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

The Andes Imagined is an attempt to extend the study of early-twentieth-century Peruvian indigenismo or nativism beyond the canonical literary works associated with that "movement." In addition to the standard figures of José Carlos Mariátegui and Luis Eduardo Valcárcel (discussed mostly via Valcárcel's Siete Ensayos and Tempestad en los Andes and Mariátegui's Amauta, Coronado devotes chapters to the critical writings of José Miguel Escalante (via the infamous polémica indigenista), the poetry of Carlos Oquendo de Amat (5 metros de poemas), the legal petitions or "testimonials" inserted in Mariátegui's short-lived, middlebrow propaganda arm Labor, and the outdoor photographic compositions of Martín Chambi.

Coronado criticizes the neoindigenista theories of "heterogeneity" and "border thinking" propounded by Antonio Cornejo Polar, Aníbal Quijano, and Walter Mignolo. He follows instead the approaches of Gerhard Leibner and Efraín Kristal, who in his notable study The Andes Viewed from the City (1987) takes nativism to be not about the ethnographic "reality of Indians" but to be instead about the elusive political modernity that (since Manuel González Prada) had been desired by those intellectuals who imagined its telluric vehicle to be "the New Indian" and "true nation" of the Andean hinterland. Also key to Coronado's approach is the concept of "alternative modernities" as developed by Dilip Gaonkar. Briefly, Coronado defines "modernization" as an external force that impinges upon the local realities and "traditions" of Peruvians, who in turn develop particular "modernities" to negotiate the changes wrought by that modernization, thereby opening new figures and horizons of experience. Although critics will note that this approach reproduces many of the pitfalls associated with old antinomies, it does lend itself to the "alternative modernities" perspective.

Readers looking for a comprehensive and grounded historical study of the modernist discourse of indigenismo in all of its manifestations will not find it here. In the end, The Andes Imagined remains primarily a synchronic literary study, for essayistic, journalistic, and poetic "lettered production" only, most of it polemical in nature, and a very brief foray at the close of the book into photography, are presented here. There is no serious discussion of legal, historical, anthropological, or scientific discourse, nor is there any exploration of theater, the arts and crafts, museums, or architecture, all of which exhibited elements of the indigenista tableau during the period under study (1920-1940). Still, from the disciplinary perspective of Spanish language and literature studies it is a noteworthy step in the right direction.