This book is the result of long-term research. Jesús Cosamalón Aguilar has always been interested in social hierarchies and the ways in which popular sectors were perceived, especially in Lima where he lives and works. His past works include Indios detrás de la muralla. Matrimonios indígenas y convivencia interracial en Santa Ana (Lima, 1795–1820) (1999).
Through a perspective of social history, El juego de las apariencias offers a four-chapter analysis of the construction of social categories in the city of Lima during the republic. Confessing his intimate passions for music and mathematics, Cosamalón labels some of the chapters with fragments of popular songs and seems to divert himself with the quantitative analysis of the 1860 census of the population of Lima. By doing so, he skillfully leads the reader to take mental possession of the city, and of various historians' tools to comprehend the strategies of individuals of the nineteenth century who sought to inscribe themselves in the values of “decency” and forget their origins. The book, then, meets Pablo Whipple's work on the construction of social hierarchies through press and judicial cases (Whipple 2013).
Since colonial times, individuals have developed intellectual and judicial capabilities to question legal categories and define their identities. Cosamalón's introduction and first chapter (“Calle Luna, Calle Sol”) point out the processes of social differentiation of the colonial period and highlight the political, social, and spatial metamorphosis of Republican Lima up to 1860. Echoing Adrian J. Pearce's reflections on early eighteenth-century Peruvian censuses (Pearce 2001), Cosamalón gathers a useful bibliography for the urban Latin American historiography on matters such as blackness, whiteness, race, slavery, class, ethnicity, wars, and electoral issues. All of these themes are also developed in the subsequent chapters of the book, as it inscribes itself in the field of the history of administrative statistics.
From the second chapter onward through the study of the 1860 census, the author proposes to analyze and interpret an important shift that took place in the nineteenth century: race and class gradually became synonymous. Even though there are many studies on the causes and consequences of this shift, not many focus on skin color as a determining factor. It is therefore an element that Cosamalón proposes to emphasize and add to others (such as race, mestizaje, liberalism, and social mobility) to explain the structure of society in the city of Lima at the end of the nineteenth century. He demonstrates, and this is undoubtedly one of the fundamental contributions of the book, that skin color is a process, not just a fact.
Indeed, skin color is determined by an administrative process that aims to make some individuals “acceptable” to others by distinguishing them from other despised social groups in a perceptible way. In this sense, Cosamalón's book is in dialogue with Paul Schor's historical study on censuses in the United States (Schor 2009). Schor highlights how statistics shaped the social categories, and he shows that statistics based on skin color were the main instruments of a “politics of race” in the United States. After reading Cosamalón's work, we may come to a similar conclusion for Peru. Society imagines itself according to the skin color and through the census as a performative act. Although we regret that the book is not always very clear in its objectives and definitions, it is undeniably a pleasant text to read, and it offers interesting possibilities to enrich the field of the history of administrative practices.
