Inventing Indigenism: Francisco Laso's Image of Modern Peru 9781477324097

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INVENTING INDIGENISM

I N V EN T I NG I N DIGEN ISM FRANCISCO L ASO’S IMAGE OF MODERN PERU

Natalia Majluf

University of Texas Press Austin

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2021 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713–7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S C ATA LO G I N G - I N - P U B L I C AT I O N D ATA

Names: Majluf, Natalia, author. | Laso, Francisco, 1823–1869. Works. Selections. Title: Inventing indigenism : Francisco Laso’s image of modern Peru / Natalia Majluf. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020057445 (print) | LCCN 2020057446 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2408-0 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4773-2409-7 (library ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2410-3 (non-library ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Laso, Francisco, 1823–1869. | Painting, Peruvian—19th century. | Indigenous peoples—Peru—Portraits—History—19th century. | National characteristics, Peruvian. | Quechua Indians—Peru—Portraits—History—19th century. | Aymara Indians—Peru—Portraits—History—19th century. | Indigenous peoples—Portraits—History—20th century. Classification: LCC ND419.L37 M35 2021 (print) | LCC ND419.L37 (ebook) | DDC 759.985/09034—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057445 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057446 doi:10.7560/324080

For Miguel and Susy, and for Martín, Verónica, Juan Pablo, and José Antonio

The new Peruvianness is something to be created. Its historical cement must be indigenous. Its axis will perhaps rest better on Andean stone than on coastal clay.

La nueva peruanidad es una cosa por crear. Su cimiento histórico tiene que ser indígena. Su eje descansará quizá en la piedra andina, mejor que en la arcilla costeña. José Car los M ar i át egui, Siete ensayos de inter pr etación de l a r e alidad peruana , 1928

Light became shadow

La luz se hizo sombra

and the Indian was born,

y nació el indio,

the high mountain became man

La puna se hizo hombre

and the Indian was born,

y nació el indio,

Prisoner in your soil

Prisionero en tu suelo

captive Indian,

indio cautivo,

with no light in your gaze

sin luz en la mirada

somber Indian,

indio sombrío,

Yesterday mountain

Ayer montaña

today only debris,

hoy solo escombro,

my entrails rage

hierve mi entraña

when I name him,

cuando lo nombro,

You will be mountain again

Serás otra vez montaña

and there will be light in your eyes,

y habrá fulgor en tus ojos,

I will hear you laugh,

Tu risa oiré,

and happy will you be

y feliz serás

and happy will I be.

y feliz seré.

Alici a M aguiña, lyr ics to Indio , 1963

CONTENTS

A Not e on the T ext Pr eface

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xiii

INTRODUCTION

1

Francisco Laso: A Republican Biography

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Indigenism’s National Imaginaries 10 From Society, into Painting, and Back 17 P R EC ED EN T S: A S H O R T HIS TO RY O F T H E I N D I A N — C O N C EP T A N D I M AG E 20 C H A P T ER 1. T H E I N D I A N: I M AG E O F T H E N AT I O N A Local Antiquity Idealization

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35

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Painting’s Critical Function 48 Gonzalo Pizarro: The Scene of Conquest and the Spanish Legacy

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The Indian as Cultural Concept 62 Creole Failures

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The Indian as Allegory and Symbol 78 C H A P T ER 2. T H E S C E N E O F A P P R OX I M AT I O N

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The Country of Melancholy: The Creole Invention of the Andean World Melancholy’s Modern Transformations

88

82

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Contents An Andean Legend: The Burial of the Priest 97 The Inscrutable Indian 105 The Rhetoric of Approximation: The Pascana Series 111 C H A P T ER 3 . P I C T U R I N G R AC E

125

A Critical Fortune of Racial Readings 127 Reading Race: The Role of the Viewer

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The Construction of the Indian Image 135 Impossible Images

142

The Elusive Indian

147

EP I LO G U E: P ER S O N A L N A R R AT I V E S , P U B L I C I M AG E S Chronology Not es

169

Bibliogr aph y Index

165

238

215

152

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

Throughout this book the term Indian refers fundamentally to the object of indigenist discourse, an abstraction that must be distinguished from the indigenous populations that the term purportedly designates. It is capitalized in the text to signal its arbitrary nature. The same applies to other categories such as Black, White, Creole, and Mestizo, with which it enters into dialogue in the always relational field of the social imagination. I follow a similar usage with terms such as Aymara and Quechua, which refer to specific language groups. I have chosen not to capitalize the term indigenous, as is now increasingly common in North American contexts, because I take it as a generic reference to a diversity of peoples bound in different ways to preconquest societies.

PREFACE

When I was growing up in Peru in the late 1970s, Francisco Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras would appear fleetingly on the television screen twice a day, at noon and at midnight, among other images that ran in succession to the words and music of the Peruvian national anthem. That was how I first came to know that painting, as part of a household routine that fit the tone of the intense nationalist mood of the period. The image matched the script perfectly: the nation and the Indian were one. Yet this was not the realization of indigenism, but its culmination—and the beginning of its undoing. Over the following years Laso’s image would disappear from view, hidden away in the storerooms of the municipal collections and displaced from public discourse by a new national paradigm that brought the urban population into focus. The figure of the Indian that had for decades dominated the Peruvian national imaginary started coming apart. All of a sudden it appeared as an object that could be subjected to analysis, dissected and exposed as the ideological artifact that official discourses had gradually naturalized in our minds to the repetitive rhythm of the national anthem. Many things came undone in the upheavals of the following decades. By the early 1990s, when I began research for this book, the issues I was studying seemed to still permeate the fabric of Peruvian society, its imagery and the narratives that shaped a common culture. But now that my dissertation, substantially transformed and updated, is published as a book, the same is no longer the case. The figure of the Indian may have receded into the background, yet it nonetheless lingers on as a residual image that keeps its hold on the national imagination. This text has been written at different moments over a long period of time. It was first presented to the University of Texas at Austin in 1995, then abandoned for many years as I assumed curatorial work at the Museo de Arte de Lima, and finally finished when I had the opportunity to undertake sustained research as

xiv

Preface Simón Bolívar Professor at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. The length of time that passed between the writing of the dissertation and the making of the book necessarily extends the list of people and institutions to which I am indebted. This project was shaped during a moment when art history was undergoing important transformations. I am particularly grateful to Nicholas Mirzoeff and Richard Shiff at the University of Texas at Austin for pointing the way to more complex and decentered histories of art. My work has attempted to straddle disciplines, especially to bridge the distance that often separates art history from the perspectives that guide historical writing. That purpose defined the project from its inception. Although it was presented to the Department of Art History, where Jacqueline Barnitz generously guided my research, it also found support in the Department of History, where Susan Deans-Smith introduced me to the discipline and gave me a broad regional perspective on Latin American studies. Her guidance was important then, just as her constant friendship and encouragement have been over the years. Most of the work with primary sources for this project was undertaken in the early 1990s. I was then able to study the important collection of Laso’s drawings and paintings at the Museo de Arte de Lima thanks to the unqualified support of its director, Cecilia Alayza. More recently, the registrarial team headed by Pilar Ríos has generously helped me in obtaining images and information on works in the museum’s collections. I am also grateful to the staff at the Biblioteca Nacional; the Archivo General de la Nación; the Centro de Estudios Histórico-Militares; the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú; the Instituto Riva-Agüero; and the Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Merino. Drawings and paintings in private hands became accessible thanks to the many friends—including Carmen Banchero, Leonie Roca, Arnaldo Mera, José Ignacio Peña, and Gonzalo Rodríguez Larraín—who opened doors and pointed me in the right direction. At a time when obtaining images was more difficult than it is in today’s digital age, Daniel Giannoni’s always generous support was crucial. His archive has served as a resource for many projects and continues to be indispensable for art historians. Mirko Lauer shared his collection of rare newspaper clippings with me, though my debt to him lies rather with his early work on Peruvian art and indigenism, which was a central inspiration for this project. Many of those who generously supported my early research have unfortunately since passed away. Juan Manuel Ugarte Eléspuru kindly shared his important family archive as well as documentation gathered while he wrote what remains the most complete biography of Francisco Laso. Félix Denegri Luna allowed me to spend long afternoons working in his exceptional library, now housed at the Instituto Riva-Agüero. Financial support for the initial stages of this project was provided by the University of Texas at Austin through the Marian Royal Kazen Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Art and the Deans’ Association Fund. Further research was made possible by a Getty Curatorial Research Grant for 2005–2006, a visiting fellowship

Preface at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, in 2007, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2011. I am especially grateful to Kerry Webb and her team at the University of Texas Press for their support in taking the manuscript to print. This book is the product of sustained discussion with many extraordinary colleagues. When I first began to work on my dissertation, the Peruvian nineteenth century was a largely unexplored subject. Luis Eduardo Wuffarden generously helped guide me through the sources and introduced me to artists and works that were then virtually unknown. Some years later, Ricardo Kusunoki Rodríguez joined us in the study of the art of the period, bringing new perspectives to our conversations and to the many projects we undertook together. I have learned much from them. I am greatly indebted to Rita Eder at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma in Mexico and Joan Weinstein at the Getty Foundation for the space they created for regional exchange through the seminar series Los Estudios de Arte desde América Latina (1996–2003). It was a privilege to be part of those conversations with art historians working on the nineteenth century, among them Roberto Amigo, Jaime Cuadriello, Laura Malosetti, Ana María de Moraes Belluzzo, Fausto Ramírez, and Angélica Velázquez. It has been inspiring to have been able to discuss many of the issues covered in this book with friends who have contributed significantly to expand the range and depth of Peruvian historiography, especially Thomas B. F. Cummins, Juan Carlos Estenssoro, César Itier, and Cecilia Méndez. Over time, exchanges with colleagues studying many other periods and subjects, including José Carlos de la Puente Luna, Vered Engelhard, Javier Flores Espinoza, Nicole Fourtané, Stefanie Gänger, Mijail Mitrovic, Elena Phipps, and Gabriela Rangel, have helped to broaden my perspectives. I owe a special thanks to Beverly Adams, whose friendship has accompanied the extended period during which the project became a dissertation and then a book, and Gabriela Ramos, who has followed and supported this work for a quarter of a century and generously—and very critically—contributed to its conclusion. Without their encouragement over the years this book may never have been finalized. I hope my family and my friends, especially Lucía García de Polavieja, Jimena González, Rocío Merino, Carmen Serra, and Martha Zegarra, can recognize how important they have been in making this book possible.

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INVENTING INDIGENISM

Introduction

It is not often that one can trace the founding moment of a discourse to an image as one can see modern indigenism visually materialized for the first time in Francisco Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras of Peru of 1855. In its forceful simplicity, the painting fixes the most significant transformation to affect the concept of the Indian since the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. The Indian emerges, at once, as both cultural ideal and visual image, an icon of authenticity that would become, at different moments over the following decades, a cornerstone of modern Andean nationalisms. This book is a study of the conditions of possibility and the rhetorical structures of modern indigenism. It is a history of the simultaneous emergence of both the discourse and its object, the one tied inextricably to the other. And though it covers a broad field of texts and images, it is fundamentally centered on the work of Laso (b. Tacna, Peru, 1823; d. San Mateo, Peru, 1869), one of the most challenging artists of the nineteenth century. There are many reasons for this focus, not least of which is the powerful relevance and radical modernity of Laso’s paintings. Few among his contemporaries—and I consider a larger international context— engaged painting quite so intently as an intellectual project or as a tool for the active constitution of a collective imaginary. His works merge the descriptive and allegorical impulses of painting into a strategy intended to make complex concepts visible. In a few notable images he figured ideas that would be crucial for the definition of modern Peru. Laso took it upon himself to redeem the possibilities of a nation conceived from its inception as a heterogeneous body destined for failure, a society in which the indigenous population was envisioned as an element of difference, to be either idealized at a distance or incorporated and dissolved. In his precise account of indigenism, Henri Favre summarized these contradictions, defining the Indian as at once

2

Inventing Indigenism

FIGURE 0.1. Francisco

Laso, Inhabitant of the Cordilleras of Peru, 1855. Oil on canvas, 145 × 90 cm. Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Merino, Metropolitan Municipality of Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

proof of the impossibility of the nation and its very foundation, both an idealized “people” and an ethnicity “condemned to be abolished in society,” while suffusing the collective imagination with its “irreducible specificity.” The emergence of the modern image of the Indian (el indio)—always singular and generally masculine— was intricately tied to a cultural definition of the nation that, against standard accounts that place its appearance in the early twentieth century, surfaced earlier. The Indian was not, as some broad narratives have proposed, always temporally displaced to a distant past, but was in fact also firmly established in the present. In the visual arts, Stacie Widdifield’s pioneering study of nineteenth- century Mexican painting already suggested the changing nature of the concept. Yet, as I argue, indigenism profoundly transformed the terms of both earlier Creole patriotism and the national community that had been forged in contractual and po-

Introduction litical terms at the moment of independence. Reversing Ernest Gellner’s proposition, we could say that in Latin America, nations engendered nationalities, not the other way around. Laso’s generation was key in effecting this change, infusing the already constituted nation-state with new meanings based on the ever more extended premise of a people bound by a common genealogy, history, and culture. It was this paradigm of the nation as the expression of an original and selfcontained culture that established the conditions for the definition of the modern concepts of both the Indian and indigenism. That this may seem self-evident today leads us to forget that its appearance marked a major break in a long history of representations. Standard definitions of indigenism as the social and political vindication of indigenous populations have obscured the specificity of its modern variants. Discourses of defense can be traced to the sixteenth century, to the ardent argumentation of the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas, and even to Spain’s tutelary laws. In the context of this continuity, the literature has differentiated modern from earlier indigenism through its political commitment, its intensity, and its ever-expanding reach. Prevailing accounts tell the story of discriminatory national discourses that would be dispelled by the rise of an enlightened indigenism. Literary studies have further drawn a distinction between a sentimental and exoticizing vision dominant in the nineteenth century and the more realist and politically committed position of later indigenists. The narratives of art history follow a similar script, a teleological account of ever more realist representations that reflect a mounting tide of interest in the Indian, a gradual awakening to a concept that remains constant and unchanging over time. I argue, to the contrary, that the rise of modern indigenism marks a major rupture, one that affects and radically transforms the very notion of indigeneity. I relate this broad paradigm shift to another global transformation of the period: the emergence of the modern concept of culture. The Indian that appears in Laso’s painting is not a stable subject whose origins can be traced to the conquest, but a new construct emerging out of the cultural discourses of modernity. It is a figure of authenticity that elicits a “peculiar longing, at once modern and antimodern” that, as Regina Bendix has stated, seeks to “recover an essence whose loss has been realized only through modernity, and whose recovery is feasible only through methods and sentiments created in modernity.” In the Andean region the disappearance of indigenous culture was but the projection of a future loss: the always distant and deferred but inevitable realization of the liberal elite ideal of a homogenizing modernization. Yet, simultaneously, the idea of indigenous culture was fundamental to the discourses of modern ethnolinguistic nationalisms, so that loss—however imaginary—was compensated by an ideal Indian, a concept with scarcely any connection to actual indigenous populations, one that was conceived and understood as representation. Central to my argument is precisely that the Indian is neither a shorthand for a complex reality, nor a synonym for an ethnic group. It is a figure of indigeneity that emerged from elite discourses and acquired a life of its own as a category around which discourses were reorganized and redeployed.

