Indigenous Mestizos

The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991

Bibliographic Data

ID2833202
AuthorsEnrique Mayer (0000-0002-5509-4580, Yale University, corresponding author)
Year2001
Volume81
Issue2
Pages410-412
Publication date2001-05-01
Open AccessNo
TypeREVIEW
Review ofIndigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991, Marisol De La Cadena, 2000
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-81-2-410
OpenAlexW2073533605
LanguageEN

This is a gripping book on how and why all the people of the city of Cuzco practice a cruel and elaborate game of discrimination against each other. Everyone in Cuzco feels herself or himself the victim of cultural/racial discrimination, while at the same time, that same person feels an equally justified right to practice the very same against others. In an admirable and very readable book, de la Cadena forcefully presents the complex and intricate rules used to disparage others by associating them with indigenous cultural or racial traits and to elevate oneself through the adoption of mestizo categories. At the other end of the continuum, the mestizo categories are used to ascribe to oneself or to superiors. Marisol de la Cadena does a superb job in showing how Andean distinctions do not conform to dual and closed compartments of either-or choices, but are a matter of an excruciatingly complicated scale that adds or subtracts, in fine millimeter-like units, a negative degree of Indianness or positive mestizo-ness to a person’s claim and counterclaim. The tokens in this game are not necessarily racial attributes, but ephemeral issues, such as respect, dignity, or authenticity that convey, to player and audience alike, degrees of “de-Indianization” (her term). The fight is thus over the control of the production of these performances.Each token that is used to discriminate has a social and political history, which the author traces with admirable skill, perceptive insight, cruel ironic humor, and a keen eye for the telling detail. She is very perceptive in teasing enlightening material from the local archives and the writings of Cuzco scholars. The history of the shifting paradigms of the cultural and socially hegemonic definitions of Indianness and how they are contested is the best part of this wonderful book. We learn, for example, how Cuzco intellectuals at the turn of the century defied European concepts of race by defining it as a cultural (and therefore changeable) variable. We are told how these indigenístas (principally Luis E. Valcárcel and his successors) could therefore set themselves up as arbiters of the pathways, the necessary steps and the outward markers of successful achievement of de-Indianization. They did this by arbitrarily defining an Indian as a rural bumpkin, degenerated through exploitation, and mistreated by the “bad” rural mestizo (gamonal). According to local intellectuals, in a civilized place such as Cuzco, there were no “bad” Indians, and only “good” mestizos, direct inheritors of a classic “authentic and pure” Inca tradition.Dominated by males and male images, local intellectuals set themselves up as hegemonic judges and gatekeepers of authentic cultural expressions of Cuzqueño culture, which distanced itself as far as possible from the denigrated Indian practices of rural areas. These intellectuals set the standards by which any performance (whether public or just social) could be judged as more authentic or more vulgar, and thus provoked a myriad of situations where claims to respect could be validated or dismissed. De la Cadena gives many examples. A wonderful section describes how the local elite created the festival of Inti Raymi, in which Cuzco intellectuals and the Ministry of Education controlled the contents, representations, and cast of these events. A lineage of “approved” performers of the key role, that of the Inca himself, monopolized the role because they were deemed to be the only speakers of the genuine royal language, Capac Simi. These performers were eventually challenged by others who claimed to know an even purer form of this language. Likewise, with the growth of tourism, town intellectuals cleaned up Indian indecencies and created the choreography, the dress, and the standards of beauty for the performers in shows presented to foreigners as authentically indigenous. These presentations were soon challenged by other choreographers’ claims to an even greater level of authenticity.Another telling case is the racializing treatment of Miguel Quispe, a rural leader in the 1920’s, who accepted the indigenístas’ agenda and demanded schools for his village, but was nonetheless shunned because the Cuzco elite were not in control of his movement. There is also the case of Alejandro Condori, a street vendor and leader of an urban dance troupe whom Marisol met during her fieldwork. Alejandro controlled the performance and the membership of his troupe in the name of the “real authenticity” of the dance, in order to segregate less desirable street vendors from his group. Similarly, Timotea Gamarra tirelessly worked for the Association of the Virgin of the Nativity in her neighborhood of Almudena to gain the respect accorded to a “good” mestiza, vying for increased prestige among competing associations. These people are, according to de la Cadena, examples of grassroots indigenous intellectuals (organic in the Gramscian scheme), who devise new texts and contents to their performances that defy the hegemonic definitions of their situations, and thus create conditions for constant change. What stays put, alas, is the reproduction of the patterns of discrimination over and over again, no matter what disguises it takes.De la Cadena is equally perceptive when she looks at the gender issue. In the countryside, women were defined as more Indian than men, and slower to de-Indianize. In the city, market women were distinguished as “bad” mestizas because they are deemed insolent, slovenly and sexually dangerous in contrast to the dignified damas of the “good” Mestizo elite. However, the market women see themselves as indigenous mestizas and their grassroots intellectual work is to contest their relative rank; they challenge dominant constructs by adding a “refined” Indigenous component to their urban mestizoness. They counter the insolence they are tainted with by insisting on respect from their customers. Insisting on being treated with “respect” also permits “disrespecting” others (faltar el respeto). “Frequently,” in order to defend one’s place, the author says (p. 227), “market women deliberately display a crudely discriminatory behavior.”Reading the author’s vivid descriptions of Cuzco, I was struck by similarities with caste-ridden India, where lower castes also engage in Brahaminization akin to de-Indianization in order to raise their relative status and where demanding to be treated with respect is also an important weapon. The endless multiplication of categories with which to discriminate occurs in both countries, as does the association of menial tasks such as the handling of food and meat with lower “untouchable” status. Such a situation is in Peru viewed by Western scholars as racism, but in India it is not. The Peruvian elite de la Cadena cites, formulates its explanations in terms that do not resort to racial terminology. Although a Peruvian scholar herself, De la Cadena aligns herself with authors like Martin Barker, Paul Gilroy, Etienne Balibar, and Verena Stolke who use terms such as “new racism,” “racism without race,” and “cultural fundamentalism” to bring the silent yet insistent subtext of race to the foreground. For me, the issue is that racism is a subcategory of the wider, more pervasive, and equally evil practice of discrimination. However, these days there is a tendency to read racism into almost every situation of discrimination. The Peruvian version of nonracial code is convenient because it masks underlying notions of absolute moral superiority of some Peruvians over others. De la Cadena does insist that the notions of achieved status through education and de-Indianization are complicit in inventing the bottom end of the continuum, the fictional indio, that serves as a standard by which everyone is measured and found wanting. De la Cadena has successfully shifted the paradigm with which these issues used to be treated. There is enough challenging intellectual material in this book to set the standard by which future inquiries into these issues will be measured

Aesthetics · Art · Dignity · Ephemeral key · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Race (biology · Racism · Sociology · Computer Science · Gender Studies · Latin American history and culture · Law

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