In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes (review)

English-language scholarship and teaching on Peru has recently been enriched by the publication in translation of Alberto Flores Galindo's classic work Buscando un Inca. Identidad y utopia en los Andes, first published in 1986. Those interested in Latin American studies will profit enormously from its appearance, as students and non-specialists will now enjoy the same access to it that Andeanists have had. Indeed, the original work has been obligatory reading for anyone studying the region's history and culture ever since its original publication. In 1986, Buscando un Inca won the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize for its author. To say that the study is ambitious is to state the obvious: alternately in broad strokes and through fine detail, it encompasses the entirety of post-Conquest Andean and Peruvian history through the optic of a particular lens (as the subtitle announces), but nevertheless purposefully asserts a sweeping analysis meant to make Peru comprehensible, perhaps especially in the present day. The date of the book's publication, just a few years before the author's death, puts Flores Galindo's work into its peculiar and remarkable light: the study also constituted an effort to understand the violence of the author's own historical moment. Perhaps most importantly, Flores Galindo's study sought a way out of Peru's civil strife.

The trio of translators and editors, Carlos Aguirre, Charles F. Walker, and Willie Hiatt, all historians, have done an admirable job in rendering the text into English. They have included a helpful glossary, explanatory notes and, in what is surely a gesture of admiration and respect toward both author and reader, have when possible filled out Flores Galindo's at times loose references. Aguirre and Walker's succinct and informative introduction situates the author within his own historical context even as it offers the necessary constellation of historical events, influences, and personages among which Flores Galindo navigated.

The book's unfurling of the notion of Andean utopia from the colonial period through the twentieth century effectively communicates its power: in the region, utopia has been identified with a particular culture, society and history, that of the Inca, and so stands apart from other definitions. Flores Galindo was primarily concerned with understanding the absence of an achieved social revolution in the Andes, and so the book seeks to understand why and how powerful revolutionary forces had been in some instances unable to shake off the yoke of the colonial system and in others incapable of rectifying the abuses of modernization that were part and parcel of the republic. For Flores Galindo, the notion of Andean utopia must be unpacked in order that it be superseded, because the historian's own political will toward social justice also motivates the text. Aguirre and Walker are entirely correct to signal the difference between the author's own sense of utopia in distinction to the versions he identifies in Andean history. This differential animates the text.

The book has a broad historical arc. It begins at the outset of the Conquest, in whose course it locates the emergence of one of the manifestations of the Andean utopia with which it is concerned, and then proceeds to focus on indigenous and other rebellions and revolts of subsequent centuries. Flores Galindo is particularly concerned with the Tupac Amaru and indigenous revolutions of the eighteenth century and later and the twentieth-century rebellions across the southern Andes that Flores Galindo and others have famously argued to be the motivating factor behind modern indigenismo. Given his attention to both these movements, he is understandably expansive with respect to two figures: Tupac Amaru II and José Carlos Mariátegui. In Search of an Inca, however, does not end with a recounting and dissection of early twentieth-century rebellions, or even with a commentary on the mid-century indigenous mobilizations against mining concerns...