Civilising School and Militant Teacher
For modern states in Latin America the school became the most noticeable institution that demarcated territory that was actively governed. Through the school, as Mary Kay Vaughan comments in the case of Mexico, state leaders hoped that a backward and feudal society would be transformed into a modern one, and that rural schools would discipline and channel the energies of rebellious peasants by nationalising and modernising them.Footnote 1 All children would be taught Spanish and civic values, national history and geography, practices and behaviours seen to mark steps towards civilisation and progress, and, with their parents, pressed to participate in displays and rituals of the state/school ceremonial calendar. In processes of state formation, the school became the secular, non-militaristic arm of the state entrusted with the task of incorporating the local into the national, thereby reproducing the values, stratifications and hierarchies of which the national society and polity was composed.
In Peru, education was hailed by post-colonial elites from the mid-nineteenth century as the way forward in building the nation, integrating indigenous populations (represented as being left prostrate by centuries of despotic Spanish rule), and achieving a symbolic whitening of national society. Teaching crusades were periodically mounted from Lima and relayed through provincial capitals where white/mestizo teachers from the towns were sent to teach and civilise the indigenous countryside.Footnote 2 Up to the 1960s, the school was considered by some as ‘the only state agency of national culture’ in the provinces, though military conscription had also made an impact. Footnote 3 So strong did the association between school and nation become that the image of the patria (Fatherland) fostered by the state was that of ‘a school writ large’.Footnote 4 For provincial elites, school and patria reinforced one another in maintaining a stratified society that emphasised a permanent distinction based on racial ascription, by which ‘Indians’ could never be teachers, only the taught. Even following the expansion and reform of education, Carlos Ivan Degregori argues, mass education could develop without breaking or questioning the underpinnings of traditional society, meaning that it remained authoritarian and ethnocidal.Footnote 5
From the perspective of indigenous/peasant communities, George Primov notes for the 1970s, teachers were perceived as a double-edged blessing, recognised as emissaries ‘whose task it is to make available in the community the knowledge that has become the monopoly of mestizos and which has served as an instrument of ethnic domination’.Footnote 6 In the 1980s, although schools were still represented as a ‘black box’ encapsulating modernity in the central square, they were also seen as ‘trampolines’ propelling indigenous children away from the countryside so they could ‘be somebody’. Education was the way to achieve citizenship, to become part of a national polity and society. The school was the place, Virginia Zavala argues, that promoted the desired integration of peasants into national culture, but it continued to be external to the community: to be indígena and to go to school were not compatible.Footnote 7 As Juan Ansión emphasises, the notion of symbolic violence is fundamental to understanding how authority was exercised in the rural school. An alien universe was being imposed through the school, this being the only one considered valid.Footnote 8 Thus ‘being somebody’ came to be linked to a sense of failure and was produced through the repertoire of forms of humiliation managed by teachers who at the same time had suffered similar humiliation themselves.Footnote 9 As young people of rural background entered higher education and joined the teaching profession they found themselves separated from their roots and, as several scholars note, in a no-man's land between two worlds. In the words of Degregori, on the one hand the educated young were no longer part of Quechua rural society like their parents, whose myths, rites and customs they no longer fully shared; on the other, they were not accepted as part of urban mestizo society, which discriminated against provincials, serranos and Quechua-speakers.Footnote 10
The ambiguity of the teacher as an intermediary is perceptively caught by Linda Seligmann.Footnote 11 Militant teachers whom she observed in a district in Cusco department in the 1980s were quintessential hybrids. Unable to achieve assimilation into Quechua rural society or dominant urban mestizo society, they forged their own path. Their ideology as teachers and political intermediaries assumed peasants were unable to fend for themselves. But they were caught in another bind when acting between demands from the state and the hostility that they felt from the people they were supposed to educate. In these circumstances, Seligmann notes, teachers could come to occupy a social and mythic space where terror and its representation were fashioned.
These underlying relations of schooling and teaching constitute the background to this paper. The focus is on what this history and these relations built on attributions of race have meant for political identities of schoolteachers in the Peruvian Andes and how race has underpinned and intersected with the political militancy adopted by teachers over a 30-year period.
Looking at the social history of school teaching one finds that, although teachers have been drawn from different social groups, they have shared the conviction that they should civilise local people, especially indigenous society, to bring about a better, more modern, world through the school. Thus teachers have been part of an avant-garde. Furthermore, they belong to a professional body that has long held the philosophy that within the profession distinctions of race, as well as of class and gender, have been transcended. In a previous article I questioned this claim. That paper explored the re-crystallisation of racism among teachers who found themselves relegated to a profession suffering impoverishment and declining social status. My research in the Peruvian central sierra in the 1990s suggested that teachers felt that teaching had been reduced to a profession of last resort and this, in turn, reflected back on their racial identity in that they risked being defined as mestizos of last resort too. This tended to reinforce a binary division in the way they classified themselves and others as either urban mestizos or newcomers of peasant/indigenous origins, to whom the problematic term, cholo, was attached. Footnote 12 While not spoken about directly in terms of race, distinctions were constantly being invoked and brought into play in everyday speech through which members of one group compared themselves to the other in terms of aptness and respectability on the one hand, and real understanding and engagement with the common people on the other. Who possessed legitimate authority? Who had true vocation? Who were appropriate instigators of civilisation and modernity? These were questions disputed in everyday exchanges.Footnote 13
Rather than continuing to look at relations within the teaching profession, this paper expands the scope and horizon by enquiring into the ways teachers have acted and reacted politically, and the forms their militancy has taken. Arguably the political militancy of teachers becomes most intense in hierarchic, highly stratified societies where racism moulds social and political inequalities, for underpinning the dominant social order are entrenched colonial ideas as to who can be teachers and who are the taught. The argument here is that through politics, teachers tried to escape from the straitjacket of the racial binary, of being classed as either mestizo or Indian, mestizo or cholo, yet this powerful ideology has bogged them down constantly.
What complicates the argument is the slippery nature of the concept of race. Here we can draw on a recent literature. To quote Deborah Poole:
The mysterious and subterranean ways in which racial discourse moves through history are more difficult – if not impossible – to grasp if we focus only on ‘race’. The very slipperiness of race is the strongest indication of its power, its hold on our social and political imaginations, and its presence in shaping modernity.Footnote 14
Notwithstanding this, as Mary Weismantel and Stephen Eisenstein underline, race has been a social fact of great salience throughout Andean history, but until recently the impoverished quality of anthropological theory on race precluded productive work on the topic.Footnote 15 Weismantel and Eisenstein argue that the concept of ethnicity is inadequate in the face of the barriers between Indians, mestizos and whites, which evoke ‘fields of reference too powerfully physical, essential, and inherently degrading to be called anything other than racial’.Footnote 16
Three questions guide the discussion of this paper. First, how can we understand identities and relations of race that underlie how teachers are represented and how they live and negotiate this representation? Second, how has racism underpinned the ways in which teachers act in the margins of the state and the ways in which they interpret their civilising role in processes of state formation? Third, how has racism informed teachers' organisation, their political repertoires, and adoption of political violence, this being one (but never the only) option of political militancy?
