‘El neoperuano’, ‘the Neo-Peruvian’, is the designation commonly applied to an architectural and decorative style en vogue, and officially promoted, under the second government of Augusto B. Leguía (1919–30) in Lima, the capital of the Peruvian republic. One expression of indigenism, the Neo-Peruvian style selectively, and creatively, integrated elements of the imagery popularly associated with Peru's pre-Columbian past to represent ‘the national’. Gabriel Ramón's book, in adding to a rich and diverse body of scholarship on the role of pre-Columbian material culture as ‘national’ symbols in post-colonial Latin America, contributes new detail, and nuance, to our understanding of that political practice in general, and the ‘Neo-Peruvian’ vogue in early-twentieth century Lima in particular.

Following two introductory chapters that set the stage for the argument, one on the ideological contours of Augusto B. Leguía's second, dictatorial government and another charting Lima's dramatic urban expansion during the early twentieth century, the book's main section consists of three detailed, well-researched case studies on Neo-Peruvian style monuments raised during the 1920s in Lima's newly urbanised areas: the Archaeological Museum (Museo de Arqueología, today the Museo Nacional de la Cultura Peruana) with its Tiahuanaco-inspired façade, a creation of the sugar magnate Víctor Larco Herrera's wealth and vision, a statue to Manco Capac, the mythical founder of the Incan dynasty, donated by Lima's Japanese community and chosen at a former Lima mayor's, Federico Elguera's, suggestion, and the Parque de la Reserva, a park complex with references to Inca and Moche material culture in its friezes, fountains and tiles, raised in one of the ‘new’ city's recreational zones, in the prosperous residential area Santa Beatriz.

Ramón largely grounds his narrative upon the controversies raised by the construction of these monuments in Lima at the time, an approach that allows him to examine how precisely, under which constraints, and to the exclusion of what, stylistic elements of the pre-Columbian past came, or not, to represent ‘the national’ at the time. The building of Lima's Archaeological Museum, for instance, was accompanied by a debate surrounding the choice of the pre-Columbian style that was to adorn its façade, and by that, be(come) predominant in the Peruvian collective imagination. The ultimate decision in favour of Tiahuanaco, a pre-Columbian site that captured the public imagination at the time, signified a temporary settlement of the question rather than a general or long-lasting consensus: particularly under the influence of the archaeologist Julio C. Tello, Tiahuanaco was soon to be replaced by Chavín de Huántar as the pre-Columbian society at the heart of nationalist discourse. Contemporary controversies not only elucidate the stylistic partialities of the Neo-Peruvian vogue, but also its criteria for exclusion. Statues representing indigenous personages had long been conspicuously absent from Lima's urban landscape, and the controversies surrounding the erection of a statue to Manco Capac was commensurately intense: it revolved not only around the statue's Japanese sponsorship, which some construed as the expression of imperialist designs and of an ‘obscure fraternity’ (p. 79) and ‘racial sympathy’ (p. 87) between that Asian society and Peru's indigenous population, but more importantly, around whether an indigenous personage belonged at all within the Hispanic city's public space, outside the museum, and whether the aura of heroism the artistic medium of the statue conferred on it would not endanger the public peace. Four years after its inauguration in 1926, the statue was consequently re-located from its former central setting to La Victoria, a poor neighbourhood on the city's newly urbanised margins; in the end, the ‘official city’, as Ramón phrases it, retained the right to deny or grant ‘admission’ (p. 95). Indigeneity entered Lima's public space not only selectively, the author contends, but also subdued. In the Parque de la Reserva, the main assembly consisted of a rotunda formed by a central loggia in the style of a triumphal arch, a series of pergolas adorned with Italian jars, and fountains adorned with Seville-style tiles; the various Inca and Moche motifs on the tiles and friezes were decorative, subordinate to European forms, Ramón argues, and the indigenous sculptures archaeologically, and picturesquely, removed from the indigenous present, the ‘Indian’ statuettes crowning the font, for instance, were in the style of coastal ceramics, with stirrup handles on their backs.

Particularly in this last, comparatively succinct case study on the Parque de la Reserva, there is a sense of disillusionment with the Neo-Peruvian in Ramón's narrative, not only as to how the makers of Neo-Peruvian style monuments retained the right to exclude, but also in regard to how they rendered indigeneity ‘decorative’ without altering ‘established’, aesthetic as well as socio-political, ‘hierarchies’ (p. 96), how the government ‘emptied symbols’, ‘depriving them of what had hitherto been considered their intrinsic properties’ (p. 95), how the elites exoticised and romanticised indigeneity, ‘devouring indigenism, neutralizing it’ (p. 93). The sense of dissatisfaction is heightened by the book's concluding section, which refers to the destruction of Lima's local huacas as a consequence of the city's urban expansion, a development that, in the eyes of the author, caricatures the exultation of the pre-Columbian past in the official, Neo-Peruvian rhetoric. A sense of disenchantment is reasonable, and entirely appropriate, if we take indigenism, and its Neo-Peruvian expression in architecture, to be a novel and original, politically committed endeavour. If we see indigenism and its attendant artistic expressions, however, as what it certainly also was, namely, the continuation of a long-standing creole discourse about indigeneity, then the Neo-Peruvian style's exclusivist, romanticist, and traditionalist stance is quite consistent, and anticipatable. As historians like Natalia Majluf have shown, ever since pre-Columbian symbols, and the political legitimacy they continued to entail, had become available, and been appropriated, for the imagined collectivities South America's creole patriots were beginning to envision in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this appropriation had not denoted primarily change but continuity; it had hardly ever signified a departure from European forms and genres. It had always privileged particular kinds of, monumental, aesthetically appealing, material culture and societies over others, having by necessity, ‘emptied’ and resignified pre-Columbian symbols, to make them accessible, credible and palatable for a Hispanic audience, and it had certainly not, or at least not necessarily, aimed at altering the established social and cultural order. As the author himself writes at the outset of the book, the Neo-Peruvian style was above all a ‘rhetorical strategy’; it was an aesthetic convention driven by the perceived necessity, not to reform or radically alter, but to creditably represent ‘the national’.