The Andes in Common

The 1910s and 20s saw an array of intellectuals and artists from various parts of Latin America experimenting with ways of using pre-Columbian legacies to ground a modern national aesthetic. As they essayed different modes of reanimating the past—in journalism, the visual arts, graphic design, and dance—and training present-tense bodies to recognize and engage with it, they also took part in a continent-wide system of interanimation, looking sideways at experiments elsewhere in learning how to mine their own pasts—or one another's. This article contends that these experiments—in the examples discussed here, from Argentina, Mexico, and Peru—were grounded in projecting an Andes in common; that, for a brief moment, the Andean became a portable and malleable transnational signifier, giving shape to each country's past while making it legible, comparable, and usable across the continent.