The latter part of the paper draws upon research from the province of Tarma in the central Andes to present biographical narratives of teachers of urban/mestizo and rural/indigenous backgrounds who saw their civilising mission in political as well as pedagogical terms. It is my contention that we cannot understand what was happening in the Andean countryside without taking account of schoolteachers as political actors. This section of the paper explores the interplay between politics and race that comes through in their reflections with respect to three critical junctures in Peru's recent history. The first is the process of agrarian reform carried out in the early 1970s by the reformist military government under Juan Velasco Alvarado, which drew upon the analyses and radical proposals coming from left-wing intellectuals. The second is mass unionisation among the teachers and strike action against the state at the end of the 1970s, when the military government, then led by Francisco Morales Bermúdez, was back-pedalling on reform and taking steps towards neo-liberal orthodoxy. The third is the emergence of revolutionary Maoism in institutions of higher education, which by the 1980s had become dominated by Sendero Luminoso, an extremist political party that preached a cold ideology of violence and tactics of terror. The discussion stops before the return to a neo-populist state apparatus and neo-liberal educational reform in the early 2000s.
Contexts of Teachers' Political Militancy
Case study material from the central Andes will be discussed in relation to three overriding questions concerning race: how teachers live and negotiate racialised identities; how they act as civilisers in the margins of the state; and how race has informed teachers' organisation and political repertoires.
Racialised Identities and Relations
Peru is now considered a mestizo society, this being an axiomatic statement of racial identification. But it would be a mistake to assume that this is a simple or unproblematic label. Marisol De la Cadena has pointed out that the confusion surrounding meanings of mestizaje stems from the way the term has been employed to denote both empirical hybridity, being of mixed race, and conceptual hybridity in which two separate taxonomic registers intertwine.Footnote 17 One register derives from nineteenth-century theories of ‘scientific’ racism in which empirical mestizaje results from biological mixing, and where the ‘health’ and ‘moral worthiness’ of the social organism thus produced can be judged as being favourable or unfavourable. In Mexico, the generation of a new, ‘cosmic’ mestizo race of bronze was officially celebrated, but in Peru indigenistas largely took the opposite view, believing that biological mixing produced degenerates. However, the tenets of nineteenth-century scientific racism were superimposed on a much older taxonomy, one that perpetuated a colonial view of the social order. De la Cadena writes: ‘Colonial feelings against mestizos represented more than concerns with their bodily or cultural mixture; they were a reaction against the disorder and political unrest associated with them as a social group.’Footnote 18 Mestizos were considered agitators of hierarchies and naturally prone to transgress social and political orders. For post-colonial elites, education held out the only hope that the moral decrepitude of mestizos would be cured and that Indians would eventually be transformed into worthy Peruvians. Education was conceived as a crusade, and as Carlos Contreras records, the state attempted to adjudicate who were fit to conduct this crusade on racial and moral grounds.Footnote 19
With the blanket appellation of mestizo, Nelson Manrique comments, the racism that had previously been directed towards the indigenous ‘other’ in contemporary Peruvian society was reconfigured. It now underpins relations within and between sectors of the population, all of whom are considered mestizo.Footnote 20 The greater ambiguity and uncertainty surrounding notions of race, Manrique argues, means that the discriminating subject cannot fully separate her/himself from the object against which s/he discriminates, and this can lead to a greater propensity towards violence. The dangerous other is also ‘mestizo’ – thus in some ways like oneself. This opens up a very different way of conceiving the attributes of mestizaje, where the simple binary between Indian and mestizo breaks down into multiple fractions. Living mestizaje is very different from representing mestizaje in polarised terms. As Peter Wade emphasises, racial-cultural mixture is a lived process; it operates within the embodied person and within networks of family and kinship relationships.Footnote 21 In this mixing, images of whiteness on the one hand and indigenousness or blackness, on the other, coexist and persist. Over time, a symbolics of origin (of being different) is reproduced at the same time as a symbolics of mixture (of being the same).Footnote 22
For teachers, mestizaje is shaped by their holding a position within a state project where education is linked to civilising the indigenous other and to the right to impose symbolic violence. How then do teachers, especially those who cannot claim descent from urban white-mestizo families, perform the civilising, mediating role assigned to them by the state? Despite the rhetoric of educational reform and the belief that race has been transcended in the teaching profession, teachers are pressed to relay the values and practices of an urban, cultured, ‘educated’ class to a rural world conceived as indigenous, backward and uncivilised. But in the practice of everyday life, mestizo teachers – old and new – are caught uncomfortably between a symbolics of difference and a symbolics of sameness, thus seeing in the other something repressed in oneself.
Civilising in the Margins of the State
Most teachers working in rural schools are employees of the state and have been expected to fulfil a host of functions apart from teaching on behalf of state and church. But in what way and to what extent do teachers actually represent the state, act to incorporate the local into the national, and participate in its civilising and whitening project? As Veena Das and Deborah Poole emphasise, the ‘margins’ of the state are sites that ‘are not merely territorial: they are also, perhaps more importantly, sites of practice on which law and other state practices are colonised by other forms of regulation’.Footnote 23 With respect to Andean Peru, Poole notes that ‘peasants are said to “encounter” the state when they enter government offices and schools', and peasant communities are ‘imagined to exist at a cultural and social “remove” from national culture and polity’. But this territorialising language cannot be taken at face value as it is integral to state formation processes themselves, in which ‘a “margin” is imagined as something that can be located, crossed, expanded, or fixed as the outer edge of a given social unit.’Footnote 24
Countering the image of fixed borderlines and clear definitions of state and non-state are the figures that move about in the margins, individuals who are insiders and outsiders, constantly crossing between acting for and working against the state. For Poole, the emblematic marginal figure is the gamonal, the violent, masculine, mestizo strongman, who represents state power but also seeks to displace it.Footnote 25 A parallel argument can be made for schoolteachers. Teachers forward the order, values, rhetoric and curriculum of the state's educational project while at the same time they may bring counter-hegemonic political visions and agendas, most recently revolutionary Maoism, into their proselytising, civilising work. Responsible for inculcating civic duty, patriotism and nationalism, teachers can easily bend state ideology to revolutionary ends.
