The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity

Introduction: Indigenismo, Modernity, Indigenismos, Modernities

1 T hIs book explores the contradictions that lie at the center of indigenismo , the cultural, social, and political movement that grew to prominence in the early twentieth century in Latin America. As a constellation of extremely varied practices, including painting, photography, literature, and literary and cultural criticism, as well as diverse government policies, indigenismo endeavored to vindicate the area’s indigenous peoples after centuries of abuse and marginalization. In order to achieve this goal, it promoted the reconfiguration of society such that it would be more amenable to the indio, the term used to designate all indigenous people. Without exception, the discourses that sought to articulate this reconfiguration all constructed particular versions of the indio and of indigenous culture. As a result, the indio, represented by others’ projections, became the critical component of the new configurations of Andean society and culture that these practices imagined. That is to say, the discourses of indigenismo were always also ways of figuring how the region might, in its own way, become modern. Thus, rather than focusing exclusively on how indigenismo represented the indigenous population and indigeneity, I seek to understand INDIGENISMO, MODERNITY, INDIGENISMOS, MODERNITIES InTroduCTIon 2 ≈ IndIgenIsmo, modernITy, IndIgenIsmos, modernITIes a wide range of indigenista work as a commentary on and reaction to the appearance and implementation of modernization in its different forms within a region marginal to Europe and the United States. To do so, we must outline indigenismo in broad terms and then address conceptualizations of modernity as they relate to it. While I will discuss some important concepts pertaining to the terms modernization and, in particular, modernity, it seems useful to make some initial comments concerning these two at times unwieldy terms. By modernization I mean to refer to a wide array of material and conceptual changes in LatinAmerica,especiallyastheybegantotakeplaceaftertheindependence period of the 1820s. These transformations include the processes of societal democratization and the subsequent emergence of new subjects into the nation , the region, the city, the neighborhood, and other conceptual units of communal and individual identity. These transformations triggered subaltern subjects to lay claims on the societies that had previously marginalized them and, in most cases, persisted in so doing. This pressure from below is crucial to understanding the contours that modern societies assume in Latin America in general and the Andes more specifically. In contrast to such claims, which can be understood as reactions, the term modernization may also denote initial actions. In this sense, it signals the influx of economic entities and systems from other parts of the globe, as well as the introduction of new technologies into Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One has only to imagine the impact that gas lighting, railroads, electricity, running water, radio, and cinema— to name but a few innovations—had on the organization of daily life to conceptualize the vast transformations that these advances wrought on Andean societies. Each of these innovations alone, and all of them together, decisively changed what it meant to live in the region over the course of this period. We must also not forget the importance of the industrialization of certain sectors of the economy, such as (significantly for this study) mining and textile production. Within this second connotation of modernization, which one might clarify by calling it instead “technologification,” I want to stress technology’s deep alteration of human experience and sensibility. In reality, it is difficult and perhaps impossible to separate, say, the implementation of railroads from their economic manifestation in a local context . Nevertheless, insisting on the conceptual distinction between these imports and the real-world contexts in which they appeared as novelties allows us to fully appreciate Latin America’s initial receptiveness toward the material and conceptual apparatuses that appeared on its stage. IndIgenIsmo, modernITy, IndIgenIsmos, modernITIes ≈ 3 Finally, by modernization I also mean to invoke the arrival and eventual eruption of foreign cultural concepts and artistic production in emphatically local cultural scenes. Here I note simply that foreign ideas—often experienced in the form of printed matter—were part and parcel of the mounting influx of goods that is a hallmark of the period. In whatever form they entered, these high and low cultural imports—which include Marxist concepts, cinematic forms, and highbrow surrealism—were sought out and eagerly welcomed by many Latin Americans. By suggesting that these conceptual and material imports are an explicit component of modernization , I anticipate the related, but distinct...