highlands. Many of the poems used innovative graphic settings to simulate film and other modern media beyond that of print. However, this, the shortest of chapters, only creates a tenuous connection to indigenismo, though Oquendo de Amat's yearnings for the Andean surroundings of his first years is a leading theme in some of his poems.

More persuasive is Coronado's discussion of the newspaper Labor which, in typical indigenista fashion, attempted to educate and transform the Indian and create class consciousness among its readers. Although it did some muckraking and was intimately tied to Mariátegui, the publication only lasted for one year (1928-1929) and was probably not much read, at least not by the target audience...