As members of an avant-garde, teachers have long been drawn to radical movements and have periodically organised against the state.Footnote 26 Such periods of mobilisation often ended abruptly due to repression by the state. In the 1890s some teachers became anarchists, inspired by the tentative revolutionary thought of Manual González Prada, though their organisations were still small and dispersed. Anarchists were hounded and their organisations wiped out in the early twentieth century. Many more became members of the APRA party in the 1930s and 1940s. Radical teachers had read (or at least heard of) Mariátegui's Seven Essays and were taking part in local popular movements against gamonalismo, for example by supporting hacienda populations trying to rid themselves of the hacendados. These movements were brought to an abrupt end following the coup of Manuel Odría, a military strongman from Tarma, in 1948. From the 1960s teachers were becoming Marxists; they joined revolutionary political parties and favoured the doctrines and the political practice of Maoism. Only glimpses of these complicated political histories at provincial level can be found in the literature. Each of these movements envisioned a socialist-utopian future led by a vanguard of the enlightened, educated few – where the teacher was in the forefront. Abimael Guzman, leader of Sendero Luminoso, underscored the iconography of the teacher in early representations of himself as the great teacher, depicted as bespectacled and with book in hand.
Repertoires of Protest
The 1970s marked a new phase in the history of political movements and contentious politics in Peru. As elsewhere in Latin America, this reflected educational expansion, agrarian reform, greater physical mobility and new possibilities of mobilising on a national scale.Footnote 27 The repertoire of contention was being transformed from traditional to modern forms, becoming ‘modular’, to use Sidney Tarrow's term. Collective action could be utilised by a variety of social actors in different places against a variety of targets. The newly found power in movements had an impact on the structure of institutional politics. ‘For if in the short run’, Tarrow argues, ‘people challenging authority frightened elites and brought down repression on their heads, over the longer run the new repertoire increased the leverage of groups within the system to challenge rulers and elevate their own power or privileges.’Footnote 28 However, the chances for increasing leverage could be nipped in the bud by state repression, and also by a political culture of intransigence.
Teachers in Peru had formed small dispersed associations since the beginning of the twentieth century, and their struggle to organise intensified in the 1950s. But when the first national mutual society of schoolteachers took up more fundamental labour issues and became militant, it was reorganised under the repressive government of Manuel Odría. By 1960, four years after the end of Odría's government, a national federation of teachers had been established with an estimated 43,000 members. It launched successful campaigns against corruption in hiring processes, as well as national strikes for higher salaries in 1960 and 1961.Footnote 29 As James Payne, who witnessed the 1961 strike, writes, there was a tendency towards belligerent confrontation and an escalation into violence.Footnote 30 In the 1970s the expansion of education in Peru, coupled with a long term decline in salaries and working conditions, pressed teachers to alter both their form of organisation and political allegiance. They created a new national union under the political project of revolutionary Maoism.
The teachers' union, the Sindicato Unico de Trabajadores de la Educación (SUTEP), which was inaugurated in 1972 in Cusco, was led by university-educated teachers well grounded in Marxist thought. No central record was kept of union membership, but 100,000 teachers were thought to have been members in the mid 1970s, representing some 70 per cent of the teaching profession.Footnote 31 Teachers reinforced the philosophy that racism did not exist in their ranks, and identified with the oppressed classes. They struggled for labour demands against a state that was portrayed as autocratic, even fascist, and linked their struggles to the grander political vision of popular revolution. SUTEP fought to abolish wage differentials between different categories of teachers and to build a united union. It vehemently opposed the education reform of the military government, even though this was inspired by experiences in Cuba and incorporated Paulo Freire's philosophy of concientización.Footnote 32
Controlling SUTEP was Patria Roja, a hardline Maoist party whose rallying cry, ‘Power is born from the barrel of a gun’, encapsulated the confrontational politics and militaristic rhetoric of party and union alike. An ideological straitjacket was imposed on all. Teachers pressed their demands through protests coordinated at national level. The repertoire of modular protest (demonstrated already in the teachers' strike of 1961) encompassed strikes, marches, sit-ins in public places, occupations of schools and public buildings, collective provision of food through ollas comunes, and forms of escalation pressuring government through a show of force. Central in the history of SUTEP were the national strikes of 1978 and 1979. The first strike lasted 80 days and won some concessions, but when the government appeared to be backtracking, a second strike was called in 1979. This lasted 118 days, the longest in Peru's labour history. But this second strike achieved nothing. The government's response to the belligerent union was to refuse official recognition; strikes were outlawed, union leaders imprisoned, and conciliatory talks between union leaders and government officials constantly broke down. The strikes, especially that of 1979, were critical events utilised by Sendero Luminoso to recruit far more widely among disillusioned teachers, education students and secondary school children.
From the earliest times, the history of Sendero was linked to the education sector. Lewis Taylor notes how the party had concentrated its organisational efforts on the student movement, its name originating from its control of the Frente Estudiantil Revolucionario por el Sendero Luminoso de Mariatégui, with important bases in the University of Huamanga in the department of Ayacucho and the National Engineering University in Lima.Footnote 33 Writing about Ayacucho, Degregori records how Sendero was challenged in its control over local popular and peasant organisations, but never lost its dominance over the Education programme in the University of Huamanga. Outside the university, the only popular organisation where Sendero preserved its hegemony was the local branch of the teachers' union, SUTE-Huamanga.Footnote 34 Some early analysts of Sendero overlooked the centrality of the education sector, helping to prompt a vituperative attack by Deborah Poole and Gerardo Renique against those US academic specialists whom they branded as ‘Senderologists’.Footnote 35
According to one (much cited) estimate made in 1990, some 30,000 Peruvian teachers (15 per cent of all teachers) were supporters of Sendero.Footnote 36 These teachers were thought to act as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the party in the provinces.Footnote 37 As Ansión and his co-authors argue, the authoritarianism and relations of violence in the school found a counterpart in the vertical, authoritarian structure of Sendero.Footnote 38 When the threat posed by Sendero was eventually recognised by the state, the response was brutal military intervention; in 1991, half of Peru's provinces were declared to be in a state of emergency where constitutional guarantees were suspended.Footnote 39
Militant Lives
The focus in this section is on the experiences of teachers who played leading parts in militant politics at critical times. The narratives and supplementary material come from research conducted in the province of Tarma in the late 1990s, when I held conversations with some 60 teachers from the town of Tarma, as well as others from one rural district, a cluster of communities abandoned during the insurgency, and a former hacienda and ex-cooperative. In addition, I participated in the classes and social life of a teaching training college where experienced teachers were studying during the long vacation to acquire formal qualifications. The history of political militancy seen through the eyes of individual teachers starts with the significance of the shake-up provoked by agrarian reform on teachers' politics. It then moves on to look at mass unionisation from a provincial perspective, and finally considers the dilemmas posed by the rise of revolutionary Maoism.
