La república imaginada

This book by Rolando Rojas analyzes how Peru's liberal elite imagined the nation-state after independence in the early 1820s. Rojas starts by observing that today nobody doubts that the social and political realities of independence-era Peru did not conform to the ideals outlined by the constitution. According to the constitution, all Peruvians were equal before the law. All adult men had political rights, and both the parliament and the head of state were to be elected through fair and competitive elections. The new political order put an end to the Old Regime's division between commoners and nobility. However, discrimination against indigenous people and the urban poor did not disappear. The rule of law did not exist for most Peruvians throughout the nineteenth century (or the twentieth, one might add). Therefore, the legal order had little in common with actual political and social life. While many historians have discussed the divide between the official and the real Peru, Rojas is one of the few interested in the way that the liberal elite imagined a country so different from liberal ideals.The book is divided into three chapters. In the first, Rojas describes the group that he calls “criollos liberales.” On the one hand, he distinguishes these criollos from foreign leaders during independence. As we know, foreigners led the most important armies of Peru's independence war. The criollos, therefore, had to explain why they had not been able to lead the independence movement. To this end, they described colonial Lima as the bulwark of Spanish rule, which had made it difficult for Lima's liberals to stand up for an independent Peru. Nevertheless, according to the criollos liberales, they had worked for independence in such heroic ways that Lima eventually fell to the independence movement without any battle. Thus, Lima's liberal elite could claim to be the natural leaders of independent Peru. Unlike the royalists in Lima, the criollos liberales had fought for independence, risking their lives and those of their families; unlike the foreign armies of Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín they were Peruvian born, interested in the well-being of their nation and their compatriots. The liberal elite of Lima created a self-description that legitimated their national leadership while delegitimizing the role of other elite groups.The second chapter describes the way that the liberal elite imagined indigenous people. The chapter is titled, in a play on the article by Cecilia Méndez, “Incas sí, indios también.” According to Rojas, the liberal elite imagined a nation-state of educated and “civilized” citizens—that is to say, a nation-state without indigenous people. However, Rojas argues that liberals believed in educating indigenous people. That is why he speaks of a “liberalismo indigenista” (p. 66). According to this view, liberals created a positive image of the indigenous population, describing them as patriots who had fought for independence. At the same time, liberals created the idea of the Peruvian “family,” which included everybody living in Peru (p. 65). However, liberals did not believe indigenous people equal to the elite of Lima. On the contrary, indigenous people had to be educated through schools and the political life of the nation-state, especially elections.The third chapter is about how the liberals imagined the popular classes of Lima. Liberals described them in a similar way as they did indigenous people, as uneducated and “ignorant” (p. 131). The urban poor of Lima, many of whom were enslaved or freed men and women, were imagined as a threat to liberal rule, a fearful potential source of rebellions and disorders.In his concluding remarks, Rojas speaks of a “fictitious nation” (p. 136). The nation imagined by the liberal elite did not exist and would never exist. Nevertheless, the discourse of the liberal elite was of great importance, as it explained and justified the contradictory political and social order. Focusing on texts written in Lima in the early 1820s, Rojas argues that the ideas that he describes were fundamental until the war with Chile (1879–84). Liberals never believed the indigenous and the poor to be citizens with all rights. They were imagined as potential citizens who had to be educated—in other words, supervised and controlled. Rojas's book is an important contribution at a moment when some historians are once again describing the liberal elite as the group who wanted to forge a Peru for all people. Rojas reminds us that the liberal elite did not intend to change the country; instead, by elaborating a discourse on the Peruvian nation, liberals justified the racist social order

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