Rimanakuy’86 and Other Fictions of National Dialogue in Peru

RIMANAKUY’86 AND OTHER FICTIONS OF NATIONAL DIALOGUE IN PERU Tracy Devine Guzmán University of Miami The native intellectual who identifies the people with the ‘true national culture’ will be disappointed. –Homi Bhabha Introduction: Indigenist Multiculturalism and the Rhetoric of Education State-backed initiatives towards what might now be considered a “multiculturalist ” politics have existed in Peru since the first quarter of the twentieth century. While academic understandings of “multiculturalism” vary widely, especially when placed across the political spectrum, I refer generally to the body of academic, educational, and political discourse that acknowledges a variety of human experiences, and advances legal, political, and social mechanisms to defend and legitimize them.1 Though it may seem anachronistic to call early indigenist projects “multiculturalist ,” I mean to suggest that incipient formulations of indigenism share with more recent discourses of multiculturalism two fundamental characteristics : First, a desire to recognize, protect, and promote marginalized cultural forms; and second, an inability to modify the uneven distribution of power that keeps colonialist cultural hierarchies in place. In forms past and present, “multiculturalism” has failed to recognize the constructed and relational nature of cultural difference by favoring, instead, superficially inclusive but ultimately static and essentialist notions of cultural diversity (Bhabha).2 Across the Americas, “indigenism” as a multiculturalist discourse overlapped in theory and practice with State-backed endeavors of “indigenous education.”3 Often understood as a homogenizing project to incorporate “Indians,” through schooling, into an all-encompassing mestiza nationhood , indigenist discourse has in fact only partially favored the assimilation of indigenous peoples into dominant society.4 At certain times and in certain places, indigenist politicians and intellectuals instead used the school to support the opposite goal of preserving idealized forms of unadulterated Indianness at all costs. This position is well represented by the early thought of historian, anthropologist, and educator Luis Eduardo Valcárcel,5 whose 1927 manifesto, Tempestad en los Andes, disdained racial and cultural mestizos as degraded Indians (cholos), and likened them to “parasitic worms” living off the “rotting body” of a corrupt and putrid society (39)6 . To counter this “degeneration,” Valcárcel’s early work sought to temper the multiple processes of cholificación through diverse mechanisms of social control, the most important of which would be schooling. Pondering this initiative nearly half a century later, he explained: “In C  2009 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 75 The Latin Americanist, March 2009 [. . .the] processes of cultural confrontation, the school’s mission was of the utmost importance. The educator was responsible for determining which of the aspects of the modern cultural archive would be worthy of admission into indigenous culture” (Memorias 352). Though his pessimism regarding the merits of mestizaje abated over the course of a long career, Valcárcel’s early reflections on the task of social engineering point to the role that his indigenist counterparts assigned to themselves as rightful guardians of “Indianness.” For him, as for many in his cohort, the enterprise of forging a desirably “multicultural” society meant molding and enforcing a specific social and cultural order. By working to save Indianness or to undo it, to prevent mestizaje or to encourage it, indigenist intellectuals of various political shades and ideological convictions took on, in Foucault’s bio-political terms, nothing less than the “calculated management of [indigenous] life” (262). As Minister of Education between 1945 and 1947, Valcárcel sought to “improve” Indians and national society by refining Indianness and recentering rural life around the institution of the school. One significant development of this period was the institution of rural schools that were initiated in conjunction with the Bolivian Ministry of Education and paid for with the financial support of the United States – the Núcleos Escolares Campesinos (“Rural Scholarly Nuclei,” or NECs).7 In the indigenist imaginary, these schools would form the physical and ideological center of the refashioned rural and indigenous community, allowing for the preservation and improvement of Indianness while at the same time keeping “Indians” in the countryside and far from the corruptive influences of dominant society. By propelling improved Indians into the future alongside but separate from their non-indigenous compatriots, the NECs would help, at least in...