Political Militancy as Repercussion of Agrarian Reform
Older teachers from mestizo families in the town of Tarma freely used racial stereotypes to indicate the unbreachable gulf they saw separating themselves from the children (and their parents) they were sent to teach in the remote rural communities. Peasant-indigenous society was seen as lacking in nearly everything: they were ‘gente sin cultura’, whose children were ‘sucia’, with ‘malas costumbres’. A string of epithets usually followed: children were timid, submissive, barely awake, lacking motivation, poorly nourished. As Ansión notes, few teachers were prepared to accept that the difficulties faced by the children were not due to their supposed incapacities, but to the enormous distance of the cultural realm of everyday and exercise of symbolic violence.Footnote 40 Since teachers spent far more time in their working lives in rural schools than comfortably ‘at home’ in the town, to be a teacher demanded a strong vocation. Women considered they possessed stronger vocations and higher moral values than men. Yet, as Seligmann points out in relation to a district in Cusco, teachers living in close proximity to peasants for long periods had been disturbed by the abuses they witnessed and the impoverished lives.Footnote 41 The agrarian reform law of 1969 brought this unease to the surface.
The aim of the reform was to modernise the agrarian sector, bringing an end to feudalism and remnants of the colonial system, by expropriating haciendas, emancipating servile labour forces, and introducing peasant cooperatives. The government was prepared to use force and persuasion to implement the reform in regions where state agencies had barely been present before. In the turmoil, teachers were forced to take sides. Some continued to support property-owning elites who dominated local politics and society in provincial capitals. But the rationale of reform pronounced propertied elites to be outmoded, and the gamonal an anachronism. In this situation, urban mestizo teachers might choose to side with the peasantry, and this was a significant political act. As Seligmann notes with respect to the department of Cusco, most teachers supported the reform, and some used their knowledge and connections to facilitate peasants' demands for land and modernisation projects.Footnote 42
Anna Gonzalez is a retired teacher now living in the town of Tarma who taught in rural schools all her working life.Footnote 43 Her family was of mestizo-European origin; they had come to Tarma as skilled artisans during the town's anarchist heyday in the late nineteenth century. After finishing secondary school in 1951, Anna had no doubt that her vocation lay in teaching. For the first five years she was obliged to go where the Ministry of Education sent her, and her early experiences (as for other teachers of her generation) left a deep impression on her. Her first school was a day's walk away from a district capital where there lived some 25 families with 20 children of primary school age. On her first visit she had been accompanied by her mother. Only once a month and in vacation time was it possible for her to return to see her family in Tarma.
In the land-holding communities where she taught, people were self-sufficient; they ate well and they showered her with gifts of food. Parents worked hard and depended on their children's labour. Although proud of their teacher and school, most therefore turned out to be less enthusiastic that their children should spend all day in the classroom. Anna taught her Quechua-speaking pupils in Spanish, and took the extra-curricular duties demanded by the Ministry of Education seriously. She taught civic responsibility and insisted on cleanliness and decency, making the children wash, wear underclothes, and sew (boys as well as girls) household items not seen before in the countryside (bed sheets, towels and tablecloths), whose use, she thought, marked a step on the road to decencia. She also taught children to play football and basketball. Later, when she could choose her postings, she preferred rural communities closer to Tarma itself. Like many teachers, she thought that the closer one got to the town the más suave the parents and más despierto the children. As Rosaleen Howard and Andrew Canessa observe in the case of Bolivia, each step from rural to urban, ‘whether it be taken through language, education, or dress, marks out those with the more urban styles as “more civilised” (más civilizado)’.Footnote 44
Up to this point, Anna's account is a standard one. The dominant image is that of the catechising, white-mestizo teacher who imparts Spanish language, discipline and cultural improvement. She presents herself as an agent of social change while apparently remaining untouched by the indigenous-peasant world. Not for a moment had she doubted that she carried authority in the communities or before state institutions. Women teachers of her generation were proud of their freedom, of fulfilling an important social role, and of being physically mobile compared to other middle-class wives whose movements were constrained by male control. Many female teachers, Anna included, linked vocation with religious commitment, and it became a kind of secular missionary.
At the onset of the agrarian reform, Anna was teaching in a community that bordered an hacienda, Ayas. She recalled the owner as an abusive gamonal who had refused to open a school and treated ‘his’ gente as beasts of burden and slaves. By refusing to allow a school and condoning their excessive consumption of alcohol and coca, she considered the hacendado directly responsible for perpetuating backwardness. A few youngsters from Ayas managed to attend her school, however, and this prompted her to side with the peasantry. Anna spent her free time helping their incipient organisation, keeping people informed of the reform's progress, and delivering petitions to the Agrarian Reform offices in the provincial capital, Tarma, and the departmental capital, Huancayo. Ayas was duly expropriated and the gamonal sent packing. Once a school was functioning there, Anna returned to Tarma. But she had ruffled feathers and was branded a trouble-maker for having incited Indians to rebel.
In the interviews undertaken in Tarma, older teachers' explanations of their actions interplayed with racist stereotypes, but did not necessarily break with the binary representation of mestizo and Indian. Anna's position had been prompted by old convictions and values; her vocation as teacher had embraced a religious notion of succouring the poor, a civilising mission, and a political goal of standing up for the abused Indian. By doing this, Anna was apparently acting in support of the state. But, like most of her class, she was suspicious of the state's invasion and rejected the imperious way that the military government attempted to control the social and political consequences of agrarian reform.
For Anna, giving support to the indigenous peasantry led to social isolation. She could not stay in the communities, but she no longer felt at ease in urban society. The town of Tarma, though still dominated by property owners (increasingly a spent force), was changing with the arrival of new urban residents, as prosperous peasant families moved to the town from the districts. The agrarian reform thus brought social dislocation for teachers in the Andean provinces on two fronts. First, they were separating from the rest of urban-mestizo society, becoming a class/caste closing in on itself. My field material suggests a growing tendency for teachers in Tarma to marry within their professional group and for children to follow parents into school-teaching. Second, it had prompted teachers to resume once again their questioning political position, and once more become an avant-garde critic, not only of the state's educational project, but also of the state itself. Such lessons were passed on to the next generation, in Anna's case to her daughter María, who took the next steps along the road of political militancy – as a leader in the teachers' union, SUTEP.
