The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (review)

By now, most students of the Latin American past are familiar with the oddities of nineteenth-century nationalism in the region. Elites actively drew their nationalist symbols from the Indian past, even while adopting genocidal postures towards Indians present. In most studies of the period, this practice has served as the basis for underlining the hypocritical racism of the period, but this view does not satisfy Rebecca Earle, who believes that much of the history of elite nationalism in Latin America is deeply inflected with complex narratives about both the Indian past and present. Her gaze is sweeping, an attempt to look at the ways national elites imagined the Indian across the region, and in part because of her breadth of focus she largely succeeds in accomplishing her goals.

Studies of nationalist ideology in Latin America tend to limit their focus to one state, following the logic that if nationalism is the focus, the scope should be the nation. Earle rejects this approach, arguing that one can best understand nationalist phenomena in Latin America through a regional lens. It seems a risky proposition, juxtaposing the obvious examples where the Indian was an important national symbol (as in Mexico and Peru) alongside places that are not obvious analogues (as in Cuba and Argentina), but Earle claims that a consideration of the Indigenous past was critical to the imagining of modern nations across the region. She reveals the centrality of uses of the Indian past in the process of independence, as criollo rebels narrated the Spanish Conquest as tragedy and made themselves the heirs to the ancient pre-Colombian civilizations. She then shows the gradual elimination of a tendency to link the national past to ancient Indian civilization. By the mid-nineteenth century, elites largely embraced hispanophila, a turn which was followed by the intensification of genocide in the late nineteenth century. Lastly, she introduces the complex and diverging paths that the nations of the region took in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, as the ancient Indian past again became a potent symbol (but only for some) and real Indians entered the picture.

If it can be said that we already knew that the Indian was an important nationalist symbol beginning in the eighteenth century, it is hard to argue that anyone has unpacked this symbol with more care. The trans-regional focus of the text helps us to see the different ways this iconography functioned, but Earle’s studiousness in examining the nuances of each case allow for this set of continent-wide practices to make sense. We see in nineteenth-century criollo elites not only the desire to define themselves as not-Spanish, but we also see in the debates and disagreements among nationalists a glimpse of just what a contested terrain this was. One can sympathize with mid-century hispanophiles when they accuse their opponents of being “absurd,” even if their own racism is abhorrent. After all, they were no less racist than those who clothed themselves in the garb of the Aztec, Inca, or Aruacanian past. In spite of a flurry of decrees making Indians citizens early in the century, no elites could imagine living Indians as their equals. Similarly, while twentieth-century Indigenistas gain some credit for their desire to connect the ancient Indian past to the present, Earle notes the importance of mestizophilia in this era and the inability of the state to deliver on the promise of citizenship. Here too she shows a broad diversity of experience, highlighting Mexican conservative Indigenismo as distinct from the socialist tendency in Peru.

Oddly, the comparison of various Indigenismos may highlight one of the weaknesses in the text. Earle is, by necessity, synthetic in her approach, and at various points she relies on the scholarship of others to fill in the gaps in her analysis. In doing so, she may reveal...