3

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Inventing Indigenism This construct determined a form of national identification paradoxically advanced by groups that did not identify as Indian. The poignant image of Laso dressed in an indigenous poncho and chullo (woven hat) speaks to those stagings of identity as a founding instance in a long history of non-Indians “playing Indian.” To wear the other’s clothes points to a horizon of desire in which longing fixes upon cultural objects; to pose in them for the camera is to flaunt the very gesture in a way that reveals no intention to deceive, no purpose other than to foreground and figure difference as an effect of empathy. The Indian returns to its origin in Creole imaginaries of alterity. Laso’s self-portrait projects his altruism as it objectifies indigeneity through material traits. The Indian here is made into an emblem of culture. As in his Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, Laso’s self-image thus condenses the essential elements of modern indigenism as a cultural narrative, one that overlaps and intertwines with social and political vindications of the indigenous population but remains a discourse unto itself, structured by its own logic. The understanding of culture as both a transcendent spirit and an immutable essence that evolved in this period in effect placed indigeneity in a separate sphere, one that could coexist with and engage other fields but would obey different rules. Rather than marking successive stages in a singular historic path, the cultural and the economic or political were defined as distinct domains of discourse and practice, an ideological separation that defines academic disciplines, institutions, and policies relating to Peru’s indigenous populations until the present. The Indian as cultural paradigm transformed but did not replace older notions of difference. Visually configured as and through a body, it built upon notions of heredity and lineage that charted subtle genealogical, historical, and geographic arguments. This complex figure was not made up of only cultural facts; it was an object shaped by colonial racial ideas, but adaptable enough to incorporate the scientific narratives that emerged in the late eighteenth century and rapidly consolidated globally. My account of this versatile figure of alterity relies on David Theo Goldberg’s critical undoing of the arbitrary distinctions between culture and biology that until recently framed discussions of race and led to overlooking its many flexible and changing faces. The indigenous population became an object of both desire and discrimination precisely through discourses that fixed difference within a dense web of disciplinary frameworks and rhetorical strategies. The Indian as an ethnoracial concept—that is, one that evokes the complex and mutually reinforcing nature of the terms which it incorporates—collapses accounts that would simplify and reduce ethnicity to culture, and race to biology. So conceived, it adds nuance to standard narratives, as summarized by Deborah Poole, that nineteenth-century racialist thought charted a transition from “a genealogical or historical paradigm of racial identity to the objectifying discourse of biologically determined racial types.” Race did become ever more caught in the arguments of science and biology, but it is not always acknowledged that the notion of an embodied racial essence was given even greater force with the rise of new cultural paradigms of difference. Robert Young has traced how forms of ra-

Introduction

FIGURE 0. 2. Anonymous photographer, Francisco Laso in Indigenous Dress, ca.

1857–1865. Photograph on paper mounted on cardboard, 21.1 × 24.2 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.11-52. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

cialization profoundly marked and transformed European cultural discourses in the nineteenth century. The spread and endurance of those discourses in the Andean context is revealed in Marisol de la Cadena’s subtle account of the ways twentieth-century Cuzco indigenists deployed culture to produce a figure of exclusion in which race was only “rhetorically silenced.” I argue further that the modern concept of culture surfaces as the defining though largely invisible matrix behind the central changes of the period. Though not always going by its name, culture emerged as a profoundly racialized site of discourse through two distinct, interrelated, and often conflicting concepts: that of culture as cultivation, which converted the particularities of international bourgeois culture into the universal model of a larger civilizing process, and that of culture as diversity, which idealized difference. Defined by the latter meaning through a cultural field bound to the former sense, indigenism was

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Inventing Indigenism structured through the asymmetrical antinomies of tradition and modernity, past and present, the vernacular and the cosmopolitan, the oral and the written, which Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs have proposed as the operative framework of modernity. In this context, it appears as a specific manifestation of broader transnational processes that constructed alterities through racialized cultural repertoires, practices, and artifacts. The modern image of the Indian, in effect, articulated the complex transformation of these discursive structures to forge what is fundamentally a cultural construct of race. How that figure emerged in the nineteenth century is the subject of this book.

Francisco Laso: A Republican Biography A study of the rise of modern pictorial indigenism in nineteenth-century Peru cannot be anything but a monograph on the work of Francisco Laso. No other artist engaged the subject so explicitly and thoroughly, perhaps because no other undertook quite so intently and deliberately the project of building a national imaginary. His undisputed status as a pioneering figure of modern Latin American painting has been sustained mostly by the force of his own work. This book cannot compensate for the lack of monographic studies on his painting; it does not attempt to recount Laso’s life or explore the general corpus of his works. The broad outlines of his biography were first established by his friends and later developed in the extensive research undertaken by José Flores Aráoz when he organized the earliest retrospective of Laso’s work in 1937. This was complemented by Juan Manuel Ugarte Eléspuru’s biographical studies and, more recently, by my own account of Laso’s contributions as a writer and political figure. The chronology included in this publication offers a schematic account of the basic facts of his artistic, political, and intellectual activity, tracing the sketch of a life that remains largely uncharted. Yet a few words are nonetheless necessary to understand where Laso stands in the larger picture of mid-nineteenth-century art and society. The first thing to note is that Laso was born to privilege. He was the son of Benito Laso (b. Arequipa, 1783; d. Lima, 1862), the influential patriot, jurist, writer, and minister of state who was part of the new national leadership— composed mostly of Creoles emerging from the middle and upper sectors of colonial society—that took over the political void left by the mass migration of Spaniards and viceregal authorities after independence. His mother, Juana de los Ríos, was the daughter of an important army officer, hacendado, and mine owner active in Puno whose wealth seems to have sustained the family fortunes. After her early death in 1830, Benito Laso’s marriage to the aristocratic Petronila García Calderón y Crespo further helped to establish his position. Marked by his father’s often turbulent career in the unstable world of early national politics, Laso’s childhood was spent between Tacna, his birthplace; La Paz, during a period of exile; and Arequipa, where the family settled in 1836, the same year in which they relocated to Lima. These movements mirror a broader pattern of elite migration from regional

Introduction

FIGURE 0. 3. Courret

Hermanos, Francisco Laso, ca. 1864. Albumen silver print, 10.6 × 6.2 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, 2013.29.15. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

centers, a process that contributed to the centralization of economic and political life in the capital and along the coast. Creole national discourses cannot be understood without taking into account this crucial but understudied process, which increased the separation between elites and the larger highland cities that had dominated and organized colonial biographies and trajectories. Such distance was not merely spatial. The period also generated greater social and cultural disparities. Laso’s biography reveals aspects of that process. He received instruction in Lima at the private school of Clemente Noel while taking lessons at the small, makeshift National Drawing Academy, which Quito painter Francisco Javier Cortés first directed and with whom he probably studied. He was a student there when in 1837 the young aristocrat Ignacio Merino, trained in Paris

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Inventing Indigenism under Raymond Quinsac Monvoisin, took over direction of the school upon his return from Europe. But local training was insufficient to satisfy the aspirations of a generation wanting to leave behind colonial traditions to participate in a world that independence had opened to them. Like his teacher before and others after him, in 1843 Laso left Peru to pursue formal training as a painter. Following a journey through Spain, he settled in Paris, where he studied under Charles Gleyre and undertook the obligatory Italian tour before returning to Peru in 1849. His movements trace key aspects of the aesthetic ideals, the lived geography, and the cultural worlds of Peruvian elites. Their rapid insertion into the global capitalist economy generated significant fractures as new cosmopolitan trajectories forced a break with local traditions, in effect cutting off young artists from their colonial predecessors, many of whom were still active in Lima. It also generated a rift between painters of high social standing and their peers of indigenous and Afrodescendant backgrounds, who remained on the margins of elite circles of power and influence. Itinerant European artists and the massive import of prints and books rapidly altered what had been a traditionally insular society. Thus, to Lima’s growing internal detachment from regional centers was added a further distance from local models, which in effect implied a major ethnic reconfiguration of the artistic field. The displacement of colonial practitioners and traditions by modernizing professional discourses contributed to the concentration of power around a new elite culture that Laso helped shape. The painter became a key figure among a younger generation that would come to dominate Peruvian intellectual and political life, including Clemente Althaus, Luis Benjamín Cisneros, Manuel Nicolás Corpancho, Juana Manuela Gorriti, José Arnaldo Márquez, Ricardo Palma, and José Casimiro Ulloa. Unlike earlier generations, they not only associated in private but gathered in the capital’s emerging literary sphere, a space formed in the theater and in the pages of newspapers and literary reviews such as El Progreso (1849–1850) and El Semanario de Lima (1848). Most adopted a liberal stance in politics, but their views ranged from radical socialism to conservative liberalism, so they would find themselves fighting on opposite sides during the revolutionary cycle of the mid1850s. Among Laso’s closest friends, Francisco García Calderón, Manuel Pardo, and Mariano Ignacio Prado rose to the Peruvian presidency, while others, such as José Antonio de Lavalle y Arias de Saavedra, took on leading ministerial and diplomatic positions. In one way or another, as Alejandro Losada has noted, they all entered into service of the state. They shaped the Peruvian bourgeoisie, a heterogeneous group of large and small business owners, rich and poor intellectuals, politicians and public servants—all bound by their relation to power, a shared cosmopolitan culture, and their ethnic background: considering the elasticity that the term could have in mid-nineteenth-century Peru, they could all have been considered White. One could, in fact, argue that the nineteenth century saw a process of elite “whitening,” both through actual family alliances with European immigrants and through processes of cultural assimilation. This transformation, closely tied to the elite’s insertion into international bourgeois circuits, was associated with an ex-

Introduction pansive modernizing mission. Based in Lima, elites administered the economic boom generated at midcentury by the export of guano (the accumulated excrement of seabirds, mined for use as fertilizer) to produce the first consistent effort to forge institutions and shape a constituency through projects ranging from urban renewal to official support for scientific publications and governmentsubsidized textbooks. Literature, history, archaeology, and geography delimited a new cultural sphere that emerged to sustain the logistics of nation-building. Laso’s work was central to this national project, perhaps less in terms of its immediate visibility—constrained by the absence of a proper artistic field of museums, exhibition spaces, and a viewing public—as in relation to the very selfconscious role he assumed in national leadership and public life. In 1854 he noisily entered the public arena with his pamphlet Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú (New Year’s Present for the Ladies of Peru), a biting criticism of Peruvian customs that shook Lima society. His work as a writer developed further after 1859, when he joined the editorial board of La Revista de Lima (1859–1863), the period’s most important intellectual forum. He took an active role in politics, first siding with General Vivanco’s revolution in Arequipa in 1857 and later supporting Mariano Ignacio Prado’s 1865 coup against President Juan Antonio Pezet. Over the following years his political activities seem to have taken over his work as a painter. In 1866, as an elected official in Lima’s city council, he courted Lima’s urban artisans and formed a company of firefighters to wage the Battle of May 2 against the Spanish fleet at the port of Callao. As representative for the capital at the Congress called in 1867 by Prado to draft a new constitution, he supported the government through his participation in the National Academy and the newspaper La Tribuna. Later, as director of the Beneficencia Pública, Lima’s public charity board, he actively fought the devastating yellow fever epidemic that struck the capital in 1868. The following year, shortly after having taken on a weekly column about political events for the daily El Nacional, he died at age forty-six of an unknown illness. In the span of what was a relatively short life, Laso participated in almost every instance of his generation’s efforts to build Peru’s national structures. In attending to the importance of that project, this book contributes to the contesting of histories of the period, which have traditionally recounted the story of alienated elites who turned their back on the country, betrayed their role as nation-builders, and failed to establish the ideological and economic foundations of modern Peru. Basing their wealth on the export of raw materials, speculating on the guano boom, and pillaging state resources, they were unable to form the capitalist bourgeoisie that would have industrialized the nation. The defeat by Chile in the disastrous War of the Pacific (1879–1883) became a symbol of the elite’s betrayal of their historic role. The emergence of indigenism, understood as the social and political defense of the indigenous population, has been traced to the “literature of disillusionment” through which postwar intellectuals such as Manuel González Prada and Clorinda Matto de Turner attempted to explain the nation’s defeat through the failure of elites. They responded to their times, to a moment of growing power for an expansive bourgeoisie, increasingly overt in their racism and ever more effective in