Teachers' Unionisation
During the 1970s, youngsters who enrolled in provincial universities and teacher training colleges encountered revolutionary Marxism and the bitter sectarian fighting of the radical left. During her student days in Huancayo, María Ramírez became a Maoist and elected to join the Communist Party, Patria Roja. She pledged to fight against the abusive traditional system and a military government which, in the party's analysis, was controlling and stifling political change. Calls for revolution and dramatic slogans (‘Land or Death’) – what Gonzalo Portocarrero and Patricia Oliart call the ‘critical idea’Footnote 45 – were exciting and inspiring. In this emerging political culture of confrontation, dialogue was distrusted and to ‘be political’ involved a show of force. There was a great deal of radical posturing and performance, but only a minority, María thought, had taken this rhetoric as an invitation to political violence. After qualifying as a teacher in 1975, María was posted to a primary school in a district capital. Immediately, she and her colleagues opted to join the SUTEP. For the rest of her working life María's vocation as teacher and her political militancy would be bound up with the fortunes of SUTEP.
The growing popularity of SUTEP in the province of Tarma was connected to the decline that teachers saw taking place in their social and economic position. Teachers who had lived through the massification of the profession expressed similar sentiments as quotations taken from our conversations show:
Teachers used to be very formal in the way they spoke and the way they dressed. Then all this changed; they became poor and were no longer respected.
Teachers began to live a wounded life; they could not dress themselves or their children in an appropriate way.
The teachers interviewed attributed declining standards to falling salary levels, but some saw how the politics of SUTEP was also contributing to change:
When SUTEP took over after 1972 this new political influence meant teachers stopped wearing carefully ironed shirts and wore jeans and sweaters instead: the teaching profession went from feudal mode to proletarian mode overnight!
The danger many saw was that teachers could no longer demonstrate a superior position in the race-class hierarchy if they did not dress the part or were unable to buy newspapers and books. They risked being equated with the proletariat (not a compelling image for the Tarma sutepistas) or with slovenly, poorly clothed cholos.
As Alan Angell notes in his analysis of the ‘classroom Maoists’ in the late 1970s, membership of SUTEP was by no means a clear-cut identity shown by union card or payment of obligatory dues. Few were active Maoists but they followed political leaders who they thought best represented their general sense of social, political and occupational frustration.Footnote 46 SUTEP leaders in Tarma were members of Patria Roja and worked hard to spread the union to the furthest corners of the province and construct a stronger basis for struggle. As organisers they moved between participating in huge congresses in the cities formulating labour demands, and regional conventions to discuss strategy, to spending nights and weekends setting up bases in the rural schools. Union organising was illegal. They could produce little written material, or use the radio, or hold big public meetings. Leaders at provincial level visited each district every couple of months and leaders at district level were responsible for the bases and keeping leaders informed. This structure was a model later used by Sendero. Although opposed to the military government and to the official teachers' union sponsored by the government, Tarma's sutepistas nevertheless identified with the ‘Velasco revolution’. At heart, many supported the military government's agrarian and educational reforms, but they could not openly say so. Countering the label of illegality, María and other leaders stressed SUTEP's responsibility as a workers' movement. For them it was vitally important that SUTEP follow unions elsewhere in the continent in giving members benefits, such as through consumer cooperatives and low-interest loans.
The strike actions of 1978 and 1979 involved closing schools, organising marches and deploying delegations to join the mass demonstrations taking place in Lima. A central element was the olla común which María organised, obtaining donations of food from supporters such as the union of market workers in order to sustain strikers and their families. In addition, SUTEP's alliances with the more experienced unions of mine-workers in the central Andes were of inestimable value. Union leaders were aware that the greatest support came from teachers in the rural districts, not from conservative white-mestizo teachers in the town of Tarma itself.
While the 1978 strike generated euphoria, the strike the following year brought despair. Trade unionists remember this as a bitter and humiliating experience; for the first time teachers were reduced to selling their belongings and trying to survive by petty commerce; María sold kerosene and then cosmetics. Teachers felt they had sacrificed everything, yet achieved nothing. Furthermore, organisers in the provinces became more aware of the strident divisions among factions at national level. In the aftermath, María was one of thirteen teachers in Tarma province who lost their jobs and were barred from employment in public schools. This blacklisting was removed in 1980 by the elected government of Fernando Belaúnde Terry.
As a union leader, María considered that she worked for the unity of all teachers irrespective of their social origins. The provincial leaders included teachers from district capitals as well as from the town of Tarma, and the union was open to everybody who accepted its analysis of class-based oppression. In practice, the union became a privileged space of mestizaje where, to use Peter Wade's terms, a symbolics of sameness took precedence over a symbolics of difference. In contrast, provincial mestizo society represented SUTEP members not only as firebrands but as cholos. But the transcending of racial division and processes of mestizaje taking place internally within the protected space of the union were not carried over to inform the ways in which unionised teachers treated indigenous society. María continued to hold views very similar to the previous generation. She reiterated the stereotypical epithets about rural children, lamented their lack of cultural progress, and crossed swords with the authorities in rural districts. This latter confrontation became more explosive when district and community authorities throughout the Andean region demanded a stronger say in what children learned and how teachers behaved.Footnote 47 María juxtaposed an old urban disdain of indigenous society with a new-found political militancy that only recognised the equality, the shared mestizaje, of those teachers inside the union movement.
From the perspective of the state, teachers could no longer be trusted to represent the state in the margins; they were potentially subversives. More worrying (though this was barely recognised in Lima), an illegal union working clandestinely had created a network of subversive bases. In relation to racial stereotyping, one can argue that labelling unionists as ‘subversives’ reflected not only the choice of confrontational action and the politics of contention, but also the changing composition of the teaching body. Unionised teachers were being depicted as unruly mestizos who were shaking hierarchies and structures of power as they had always done, according to the taxonomy of racial classification noted by De la Cadena, in colonial days. Through SUTEP, teachers were adopting an oppositional discourse and ideological project to that of the state, and this became particularly clear after the neo-liberal about-turn that occurred during the second phase of the military government.
Repressive reaction by the military government and the intransigence and confrontational politics of the union movement meant that dialogue to open up institutional politics, the possibility that Tarrow holds out, could not be sustained. Instead, teachers' militancy was moving away from its quasi-legal, quasi-public domain and repertoire of open protest into clandestinity. Ready to haraness the disillusion of the militant teachers was Sendero Luminoso.
The Eruption of Revolutionary Politics
Sendero ideologues had been proselytising in Tarma province since the early 1970s. They met with limited success and failed to gain a foothold in SUTEP. But the reaction to the 1978 and 1979 strikes was changing attitudes, especially among the young. Sendero activists made their presence felt in Tarma by occasionally throwing home-made bombs (at the municipality and Banco de la Nación), attacking district police stations and carrying away arms and uniforms, hoisting the hammer and sickle flag, and writing graffiti on walls. Along with these visible signs, Sendero had infiltrated the telephone exchange in Tarma, was taking over schools in the rural periphery, and ousting rival organisations running social welfare programmes.
