Indians in the Lobby: Newspapers and the Limits of Andean Cosmopolitanism, 1896–1930

JOSH:

So there are these two Indians in the lobby . . .

C. J.:

Yeah? (waiting for the punch line)

JOSH:

No, that’s not the beginning of a joke. I’m saying, . . . there are these two Indians in the lobby.

— The West Wing (2001)¹

Modernizers in Cuzco, Peru, ushered in the twentieth century by exalting newspapers as a universal vehicle for peace, prosperity, and progress. Although the city stood at more than 11,000 feet above sea level in the remote and rugged southern highlands, editors, public officials, and intellectuals were convinced that small but plentiful local newspapers contributed to a robust international public sphere. The writer who in 1910 lauded the press as the “aurora of salvation of the people” that “propagates itself through time and distance to keep redemptive thought alive” was hardly alone in his cosmopolitan idealism or emancipatory zeal.² In the decades to come, a flood of pretentious self-tributes conveyed the idea that newspapers were almost divinely appointed to propagate a modern liberal project.

However, the Western, bourgeois scaffolding of Cuzco’s Spanish-language press was a curious phenomenon in a majority Quechua-speaking region where almost half the 20,000 city residents and the great majority of the rural population could neither read nor write.³ Even as Cuzco’s elites and nascent middle sectors imagined communion with readers in Europe, North America, Argentina, and other regions they viewed as more modern than their own, the “degenerate” and marginalized Indians they encountered in streets adorned with Inca architecture often disappeared within massive ideological blind spots. The Cuzco press experienced a dramatic transformation in the mid-1910s, when liberal indigenista intellectuals appropriated newspapers as the primary platform for debating the “Indian problem,” newly framed within the emerging social sciences. When Indians seized this opening in the public sphere to submit their own letters to the press and air their grievances to reporters outside newspaper offices, even the most ardent indigenistas struggled to reconcile their commitment to universal inclusiveness with the unnerving image of politically engaged Indians.⁴ Modernizers pressed newspapers into ambivalent service: the intrusion of Indians into this space unmasked “universalism” as a centered concept that ceded little room to an indigenous “other.” In the process, Indians exposed a false placelessness in Cuzco newspapers, whose Western texture often flattened the contours of a diverse Andean society and at times erased the Indian population altogether.

The dozens of tabloids and broadsheets that circulated in Cuzco provide a rich archive for exploring cosmopolitanism and its limits on the periphery.⁵ Recent scholarship illuminates underlying contradictions by examining the construction and cohesiveness of “multiple affiliations” beyond the nation-state, tensions between unity and diversity, and the dichotomy between the global as modern and the local as backward.⁶ Discourse celebrating journalism as a conduit of modern ideals helps map historical silences within Cuzco indigenismo and at the same time uncovers the rickety inner workings of liberal, universalist projects. Though hardly monolithic, the political, intellectual, and artistic indigenista project sought to defend the indigenous masses against exploitative landowners and to contest the image of Andeans as racially inferior to their coastal counterparts. Cuzco indigenistas rejected the notion that Hispanic and urban Lima defined Peruvian modernity.⁷ Yet, homogenizing discourse in the region’s bourgeois print vehicles betrayed seduction by Westernization and paradoxically eclipsed the very groups indigenistas claimed to represent. Many struggled to reconcile the local and authentic with what they viewed as the universal and modern.

Indigenismo’s emergence in the press evoked a long tradition of elite tutelage and paternalism. With only a few hundred readers in the middle of an indigenous sea, what sort of emancipation did newspapers promise, and in whose image? How could the press “rehabilitate” the indigenous masses whose illiteracy represented the barbarism against which newspapers toiled? And if print capitalism was the middle-class medium in which Cuzqueños found a cozy sense of national or regional inclusion, what did the active engagement of literate and illiterate Indians with newspapers mean for the republican project?⁸ [End Page...