1920s ~ Defining Mestizo and Indian
Conversation on educated morality in Marisol de la Cadena’s text
I’m really enjoying Marisol de la Cadena’s book Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru 1919-1999 (2000). She speaks to the named topics – politics, race, culture – through the movements around the modernizing era. Modernization was preceded by debates of regionalismo versus centralismo in the early nineteenth century. This political debate and distinction in racial identity is a point of investigation when conceptualising social hierarchies and their extension into associations of moral propriety (p. 48).
Two main points have stuck out thus far: first is the notion of environmental determinism. The demographic distribution of peoples found that “Indians were anchored to the Andes” while the coast was populated by whites and mestizos (p.45). In the coastal terrains of Peru, self-identification with progress (also associated with whiteness) favored centralismo. These ideologies were lead by Limeño inhabitants and officials, dominating the intellectual and political discourse. Dialectically, discourse infantilised and placed prejudice representation of Serranos (highlanders) as regressive. But what does the environment have to do with this determinism? To be anchored to the Andes, to be highland people who have established in harsh elements and variable terrains, is this regressive? Single stories of progress within racial realms converged with the concept of pureza de sangre, a notion notably utilised by Christian belief, but also has more tribal roots in the desire to preserving lineage. But ultimately the feature of the environment is simply Coastal Lima’s access to European influence and resource via market trade.
Seconds, is the concept of “decency” awarded to the Urban (white) cuzqueño population was a quality endorsed by certain education models supposedly removed from Serrano lifestyles and family structures. In simplified identity politics defining Indians as illiterate agriculturalist living communally in highland ayllus (collectively possessed) and mestizos as non-Indian, and therefore literate (p.87), education was ascribed as the path to decency. An influential politician (Luna, 1919) as well utilizes sterilizing language to deprecate the Indian:
“Education disciplines can combat and modify inherited tendencies because education is the true hygiene that purifies the soul (Luna, 1919:25) (p. 47)
Why would Limeño distinguish racial identities while pushing against regionalism and advocating for centralismos format of power? How did the strategy of asserting their superior classifications work out for national unification (aim: power over)?
1921-1926 saw the response to such racial and pedegocical bigotry (“racially defined as irrational”). Events deemed Indigenous rebellions by landowners (Gamonales y hacendados) con-currently stimulated the introduction of populism under Augusto B. Leguía presidency. While, ironically in the format of Coastal Limeños discrimination, more radical Indigenistas groups did revive language of “restating the Inca empire” and opposing all things non-india. The 1921 state constitution “[favored] the struggle for indigenous rights and organizations” and protected via recognition the Indian race (Patria Nueva, Leguía). Political power of literate Serranos was uplifted by the constitution and pro-Indian organization, Comité Pro-Derecho Indígena Tawantinsuyu— their aim to conceive alternative definitions of Indianness associated with literacy, finally a chance for self-identification and self-representation of the highland region.
It’s so strange to me to imagine how compliant the masses were on accepting the link between literacy and morality. The intellectualisation of feeling and judgement, said to otherwise be impure and misguided, displays a superiority complex central to racialized and culturized hierarchies. How do these historical concepts implicitly live on in internal bias and external structure? Which definitions do we humans escape through in our moral practices?
"It’s so strange to me to imagine how compliant the masses were on accepting the link between literacy and morality." An old bearded man once said that:
"The 'dominant ideas' of a given era are, however, those of the ruling class." But as you say, things are more complicated and difficult to disagree in the case of Peru. I'm glad you've been invested in this book, because it recognizes that Indigenous categories are historical and therefore sensitive to social change. It may be surprising, but the centrality of “decency” in this definition (and differentiation) of Indigenous seems to me to be very productive for understanding current Peru (compared to what is happening in Canada, for example).