In the central Andes, political violence reached a crescendo in 1989–92. The aftershock was palpable when I began fieldwork in Tarma in the mid 1990s. Some teachers, though, wanted to explain what had happened to them and talked at length about experiences that had changed their lives. Teachers who had taken part in the political violence (or wished to give that impression) tended to represent the past through recourse to stock phrases and slogans of revolutionary Maoism. Most eloquent were teachers who had been on the fringes of Sendero, who had been members or had considered joining when young, and had suffered grave doubts later on. In their narratives they registered both fascination and repudiation of what Sendero had first stood for and then delivered. Obviously political militancy among teachers who came from indigenous communities took place in a different context and followed a different course from those from the town.
Three narratives demonstrate how students/teachers dealt with the political militancy represented by Maoism. The first is by a mestizo teacher, Teresa Hernández, from the town of Tarma, who managed to leave Sendero before the onset of armed struggle. The second is by a pioneer teacher, Antonio Quispe from Maco, an expropriated hacienda later transformed into a peasant cooperative, for whom the defence of community was uppermost. The third is by a Sendero sympathiser, Teodoro Chagua, who hailed from Cayash, a peasant community on the northern fringes of the province. He was recruited into Sendero while at secondary school in Tarma, and found it more difficult to escape.
Teresa Hernández
Teresa Hernández comes from an urban mestizo family, both her parents having taught in rural schools throughout her childhood. She was brought up by her grandfather, a well-known singer and advocate of Tarma's mestizo cultural traditions. She was 15 years old and a pupil at the Angela Morena secondary school during the SUTEP strike of 1978. During the strike she organised a week-long demonstration of schoolchildren from all over the province. They supported their striking teachers but also protested at the Ministry of Education's threat to penalise children by failing them in their examinations. The youngsters adopted the repertoire of contention of their teachers. They marched, carried flags, shouted ‘la unión hace la fuerza’; the girls of Angela Moreno occupied their school buildings for two days protesting that some of their teachers refused to strike. The demonstration was to have lasting consequences for it brought young leaders to the notice of Sendero.
Teresa joined an escuela popular in 1978, the group meeting in secret at night in the house of an hacendado family; their intention was to form an agrupación politica (political cell). They struggled to teach themselves historical materialism, dialectics and political economy from Marxist manuals bought in the market place. As Degregori notes, these texts strengthened a conception of social science as a closed system of universal truths whose legitimacy was established by authority.Footnote 48 For Teresa it was like studying the Bible. She recalled how they all wanted to become gran guerrilleros; they had posters of Che Guevara on their bedroom walls and schemed how to get hold of dynamite and storm police stations. But they were not really so different from young political militants elsewhere.
In 1979 her agrupación politica left for Lima. Being children of a provincial mestizo middle class, their families set great store on them studying at universities in the capital. Teresa enrolled to study education in Lima and left to live with her grandmother. She continued to meet with her comrades and developed ties with fellow radical students from Ayacucho. In 1980 the group received a summons that they leave for Ayacucho to launch the armed struggle. Her comrades pressed her to go, but she was already distancing herself from them and decided to stay behind. The reason she later gave was responsibility for her family. But it was hard for her to listen to the abusive terms her family flung at the activists – cholos, fracasados, estúpidos, ignorantes – all terms carrying racist innuendo. Sendero abused the altruism and passion of the young for political change and channelled their naivety into political violence. When she met her comrades later, Teresa saw them as ‘aged beyond their years’, ‘impassive as stones’, ‘speaking of nothing but revolution and the Sendero cause’; she found ‘they had no longer any emotions; Sendero had sucked them dry.’
University study now seemed irrelevant and Teresa returned to Tarma to find work as a teacher. Though rejecting Sendero, she felt alienated from the glorifying myths of idiotic white generals presented as national heroes in official textbooks whom the children were supposed to emulate. She longed to tell them about revolutionary leaders, like Che Guevara, and take them to Ayacucho to show them the grave of her heroine Edith Lagos, killed when only 19 years old, whom she had known when a student in Lima.Footnote 49 But following the passing of the Ley de Apología del Terrorismo in 1992 and its sequel, the Ley del Terrorismo Docente, by the authoritarian government of Alberto Fujimori, close watch was kept on what teachers said in the classroom. She silenced her political radicalism. Instead, she worked to revive Tarma's cultural traditions, especially Carnival, the unruly festival that was ‘subversive’ in a traditional mode, mocking and overturning authority at least the duration of its few days.
Coming through in Teresa's account is the disassociation between the high aspirations and mobility of the provincial middle-class young sent to Lima for higher education and the popular racial branding (as by her family) of political revolutionaries as cholos. Teresa and her comrades were not from the margins of society but established mestizo families. However, Sendero's revolutionary Maoism, by emphasising class, appeared to offer a political space where race was overcome, in the same way that SUTEP had done. Yet this image was false, for Sendero cadres assumed the racial superiority and catechising behaviour of the traditional urban mestizo teacher. Teresa discovered that the rise of Sendero meant all other channels of radical political expression closed down, and she was both marginalised and silenced. Her response, a common one in the history of Tarma at times of political repression, was to redirect her energies into cultural creativity and cultural expression of mestizaje in the town.
Antonio QuispeFootnote 50
As a child, Antonio had attended the primary school on Hacienda Maco that taught children up to the third grade. His teacher was remembered as ‘white’, even though he came from a rural district and would have been classified as cholo elsewhere. He had been rough with the children, hitting them until they learned, and adopting a militaristic pedagogy in which much attention was paid to parades, bodily hygiene and discipline. But the children had benefited from this, Antonio reflected, as they had been slow and timid; boys learned to hold their heads up high and shout like men. Children had been psychologically submissive because their parents had implanted a great fear of the supernatural. As Antonio later came to realise, peasant superstition had suited the hacendados well for it had stopped them from learning ‘the truth’ or reflecting on the reasons for their exploitation.Footnote 51
Antonio was obliged to work for the hacienda after he turned 14 years. But then reform brought release. Though Maco's owners had been unusually resourceful in modernising agriculture and livestock production, the organisation of production had changed little and was still based on servile labour relations.Footnote 52 Now the old regime was past, Antonio could continue his education. A native Quechua speaker, he specialised in Spanish language and literature, completing his secondary education in 1978. That year he was appointed teacher by the cooperative administration (then responsible for running the primary school), where he joined three mestizo teachers from the towns of Tarma and Jauja who were employed to teach the 54 children enrolled. Urban teachers were preferred, as they could instruct children in town ways and bring prestige, but before long they left and Antonio was made headmaster. He felt a strong sense of responsibility to despertar a la gente so that they could defend the community.
