Alberto Flores Galindo was one of the most important twentieth-century historians of Peru. Carlos Aguirre and Charles Walker, themselves two leading Peruvianist historians, have penned a thoughtful, fascinating, and at times moving exploration of Flores Galindo's body of work.
Flores Galindo died of brain cancer in 1990, when he was just 40 years old. In his too-short life, Flores Galindo published an absolutely astonishing quantity of historical work. Pulled together, his monographs and assorted essays fill six book volumes, each between 400 and 600 pages long. The range of Flores Galindo's work was equally staggering, including considerations of conquest, colonial Andean society, the Túpac Amaru rebellion, Independence struggles, class structure, racism, the campesino rebellions of the 1960s, and the Shining Path. He ably considered Peru in its complex geographical entirety, writing about the coast, the northern and southern Andes, and the Amazon. He wrote an important work on José Carlos Mariátegui and had begun a study of Peruvian anthropologist and writer José María Arguedas that was interrupted by his premature death. The quality of Flores Galindo's work was just as impressive.
Aguirre and Walker's book considers Flores Galindo's writings from many different perspectives. Their chapter on his magisterial Buscando un Inca effectively shows the importance and impact of his most famous work, which interpreted 500 years of Peruvian history through the lens of Andean utopia. To date, that book has had seven editions in Spanish and has been translated into Italian and English. The book further explores Flores Galindo's historiographical importance to considerations of Peru's Independence period, his efforts to understand Shining Path violence, and his engagement with literature. There is an intriguing chapter on Flores Galindo's trips to Cuba that very effectively contextualizes the Casa de las Américas contest, which Flores Galindo won in 1986, and the book as a whole does an outstanding job of explaining his work in relation to the tumultuous historical context of Peru's 1970s and 1980s.
The book demonstrates Flores Galindo's crucial role as a public intellectual. He came of age in an era where to be a leftist activist was to read and write extensively. No Peruvian did so more energetically and effectively than Flores Galindo. Aguirre and Walker show how he wrote history with conscious attention to understanding and improving present-day Peru. Beyond his books and academic articles—which were themselves beautifully written in an accessible, engaging style—Flores Galindo published in a huge range of popular venues, including newspapers, magazines, union periodicals, and more.
Walker and Aguirre paint a vivid picture of Flores Galindo as a generous and supportive mentor of young scholars. He was always keen to reference lesser known and junior historians, to chat with students about their projects, and to help young scholars establish connections. Indeed, Walker and Aguirre first met because Flores Galindo put the two in touch. Yet at the same time, he could be a very sharp critic. His style was aggressive and polemical. His most heated intellectual disagreement was with the prominent Peruvian anthropologist Carlos Iván Degregori. Their debate centered around Flores Galindo's interpretation of the Shining Path and Andean culture, and the tension between the two scholars was well known.
There are two surprising silences in the book. The book repeatedly notes Flores Galindo's sudden illness, and even the fact that he received treatment in New York, but Walker and Aguirre do not explicitly name that illness as brain cancer. Given that Flores Galindo wrote so openly about his brain cancer in his public goodbye letter, it is not clear why Walker and Aguirre do not do the same. Similarly, while Walker and Aguirre write about Flores Galindo's childhood and university years, they do not tell us of his marriage to Cecilia Rivera, beyond a brief reference to her as his wife.
Small silences aside, Aguirre and Walker have produced an excellent book that honors a truly exceptional historian and human whose words, ideas, and commitment to a more socially just Peru continue to inspire three decades after his death.
