This varied and polished collection of essays comes at a timely moment in Peru's history, as the bicentennial anniversaries of the Declaration of Independence (1821) and Battle of Ayacucho (1824) approach. In the last ten years, intellectuals, politicians, and artists have been revisiting the country's recent and difficult past of guerrilla war and violence. Museums have been built and there has been a flowering of studies, novels, and plays, producing new analysis and great controversy. Surprisingly (or not) very little has been done in preparation for the upcoming celebrations. The delay may originate in the country's unhurried ways, or perhaps in the tensions that these events continue to produce, for as this text so well exposes, there has always been little agreement in Peru on how or what to celebrate Independence.
The book is divided around three main themes: historiography, centennial celebrations, and public sculptures. Its goal is to offer critical and balanced analysis that includes but goes beyond the capital and pays attention to Peru's provinces. The volume also makes an effort to place discussions of Peruvian independence in larger continental frameworks.
Loayza opens with a fascinating chronological overview of the intellectual controversies around the celebration of Independence from 1920 to 1980. He correlates the rise of new approaches and questions with changes in the evolution of the historical profession. While Loayza compellingly shows how different themes—the nation, the quest for national heroes and the regret in lacking them, Peru's mestizo character, hispanismo, militarism, liberalism, nationalism, regionalism, dependence—dominated certain moments, no single interpretation ever wins. Juan Fonseca, following Ranajit Guha, analyzes the ways in which the historiography has considered popular participation during the wars of Independence, a topic of much interest in the past two decades and key to understanding the disruption and violence produced at this time. His essay reveals, however, the bigger challenges that the case of Peru poses in this kind of study, as it is not possible to fully understand popular participation in the highly militarized old viceroyalty without taking the Spanish royal armies and their mechanisms for ethnic inclusion and development of guerrillas into consideration.
The book then turns to the centennial celebrations of independence. Carlota Casalino's well-researched piece on Francisco de Zela's brief rebellion in Tacna in 1811 illustrates the difficulties of coming to terms with an upheaval that took place on the remote southern frontier, lasted only four days, and was more connected to events in Río de la Plata than in Lima. Placing Peru in a continental context and attempting an interconnected history, Pablo Ortemberg takes us back to Lima to show how the centennials—rather than inviting a new reflection on the country's past—were used to put forward in one case a modernizing project of public works and in another a solution to the country's border conflicts under Augusto B. Leguía's government.
Guillemette Martin examines centennial celebrations in Arequipa, revealing the tensions between this proud southern city and Lima. The local organizers chose as central figure the poet Mariano Melgar, who joined the Cuzco rebels of 1814 and was killed shortly afterwards. Interestingly, they omit, as did Martin, the major role that the region and city played on the loyalist side, funding and providing for the royal armies of Alto Peru. Carlos Hurtado follows with a piece on Jauja, revealing how the local elites bought into President Leguía's modernizing goals, leaving their Andean traditions and past behind. Iván Caro centers on the centennials in Ayacucho and describes the tensions between central and local authorities, the struggles of the latter for national prominence, and the cold neglect of the central government.
In the last section of the book, Nanda Leonardini examines the role of local artists in creating sculptures in Ayacucho, suggesting that Lima's lack of interest in them left them space to forge images and memories of their own. Daniel Vifian studies the equestrian statue of Simón Bolívar built in Lima during the wealth of the guano era, when the military ruled and drained the country's wealth. The last chapter, by Rodolfo Monteverde, discusses the state project of creating a monument and a public square for José de San Martín in Lima as late as the 1910s and 1920s, during the so-called “Aristocratic Republic.”
These last three chapters are mainly descriptive and lack historical contextualization, but they do engage with the main theme of the book: the great challenges of studying and celebrating Peru's independence. No simple interpretation or unique figure has risen to embody or dominate over 20 years of war, the consolidation and breakdown of royal military power in this old viceroyalty, the arrival and failure of Argentinean and Chilean insurgent forces under San Martín, and the subsequent domination of Bolívar's Venezuelan and Colombian forces. Rather than trying to meld together this confusing and overwhelming past, we should embrace it as this book does, and build from this complexity. Not having a consolidated national figure or history to celebrate give us historians more freedom to study the fractures and divisions on which our present has been built.