Antonio's political militancy was first channelled into the struggle between the socios and the administrator for control of the cooperative. He organised meetings and wrote petitions demanding the removal of the arrogant, white ingeniero agrónomo foisted upon Maco by the Agrarian Reform office, who stood accused of embezzling funds. Dismissed from his teaching post by the administrator, Antonio took a case of wrongful dismissal to the Ministry of Labour and was reinstated. That a cholo could win against a blanco showed Antonio he could receive justice from state authorities. But in 1982 the cooperative was bankrupt and could no longer pay the teachers' salaries. Antonio then took teaching posts elsewhere, and through fellow teachers in district capitals came into contact with SUTEP, revolutionary Maoism and confrontational politics.
Like many rural teachers, Antonio recognised the class-based diagnosis of Peru's problems put forward by the Maoists, for he had suffered the abuse and exploitation of the hacienda system first-hand. These teachers were developing a political language in which an Andean imagery of darkness and light, being blind then seeing, being ignorant then enlightened, and suffering in order to learn, was interwoven with political radicalism learnt in the towns. One can see this discourse as a key process of mestizaje from below; through it teachers (especially those from the enclosed worlds of former haciendas) tried to ‘awaken’ their fellow comuneros by offering them a language through which to make sense of past exploitation and channel aspirations for the future.
At first Antonio had been impressed by Sendero and its intellectual leader; he accepted that armed revolution had been launched on behalf of poor people like himself. The first party cadres who showed up on Maco he found worthy of respect. They were well-educated, spoke perfect Spanish, knew the region and its problems, seemed to care about the children's welfare; in sum, they conducted themselves like urban mestizo teachers. He was tempted to join them, for he identified with their message of social justice and new political order. But he could not leave his suffering community. Later, sympathy for Sendero evaporated. He witnessed the violent incursions, executions, and burning of communal buildings taking place in communities bordering Maco. When Sendero forces arrived in greater numbers, 60 or more at a time, they took food and emptied the community health post of medical supplies. They accused the teachers of being informers and harangued people for hours demanding that they block roads and blow up bridges to stop the military from entering the Ricrán valley (this being an important north-south route for Sendero cadres). Antonio cautiously organised community resistance and led a delegation to the army base in Tarma asking for weapons to arm a ronda campesina (peasant militia).
Although Antonio won affection and respect for his defence of community, he felt denied the recognition and authority due to a teacher, proof of this being he had never managed to complete a university degree (in education) started twenty years before. The conclusion he drew was that teachers from ex-haciendas and indigenous communities were treated as second class citizens, as cholos, by a racist external world. In the margins of the state, he translated between a peasant world view and messages coming from the outside political movements. While his indigenous roots made him an admirable defender of community, they had blocked him from being a ‘proper’ teacher. A phrase used by Antonio and others like him who taught in their home communities was that ‘you can never be a prophet in your own land’. Familiarity and embeddedness in peasant society meant they had difficulties in becoming part of an actively proselytising avant garde. But the promise held out by Sendero, as well as by SUTEP, was that they could be, by transcending ‘politically’ the dualistic stereotype of race.
Teodoro Chagua
In the final narrative, that of Teodoro Chagua, one finds a resemblance to Antonio Quispe, in that he came from peasant society, and to Teresa Hernández, in that he attended secondary school in the town of Tarma. There were links between the three, for Teodoro had taught briefly on Maco and he had been a classmate of Teresa's when taking the course for experienced teachers at the teachers' training college.
Teodoro's parents were relatively prosperous and his father had been a community authority. When he was 11 years old, he was sent with his elder sister to Tarma so that both could study. Since no relative lived there, a room was rented for the children and their father visited every month bringing food and money. Teodoro remembered the move to Tarma as traumatic. These rural children had been catapulted into an alien urban world, they felt home-sick (some being forced ignominiously to return home), and they were soon made aware of the disdain of fellow pupils and teachers. Although it was the children from the most prosperous, whitest, least ‘Indian’ families who were given this opportunity, they felt themselves treated differently, as uncultured Indians. In the early 1980s, rural children sent to urban schools found themselves targeted by Sendero ideologues. Many were open to a political ideology that offered ‘the truth’, the hope that through devotion and militancy they would earn respect, authority and acceptance within a political space where race had been transcended. As disciples of a learned leader in a tightly controlled party structure they might find the social moorings that non-comprehending parents could not provide. Rural children were deployed into a hazardous world based on racial ascription, but where a quasi-religious ideology of political violence could give them a new non-racialised identity.
In the early days, Teodoro returned to Cayash during school holidays to help his father, but latterly he stayed away to earn money for his keep. Being absent so long from home, he never took on posts of community authority. Instead of working the land and trading like his father, he acquired urban skills, in machine repair, book-keeping, baking and Chinese cooking. Teodoro continued to identify himself as cayashino, and his parents continued to remind him of his duties towards his community. But at home, many like him found the knowledge that they had acquired with such sacrifice was rejected by fathers for whom obedience was still paramount.
I first met Teodoro in 1995 when he was 25 years old, still badly shaken after five months in military custody (his second period of imprisonment). He had been caught up directly in the political violence after returning home in 1989 to teach in the new secondary school that served a cluster of small communities. The following year Sendero made Cayash a support base and located several battalions of cadres in this thinly populated zone. Food, labour and other resources were commandeered; the young carried off for military training; and community authorities replaced by inexperienced Sendero supporters. Nobody was allowed to leave, for fear they would inform, a dictate that interrupted the long-distance trading/exchange activities that were the communities' lifeline. Schools were forced to accept a new curriculum and ceremonial calendar glorifying Sendero's political project. Cadres could pop up anywhere as they policed the zone, and they punished. At a so-called public trial in the central square the mayor was killed, accused of being an informer. But Teodoro's dilemma was especially acute. He had been recruited by Sendero while attending secondary school in Tarma. He had imbibed the ideological message, but now wanted to distance himself from invaders who were bent on destroying the order, livelihood and way of life of his home community.
After a year of Sendero domination, the military was alerted and troops sent to wipe out the ‘terrorist base’. At this juncture everybody fled, looking for refuge in the towns. But local and national newspapers had branded Cayash a hotbed of terrorism, and anonymity was difficult. The army arrested cayashinos on the grounds that they were accomplices of Sendero. In 1992 some twenty desplazados from Cayash were taken to the military base in Tarma; two of them were not seen again. Then Teodoro and three teachers were held and handed over to DINCOTE, the specialist force dealing with terrorist suspects. After being ‘missing’ for several weeks, his sister found him in Huancayo and marshalling help from the Red Cross won his release. But the respite was short-lived, for he was arrested a second time. His family sold what they could to pay a human rights' lawyer who, after five months, secured Teodoro's release. Afterwards it became clear that relations between Teodoro and his family had cooled. No longer was he invited to family gatherings. He took teaching posts in distant schools and never admitted he came from Cayash. As access to posts increasingly became a political matter during the government of Alberto Fujimori, he ended up an active supporter of the president's party.