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Inventing Indigenism imposing exclusion. As they questioned this status quo, postwar writers established a rupture with the immediate past that silenced previous vindications of the indigenous population. Yet despite the nuances introduced by positivism and anarchism, late nineteenth-century indigenisms in fact perpetuated older discourses, largely repeating earlier arguments. The recent turn to cultural studies in a historiography mostly unconcerned with the study of art, literature, and visual culture has been insufficient to adequately appraise the national images that Laso’s generation helped to build, and which would sustain the expansion of indigenism as a movement in the early twentieth century. If it is true that not all of these ideas took immediate hold of the collective imagination, both a dual image of the nation and the elevation of indigenous culture were already determining elite discourses. The rise of mass culture at the turn of the twentieth century would set them indelibly in the national imagination. Laso had no immediate followers. Over the last third of the century, the artistic field suffered the premature death of many of the central figures of the first generation of modern painters, as well as the emigration of the most talented younger artists. The economic devastation caused by the war confounded this crisis, which would be resolved with the establishment of the National School of Fine Arts in 1919. Indigenism as a broad pictorial movement would emerge only then, supported by the rise of ethnolinguistic nationalisms and the consolidation of complex social and political processes. Though couched in the language of modernist rupture, the forms that this new vindication of indigeneity took owed as much to Laso’s precedent as to the structure of discourse that his generation built. This book thus forms part of a broader rethinking of the period that has developed over the past two decades in the writings of Carlos Aguirre, Paul Gootenberg, Brooke Larson, Florencia Mallon, Carmen McEvoy, Cecilia Méndez, Víctor Peralta, Deborah Poole, Mark Thurner, and Charles Walker—among others hailing from different disciplines and perspectives—who have brought a growing awareness that a vague “colonial legacy” cannot explain the historical unfolding of modernity in the Andean region. Laso’s paintings are a critical though still unacknowledged chapter in that history, as concrete and certainly as influential as other projects explicitly conceived to give the nation material form. These include Francisco García Calderón’s dictionary of Peruvian legislation, Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán’s Atlas geográfico del Perú of 1865, and Manuel Atanasio Fuentes’s statistical and editorial projects, as well as the building of railroads and the plans to transform the urban and aesthetic profile of the capital in the guano era. Laso’s generation established the conceptual foundations of the nation. Their influence on ideas and their hold on shared imaginaries, even today, prove their enduring impact.

Indigenism’s National Imaginaries The Inhabitant of the Cordilleras was Laso’s construction of the image of the Indian. That figure of alterity embodied the nation. Its presentation next to another paint-

Introduction

FIGURE 0.4. Francisco

Laso, Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro, ca. 1854. Oil on canvas, 79.5 × 71 cm. Courtesy of Museo Central, Banco Central de Reserva, Lima (PO-024). Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

ing, the portrait of the conqueror Gonzalo Pizarro, suggested its place in a broader scheme (explored further in chapter 1) in which the Indian emerges as a clearly relational term in a complex configuration of the national idea. Laso’s foundational painting was followed by a sequence of emblematic images, including The Three Races, The Laundress, The Burial of the Priest, Saint Rose of Lima, and the Pascana series, all painted within the span of the long decade that closed with Laso’s death in 1869. Together these paintings proposed the first consistent formulation of the image of Peru that lies at the center of this book, which is conceived as a study of images rather than the nation itself, of nation-building rather than nationalism. Laso’s figuration of Peru required the redefinition of complex ethnoracial concepts such as Indian, Creole, and Mestizo, terms with long colonial histories that were redefined as cultural categories during the nineteenth century. They cannot be studied in isolation because they are part of a complex system of national representation precisely through their position in a wider relational field that opposes one to the other. Though they are framed through elite perspectives, these terms are not disengaged from social contexts and lived experience. I recognize the specific historical conditions against which, and through which, they came to be de-

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Inventing Indigenism fined, yet I also stress their arbitrariness and their distance from actual social processes. I follow the history of these concepts as they were determined in discourse rather than focusing on the populations they designate or their use for establishing individual or collective identities. Thus the term Indian may, but does not inevitably, refer to the indigenous population; Creole evokes, but does not necessarily designate, urban elites of European descent; Black is only an abstract label for a number of diverse Afro-descendant individuals; and Mestizo is a category perhaps even less directly related to persons associated with miscegenation. At issue is not solely the differences—and specifically not the distance—separating these symbolic terms from their supposed referents, but how they are themselves altered, how the conceptual confines of the nation and the new geometries of power twisted words apart from preceding etymologies and signifying histories to weave them into new constructions. It was not only their meanings that changed. These terms gained visibility as reified objects of discourse through the expanded impact of words and images. In acquiring material form, they also took on new roles. Throughout Latin America, the early nineteenth century saw the rise of a rhetoric of description in literary and visual costumbrismo that produced a sharp break with previous textual and visual traditions, both in the nature and the reach of images. This was when the Argentinian gaucho, the Chilean huaso, the Venezuelan llanero, and the Mexican charro and china poblana gradually rose from the mass of purportedly descriptive images to the status of national symbols, as embodiments of the traits that distinguished and identified new imaginary ethnicities. They emerged as visual objectifications of autochthony and alterity, paradoxically appropriated to represent nations where Creoles held the upper hand. The Indian was one such cultural object that gained a privileged status in the articulation of national discourse. And though it is the central subject of this book, it cannot be understood in isolation from other terms that anchored social imaginaries. The term Creole is a critical case in point. Though there is no proper history of the modern category, in the course of my discussion I will attempt to propose elements for a historical evaluation of its significance. In certain contexts, Laso could qualify as a Creole, a term which, in its simplest and most reductive form, refers to the descendants of Spanish settlers in the Americas. Though European ascendancy is stressed, the category could admit a broader range of racial and ethnic gradations. It was a figure framed both by racialist thought and racist fears. Since the earliest moment of conquest, Creole lineages were permanently questioned, suggesting a tainted ascendancy that hid both indigenous and Afro- descendant mixtures. By the mid-nineteenth century the term had acquired the density of a cultural object—criollismo, or Creolism—through new stereotypes and associations that Laso’s own paintings and writings helped to shape. Conceived as the nostalgic evocation of the Spanish legacy, the Creole idea was crafted by the urban intellectuals of Laso’s generation, who would nonetheless attempt to take distance from the negative stereotypes associated with the category they had helped to shape. Their identity as modernizing elites was forged specifically in dialogue with and

Introduction in opposition to this Creole culture, associated with the colonial past they were intent on overcoming. With the rise of criollismo as a cultural construct, the meaning of the term Creole was fundamentally altered. It became a sort of ethnic category, a complex artifact with which elites could identify or from which they could distance themselves. The term was also closely associated with the Afro-descendant population and the urban lower classes, which were subsumed as a central part of Creole identity, ultimately defined through contrast to the Indian, a figure erected as its defining opposite. Indigenism emerged as part of a dualistic representation of the Peruvian nation, imagined through a series of oppositions between the contrasting poles of the Creole and the Indian, a dichotomy that can be extended, as Antonio Cornejo Polar has done, to form a further set of equivalent polarities between the coast and the highland Andes, tradition and modernity, past and present. This dualism pervades the national imagination. It determines the apparently opposing perspectives of both Indianists and Hispanists, and even the country’s geography is symbolically charged by this opposition. The ideological configuration of national geography was central to elite projects, as was the case throughout Latin America in this period. Benjamin Orlove has incisively described the underpinnings of the “images of order” that have organized Peru’s geography into an imaginary tripartite division of natural regions—the coast, the Andes, and the Amazon— through which the country is traditionally represented. In the terms of cultural nationalism, it is significant that the Amazon basin should be figured as an empty frontier zone, a site of nature marked precisely by the absence of culture, which explains why, in the final account, within the cultural horizon of modern Peru only the coast and the highlands remained as structuring poles of the national dualism. The connotations and the political implications of Indianness and Creoleness have changed significantly since the mid-nineteenth century; the social makeup of the nation also changed, but this dichotomous architecture remained intact. It is clearly visible in the catalogue that the painter José Sabogal designed in 1919 for his first exhibition in Lima, considered a founding moment of twentieth-century pictorial indigenism. On the front is a strong image of Andean culture through the conflation of past and present, of highland sceneries and neo-Inca designs, while the more conventional image of the tapada (a veiled woman), the traditional symbol of Creole Lima, was relegated to the back cover. The pamphlet synthesizes the nation through the contrast between a virile, modern, and dynamic Andean pole and a weak and feminine element described through a restrained style associated with the past. This opposition was textually portrayed by José Carlos Mariátegui, whose Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928) contrasts a coastal type, described as a weak blend, lacking both homogeneity and a “strong personality,” to the Indian as a symbol of the autochthonous race, which not only “represents a type, a theme, a plot, a character,” but also “a people, a race, a tradition, a spirit.” Like a fetish that compensates for Creole inadequacy, the symbolic force of the nation had come to be grounded in indigenous culture. Between the Indian and the Creole there is a third element, the Mestizo, a term

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Inventing Indigenism

FIGURE 0.5. José Sabogal, Impresiones del Ccoscco, 1919. Exhibition catalogue, Casa Brandes, Lima. José Sabogal Archives, Archivo de Arte Peruano, Museo de Arte de Lima.

used to refer to the offspring of European and indigenous unions, and which would appear to threaten, through the specter of miscegenation, the settled stability of this dualism. Yet in Peru the Mestizo was, as Patricia Oliart has noted, a largely absent category in nineteenth-century national discourses. It would only acquire a symbolic presence in the early decades of the twentieth century as part of a broader Latin American discourse on mestizaje. The term came to designate not the general diversity of Peruvian society, nor actual processes of miscegenation, but a symbolic category that attempted to express the ideal fusion of only two model elements, the Indian and the Creole. One could argue that the Peruvian framing of this category did not dissolve but actually helped to sustain the Creole/Indian duality. For example, in the writings of José Uriel García and José Varallanos, the positive interpretation of the “new” Indian, or Cholo, involved little more than the ascription to these social groups of “Andean” traits. Mariátegui also could not overcome this dualism. He simply opposed an Indianized Mestizo of the highlands to a Hispanicized Mestizo of the coast. Reflecting an old aversion to racial mixtures, his conception of Peru did not allow for the “undefined hybrid nature” of the Mestizo. This dichotomous ordering of the national imagination not only reduced and simplified the diversity of the country’s ethnicities, geographies, and histories, but also further held the very idea of miscegenation at bay. The separateness of the two dominant symbols of the Peruvian ethnoracial imaginary insistently contained and repressed the Mestizo, at once a figure of contamination and of cultural dissolution.

Introduction Laso’s generation was responsible for the modern definition of these categories, whose meanings they re-signified in the decades after independence. They did so from a more distant and isolated position than intellectuals and authorities had previously occupied. Colonial elites had taken posts as corregidores (religious or civil authorities) throughout the viceroyalty, in both large urban centers and in villages and smaller jurisdictions. Their interests and obligations led them to traverse Andean geography and to establish direct relations with different social and ethnic groups. It is surprising to distinguish a much greater mobility among colonial middle and upper sectors than modern elites ever had. Laso himself traveled little within Peru. On record is a trip to Arequipa in late 1849, a city with which his family had close ties and where he was to create his earliest studies of indigenous subjects; a visit to Cuzco at the end of 1851, his only extended period of travel through the southern highlands; another stay in Arequipa in 1857, which may have included short incursions into the city’s hinterland; and his final journey to the central sierra in mid-1869, where he died in the town of San Mateo on his way to Jauja to seek relief from the illness that was to end his life. Compared to the longer periods he spent in Europe, these short trips may seem limited were it not for the fact that his contemporaries appear to have traveled even less within Peru. These patterns of elite movements shaped new social cartographies. Far from the notions of continuity that long dominated nineteenth-century studies, the centralization of government in the capital, the development of exports based on coastal resources, the collapse of colonial commercial circuits, and the new dynamics of international trade significantly transformed Peruvian society. By midcentury the Lima bourgeoisie had control of state institutions, national finances, and the larger part of printed media. This gave them a solid grip on the means of political and symbolic representation, perhaps greater than the actual hold they had over vast portions of the country. The process of centralization—along with the administrative, fiscal, and military weakness of government after independence—contributed to the isolation of the Lima bourgeoisie. They controlled the state, but the state was largely disengaged from vast portions of the national territories. Theirs was a fractional hegemony, and they were conscious of the fragility of their position. Their challenge, as Ulrich Mücke has proposed, was to subsist in a mainly rural country. The confrontation between modernizing Lima elites and regional caudillos was an expression of this process. So too were its demographic consequences. People of indigenous descent—however variously defined— composed around 60 percent of a population of 1.5 million inhabitants. A large proportion, mostly of Aymara and Quechua ethnicities, were agricultural and pastoral landholders who remained culturally, socially, and linguistically removed from the new bourgeoisie. Geographic distribution evokes this distance: barely a quarter of the total inhabitants of the country lived in Lima and other cities along the coast, while the vast majority lived in highland towns and cities. The situation came to be figured as an imaginary divide, one that could be

