Cruz y arado, fusiles y discursos

In this long and meticulously documented book, Pilár García Jordán studies nation building in Peru and Bolivia: more specifically, how each country conceived and implemented the incorporation of “Los Orientes,” their eastern territories. In examining how politicians made policy at an enormous remove from the polis, the author describes two Andean Orientalisms, each characterized by erroneous assumptions, fits and starts, and by failure more than success. Nevertheless, she finds that the two national experiences produced very different results.García is a professor of the history of the Americas at the Universitat de Barcelona, as well as director of its Taller de Estudios e Investigaciones Andino-Amazonas, a project described at http://www.ub.es/america/objetivos.htm. The present study is part of a considerable body of work, some reviewed in this journal, that has grown out of the workshop’s decade-long concentration on the integration of Andean and Amazonian space into nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The book is organized symmetrically, with two Peruvian chapters and two Bolivian ones, set to the same chronologies—the 1820s to the War of the Pacific and the 1880s to the mid–twentieth century. The narrative stretches across several thousand kilometers of tropical latitude and settles on some pretty obscure locations—a modern map or maps of the area would have been helpful. In her Bolivian presentation, García reaches beyond the Amazon into Chiquitos and the Chaco. She uses the term Orientes bolivianos to encompass this collective and refers readers to the edited proceedings of a 1993 conference to explain it.Peru’s incorporation of its eastern territory began at a very low ebb, with the late colonial years afflicted by the Juan Santos uprising in the central montaña and the early republican ones paralyzed by the resignation of Spanish missionary friars. However, a combination of factors produced a Peruvianized Amazon by the 1920s. The most important component of Peruvian success was an alliance made between a succession of presidential regimes and the Catholic Church, itself redefined as an instrument of the modern state. This union enabled a vibrant missionary enterprise. Turning to Bolivia, García sees a different dynamic and a different result.While the Oriente became fixed in the Bolivian imagination by the middle of the nineteenth century, national leaders never turned this vision into something tangible. Colonization schemes failed to materialize, and laws intended to foster economic development fell victim to unintended consequences. Most importantly, the national government failed to enforce its will when local elites opposed it. Thus, Amazonian mission stations were depopulated when rubber extraction demanded labor power. Settlement of the Chaco also suffered from the gradual decline of mission settlements as the national government eroded the missionaries’ authority. By 1920, Bolivian nation building succumbed to a posture that defended territory, a strategy whose flaws the Chaco War would make painfully clear.García presents a documentary tour de force. Writing an authoritative history of Andean nations still requires creating much of its underlying infrastructure from scratch, and García offers her readers a master class in documentation. She has pieced together a comprehensive file of presidential messages, congressional proceedings, ministerial reports, and other official documents. Furthermore, she gives accurate and full citations, a service that should guide generations of researchers working in this period. And while the book’s 1,273 footnotes may seem excessive by the current conventions of historiography, their number and depth of detail provide insights into the sources found nowhere else.Years of work (the present volume being only the latest iteration of these themes) have led García to a thesis on nation building in the central Andean republics that she encapsulates in the title to this book. The mission (cruz) was the most effective integrating institution in the Oriente, and church-state relations determined mission viability. Agriculture (arado) advanced the frontier, while extraction did not. Military force (fusiles) was sometimes necessary to defend frontiers, although only those essentially part of the nation. And discourse (discursos) can initiate action. While these conclusions are well substantiated and expertly documented in this work, I find them only partially satisfying.García bases her analysis almost exclusively on the official record. She has digested an enormous mass of documents and teased from it a sophisticated account of intellectual currents and political events in Peru and Bolivia. From her work, readers will gain valuable insights into the national political scene, church-state relations, and how the Oriente appeared to governors situated on the Pacific Coast and Andean highlands. But, surely, nation building depends on the consent of the governed as well as the intentions and policies of the governors. Without testimony from the governed—historical polling, if you will—an understanding of the formation of modern nations will always be incomplete

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