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

Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991. By Marisol de la Cadena (Durham, Duke University Press, 2000) 408 pp. $64.95 cloth $21.95 paper

Through a combination of historical and ethnographical materials, de la Cadena analyzes perceptions of race in twentieth-century urban Cuzco—in particular, those associated with the notions of "indianness" and mestizaje. Her main objective is to debunk what she considers to be the "dominant" or "elitist" notion of mestizaje in Peru by expounding what she characterizes as the subaltern perspective. The book is divided into two clearly differentiated sections. The first one (chapters 1 to 3) presents the "elite's" perceptions of race, largely on the basis of written sources (including municipal records, newspapers, and intellectual production), and the second one (chapters 3 to 6) discusses the "subalterns'" views, based on ethnographical information and interviews that the author conducted in the city of Cuzco during sixteen months between 1991 and 1992.

De la Cadena argues that dominant notions of mestizaje in Peru are rooted in a dichotomous view of the country, where "indianness" is associated with a primitive and rural condition, poverty, and illiteracy, and "non-indianness" with a coastal lifestyle, urban manners, economic success, and education. Within this scheme, mestizos are defined culturally (rather than biologically) as those Indians who, upon migrating to the city, acquire urban ways, become literate, and progressively give up their language and traditions—that is, stop being Indians. Mestizaje, thus conceived, presupposes "cultural passage": from rural to urban, from Quechua to Spanish, from illiterate to literate, from poverty to affluence, from Indian to non-Indian. De la Cadena claims that these notions are well exemplified in modern times by the writings of novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, and that they were already entrenched in the thinking of indigenistas of the early 1920s and 1930s, the neoindianistas of the 1940s, and the Marxists of the 1960s to 1980s. Although in accord with the class language that they embraced, Marxists dropped allusions to race—replacing the term Indian with peasant—they did not eradicate the "culturally fundamentalist" notions that indigenistas had attached to Indians (which Marxists transferred to peasants) and that conceived of them as minors who could not speak for themselves and needed to be represented.

De la Cadena's discussion of elites' perceptions of race is enlightening as an intellectual history and constitutes a political critique of contemporary racist practices and discourses in Peru. Her treatment of gamonalismo (a form of peasant exploitation by petty hacendados or gamonales) and its representations, and her discussion of the various "pro-Indian" agendas and their limitations, will be of special interest to scholars interested in political discourses and representations of race in early twentieth-century Latin America. Her overall idea that racism can be perpetuated with cultural rather than racial allusions, is especially forceful in a country where phenotype differences between poor peasants and Andean elites are often nonexistent. An effective euphemism for Indian, de la Cadena tells us, is "ignorant."

Her discussion of the "subaltern" perspective is, however, less persuasive. De la Cadena's subalterns are relatively well-off rural migrants in the city of Cuzco (among them, market women, dancers, and university students) who espoused urban ways and improved their educational and economic standards but, unlike Vargas Llosa's mestizos, neither reject their "Indian condition" nor give up their "indigenous culture," which they conversely "celebrate." To prove this claim, de la Cadena describes their fiestas, religious rituals, and dances in the city and its outskirts, where Quechua is spoken, bearing the imprint of various rural life traditions. De la Cadena emphasizes the "hybridity" of these practices in her attempt to show that these migrants—whom she calls "grassroot intellectuals"—have flexible identities and are not necessarily torn between (either "rural" or "urban") dilemmas.

This claim is a most...