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Inventing Indigenism bridged only by “cutting the Andes with railroads,” to use Laso’s phrasing of his generation’s vision of progress. The “geography of the imagination” effectively materialized in a “geography of management,” in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s useful phrasing of the reciprocal relationship between modernity and modernization: trains traversing the Andes to bring the seeds of progress fused with images of European colonization that would homogenize the nation into a new paradigm of whiteness. Lima’s hegemony was built on this colonizing fantasy, driven by mirages of indigenous displacement that became ever more explicit. The endgame of economic and material advances would eventually dissolve the indigenous obstacle to elite national projects. The temporality of progress behind this spatial politics further charged geography with deep ethnic and racial meaning that gained a firm hold over official discourses. Liberal modernity’s claims to abstract universality sustained profoundly racialized narratives. In the passage from colony to independent nation, Peru was thus transposed from “two republics, to one divided,” as Mark Thurner defined the country’s “troubled transition from pluriethnic colony of castes toward a unitary postcolony of citizens.” From the earliest moments of independence, elites had envisaged the gradual incorporation of the indigenous population into an integrated society, in which colonial corporatist structures were to be displaced by the liberal ideal of one society submitting to a single code of law. Freed even from ethnic labels, Indians were to become Peruvians, citizens equal to all others. The ostensibly neutral discourses of liberal nationhood suggested a civilizing process that would eventually de-Indianize Peru. Yet indigenous tribute and communal patterns of property were not immediately or evenly abolished, and historians have, in fact, described an inverse process of indigenization, firmly establishing the nineteenth century as a period during which the native population of Peru not only remained stable but actually recovered. Over the past few decades, research has revealed the dynamism of the indigenous population, its gravitating participation in the economy and constant interaction with the state. However, most studies of indigenous agency have been written from regional perspectives, which may blind us to the realization that relations with government and involvement in politics were highly localized and rarely able to transcend regional frames of reference. Such containment could be explained by the fact that, much like elites, the indigenous population seems to have had a more limited mobility than in the colonial period. There is something to be said for the fact that the government did so little to effectively map its population; that it did not even attempt to imagine the possibility of incorporating linguistic diversity; that it was unable to integrate difference. All this shaped a formal and limited democracy within which indigenous and subaltern groups were systematically excluded from government leadership and from the spaces of production of national discourse. There is a danger in minimizing this overarching framework, this uneven distribution of power, for the net effect of social changes in the nineteenth century was a segregated country—if not in discourse, at least in fact. This may sound like a re-

Introduction turn to old historical narratives of culpability regarding the failure of elites, but this book is not organized around forms of overt racism or the social structures of discrimination on which inequality was built. Instead it focuses on well-intentioned attempts to affect this reality through a discourse of cultural idealization and defense of indigenous rights, for the paradox pointed out by Magnus Mörner, that indigenism “grew out of an environment that was imbued with racism,” is only apparent. Republican society built upon the racialism inherited from the colonial period to undertake a reorganization of public discourse that subtly incorporated new forms of discrimination into an ostensibly liberal program. The notion that indigenism likewise produced a progressive discourse that necessarily built upon and simultaneously veiled profoundly racist social structures contributes to the already significant history of critical readings of indigenism that have come to question its claims. The discourses of nineteenth-century elites in effect mark the emergence of the cultural arguments that Marisol de la Cadena has identified as the foundation of Peruvian racism in her studies of twentieth-century Cuzco indigenisms. More than the vilification and denigration of the indigenous population through explicitly racist discourses, more deceptive, apparently positive stereotypes built on actual social processes to broaden the ethnic divide.

From Society, into Painting, and Back This is the complex discursive field that Francisco Laso helped to shape through his emblematic images of the nation. I chart the place of those works in a broader universe of texts and images that have not been properly explored in an integrated way. What I hope emerges is a new perspective on nineteenth-century visual culture and elite nationalist discourses that would be difficult, and perhaps impossible, to read in the absence of Laso’s paintings. I cannot engage here with the extended debates that have defined discussions of a critical history of art over the past few decades, but my framing of the contexts that make Laso’s paintings legible are determined by the directions opened up both by debates in the discipline and by the works themselves. In that regard, this book may be said to have created its own contexts against which and through which Laso’s paintings can be understood. The history that emerges moves through disparate visual and textual sources that are rarely studied together, producing readings that are not bound to any particular discipline. Yet the larger narrative remains, nonetheless, tied to the fundamentals of art-historical method, grounded in the inscription of particular works in precise contexts and relations, to derive broader historical questions from the exacting specificity that objects provide. This book is organized into three parts: a brief account of precedents, three central chapters, and a short closing text. The first part offers an extended reading of the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras of Peru and attempts to identify, one by one, the discursive elements that shaped the apparent self-evident coherence of Laso’s conception of the Indian as cultural emblem of the nation. It studies what the

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Inventing Indigenism painting shows and the larger discourses that it directly evokes or subtly implies, as well as those that it silences. It outlines the sudden emergence of the Indian in the nation’s imaginary and its place in a dichotomous ordering of the national imagination. The second chapter focuses on Laso’s strange and unusual The Burial of the Priest and on his Pascanas, a series of three major paintings that turn pictorial space into the scene of an imaginary encounter between a bourgeois subject and the “Andean world.” The text ties these works to new discourses on the nation and the Indian to propose nineteenth-century indigenism as a founding instance of a modern ethnography. It tracks the moment when the Indian became an object of Creole desire, when in the absence of actual encounters, far from the practice of fieldwork, a sort of detached ethnography first emerged. This is the moment when modern ideas of culture came to be localized in geography, fixing the notion of Andeanness as an indelible essence. As Orlove summarizes it, “the Indians became the people of the highlands, the highlands the place of the Indians.” Indigenism departs from the supposition of a prior separation: its rise to the stature of a national myth was built on a particular rhetorical strategy of approximation and simultaneous distancing to an unchanging and hypostatized Andean world. Reading Laso’s paintings through the lens of contemporary writings reveals how the many variants of indigenism forged a monolithic discourse as consistent in its tropes as it was unified in intention. It also reveals the continuities of a set number of stereotypes, fixed in texts that shaped a Creole intellectual genealogy through a history of reprints, quotations, and constant repetitions. The images of the victimized, inscrutable, and melancholic Indian—none openly negative figurations—gave shape and regularity to a complex discursive formation that elevated the abstract Indian into a national ideal while simultaneously placing the indigenous population at a distance. The ambivalent movement of rejection and desire, remove and approximation, denigration and idealization defines the contradictions and anxieties of elite discourses. The Indian became at once a locus of radical alterity and a national ideal, an obstacle to progress and a source of authenticity. As it appears in Laso’s works, the Indian is a complex construct built upon the sediments and traces of old ideas, which adhere to the foundations that support the ideological and social structures of modern Peru. Stereotypes defined the image of the Indian other, but they also elaborated an elite intellectual history and identity through a coherent group of texts founded on late eighteenth-century ideas, which were given surprising continuity throughout the long nineteenth century. The endurance and consistency of these images cut across specific social or economic determinations with which discourses on the Indian have traditionally been identified, revealing indigenism as a broader and more pervasive discursive formation. It appears not only as a current and a movement, but as a relatively autonomous and highly complex structure that maintains its consistency across a broad terrain of discourses, practices, and institutions. Laso’s works enter into a tense dialogue with these discourses, which they sometimes contradict and in other instances help to perpetuate, yet they are more than

Introduction visual counterparts of discourses elaborated in other spheres. Images do not operate like texts, even less so in the fraught field of racial nomination. Chapter 3, a close reading of the contested reception of Laso’s images over time, engages the complex ways in which visuality interplays with the formulation of race. It heeds Deborah Poole’s call to question the apparent fixity of racial concepts and attend to their temporality and contingency. The intensity with which Laso’s images of ethnicity were challenged, disputed, and questioned confirms the importance of historicizing discussions of race. It also reveals how a theory of reception is key for understanding the way that images operate in the field of ethnoracial figuration. I draw from the larger visual culture of the period to explore how artists, sculptors, and photographers tackled the challenges of racial representation. The underlying assumptions of these images, and the disputes that put them into question, reveal how the instability of ethnoracial depictions undermines indigenism’s claims to truth. The rhetoric of realism obscures the fact that there is no reality behind the Indian imagined by modern indigenists, and that the Indian as representation is itself the actual subject of discourse, not that to which it purports to refer. Probing the contradictions of visual figurations of the Indian, allegorical objects cloaked in the discourses of realism, reveals the tenuousness of the claims that these images make, the way in which, ultimately, visual indigenism simulates its referent. Although this book places its focus on the Indian as an emblem of Andeanness, it does not elude other figures of indigeneity. The brief closing text, centered on The Three Races (or Equality Before the Law), studies Laso’s ideas on the nation and indigenous citizenship in an attempt to understand how the rise of the Indian as a cultural ideal coexisted, paradoxically, with a civilizing discourse of assimilation that envisaged the end of indigenous culture. It explicitly addresses Laso’s autobiographical conception of painting and his engagement of the beholder, both central issues for my discussion, to explain how reception bears on the definition of the painter’s complex pictorial project. That the viewer should have been such a constant concern for Laso is entirely understandable, for if the perceived lack of an audience was the challenge of nineteenth-century painters, it must have been particularly daunting for Laso, the artist as nation-builder, intent on constructing a shared imaginary for a nation divided. Laso’s paintings materialized modern indigenism long before the phrase Perú profundo (deep Peru) fixed in the popular imagination the idea of the Indian as the nation’s bedrock, a base so solid and so profound that it would remain inaccessible. That real Peru, opposed to the falsity of official structures, was figured from its inception through the tropes of distance. The modern reinvention of the Indian as a cultural symbol was, in effect, central to both the process of benevolent idealization and the translation of difference into effective separation. It created the Andean world, that unassailable space of alterity on which the cultural foundations of the nation were to be built.

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Precedents A Short History of the Indian—Concept and Image

The Indian. There is no single term as complex and debated in Latin America since the conquest, and probably none on which more has been written. Since it was first imposed on the diversity of cultures and societies that populated the Americas, or wielded as a central category of colonial society, none has been as visually elusive. As Mirko Lauer has noted, between Spanish colonization in the sixteenth century and independence from Spain in the nineteenth, Andean painting did not produce any significant visual images purporting to represent this concept. While a number of early images can be identified as depictions of Indians, none carry the same meaning or significance as Laso’s visual construct. More than merely a new subject in art and literature, what emerged was a new concept. A brief account of colonial images related to notions of indigeneity illustrates the differences that allow us to give substance to the claim that Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras is the first modern image of the Indian. The conquest created the term but did not formulate its image. The schematic prints and figures that illustrate early chronicles and travel accounts do not quite refer to the concept of the Indian, but rather to the category of the noble or ignoble savage, a complex figure of the early modern European imagination. While they were meant to evoke the New World’s indigenous populations, the conventional, allegorical plumed figures that appear on maps and in paintings and books actually personify America as one among other equally abstract representations of the continents. They designate geographic concepts or charged notions of savagery and paganism that do not directly suggest the ideas of cultural difference that are key to modern definitions of the Indian. This concept of ethnicity as a bounded, visible essence is also generally absent from colonial pictorial traditions. Images of persons whose physiognomies or dress can be associated with indigeneity do appear in Guaman Poma de Ayala’s early

Precedents

FIGURE P.1. Allegory of America, 1604. 6.5 × 10.6 cm. Engraving from the title page of Hendrick Ottsen, Warhafftige Beschreibung der unglückhafften Schiffarht eines Schiffs von Ambsterdam, die Silberne Welt genannt . . . nach Rio de Plata (Frankfurt: Wolff Richtern, 1604). Courtesy of John Carter Brown Library.

manuscript, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, a critical exception that confirms the rule. Yet early colonial imagery aligns visual codes of difference and discrimination primarily along religious lines. In painting, indigenous figures appear in a number of religious scenes, woven into a complex web of theological notions of heaven and hell, virtue and sin. They also figure as naturalist representations among urban crowds in some rare colonial paintings, particularly the exceptional Cuzco Corpus Christi series. Yet unlike modern images, they are not singled out but integrated into the larger weave of Andean society, sharing space with authorities, church officials, and other social groups. The reinvented Inca dress worn by the curacas leading the processional carts in the Corpus Christi series further reflects a contested alterity, configuring a composite difference, as Carolyn Dean has described it, an ambivalent strategy of representation through which the Andean nobility engaged colonial structures. In more than one sense, the Incas and their real or imaginary descendants were not properly Indians. Though clothed in the symbols of an ideal Inca culture, the participants in these paintings do not evoke modern notions of ethnicity as the positive affirmation of cultural forms. Neither do the rare portraits of the Andean nobility that have come down to us. As depictions that sought to affirm the privileges of those who could claim an Inca genealogy, they were signs of distinction and power that served to differentiate their subjects from the larger mass of indigenous commoners. They are portraits, images

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Inventing Indigenism of specific individuals that carry no generic pretensions but rather advance lineages and names. What is perhaps more important, they are self-representations, commissioned by those depicted in the paintings or by their direct descendants. In every way, these images confirm our understanding of Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras as a different sort of pictorial construct. We can thus claim that, at least until the eighteenth century, the term was rarely expressed visually. The reasons for this absence have to do with the changing definitions of the concept, an issue that will be explored later, but fundamentally with the function of visual representation in colonial society, tied as it was to the religious purpose of images as vehicles for otherworldly narratives. The role of imagemaking was dramatically transformed with the tide of Enlightenment ideas that swept the region in the late eighteenth century. The turn to natural science and the practices of visual recording gave the notion of embodied difference a new tangibility that, as Deborah Poole has explored with respect to European sources, was the context for the appearance of the earliest modern figurations of race in the Andes. Through the empiricist objectification of the world, Enlightenment science forged the first images of Indians as visible, measurable bodies. The impulse to description and taxonomy framed one of the greatest local visual compendia in Andean history, the ambitious collection of watercolors gathered by Bishop Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón between 1782 and 1785. The

FIGURE P. 2. Anonymous, Cuzco School, Parish of Saint Sebastian, Corpus Christi series, ca. 1675–1680. Oil on canvas, 218 × 220 cm. Museo de Arte Religioso, Cuzco.