Representing and Negotiating Mestizaje
Comparing the narratives of the three teachers of the generation that had confronted Sendero suggests the following. First, those resisting the message of revolutionary Maoism put personal commitment of belonging, the flesh and blood ties of kinship and community, before the abstract ideas and cold emotion required for political violence. It sounds banal that Teresa put responsibility for an ailing grandmother before the call to revolution, or that Antonio remained on a co-operative doomed to failure rather than leave to bring down the state. In contrast, Teodoro's separation at a young age from parents and community meant his attachment had become distanced and the stuff of nostalgia rather than lived experience. Second, linked to belonging was defence of community. For Teresa, radical politics were re-worked in the cultural realm. For Antonio, a respected peasant leader, belonging meant repulsing invaders. But for Teodoro returning to Cayash as teacher and Sendero sympathiser, he faced the shock of colluding with the imposition of Sendero rule, of being complicit in the violence. Rumours circulating among desplazados in Tarma claimed it had been Teodoro who had alerted the military as to Sendero's presence – as a way of redeeming himself. This rumour depicted him as the archetypal cholo trickster who in the margins of the state blurred categories by moving between the revolutionary alternative and the repressive forces of the state.
Third, the stories show how teachers were positioned in a political field reduced to the polarity of being either ‘for’ or ‘against’ violent revolution, and at the same time in a racial field reduced to the polarity of being either ‘mestizo’ or cholo. Teresa, like earlier generations of political militants (represented by Anna and María) found herself isolated from urban mestizo society on the grounds of her politics. The channel through which she sought to re-establish a lived mestizo identity was not through the either/or of politics or race, but through multi-faceted carnival in which urban mestizo and rural indigenous elements are brought into play. Antonio broke out of the enclosed world of the hacienda and won an education, but in his eyes the achievement of the superior status of mestizo teacher had eluded him. Yet his narrative points to instances where the dichotomy of racial ascription was overcome: one, his role as intellectual synthesising the languages of Andean thought and contestatory politics. Teodoro's separation from indigenous community had been the most drastic and conclusive. Ironically, while he was more at ease than Antonio in an urban mestizo milieu on account of his secondary education and urban work skills, he had been dislodged from family and community on account of his political position. He had landed up the real outsider – the cholo.
Colliding Forces
The narratives of teachers of urban-mestizo and peasant-indigenous backgrounds suggest that in everyday life teachers confronted racial ascription and identification and struggled against it. The narratives provide evidence for the claim that teachers acted as an avant-garde and were in the forefront of political movements: on behalf of the peasantry in the agrarian reform years, creating a strong national union to take labour demands to the government, and constituting the primary social base from which Sendero drew support and recruits – an identification that solidified and spread as a result of critical events, the SUTEP strikes of 1978 and 1979. This is fairly well-known. Less appreciated is the subsequent history of how teachers acted during the insurgency. A great many reconsidered their political position and tried to avoid or extricate themselves from a party preaching political violence. Once again, teachers tried to forge their own path, to belong neither to the insurgents nor to the repressive forces of the state. But in a state of war this middle ground was untenable and not recognised by central state or wider society.
Individual trajectories of political militancy were taking place against a backdrop, a particular historical conjuncture, when a new regime of citizenship was coming into being. Not only was the state intervening in different guises and the mechanisms organising state-society relations undergoing change, but the nature of the state and what it stood for was being transformed. As Deborah Yashar argues, the corporatist citizenship regime, whose apogee in Peru was the reform period of the early 1970s, was being eroded by successive governments which adopted a monetarist economy and neo-liberal policy.Footnote 53 In the margins of the state, three protagonists were bearers and/or opponents of the changing citizenship regime: the central state, unionised schoolteachers, and revolutionary political parties.
After decades of marginality – but also relative autonomy – indigenous/peasant society was being claimed and incorporated by agencies of the central state implementing agrarian and education reforms under the Velasco government. But following this energetic territorial advance, after 1975 an increasingly neo-liberal state was withdrawing, abandoning the state-led reform project of the Velasco years. This left co-operative structures fragile, new social agents without resources, and the state's earlier commitment to emancipate the indigenous peasantry barely begun. As the central state retreated as a territorialising power, it was partially replaced by the national union of schoolteachers organising at a national level. Building on this, revolutionary Maoist parties organising on the basis of class also offered adherents an internal space where racial ascription could be overcome. Waging revolution, Sendero adopted a crude Maoist strategy of capturing the margins, bludgeoning the peasantry into acquiescence, and creating ‘liberated zones’ under party control. These actions by oppositional territorialising forces brought the state back in, with a vengeance: the army was sent to reconquer the margins, and this offensive took a brutal, militarised and punishing form.
The reaction of the central state and its military to the Maoist insurgency was to stress once again racial identity and racial disdain. The contemptuous representation of Andean teachers is brought out in the Report of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation presented in 2003.Footnote 54 As Paulo Drinot comments: ‘The Report laid bare the rotten pillars of Peruvian society like no other analysis, pointing to the “normalised ideas and behaviour” that underpinned both the violent actions of Sendero Luminoso and of the armed forces and the indifference of Peru's “included” few to the predicament of the “excluded” many.’Footnote 55 Shaping this was enduring racism, as illustrated in the following comment from the Report:
The military perception of the schoolteachers was not well-elaborated. Overall, they were seen as dangerous and suspicious. This vision became enhanced by the almost mechanical application of certain stereotypes relating to the generation and ethnic origins of the subversives: they were young, came from the provinces and were considered ethnically as cholos. This view comes through in the 1989 manual of counterinsurgency put out by the Peruvian Army … For the authors of the manual, the school is the special space chosen by the Communist Party of Peru, Sendero Luminoso, to consolidate its actions. At the same time, in this space the schoolteacher is converted into the potential transmitter of revolutionary ideology and for this reason is an actor who should be watched.Footnote 56
The Commission documented the re-surfacing of racist stereotyping at a time of national crisis when the use of the derogatory term, cholo, was associated with a proneness to transgression and the undermining of the civilising project of the state. According to a social imaginary widespread in Peru, the problem of political violence had arisen when teachers were no longer mainly drawn from the ranks of urban-mestizos but were of indigenous background, who by their ‘nature’ were less morally worthy, and transgressive. In this disdain one finds echoes of the colonial taxonomy of race explored by De la Cadena that naturalises the unruliness of the mestizo.
