There has been a surprising dearth of critical reflective work on the discourses and driving forces, currents and movements that indigenismo inspired in early twentieth-century Andean societies. From the standpoint of the present day, indigenismo, whether in the field of cultural production or political struggle, is all too easily and quickly dismissed as flawed and mistaken. It is judged to have been one more trick, an insidious way through which national and regional elites of the clase letrada, while claiming to be vindicating indigenous peoples after centuries of abuse and marginalisation, were in fact perpetuating the misrepresentation and exclusion of indigenous fellow nationals. The label indigenista has for many become a pejorative word. Of course, there are good grounds for these allegations, but it is timely that the bases for them should be revisited, contextualised and weighed up. After all, indigenismo arose in connection with oppositional literary and political movements that strove to counter the exploitation and debasing of indigenous people and culture dominant in their society. Simple labelling and dismissal does not explain the potentials that radical, or nonconformist, intellectuals struggling to imagine ‘modernity’ and invent the ‘nation’ found in indigenismo at the time. Missing have been the serious scholarly works that review and question the different strands and debates that fell under this fluid, all-embracing term, especially in the period when indigenismo was being most energetically promoted and also most actively contested and repressed.
In The Andes Imagined Jorge Coronado focuses on the cultural field, specifically on lettered production in Peru during the 1920s and 1930s. The author's sceptical, problematising approach is clear from the start, when he announces that the book explores ‘the contradictions that lie at the center of indigenismo, the cultural, social, and political movements that grew to prominence in the early twentieth century’ (p. 1). The result is a highly engaging and skilfully written book that reads as a series of essays, by an author very much at home in his field. Since this reviewer has worked primarily on manifestations of indigenismo within political struggle and movements in the Andes in the same period, it has been a delight to learn and appreciate the contexts, contributions and pitfalls of indigenismo seen from the perspective of the literary field.
The book's central thesis concerns the interplay of representation at two levels. The first is that in mounting a titular defence of indios, indigenistas also created an image or a figure to represent the indio and to rehabilitate indigenous peoples. The second is that in the many and diverse forms of lettered production, it was through images given to the indio that modernities were conjured up and configured. Thus representation of the indio was shaped according to the particular indigenista's vision and needs with respect to modernity. Outstanding for José Carlos Mariátegui was the image of the ‘Revolutionary Indio’, explored in chapter 1. For José Angel Escalante, a cuzqueňo working in the Leguía government, whose viewpoint is presented in chapter 2, it was the need to both preserve and modernise the Andes as a cultural region. For the poet Carlos Oquendo de Amat, the subject of chapter 3, it was the Andean migrant's bifurcated discourse that continued to separate the modernity of the city from the indigenous highlands taken as a semantic field previous to and protected from modernity. In sum, lettered practice had no interest in embodying or communicating what it was to be indigenous. Rather, indigenismo operated ‘as a mechanism that constantly evokes an indigenous object’. While novel cultural forms were created, there was always a distancing, so far from closing the gap between Hispanic society and indigenous cultures, ‘indigenismo's many cultural products sought to mark it’ (p. 17). Even when contested and attacked, indigenismo overwhelmingly ‘refused to relinquish its tutorial attitude toward those it sought to protect’ (p. 135).
Each of the book's five chapters tackles a different slice of cultural production. These examples of indigenista production are complementary and contemporaneous, and advancing through them, we discover that Coronado presents a second general argument. This is that, over time, spaces were being opened up that allowed Andean subalterns to talk back. A new ‘publics of print’ appeared, notably through Mariátegui's journal Labor, the subject of chapter 4, which included eyewitness reports and letters from Andeans. This opening occurred, Coronado surmises, following the realisation that ‘in order to make inroads into the formation of an egalitarian society in the Andes, indigenista lettered practices … had to explore strategies that enacted communication instead of resting on representation’ (p. 112). This was an important, though ephemeral, breakthrough. Labor as a working-class newspaper ‘sought to grapple with and incorporate indigenismo into its discourse’, impart the idea of the indio as the analogue of the urban worker, and achieve a desired solidarity among the dispossessed of both the city and the Andean sierra. A different challenge came not within writing, but from photography. In a fascinating final chapter, Coronado chooses the work of Martín Chambi in Cuzco to act as a counterpoint for lettered culture. He finds that the technology of photography, new to the Andean world, could ‘provide fascinating points of tension with writing’. Seen as deeply problematic by local indigenistas, the visual image had the power to become counter-hegemonic because photographs could undo ‘the very representational protocols at the core of indigenismo’ (p. 137).
To draw out central arguments from this complex history of varying positions, points of reference and debates surrounding indigenismo, Coronado has rightly set limits to the scope of his study. This works well for the first three essays, which seek to substantiate the principal argument linking representation to configurations of modernity. But it works less well when it comes to the second argument, the opening up of counter-hegemonic spaces and subaltern voice. Strengthening this second argument would require greater attention to historical antecedents, such as the earlier attempts by radical newspapers to act as ‘print publics’. Thus, although Manuel González Prada is amply discussed as the first modern indigenista, no mention is made of La Integridad, the Lima newspaper produced at the turn of the century by his associates in the Unión Nacional (the political party he founded), which included reports and letters purporting to come from indios speaking out about their exploitation. The argument of opening spaces also begs questions about the interfaces with the political field. It is therefore surprising that only once is the Comité Pro-Derecho Indígena Tahuantinsuyu mentioned, even though Mariátegui assisted in its foundation and the movement drew inspiration from anarcho-syndicalist workers' unions on the coast. Although the Comité only existed formally from 1919 until 1927, when Leguía ordered its disbanding, the work of local comités continued to have reverberations in the Andean region long after its suppression, and this paved the way for APRA and a renewed radical message in the 1930s and 1940s. But these are other stories.