Precedents

FIGURE P. 3. Anonymous,

Cuzco School, Manuela Tupa Amaro, Ñusta, ca. 1777. Oil on canvas, 167 × 106 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima. Gift of Petrus and Verónica Fernandini Collection, 2013.12.1. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

project attempted a totalizing representation of the bishopric of Trujillo through hundreds of images drawn under his supervision by untutored watercolorists. The second of the nine volumes offered to the king of Spain, a catalogue of costumes and social groups, contains a series of depictions of Indians, part of a larger set of groups including Spaniards, Creoles, and Mulattos. The sequence hovers between the typological ordering of the natural sciences, the social discourses of miscegenation (in fact, the organization of the plates replicates the hierarchical sequence of casta series), and the descriptive function of the travel account. It confounds notions of culture and nature: the Spanish male and female types are shown in successive images wearing different costumes, and the Indians of the sierra and the valleys, of Hibitos and Lamas, are likewise depicted alternatively in ordinary dress, in church attire, or riding a horse. The intersection of typology and description

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FIGURE P.4. Anonymous,

Indio hivito con traje de iglesia (Hivito Indian in Church Dress), ca. 1785–1796. Watercolor on paper, 41.7 × 32 cm. Trujillo del Perú, vol. 2, no. 21. Fundación BBVA Continental, Lima. Archivo Digital de Arte Peruano. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE P.5. Anonymous,

Indio hivito con traje ordinario (Hivito Indian in Ordinary Dress), ca. 1785–1796. Watercolor on paper, 41.7 × 32 cm. Trujillo del Perú, vol. 2, no. 20. Fundación BBVA Continental, Lima. Archivo Digital de Arte Peruano. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

Precedents

FIGURE P.6. Anonymous, Indio de la sierra con traje ordinario (Indian of the Sierra in Ordinary Dress), ca. 1785–1796. Watercolor on paper, 41.7 × 32 cm. Trujillo del Perú, vol. 2, no. 16. Fundación BBVA Continental, Lima. Archivo Digital de Arte Peruano. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

in Martínez Compañón’s work configured the first images of Indians as complex objects that exceed and defy accounts that would set apart ethnic and racial difference. Far from the scientific perspective, or even the organizing logic behind contemporary official expeditions promoted by the Spanish Crown, this sequence reveals the ambiguous status of the bishop’s collection of images and the unfi xed place—unbound by nature, culture, or geography—that the Indian has in a larger system of representation. There is not one Indian in this taxonomy, but many, distinguished only by subtle social and ethnic differences, so subtle that in the absence of labels they would probably be unidentifiable. The Indian here is but part of a broader socio-racial continuum, a mere link in “the great chain of being” that reflected and shaped the hierarchal gradations through which colonial society was imagined. Few, if any, eighteenth-century visual depictions isolate the Indian. In casta paintings (both the extensive Mexican series and their sole Peruvian counterpart), as in so many other visual documents of the period, the Indian figures as part of a larger social hierarchy. These sequences are about miscegenation, and thus about the Indian’s participation in narratives of social passing and the imaginary interventions conceived to control such transformations. They are central to the story but are far from standing in a privileged position with respect to other categories. Like the

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Inventing Indigenism Spaniard or the Black, the Indian is one among many racial figures that generate the endless chain of miscegenation. Freed from any scientific pretensions, the same diversity marks early costumbrismo, the tradition that carried over, at an even further remove, the typological logic of Enlightenment visual projects into the nineteenth century. The multiple Indian types in costumbrista repertoires are but a few of the many groups that figured as part of the urban population of Lima, where the genre largely arose and flourished. Like Martínez Compañón’s heterogeneous system, these popular images literally betray their distant origins in scientific taxonomies to further confound attempts to frame difference through clear distinctions that would oppose (from the hindsight of the twentieth century) nature and culture, biological notions of race and cultural conceptions of ethnicity. Costumbrista collections, with their vast and unsystematic repertoire of types, established difference itself as a defining structure of the global imagination. Singular images figured discrete units that made broader general categories—whether nations, cities, or cultures— concretely visible.

FIGURE P.7. Attributed to Cristóbal Lozano, No. 2. Yndios serranos tributarios

civilizados. Yden (Highland Indians Civilized Tributaries. The same), ca. 1770. Oil on canvas, 100 × 125 cm. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Madrid. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

Precedents

FIGURE P. 8 . Attributed to Cristóbal Lozano, No. 3. Español. Yndia serrana o café[tada]. Produce Mestiso (Spaniard. Highland Indian or Coffeed Woman. Produce Mestizo), ca. 1770. Oil on canvas, 100 × 125 cm. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Madrid. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

Eventually, certain types were emphasized above the rest as emblematic representations of the nation. They came to literally embody ethnicities, determined both through the body and through elements of dress. Made into tangible objects of culture and raised to the status of national symbols, their material factuality presupposed a logic of objectification that, carried to the extreme, would lead to the possibility of imagining life-size, fully dressed casts or mannequins in international presentations—just as Argentina was embodied in a gaucho at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867, and Peru was figured by a pair of tapada women at the entrance of the Peruvian national pavilion in 1878 (fig. 1.21). These threedimensional variants of the types that costumbristas had previously formulated reveal the degree to which personifications condensed powerful notions of embodied culture in the popular imagination. They were visual strategies for the representation of densely interwoven ideas of both ethnicity and race. Produced in the flow of an expansive market, multiplied by hand or through photographs and prints, costumbrismo transformed its precedents but also extended

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FIGURE P. 9. Attributed to Francisco Javier Cortés, Indian Muleteer from the Sierra, ca. 1827– 1838. Watercolor and tempera on paper, 24 × 19.3 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima. Gift of Juan Carlos Verme, 2015.21.57. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

their reach and impact. It was these popular ethnoracial types—rather than the scientific figurations of race, which have received greater attention—that shaped national imaginaries in the nineteenth century. Laso entered into dialogue with and attempted to supersede this tradition, which determined the visual field that made his own representations possible. Though he distanced himself from his sources, the impact of costumbrismo is clear in his work, as it is in that of near contemporaries, including José Agustín Arrieta, Felipe Santiago Gutiérrez, and Manuel Serrano in Mexico, and Juan Manuel Blanes, Carlos Morel, Leon Pallière, and Prilidiano Pueyrredón in the Río de la Plata (River Plate) region of Argentina and Uruguay, among other painters who worked in places where academic strictures did not hold strong. The incorporation of popular imagery into the fine arts transformed its meanings, emphasizing the role that singularized local types played as emblems of the nation. Against the backdrop of a repertoire of images that tended to multiply into endless series, Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras emerges, by contrast, as the Indian: a collective singular, a self-contained figure that rises above other ethnic or racial groups. And it is only through the emergence of this abstraction that it became possible to imagine its figuration as a visual concept. Unlike Atahualpa,

Precedents Caupolicán, Moctezuma, Tabaré, and other historic indigenous heroes that Latin American academic history painting later recovered as national images, Laso produced an anonymous allegorical figure. The modern Indian, as Mirko Lauer pointedly notes, is necessarily generic and nameless: subsumed under broader categories, it inevitably signals beyond itself. There is, in effect, a critical difference between the evocation of historical characters and the emblematic personifications of culture and nation that emerged out of the meeting of costumbrismo and allegory. This marks the distance that separates Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras from that other emblematic national image, Luis Montero’s Funeral of Atahualpa, a distance that can be grafted onto the cleavage separating the modern disciplines of anthropology and history. Yet such divisions did not erect irreducible categories, but permeable concepts that were mutually defining. There was ultimately no contradiction in the fact that historical figures could also be represented as concretizations of new racial and cultural ideas: pre-Columbian heroes were also Indians. In his conception of the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras as the embodiment of the nation (to use the phrase coined by Stacie Widdifield in her study of nineteenthcentury Mexican art) —a figure that brings together the past and the present— Laso imagined the Indian, perhaps for the first time in Latin American history,

FIGURE. P.10. Luis Montero, Funeral of Atahualpa, 1867. Oil on canvas, 350 × 537 cm.

Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Merino, Metropolitan Municipality of Lima; in custody of the Museo de Arte de Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

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Inventing Indigenism as a cultural concept, in the terms that modern nationalisms would later frame. His paintings mark the culminating moment when the Indian (indio), which was born as a colonial juridical category, finally became fully synonymous with the indigenous or the native, idealized as the living emblem of an originary people that could lay the foundations for an authentic national culture. Laso’s painting constructed, ex nihilo, the modern image of the Indian. The success of that ethnoracial figure requires that we take distance from its now obvious self-evidence to understand how it was first articulated as a visible concept.

CHAPTER ONE

The Indian Image of the Nation

Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras of Peru is at first glance a simple, straightforward composition. At the very center, a single figure, dressed in a flowing black poncho, confronts the viewer, virtually filling the frame of the painting. He firmly holds in his hands a pre-Columbian vessel. A direct relation is suggested between this ancient object—a common type in Moche iconography—and the main figure, presumably representing a contemporary Indian. If the ceramic brings ancient history into the present, it functions as more than a generic reference to the pre-Columbian past; it is an image that has been carefully selected and centrally placed. The vessel depicts a prisoner whose hands are tied behind his back and bound by a rope around his neck; it is the image of a victim—constrained, subjugated, and immobilized. Held out by the main figure and frontally presented to the viewer, the pre-Columbian object turns the painting into an allegory of the Indian’s oppression. If the main thrust of the work can in fact be condensed in a single paragraph, the brief summary neither depletes the painting’s dense range of meaning nor its radical historical significance. As in all of Laso’s works, the self-evidence of the image hides a focused strategy, one that can be recovered only through sustained analysis. This involves reading it beyond itself to frame its contexts and the conditions for its appearance. In what follows, I trace the ways in which the painting catalyzes a major shift across a number of discourses, one that forges a dichotomous ordering of public discourse in which a new notion of indigeneity is erected in opposition to both historical Hispanism and contemporary Creole culture. This book makes many claims regarding the importance of this painting, but perhaps the most significant is that it was the first to elevate the image of the Indian into a symbol of the nation. It thus matters that it was not only first presented at but also expressly conceived for the 1855 Paris Universal Exposition. In that first

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FIGURE 1.1. Floor plan of the Palace of Fine Arts, Paris Universal Exposition of 1855.

From Magasin Pittoresque 23 (July 1855): 215. Private collection, Lima.

showing of Peruvian artists abroad, the painting hung next to another work by Laso, the Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro, One of the Most Famous Conquerors of Peru, Brother of Francisco Pizarro (fig. 0.4). They were exhibited as pendants, and together they offered a synthetic image of the nation. Laso’s works fit the frame of the first international exhibition to effectively bind pictorial practice to national schools. None of the previous fairs organized in London, Brussels, Berlin, Dublin, and New York had stipulated that artists represent their countries of origin. In November 1854, following regulations that required foreigners to obtain official support, Laso and Ignacio Merino, then also living in Paris, approached the Peruvian delegation in Paris. Even before the exhibition opened in May of the following year, artists were interpellated as national representatives, a status that would be confirmed when the imperial commission hung the paintings in clearly defined national sections. Emerging cultural nationalisms literally materialized in the Paris Universal Exposition. The ensuing critical writing followed the order of this script, proposing what is possibly the first broad comparative discussion of the visual arts explained through national schools. Critics vied to determine the pictorial character of each nation and expressed their frustration when they could not find the distinctive traits they sought among foreign artists like Laso. Expectations of difference determined the show’s premises, the critical writing it produced, and the way artists understood their participation. The nation was imagined on the foundations of a rapidly expanding international system of the arts. This was a critical moment for cultural definitions of the nation on other fronts. The exhibition followed on the heels of discussions about Peruvian literature cen-

