Making Machu Picchu

Mark Rice's excellent Making Machu Picchu shows how strange this Inca estate's rise has been: a national site 350 years older than the nation-state, first promoted by an American historian named Hiram Bingham, that has become an uninhabited and state-managed engine of commerce and identity—the “synthesis of all things Peruvian,” President Alan García told the nation in 2011. Bingham or Machu Picchu's Inca history has little to do with it, Rice argues. The key is tourism and the transnational contact zone—per Mary Louise Pratt—of the nearby city of Cuzco.That tourism is integral to Machu Picchu's “Marca Perú”—the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism's brand since 2012—might seem self-evident. Making Machu Picchu points out how unlikely it would have sounded in the late nineteenth century, when elite nationalism was flatly anti-indigenous, even anti-Inca, or in the mid-1910s, when the site was infamous because of rumors that Bingham's Yale expeditions smuggled artifacts from Machu Picchu and other sites. (They had; only Machu Picchu's artifacts went back to Peru when Yale acknowledged the country's demands in 2011.) Instead, using a range of daily and tourism periodicals from Cuzco and Lima and the archives of intellectuals and government agencies in Peru and the United States, Rice shows how a shifting coalition of regional and transnational boosters in Cuzco expended decades of political, intellectual, and economic labor to encourage the national state to promote tourism to Machu Picchu's and Cuzco's indigenous pasts. Their success meant that both places became less profitable to those who actually lived there.Making Machu Picchu is engagingly written and free of jargon, a tight first monograph that models how use of a newer field like the history of tourism refreshes prior literatures, like that of indigenistas in Cuzco after Bingham. This book makes clear how transnational their regional concerns were. Chapters 1 and 2 show how indigenistas allied with actors like Albert G. Giesecke, a Philadelphia-born rector of Cuzco's university, to promote the city as the Americas' mecca of tourism: more modern than the rural Cuzqueños demanding social reform, more Peruvian than Lima. In the 1930s and 1940s, during the Good Neighbor era, groups like the Touring y Automovíl Club del Perú (TACP) encouraged the Peruvian state to stoke tourists' interest in the site. In 1948 Benjamín Roca Muelle, the first director of Peru's Corporación Nacional del Turismo, collaborated with Giesecke to bring Bingham back to inaugurate the first highway to Machu Picchu and attract—as the January 1944 issue of the TACP's magazine Turismo hoped—an “invasion” “from the North, blond, happy, and wealthy,” bearing their “famous weapon: money, money, money” (p. 60).Chapters 3 through 5 show how the wax and wane of state support built up local tourism and then abandoned it to transformation by outsiders. Cuzqueños' efforts are visible throughout. In a clear example of Naomi Klein's “disaster capitalism,” the city's leaders mobilized foreign interest to protest the centralizing national state's failed reconstruction of Cuzco and Machu Picchu after the earthquake of 1950: incoming funds from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and the Inter-American Development Bank prioritized tourism over industrial development and agricultural modernization. Too much interest was also a problem. A 1972 alliance with the center-left military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado failed to bring the promised construction of a luxury hotel at Machu Picchu. When archaeologists, architects, and forestry engineers declared it a cultural and environmental hazard at odds with reformist values, Cuzqueños perceived a Limeño conspiracy to thwart economic autonomy. Finally, the collapse of Velasco's “peculiar revolution” made clear how dependent on outside capital Cuzco had become. The 1980s, when the Shining Path surged, were boom years for local entrepreneurs and previously unwanted hippie expats who remade Machu Picchu tourism as a mystic, environmental adventure. But their bootstrap rebranding coexisted with the consortiums of Limeños and international capital that bought Cuzco and Machu Picchu's state hotels and railways from the government in the mid-1990s. This neoliberalization of tourism's industry made “Cusqueños . . . strangers in our own homeland,” El Comercio del Cusco protested in 1995 (p. 152).Given this book's happy concision, it feels greedy to want more. Rice points to other authors, like Keely Maxwell and Pellegrino A. Luciano, for the environmental and social construction of the Inca Trail and the town of Machu Picchu Pueblo (also called Aguas Calientes), below the ruins. His thesis instead offers a hemispheric backdrop to their works. This is not another (tired) story of nationalism's failure in Peru. It is an important book about the hazards of stratified success: how “tourism and transnationalism can offer alternate paths to the creation of nationalism, the[ir] imagery . . . no less imagined” (pp. 160–61). Claims of tourism's importance to the Cuzco area are perhaps overblown, Rice notes, but this “elite-oriented cultural project constructed to serve the outside gaze” is one that millions of Peruvians engage with, work for, each year (p. 161). Rice observes that 425,000 of the 1.4 million visitors to Machu Picchu in 2016 were national citizens, who have grown up told that Machu Picchu belongs to them (p. 163). Some may have their doubts. Bingham is dead. Alan García now too. But Marca Perú marches on

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