This book weaves together three strands. First, it adds to the case for a more explicit treatment of inter-group or ‘horizontal’ inequalities in contemporary political economy analysis and development studies. Second, four chapters of historical narrative brilliantly explore how group inequalities in Peru have evolved and proven to be so resilient to change. Third, it draws on primary research in three locations across the country to examine contemporary social identity, local collective action and political mobilisation, or lack of it. These strands are brought together into a strong overarching argument: that the relative weakness of Peru's explicitly indigenous politics is a tragedy.
A necessary foundation for this argument is to identify the group identities that are most salient to explaining Peru's high and sustained rates of inequality. Chapter 2 tackles this task with a useful review of the complex literature on the subtle and changing meaning of being labelled as blanco, criollo, mestizo, cholo, indio, serrano, chuto and so on (Amazonic group identities are not included in the analysis). Without denying racial elements of these ethnic divisions, it is their cultural framing that the authors most emphasise. For example, it is not uncommon for people to label themselves as ‘blanco’ in the highlands in order to distance themselves from socially subordinate Aymara- and Quechua-speaking ‘indios’, while also distancing themselves from more affluent whites when in Lima and other cities by adopting a ‘mestizo’ or ‘cholo’ label. Extra insights, particularly into experiences of prejudice and discrimination, are provided from interviews in Bambamarca in Cajamarca, Huanta in Ayacucho and San Juan de Lurigancho in Lima.
The subtlety of social identity distinctions in Peru belies not only the use of a simplistic dichotomy between indigenous and non-indigenous groups, but also any attempt to identify unambiguous ‘ethnic markers’ with which to measure group variations in access to resources or indicators of well-being. However, the authors also recognise that oversensitivity to the complexity of social identity risks downplaying the importance of its overall contribution to Peru's high and persistent inequalities. Chapters 3 and 4 (co-authored with Adolfo Figueroa) fall back on a simple but powerful three-way classification of national survey data according to the geography of adults' birth places: ‘indigenous’ for the 69 per cent of adults not born in the residential districts of regional capitals; ‘mestizo’ for the 27.5 per cent born in provincial capitals or the barriadas of Lima; and ‘white’ for the 3.5 per cent born in the 11 most affluent districts of Lima. For all its crudity, this distinction does succeed in highlighting profound inequalities. For example, the respective national household poverty rates are estimated at 53.4 per cent, 28 per cent and 9 per cent (Table 3.2) and corresponding women's literacy rates are 75.6 per cent, 95.1 per cent and 99.5 per cent (Table 3.3). Access to health care, basic services, education, employment and political participation is found to be similarly skewed. Particular emphasis is given to demonstrating how inequality in access to education, and variation in its quality, contributes to the reproduction of inequality rather than serving as a means to achieving improved socio-economic mobility.
Overall, the opening chapters mostly reinforce previous understanding of these issues, including Figueroa's own work. They also largely avoid engaging with the more technical literature on definition, measurement, decomposition and empirical analysis of determinants of poverty, inequality and well-being in Peru and Latin America more generally. However, they do cogently set the scene for the historical account of the embedding of inequality in Peruvian institutions and culture that lies at the heart of the book.
Chapter 5 covers the period from the conquest, through independence in 1824, to the 1879–83 war with Chile. Contributory factors woven together into the narrative include the effect of labour scarcity on colonial institutions of labour control, the role of religion in sanctioning racial subordination, and the ambiguous status of offspring of mixed unions. The authors also emphasise the importance of the guano export boom in shifting wealth and power to the Pacific coast, condemning much of the Sierra to the political and economic margins. Local power was distilled into a new class of landowning monopolists or gamonales, whose alliance with Lima was consolidated by the political instability resulting from military defeat.
Chapter 6 takes the story up to the 1960s. Building on Thorpe's earlier work, it first examines how subsequent export cycles both exacerbated polarisation of wealth in export sectors and accentuated the spatial consolidation of ethnic inequality by forcing indigenous farmers to choose between adverse incorporation on the coast and economic exclusion in the Sierra. Accommodation between the national business elite and foreign investors also weakened national incentives to adopt more dirigiste economic strategies. Meanwhile, state policies of assimilation of indigenous people through education, public health and land tenure reform struggled to overcome the gamonalismo of regional elites whose prosperity still rested on coercive subordination of indigenous peasant labour. As members of this group shifted (along with much of their capital) to Lima and the coast, so rich peasants built on patron–client relations to occupy their old niche in the economic hierarchy, thereby diluting the racial basis for rural social differentiation in favour of a cultural framing of mestizaje and a derogatory labelling of poorer peasants as primitive natives or chutos. Meanwhile, mass migration to Lima and other coastal cities from the 1940s laid the foundations for cholo social identities that replaced the illusory myth of assimilation through mestizaje with a new hybrid of indigenous and Western culture.
Chapter 7 describes the peasant mobilisations of the 1970s, along with the flawed Velasco nationalisations and corporatist land reforms. It assesses the resulting political confrontations, emphasising the failure of the Left to unify and to connect with indigenous interests any more effectively than the Lima-based government bureaucracy. Economic recession and reliance on US PL480 imports to keep food prices low at the expense of peasant producers further added to the conditions that allowed Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path, SL) to bring violence and terror to much of the country. Chapter 8 continues the now well-documented story of SL's rise and demise during the 1990s. It plots Fujimori's initial successes in both neutralising SL and bringing about institutional reforms that restored the export-led economic growth model at a time of global trade expansion. The narrative ends with the re-emergence of familiar contradictions: economic polarisation, political centralisation, growing cultural alienation exacerbated by lack of local state capacity, generalised distrust, and weak political party structures and capacities.
The third strand of the book, emphasised particularly in the concluding chapter, is an appraisal of capacity for popular collective actions on the part of indigenous groups. These actions include class-based peasant and labour mobilisations in the 1970s, the grassroots origins (if not the final destination) of women's popular kitchens during the 1980s, the resilience of rondas campesinas (particularly in the northern Sierra), post-Fujimori democratisation, and a reassertion of communal interests against commercial mining. This list demonstrates the capacity of indigenous people to mobilise politically, despite relative poverty, cultural subordination and free-rider disincentives to collective action. At the same time, however, Peru's skewed economic geography, its persistent racialised class hierarchy and the resilience of personalised patronage politics remain obstacles to achieving broader-based and more equitable social and economic development. Hence it is a big leap to conclude that the only path to more equitable development is the establishment of a strong and indigenous party political movement of the kind experienced in neighbouring Ecuador and Bolivia: an alternative view is that indigenous politics operates in a more diffuse way over diverse and often regional issues, but nevertheless with a combined and cumulative capacity to influence national politics. Either way, the book provides a brilliant historical account of how economic, political and cultural forces have conspired to perpetuate Peru's inequality and remain deeply entrenched.