The Indian tered largely on the work of Manuel Nicolás Corpancho, a young writer with whom Laso shared time in France. The sequence of commentaries that preceded his collection of poems (published in 1854) in effect set the groundwork for the first systematic debate on the possibilities of a national literature. Laso’s friend and companion in Paris, José Casimiro Ulloa, criticized Corpancho for his choice of European (and, specifically, Iberian) subjects, pointing to the potential that Peruvian nature and history offered artists. The conception of the modern aesthetic field in national terms emerged from these complex cosmopolitan spaces. Years later the painter Federico Torrico dramatized the circumstances of the paintings’ creation, claiming that since “Peru did not present anything to this great congregation of the intelligence and industry of all nations,” Laso had to conceive and execute his paintings only days before the opening. Torrico, the first Peruvian art critic, imagines Laso as a deliverer of Peru’s failure to find representation in this international scenario. He claimed that the artist had refused offers for his painting because, living on a government pension, he knew “that all the works he created under the shadow of that protection belonged to the republic.” Laso later presented this painting, along with Justice, The Concert, and one of the versions of Saint Rose of Lima to the Peruvian state in January 1860, specifying that the gift was intended to repay the support he had received. The artist thus emerges as an agent indebted first and foremost to the nation. It is clear that the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras was expressly conceived as both a representation of the country abroad and a painting for the Peruvian nation. Laso painted this national allegory at a moment when the genre was being drastically reconfigured. Artists were pushed to think through and against the allegorical mode in the wake of the gross failure of the competition called in 1848 by the provisional government of the Second Republic for a “symbolic figure” of the French Republic, whose shy results Laso had certainly seen on his return to Paris from Italy in March 1849. The best projects that emerged from that failure—from the realism of Gustave Courbet to the pastoralism of Jean-François Millet—put into tension lofty conceptual abstractions with the particulars of contemporary life, transforming elevated subjects into modern allegories. Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras is part of the broader response to that crisis of painting around 1850, a focused attempt to create a national art from the shaken structures of French academic painting as it emerged to represent a new international pictorial language. Laso shaped his visual strategies out of a number of disparate references, drawing from both high and low art, from the specifically French rejection of historical genre and the contemporary rise of the modern allegory, to the broader impact of popular imagery. The work deftly weaves the different strands of Creole discourses to give shape to a radically new image of the Indian—and of the nation. To see this more clearly, we have only to compare the painting to what is perhaps its only related local precedent, Luis Montero’s El Perú libre (Free Peru) (fig. 1.2). Finished in Florence around 1850 and exhibited in Lima a year later, it too had been a gift to the nation, a compensation for the official support that had allowed Montero to study in Europe. It was also the young painter’s first major composition, and its

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Inventing Indigenism

FIGURE 1. 2. Luis

Montero, El Perú libre (Free Peru), ca. 1849–1850. Oil on canvas, 223 × 156 cm. Congreso de la República del Perú, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

subject, appropriately enough, was an allegory of his country. The plumed Indian figure in the painting directs his eyes upward, one arm raised to his chest, the other holding the broken shackles of Spanish bondage, in a gesture that suggests a pledge of gratitude to the heavens. Next to the whiteness of the figure’s skirt, the bright red of the folds of his tunic recalls the alternating colors of the Peruvian flag, while at the foot of the truncated column behind him lies the national coat of arms. A steamboat, an allusion to progress and modernity, sits in the middle of a vast sea, and beyond, in the background, rises the towering profile of the Peruvian mountains. Every emblem in Montero’s painting has the self-evident character that one could expect to find in a manual of republican imagery. It is all allegory, the sort of trite, literal image that had become an object of derision in European art criticism of the period. There is no doubt that Laso knew the painting. It stood as one of the first original compositions of the nation produced by a modern Peruvian painter, and, as such, it had been presented publicly, promptly copied, and widely discussed in the daily press. In every way, Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras may be interpreted as a sustained critical response to Montero’s painting—his pro-

The Indian posal of what a modern Peruvian allegory could be. It was perhaps no great challenge, but the comparison may at least serve as a foil to the subtle complexity of Laso’s image and the pictorial project he set out for himself.

A Local Antiquity The single action depicted in the painting, if there can be said to be one, is the presentation of the pre-Columbian ceramic, held out by the main figure and offered to the viewer. It marks, to my knowledge, the first appearance of a pre-Columbian object in a South American painting (or in any Western painting for that matter). Images of preconquest artifacts had frequently appeared in illustrated travel books and journals, but for all the refined graphic quality of these images, their documentary function, their formats, and the scientific and popular discourses in which they were framed do not approximate the gesture of bringing the ancient objects directly into the sphere of the fine arts. There is perhaps one significant precedent, that of the sculptor Manuel Vilar, of the Mexican Academy of San Carlos, who had studied pre-Columbian sources for the dresses of his large-scale figures of ancient Mexican heroes in the early 1850s. Yet, until Laso, no artist had attempted, with any degree of verisimilitude, the same sort of portrait of an actual pre-Columbian object in either painting or sculpture. To recognize the consequence of this move, we must return to a time before preColumbian archaeology, when many of the monuments of ancient Peru were barely known—when the diversity of preconquest Andean societies remained undifferentiated, subsumed under the label of “Inca” culture. Broad access to pre-Columbian art had been limited to a fledgling national museum in the capital, where the ancient objects vied with natural history specimens, historical relics, curiosities, numismatics, and painting. Pre-Columbian works circulated largely in bourgeois interiors, mainly in Cuzco and Lima, where collecting was emerging as common practice. Thus, beyond a sampling of crude illustrations in journals and books, archaeological objects scarcely had a public image that could resonate more broadly. Only Alexander von Humboldt’s ambitious Vues des Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (1810) can be counted among those rare works that attained significant popular impact beyond specialized circles in Latin America. In a broader international context, this changed dramatically around 1850, when the Louvre opened its new Salle des antiquités américaines, located next to the Assyrian galleries on the north sector of the Cour Carrée. The vast collections now presented to the public reflected the French government’s sustained interest in pre-Columbian archaeology and the official support that it had given to scientific expeditions to the region. The Musée américain, as it came to be known, gave pre-Columbian art more than mere visibility; it offered the kind of aesthetic validation that only an institution like the Louvre could bestow. Until then, preColumbian objects had escaped classification. They had appeared as ethnographic artifacts in the Musée navale, also located at the Louvre, among a mixed gather-

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Inventing Indigenism ing of objects that bore witness to the grand narrative of French naval exploits. A number of other pieces, mostly from Central and North America, were in fact shown in the main hall dedicated to Jean-François de la Pérouse. Considered the products of advanced cultures, these pieces were now given their own space, distinguished from the ethnographic museum located only a few galleries apart; they had now become antiquités américaines, somehow comparable in status to Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities. The presence of pre-Columbian objects at the Louvre no doubt had a profound impact on Laso when he returned to Paris. It must have struck the painter to see the works of ancient Peru shown in the same building that housed the masterpieces of European art that his generation was seeking so hard to emulate. Somewhat paradoxically, the entry of ancient Peruvian art into French museums must have appeared like the strange fulfillment of what then seemed like a distant fantasy for artists of his generation: the possibility of the nation’s participation in the authority of the European artistic tradition. The opening of the Musée américain coincided with another major event for Andean archaeology: the publication in Vienna of the foundational Antigüedades peruanas by Mariano Eduardo de Rivero and Juan Diego de Tschudi (Johann Jacob von Tschudi). Printed with official support and offered by its author to the greater glory of the nation, from its very title the book proposed the incorporation of pre-Columbian art into a new collective genealogy. Sara Castro-Klarén has emphasized the roles that ethnographic priority, territorial permanence, and originality of language played in Rivero and Tschudi’s narrative of the nation as cultural artifact. If, in fact, his extended description of the material achievements of past societies set the foundations for a new accounting of Peruvian history, the lavish editorial quality of the accompanying album of color lithographs gave this legacy a new status and visibility. The Louvre galleries and Antigüedades peruanas spurred an unprecedented interest in American antiquities. Barely a month after Laso’s arrival in Paris in 1852, the illustrated journal Magasin Pittoresque began publication of a series of articles on the subject, followed shortly after by L’Illustration. Francis de Castelnau’s album of lithographs on Peruvian antiquities—published in 1854 as part of his multivolume Expédition dans les parties centrales de l’Amérique du Sud (1851–1854)—further expanded the repertoire of available images. The inclusion of a Moche ceramic in Laso’s painting became possible only at this point, as the painter could suppose that such an object would no longer be completely unfamiliar to informed Parisian audiences. Yet the centrality of the piece in the painting also suggests that it was more than a token of pre-Columbian culture: inscribed in the language of academic painting, it became an essentially aesthetic statement. The short-lived Louvre galleries (displaced soon thereafter) served to counter prevailing attitudes toward pre-Columbian art, though they would by no means generate definitive change. Even André Longpérier, responsible for organizing the Musée américain, remained unconvinced of the aesthetic status of the objects under his care. In his prologue to the catalogue of the collection, he proposed

The Indian that the social organization of Mexican and Peruvian civilizations had somehow “prevented the pursuit of beauty, the only element that leads to artistic progress,” and this inability to recognize “nature in its noblest aspect” led them to produce only “bizarre combinations.” “[E]lles ne sont pas encore classiques,” he declared, thereby clarifying the sense he had given the word bizarre. The classical remained geographically specific, a concept tied exclusively to the Mediterranean domain. Thus, Longpérier incorporated Egyptian antiquities through his claims that they were bound to European sacred history, but not those originating in the Americas. He would concede that they had the status of advanced civilizations, but their artifacts could only be of interest to specialists or to those captivated by “the inexplicable attraction of mysterious subjects.” It is significant that bizarre should have been the term most consistently used in relation to these objects (though occasionally harsher terms, such as grotesque, were deployed). The word signals disruption of the norm; it evokes the eccentric—literally, what lies outside the center. The tinge of exoticism marked the difference that separated pre-Columbian art from the European classical tradition, the dominating paradigm of all antiquities. The presence of pre-Columbian art at the Louvre was charged with ambivalence: it suggested the possibility of incorporating ancient American antiquities into the history of art and, at the same time, by forging new juxtapositions, it also generated a sense of estrangement; it forced into visibility the contrast between those objects and the European tradition. Pre-Columbian art inevitably remained classicism’s other, a locus of intractable alterity. Laso’s inclusion of the ancient ceramic in his painting implied an assertive appropriation of this difference, and one may imagine that to contemporary viewers the appearance of such an object in an academic painting produced a sort of aesthetic collision. The conflicted entry of pre-Columbian objects into European art-historical narratives, precisely in the context of the nationalist discourses that determined the Paris Universal Exposition, no doubt catalyzed Laso’s project for a national painting. A few years earlier, in October 1851, he had requested a leave of absence from his work at the Lima Drawing Academy to undertake “a quick survey of the celebrated monuments that the ancient Capital of the Incas presents to the traveler and artist.” There is a parallel to be drawn between the purpose of his previous travels through Italy and the way in which he envisaged his journey to Cuzco as a survey of antiquities. He no doubt drew on the precedents of Rivero’s archaeological travels through Peru, and on those of the French diplomat Léonce Angrand, whom he likely met in his formative years in Lima or later in Paris. Long before the idea of tourism had consolidated, the painter’s trip to Cuzco instead had programmatic implications. In one of the earliest articles on Laso, published in La Semana, an important weekly edited by José Arnaldo Márquez, the politician and writer Ignacio Noboa announced the painter’s aim to “steep himself in the poetic beauties that flow everywhere from our Peruvian soil.” Laso had resolved to visit Cuzco, wrote Noboa, “to enrich his palette and fertilize his imagination,” for he knew “well how a spark of originality matters in the old European territories.” That Laso did, in fact, bring the sketches produced during his travels through

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Inventing Indigenism the southern Andes back to Paris reveals that the Inhabitant was the end product of a project he had previously envisioned. It also demonstrates how the discourses of cultural authenticity had already determined his generation’s perspective on painting, even before they were forced to confront the demands of national originality insistently placed by French critics on foreign artists at the Universal Exposition. This focus on a local originality determined the way in which pre-Columbian objects projected the nation’s image through cultural arguments. It must have also guided Laso’s later decision as founding member of the National Academy during his tenure in Congress to devote his inaugural lecture to Peruvian archaeology. Though apparently never published and perhaps never even read in public, the gesture nonetheless reveals the subject’s centrality in Laso’s imagining of national history. He had touched upon it in his only substantial art-historical discussion, “Algo sobre bellas artes” (A few words on the fine arts), published as his opening contribution to La Revista de Lima in 1859. This brief survey of the arts in Peru from the pre-Columbian period until the nineteenth century proposed the first narrative of a national art as a constant expression through time. It founded the country’s art history in an ancient pueblo peruano (Peruvian people) and, finding no contradictions, traced its evolution through the work of Creole, Spanish, and indigenous artists of the colonial era and of the early Republic. Following in the footsteps of Rivero and Tschudi’s Antigüedades peruanas, Laso affirmed the aesthetic value of pre-Columbian material culture. Yet his explanations for the artistic superiority of ancient sculpture over architecture reversed Rivero’s arguments in favor of the former. The Indians’ “ingenuity” was revealed in their ceramic and metal huacos, which Laso found comparable in “good taste” to the terra-cottas of the Etruscans and Egyptians. He singled out a piece representing a sleeping man, which he claimed to have seen in a private collection in Cuzco, “for the inventiveness of its conception and the precision with which the author has copied the dream-state.” It is significant that he should have evoked a sculptural vessel, which may be identified with a fine Moche ceramic from the Cuzco collection of Ana María Centeno—today at the Ethnologisches Museum der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin—a piece that had already been praised and reproduced by previous writers. For its aesthetic merits, Laso claimed it was “worthy of Luca de la Rovia [Luca della Robbia], the Florentine.” This invocation is deliberately eloquent. By calling forth the Italian sculptor, he elevated ceramic, a minor genre in the hierarchy of the arts, to the realm of sculpture, and brought it into the hallowed sphere of the Italian Renaissance. Through its assertive presentation, the image of the ceramic proposed an alternative antiquity. Laso’s choice may be explained by his claims on the superiority of sculpture, but also by his perception of the lowlier status of painting in preColumbian societies: it was an art of extreme refinement, a sign of civilization that the Incas would surely have attained had their society not been struck in its infancy by the violence of the conquest. His vindication of pre-Columbian artistic achievements thus finds its limit precisely in the sphere of his own practice, painting, an art for which the ancient Andes seemed to offer no adequate models.

