Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991 (review)

The problem of race mixture and how it is perceived is one of the recurrent and most interesting problems in Latin America. New perspectives, especially the postmodem twist, have provided tremendous potential to find new insights in an old and worn topic. Marisol de la Cadena’s book is an important but dense contribution to the field that takes the challenge of understanding racial categories with new social science analytical tools. Although de la Cadena is an anthropologist, her book is mostly a historical treatise on how views on race and Indians changed over the past century.

Cuzco was the capital of the Inca empire and has been one of the most important cities within post-independence Peru. Cuzco is also located in the most heavily Indian portion of the country; the local elites have had to justify their place within the national hierarchy in competition with other regional elites while taking into account an indigenous heritage that people of coastal Peru despised. The author shows how the concepts of race evolved in the everchanging definitions of white and Indian within the regional context. She presents a highly complex argument and each page is chock full of ideas and new insights. Although rewarding, sometimes this writing style and the sheer density of ideas make reading this book hard going.

The Cuzco elites felt themselves to be white, despite the fact that people from the coastal capital, Lima, saw them as dark-skinned. In an effort to define their own equality vis-à-vis the Lima elites and their superiority to the surrounding mestizos and Indians, the Cuzco elites exalted their Inca past in the 1920s. They thought of the Indians as rural brutes who had forgotten the glories of the Inca past. Only Cuzco elites knew the Inca speech; Indians from the countryside, according the elites, spoke a degenerate version of the language. In a period when radicals on the coast were denouncing the landlordism of the highlands, Cuzco elites asserted that they were blameless; the abuses came from newcomers (gamonales) who administered the lands (and the Indian peons on them) in immoral ways.

In one of the most important sections of the book, de la Cadena disputes that the Indian rebellions of the 1920s, upon which a number of Peruvianist scholars made their reputations, took place. Instead, she asserts that landlords used the reports of rebellions as political weapons to assert their control over nativist organizations that attempted to wrest control from the landlords. The Cuzco elites asserted that they were not at fault for the unrest, since it was the bad gamonales who incited the Indians to revolt. Elites in fact liked high Inca culture and began to stage plays depicting the Incas first for internal consumption, but by the 1940s for tourists as well. This brought about a struggle for authenticity with lower-class interlopers, during which time the elites attempted to maintain their control over the cultural production of the city and of the region. Numerous conflicts between official intellectuals and self-identified intellectuals marked the century.

De la Cadena also adds much to our knowledge of indigenism, a movement that began in the 1920s, presumably to protect the Indian population from rapacious outsiders. De la Cadena reveals the profoundly racist assumptions behind the efforts at the “redemption” of the natives and shows how the movement was in truth an ethnocidal project (that posited the elimination of peasant culture) as well as part of an elite project of maintaining control over rural folk. It also devalued the position of mestizos as the representation of the worst of both European and Indian features. The “neo-Indianists,” while they fought with the older indigenistas over how to represent and control the natives, did little better. According to the author, nobody came out well in this debate, including such towering figures in Peruvian intellectual history...