In his monograph, Thomas F. Love traces the formation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of a distinctive regional identity in Arequipa. Drawing on popular roots, this discourse offered an inclusive multi-class framework for citizenship. Yet a tension existed between the urban gaze of intellectuals (‘cultural entrepreneurs’) who formulated this identity and the rural popular culture they claimed to portray. The monograph is ambitious not only in its chronological scope, stretching back to pre-Columbian times, but also in its interdisciplinary approach that combines history and anthropology. Love relies on his own experiences as an anthropologist to contrast the idealised vision of a rural mestizo small-property owner as a symbol of Arequipa identity with his own reading of rural culture.
The book begins by establishing Arequipa's historical connection to Peru's heavily indigenous southern highlands. From as far back as the Middle Horizon period (400–1100 CE), Arequipa was connected to the altiplano (highland plains around Lake Titicaca) and to Tiyawanaku trade circuits. The cultural connection to the altiplano continued during the Spanish colonial period as religious pilgrimage routes developed around the Virgen de la Candelaria. Arequipa's Virgen de Chapi shrine formed part of this broader syncretic Marian cult throughout the region.
Following Peruvian Independence (1821), Arequipa intellectuals developed a distinctively regionalist political discourse that challenged Lima's centralism. A number of major political and economic shifts fractured Arequipa's connection to the altiplano. These included the failure of the short-lived Peru–Bolivia Confederation (1836–9), the building of the railroad that connected Arequipa to an export economy via the Pacific port of Mollendo, and the consolidation of a regional wool-exporting elite. Love identifies the romantic poet Mariano Melgar and the conservative cleric, essayist and political propagandist Deán Valdivia as the main architects of a new ‘largely conservative yet populist tradition’ (p. 95) that emphasised Arequipa's rebelliousness in relation to Lima. In his book Las revoluciones de Arequipa (1874), Valdivia included the popular sectors in the political history of Arequipa. Love claims that Valdivia, who himself had humble social origins, may have been the first to use the word campiña to refer to the Arequipa countryside. His work helped to lay the foundations for the later identification of the small-scale rural property holders as a key component of a developing arequipeño identity.
Chapters 4 and 5 establish a comparison that constitutes the heart of the book's argument. Chapter 4 analyses the works of intellectuals who constructed a regional mestizo culture. Chapter 5 examines the rural popular culture that these intellectuals idealised but never fully grasped. As Love describes it: ‘My central assertion in this and the next chapter is that though small-holders, picanteras [women who ran establishments that sold chicha, a corn-based fermented drink], and other plebeians were often the key symbols and primary bearers of this structure, they themselves played virtually no role in the construction of this imaginary’ (p. 134). Yet his ‘central assertion’ does not seem at all novel or surprising in light of the literature he cites (including Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, 1973) that has uncovered how urban discourses of identity misrepresent and idealise the countryside. This reviewer also has questions about the methodological challenges of comparing the discourse analysis of works by intellectuals, some of whose work dates back to the 1890s, with Love's more contemporary ethnographic observations. These two chapters stand better on their own than in relation to one another.
In Chapter 4, Love argues that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, intellectuals, artists and musicians constructed a discourse of regional identity based on an idealised image of the rural mestizo small-scale landowner. Arequipa's mestizo identity differentiated it from Peru's indigenous southern highlands. Yet the term ‘browning’ in the chapter's subtitle (‘Browning, Secularizing and Ruralizing Regional Identity’) is somewhat misleading as it suggests that these various ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ subscribed to a common project of creating a regional mestizo identity comparable to indigenistas’ constructions of a national discourse of indigenous identity. Yet, as the author acknowledges, the notion of mestizo meant different things to the different intellectuals, and many didn't even use the term mestizo at all. For example, the influential intellectual and educator Jorge Polar defined Arequipa through the lenses of environmental determinism and social Darwinism, and considered the region's Indian and Spanish heritage racially problematic. Other authors, like the poet Percy Gibson with his poem ‘El Cholo’, come closer to a celebration of a racialised mestizo identity. Love acknowledges this diversity by grouping these intellectuals into categories such as ‘scientific folklore’ and ‘romantic folklore’. He includes a subsection titled ‘“Mestizo” Tradition Skeptics’ to address the work of those, like elite-born Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, altogether sceptical of the concept of a mestizo identity.
Chapter 5, based on data from a sample of 100 informants, points to the disconnect between the emblematic image of the rural arequipeño constructed by urban intellectuals and the actual rural arequipeños the author met during his fieldwork in various rural districts. The urban view of an isolated campiña missed the reality of increasing interconnection between countryside and city. The idealised image of the picanteras and lecheras (milkmaids who also delivered milk) contrasted with the reality that these were disappearing figures in the countryside. Intellectuals had overlooked the most salient features of the rural culture around the city of Arequipa: the centrality of bull-on-bull fighting and pace-horse ownership that became signs of social status and defining features of participation in communities that had grown around cattle ranching.
The book concludes with a somewhat lengthy chapter that summarises earlier arguments in what seems like excessively theoretical language (as exemplified in the chapter's title: ‘Social Genesis, Cultural Logic, and Bureaucratic Field in the Changing Arequipeño Social Space’). It does make the important point that regional discourses have received much less scholarly attention than discourses on national identity. Love has provided a rich picture of a regional culture, from different perspectives. His work will hopefully inspire more scholarship on both Arequipa and other regionalist discourses.