The Indian

FIGURE 1. 3. Moche, Sitting Sleeping Anthropomorphic Figure, AD 0–600. Ceramic, 22.5 × 11.7 × 23.7 cm. Former Ana María Centeno Collection, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, VA 8033. Photograph by Claudia Obrocki.

The ceramic not only functions as a sign of a local aesthetic tradition but is also the vehicle for the painting’s message. Laso chose the figure of the bound, kneeling prisoner, a common Moche iconographic type that was widely available for study in both French and Peruvian collections. A similar piece appeared in the lithographic album accompanying Rivero and Tschudi’s Antigüedades peruanas and yet another in one of Ignacio Merino’s drawings in Lima por dentro y fuera, a book published in Paris at around the same time that Laso must have begun work on the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras. Merino’s illustration was most likely drawn from a French collection, one in all likelihood also known by Laso, as it shows the piece among other ceramics atop the ledge of what appears to be a chimney, an item then unfamiliar in Peruvian interiors. Though it has not been possible to identify the precise object that Laso used as model, there is a crucial variation with respect to those published sources. In Rivero’s and Merino’s illustrations the coiling cord around the neck of the figure in the ceramic is actually the twisting body of a snake whose head appears at the level of the figure’s navel and ensnares his genitalia. But in Laso’s painting the snake becomes a rope, which disappears behind the back of the figure, leaving the place where the genitals would have been as an undefined surface, an empty space. That Laso was aware of the serpent motif

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FIGURE 1.4. Leopold Muller, Conopa, Representing an Indian. Lithograph from Mariano Eduardo de Rivero and Juan Diego de Tschudi [Johann Jacob von Tschudi], Antigüedades peruanas: Album (Vienna: Imprenta Imperial de la Corte y del Estado, 1851), plate 24. Museo de Arte de Lima Library. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

is evident from a reference in his later essay “Algo sobre bellas artes.” There Laso claimed that the Indians had “not simply copied men, animals and fruits” in their vessels, but that, in creating them, they had been guided by a “philosophic idea.” He specifically mentions a class of pots “representing the same character, who is wrapped by a serpent, and the manner in which the reptile is placed suggests that it was intentional: but we may not translate the idea for fear of passing as disingenuous or immoral.” What Laso could not mention in writing, he would have deemed less appropriate in painting. But there are other explanations for his alteration of the motif. By transforming the serpent into a rope, he reduces the range of possible readings of the vessel, whose “emblematic” significance had eluded Rivero, giving it a clearer signification as an image of subjugation and oppression. Yet the absence of the snake neither explains nor requires the elimination of the male genitals. There is more than pictorial decorum in the gesture, and if we take Laso at his word re-

The Indian garding intentionality, it appears as a motivated, even conscious act, a castration that the painter performs on the figure. The ceramic’s function as an allegory of pre-Columbian societies suggests that this mutilation refers more broadly to the destruction caused by the Spanish conquest. The theme recurs persistently in Creole texts and specifically echoes the early poetry of Laso’s father, written in the period of independence and recovered with admiration by the poets of his son’s generation: I turn my eyes! (Who would not, and whoever did, when born was blind!) over this continent long and wide, which Manco-Capac first governed: I see new customs, new peoples, I see new cities, new towns, which, banishing the beautiful innocence spread the venom of vice, which, ruining old populations with their ashes form new towns, who, spilling the blood of Kings, erect themselves into tyrants of this land full of brutal and impious arrogance, domineer without law the perulero, and unfair and bloody everywhere, force and interest are their rights.

FIGURE 1.5. Ignacio Merino, illustration in Lima por dentro y fuera, by Simón Ayanque

(Esteban de Terralla y Landa) (1797; new ed., Paris: Librería Española de A. Mézin, [1854]), 175a. Museo de Arte de Lima Library.

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Inventing Indigenism An idyllic past is forever lost, and a new society has been spuriously constructed on its pillage. Similarly, it is the end of the Incas that is figured by the ceramic. The limited knowledge of pre-Columbian cultures and the presence of Northern coast objects in collections throughout Peru contributed to the confusion surrounding regional and temporal variations, allowing an identification of the Moche ceramic style with a vague Inca legacy. The vessel’s castration is thus also a metaphor for a society whose development had been violently stifled. Its worn surface, chipped and broken at several points, bears the marks of the passage of time; the hands that hold it in a firm yet easy grasp recall the tactile qualities of its surface, but also the intrinsic fragility of an object that has withstood the tests of a brutal history. This sense of mourning resonates throughout the painting. It is evoked by the restrained range of colors and, specifically, by the black dress, absent from Laso’s other depictions of Indian subjects. The choice no doubt alludes to the widespread belief that in certain regions of Peru (which generally remained unspecified) the Indians wore black as a sign of mourning for the Inca. The spread of the notion among Creole intellectuals probably derives from visitor José Antonio de Areche’s 1781 sentence against the rebel Túpac Amaru, a document often cited and reprinted during this period. It prohibited “the black dress they [the Indians] wear as a sign of mourning and that they carry in some provinces in memory of their deceased monarchs and of the day or time of the conquest.” General William Miller repeated the idea: “Such is the veneration in which the Indians hold the memory of their Incas,” he wrote, “that in many provinces they wear mourning for them to the present time.” The theme recurs constantly in nineteenth-century literature, to the point where it ceased to be a purported reference to actual customs and became a common metaphor for the Indian’s oppression. In its subtle reference to death and mourning, the painting echoes its most evident pictorial source, Francisco de Zurbarán’s stark and imposing Saint Francis Standing with a Skull (ca. 1635), a composition that was widely known in France through versions shown at the Louvre’s Galerie espagnole in the 1840s, which Laso no doubt visited during his student years in Paris. In May 1852, shortly after his return to France, it had been again brought to the public eye when one of these paintings was included in the auction of Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult’s collection of Spanish art, one of the most important and publicized sales of the decade. The austere yet assertive simplicity of the composition, its chromatic synthesis, the silent gravity, and strict frontality of the figure leave no doubt as to its priority with respect to Laso’s painting. Even the contrast between figure and ground, which converts the contour of the black garments into a silhouette, evokes Zurbarán’s distinctive style. Like the skull that Saint Francis holds, Laso’s ceramic appears as a different sort of memento mori, one that does not refer generally to the ephemeral nature of human existence but instead reflects on the passage of a particular society. In the context of an image that speaks of the violence of the conquest, it is perhaps surprising that Laso should have chosen as a model precisely the work of a Spanish painter. The very medium through which the vindication of the preColumbian heritage is expressed forms part of the cultural tradition associated

FIGURE 1.6. Francisco de Zurbarán, Saint Francis Contemplating a Skull, after 1634. Oil on canvas, 36 × 12 in. (91.5 × 30.5 cm). Saint Louis Art Museum.

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Inventing Indigenism with the destruction that the painting denounces. Laso’s painting constantly foregrounds this tension between the formal language of the European pictorial tradition (part of his participation in a global cosmopolitan culture) and the challenges he met in conceiving a local painting; between his identification with the Indian and his identity as a Creole descended from the conquerors. The range of historical and aesthetic associations conveyed by the ceramic vessel makes it a central bearer of meaning in Laso’s painting. Like the pieces he had referred to in his writings, it, too, holds a complex “philosophic idea.” There is a clear affinity between the way Laso construes the ceramic’s strategies of signification with his own idealist conception of painting. In more than one sense, he seems to have turned pre-Columbian art into a model for his own artistic program. But although the ceramic itself carries a rich range of meanings, it is not an isolated element; it functions in relation to the main figure, which we have until this point ignored and to which we will now turn.

Idealization The bloody trace of the conquest is still fresh, and the shadow of Atahualpa still roams the solitude of our ruins, no longer outraged, as in the past, pleading the heavens revenge, but moved by pain in contemplating the enslavement of his unfortunate race. José Casimiro U l loa, 1854

Solidly centered within the frame with almost mathematical symmetry, the main figure stands upright, projecting a sense of solemnity, a gravity which lends it the hieratic nobility that critics were quick to recognize and praise. “How are thus the kings in this country,” the critic A.  J. du Pays asked, “if the potters have such a monumental demeanor?” Yet there is in fact a kind of quiet self-assurance in the figure’s stance, a confidence that is not altogether rhetorical or imposed. It is the subtle ease of the Indian’s dignity—even more than the obvious pride of his bearing—that marks the painting as a drastic departure in the history of representations of the Indian. To grasp the radicality of this depiction, we must understand the broader discourses within which and against which it functions. This is what I will refer to as “the image of the victimized Indian,” a complex discursive construct that produced and was in turn sustained by some of the most pervasive and long- standing stereotypes of the indigenous population. Going back to the foundational writings of Bartolomé de las Casas, the defense of Indian rights and the condemnation of abuses had been based on the premise of the miserable condition of the indigenous population, a concept referring to their defenselessness in the face of coercion and exploitation. Based on the acceptance of inequality, legal norms and institutions were created to provide special protection for the indigenous population, thus setting the legal foundations for their tutelage by the church and the crown. Over time, the concept of misery endured, though its meanings and uses would change.

The Indian For a brief moment during the wars of independence, Creoles attempted to appropriate the Indians’ oppression, identifying themselves with their condition as victims of the Spanish conquest. Because of the ambivalence of their discourse, in which they no longer presented themselves as heirs of the conquest, the terms americano and peruano were preferred as they served to include the Creoles and the Indians in a shared bond of suffering against external domination. The outcome of the wars, which placed Creoles in a position of undisputed power, demanded a new reading of the theme of common bondage. No longer able to justify their selfimage as victims, Creoles retooled the notion of Indian oppression into the justification of a new paternalism. The strategy had been perfected prior to independence. In 1811, a text in El Diario Secreto, a liberal Lima newspaper, stated: The degrading humiliation and the abandonment in which the Indians were buried, and in which they still remain, does not allow for the restitution of their ancient dominions, for they would be incapable of government or of keeping themselves; paternal care and an education of many years are needed in order that they may at least recuperate and assert their rights as men in society.

The stereotypes did not change, only the terms of their justification. It was now the Spanish system that had brought about the backwardness and present misery of the native population. In the context of Creole national discourses, Indian abjection also served to annul any possibility of self-determination, thus deflecting the largely unfounded fears of an autonomous indigenous state, a persistent specter in the Creole imagination. This paternalism, which now supplanted the tutelary laws of the Spanish legal system, surfaced even in the writings of a radical republican like Benito Laso, who in 1826 referred to the “indigenous caste” as that numerous and unfortunate portion of our land, which under the paternal government of the Incas was the most innocent race ever seen on earth, acquired since then that blind and apathetic submissiveness, which has been, and will continue to be for a long time, fatal to the progress of civilization. Colonial domination seems to have annihilated in them that instinct through which even savage men aspire to preserve the dignity of his species.

Written on the eve of the foundation of the new republic, the text deploys the figure of the victimized Indian to justify Creole tutelage. The manifest high intentions of the liberal reformer are immediately betrayed: the most extreme stereotypes of the indigenous population’s brutish character—insistently posed through comparisons to animals and beasts of burden—could unproblematically be incorporated into discourses elaborated in defense of their political rights. Thus, the apparent paradox of late colonial and early national discourses on the indigenous population throughout Latin America, asserted always through degradation. This is a recurrent trope of benevolent domination, which Nicholas Guyatt neatly

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Inventing Indigenism sums up in his discussion of North American discourses on indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples as “temporarily and reversibly inferior, perhaps, and degraded through no fault of their own, but inferior nonetheless.” Discursively subjected, the Indian rarely emerged as a threatening figure in official rhetoric, legal discourse, or literature. The image was partly justified. In spite of the political disturbances caused by caudillo factionalism, no indigenous rebellions emerged to threaten Creole power in the first decades after independence. Only the Huanta revolt of 1827 and the Huancané uprising of 1866–1868 disrupted the relative calm of the early republic. In the former, the binding force of the image of the victimized Indian had actual consequences in the legal treatment of the rebels as this paternalist rhetoric made them, in practice, unimpeachable before national courts. In the latter, official violence against the rebels in fact generated a vast and unprecedented wave of public support for the indigenous population. Calls for violent repression of the Huancané Rebellion were actively contested in the Lima press as societies were established and theatrical events organized to generate public awareness of the plight of the indigenous population. “Moved by the misfortunes of the poor inhabitants of Puno,” composer Carlos Pasta wrote the music for a zarzuela titled “¡Pobre indio!” (Poor Indian), seeking to excite in his audience similar “sentiments of admiration and esteem.” The victimized Indian, a docile and submissive figure, deflected Creole social fears and contained the anxieties of a caste war—that muted but ever-present threat that haunted elites. These images establish a stark contrast with the dangerous Indians that appear in contemporary representations in the Southern Cone countries, where indigenous groups were framed as figures of barbarism to be eradicated for the advancement of civilization. The danger underlies the narratives and images of White women captured by Indians in the Río de la Plata region, which served to justify the state’s frontier wars, a policy predicated upon the occupation of indigenous lands and the extermination of their populations. The Indian’s violence, as Laura Malosetti has noted, becomes itself a justification for violence. In nineteenthcentury Peruvian literature, by contrast, the sexual union between a Creole male and an Indian woman is generally characterized as an abuse of Creole power, as violence committed against the native population. Passive and impotent, the literary Indian is rarely if ever involved in sexual offenses, thus affirming the perception that indigenous groups posed no outright threat to the self-assured power of Peruvian elites. Laso’s depiction marks a radical departure from these discourses, though how he undermines the figure of the victimized Indian is in no way self-evident. Later commentators would argue that he did so through idealization, a process that is nonetheless more easily named than understood in the specificity of its signifying strategies. Some have found the marks of such transformation in the image’s supposed racial ambiguity, paradoxically asserting that elevating the Indian somehow involves its de-Indianization, an issue addressed further ahead. What the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras does, in effect, is to deftly undermine a textually structured stereotype through essentially visual formulas.

The Indian

FIGURE 1.7. Print by A. Pinçon and P. Delamare, based on An Indian, a photograph by Emilio Garreaud, 1863. In Mariano F. Paz Soldán, Atlas geográfico del Perú (Paris: Fermin Didot, 1865), plate 35. Museo de Arte de Lima Library. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

The way in which the painting contests a broader field of discourse is revealed through contrast to contemporary images. Though most such representations were produced in the 1860s, years after Laso’s painting, the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras can nonetheless be productively compared to those visual representations in which indigenous subjects appear, almost without exception, bearing the signs of poverty and dejection. One of the most enduring and influential of these images, and among the earliest, is the engraving of a man based on a photograph taken in 1862 by Emilio Garreaud in Cuzco, published as an illustration to the album accompanying Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán’s Atlas geográfico del Perú of 1865. Given a privileged place in the publication (no other ethnic groups were represented), the engraving serves as a visual confirmation of prevailing stereotypes. The disarray of the figure’s hair and the crudeness of his clothes evoke the indolence and lack of self-esteem that was said to epitomize the indigenous population. The large and prominently displayed glass of chicha, which the man holds in one hand, evokes secular images of indigenous drunkenness, while the glazed, unfixed stare and the slumped pose emphasize the laziness and the lack of will associated with the Indian’s character. Paz Soldán’s own description of the engraving translates the Creole image of the victimized Indian: he claims to be able to dis-

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Inventing Indigenism tinguish in the man’s face “that combination of sadness and distrust which constitutes the depths of his character, as they [sic] have been during centuries victims of the rapacity and deception of those who do not belong to the race.” Violent stereotypes are adeptly couched in terms of profound empathy. Crucially, Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras manages to evoke indigenous oppression without turning the Indian into a dejected figure. He effectively displaces the signs of subjection from the figure’s body, avoiding the stereotypes associated with the victimized Indian. The pre-Columbian ceramic allows him to transfer the marks of oppression onto the inert and broken object: the scars on the surface of the ceramic evoke the destruction of a civilization, and the bound pose of the figure denounces a brutal exploitation, yet no violence was inflicted on the image of the Indian, whose body is freed from bearing the scars of secular hardships. Laso literally liberates the Indian from the rhetoric of subjection: while he built his image on the existing Creole tradition, he also subverted its very foundations. There is a sense of empowerment in the figure’s solid stance and impassive confrontation of the viewer, a kind of dignity that appears nowhere else in Creole texts or images of the period. With the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, Laso proposed a new image of the Indian that radically transformed older vindications of the indigenous population to advance a form of idealization that left behind the rhetoric of degradation and commiseration.

Painting’s Critical Function The figure in Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras is presented as an autonomous individual confidently addressing the spectator. The intention is revealed through contrast to Saint Francis’s face in Zurbarán’s painting, where it is almost completely hidden by the downward angle of the head and the shadows cast by the hood of his habit. Laso lifted the face of his figure to enable its steady outward gaze. Yet unlike the vague stare of allegories, which go past and beyond the viewer, this figure’s gaze confronts our own; it fixes itself on us with quiet, unrelenting calm. And as it takes us into account, it also places itself in our time, in the presentness of our viewing. At issue, precisely, is whom we imagine, or whom we may suppose the painter imagined, standing in front of the painting. Whom may we take to be its intended audience? There was the European public, the critics and visitors at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1855; they were certainly one of the audiences Laso would have envisioned. Yet there was also a Peruvian audience—fundamentally, the Creole inhabitants of Lima—for which, all evidence suggests, Laso had ultimately intended his painting. Laso had addressed this very public in an extended essay he wrote in Paris at the end of 1854, when he was preparing for the Universal Exposition. Published under the pseudonym “El barón de poco me importa” (The baron who couldn’t care less), Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú (New Year’s Present for the Ladies of Lima) offered a scathing assessment of Peruvian society. The satirical pamphlet traced the story of the education of a boy of good social standing whose innate tal-

The Indian ents and pleasant disposition are gradually destroyed in the process of growing up in Lima’s morally corrupt environment. Laso’s critique of Peruvian customs raised a storm of protest when it was published in the pages of El Comercio in April 1855. Stung by its caustic tone, critics condemned the tract as unpatriotic libel, as a vile caricature of Peruvian society. Laso was denounced as a “false Peruvian” and a treacherous Judas; one critic demanded that his government pension be withdrawn. Others, the radical liberal Juan Espinosa and Laso’s father among them, rose to defend his moral character and the pertinence of his critical stance, even though they took distance from the pamphlet’s irreverent tone. When, a decade later, his political opponents reprinted the text, Laso himself described the context that prompted its publication and explained his motivations for publishing the essay in France: That year [1854], as Peruvians living in Paris, we received with each trip the saddest news of the patria. On the one hand it was said that Ecuador had humiliated us in the cruelest manner as a consequence of the Flores expedition. . . . To such news were added the stories of the Consolidación [the fraudulent cancellation of internal debt]. Those stories, which in themselves were of great import, arrived magnified to Paris. I will refrain from repeating the things that were then said; but I will only say that the Peruvian colony in Paris was aghast with what was said to be happening at the time on these shores, and the youths of the Latin Quarter vociferously expressed their desperation.

In Paris, Laso had come into contact with a younger generation of Peruvians who were studying or working in Europe: Narciso Alayza, Manuel Nicolás Corpancho, Manuel Pardo and José Casimiro Ulloa, who formed a close-knit community that engaged the debates taking place in Peru. In 1854, Ulloa, then a medical student, published a tract criticizing President José Rufino Echenique’s administration. Dedicated to the Chilean radical Francisco Bilbao, the openly anti-clerical text criticized fiscal corruption, the pervasiveness of militarism in politics, and the ignorance and lack of patriotism of Peruvian intellectuals, as well as the persistence of slavery and the exploitation of the indigenous population. The corruption and conservativism of Echenique’s government created a generalized climate of protest, and disillusionment paved the way for the liberal revolution that took General Ramón Castilla to power in January 1855. In the midst of the civil war that ensued, the abolition of indigenous tribute became one of the rallying cries of young liberals as well as a strategy deployed to obtain popular support: Fermín del Castillo, who rebelled in Junín, abolished tribute locally in February 1854, and in July of the same year, Castilla’s government responded with a similar decree that was to have much broader repercussions (fig. 3.12). For liberal reformers, tribute was not simply one among other forms of abuse against the indigenous population, but a generalized symbol of bondage, synonymous with oppression. Discussions surrounding the head tax surfaced among other denunciations of the exploitation of the indigenous population in the late 1840s, rapidly bringing “the Indian problem” from the margins into the center of public attention. Beyond any ex-

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Inventing Indigenism

FIGURE 1. 8 . Francisco

Laso, Justice, 1855. Oil on canvas, 150 × 86 cm. Palacio de Justicia, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

plicit intent, Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras no doubt resonated in the context of these debates. Like other works Laso created during this period, the painting projects a sense of urgency. As Gustavo Buntinx has noted, in its critical content and its allegorical tone, it evokes Justice, a composition also dated to 1855. Almost identical in size and format, both paintings show single hieratic figures, represented frontally, confronting the viewer directly, with a similar relentless gaze. The surviving preparatory drawings for Laso’s Justice reveal his exploration of alternative compositions. One shows a single flying figure—angrily raising its left arm into a closed fist as it directs an enraged look at the viewer—that inevitably recalls the flying figure in Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s Divine Vengeance and Justice Pursuing Crime (1808), which

FIGURE 1. 9. Francisco Laso, Study for a Flying Figure, ca. 1855. Charcoal, pencil, and pastel on paper, 27.7 × 44.2 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.0-1058. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 1.10. Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Divine Vengeance and Justice Pursuing Crime,

1808. Musée du Louvre, Paris, INV7340, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Jean-Gilles Berizzi.

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Inventing Indigenism had originally been commissioned for the French Palais de Justice but has hung at the Louvre since 1826. Although Laso finally committed to more established allegorical conventions, Justice maintains its association with the concept of vengeance. The fusion of Justice and Nemesis into a single figure did not escape one Peruvian critic, who described the work when it was first shown in Lima in 1860. He discerned in the pallor of the face the mark of “a bilious, choleric temperament,” and he described the expression of the steadfast gaze as “menacing rather than impassive.” Pointing to the image of the city in flames in the background, the critic concluded that “we have here a true portrait of the goddess of Vengeance.” Laso’s Justice confirmed his social engagement, as well as his ability to impress the most banal public images with explicit critical content. Like the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, Laso’s Justice emerged from the political commitment of a generation that saw itself responsible for laying the foundations of the Peruvian nation-state. But its severity contrasts with the irony and the colloquial irreverence of Laso’s writings, which so offended critics of his Aguinaldo. His friends argued that the tract did not pretend to be a work of literature, that its language was mere “rhetorical artifice,” tasteless but nonetheless necessary. Laso himself explained to Corpancho: You know that it has not been my intention to devote myself to literature. I have neither the time nor the disposition to entertain myself fabricating elegant phrases that the wind carries away. If I have taken up the pen it has been out of desperation, and since I opened my mouth I had to cry out with all my strength to point out the danger, so that those who have a heart should awaken and rush to save the country.

Writers had been trained in the acerbic sarcasm that shaped political and ideological debates in the daily press. Yet for Laso’s generation, art and politics coexisted in separate spheres. Painting remained an unachieved ideal, part of the modernizing utopia of progressive liberals. The informal language of journalism was inappropriate in the fine arts, a category framed by a sense of decorum that could not be debased by the specificity of immediate political concerns. This partly explains the distance separating Laso’s writings from his paintings, and the ways in which his critical outlook was framed and modulated by the discourses defining the fields of his practice. There is no single explicit image of denunciation in his known pictorial production, save for a small drawing representing a scene of forced recruitment in an Andean landscape. In the foreground, two women in indigenous dress cry out as a group of horsemen in the background lead a party of shackled men away. In the lower front lies the inert body of a man, no doubt fallen in resistance, a narrative that appears in a number of stories and novels of the period. Though illegal, forced recruitment had been generalized since independence and was rarely punished. By midcentury it had become a constant issue of debate in the press and a recurrent theme in literature. Laso himself denounced indigenous exploitation through forced recruitment, and his drawing

The Indian

FIGURE 1.11. Francisco Laso, Recruitment, n.d. Pencil on paper, 24.8 × 47.2 cm. Museo

de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.0-1055. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

clearly evokes the disrupted lives and the suffering caused by the practice. Significantly, however, the scene was never taken to painting. Yet even in this small image, it is clear that the generalizing echoes of allegory allowed Laso to produce a form of social criticism that did not undermine the elevated nature of his practice. But there is a further and more significant difference between writing and painting, between Laso’s Aguinaldo and his Inhabitant of the Cordilleras. The text was dedicated to the “ladies of Lima,” to whom it was mordantly and irreverently addressed. By offering an insider’s view of Peruvian society, it confronted its audience from within. But the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras poses its critical perspective from outside of Lima’s polite society: the figure denouncing the conquest and indigenous oppression is himself an Indian. This significantly reverses conventional indigenist discourse: Laso not only confronted the Lima public with its other but also figuratively gave the Indian a voice or, to be more precise, the right of address, the right to his own self-defense. The critical import of the painting is based on this confrontational looking out, and looking back, at the viewer: the empowerment of the returning gaze. Yet it is nonetheless true that, in the end, Laso’s pictorial strategy was one that he himself designed, and his Indian, inevitably, no more than a fiction of his imagination.

Gonzalo Pizarro: The Scene of Conquest and the Spanish Legacy The scene of conquest is suggested everywhere in Laso’s painting. It is evoked literally through the bondage imposed on the ceramic, and metaphorically through the main figure’s black dress. What is subtly implied by the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras was explicitly confirmed by the painting that accompanied it in its first exhibi-

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Inventing Indigenism tion, the imaginary bust portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro. By opposing the image of the Spanish conqueror to that of the Indian, Laso established the historical origins for the oppression that the painting condemned. It may seem strange that Laso selected Gonzalo Pizarro to evoke the Spanish conquest instead of his brother Francisco, by far the more obvious choice. The youngest of the Pizarros, Gonzalo (1502?-1548) participated in the conquest from its earliest stages. He was governor of Quito when in 1541 he led an expedition of two hundred Spaniards and four thousand Indians to the unexplored regions to the east. Upon his return in 1542, he was met with news of the death of his halfbrother Francisco and of the New Laws, by which the Spanish Crown restricted the privileges of the conquistadors and gave measures for the protection of the indigenous population. To defend their prerogatives, the Spaniards named Gonzalo governor of Peru and leader of the anti-royal forces. He fought and killed Viceroy Blasco Núñez de Vela in the Battle of Anaquito but was finally defeated and captured by the royal envoy Pedro Lagasca. Although Gonzalo never claimed outright rebellion against the Spanish king, he was condemned as a traitor and beheaded in 1548. Gonzalo was to remain a contested figure in Peruvian historiography of the conquest, which by the 1850s had suddenly become the subject of broad international interest, fundamentally sustained by one book, William Hickling Prescott’s hugely successful History of the Conquest of Peru. Originally published in 1847, within a decade it had already appeared in more than twenty English and Spanish editions. Prescott’s claims to scientific objectivity, his conscientious notes, and his impressive compilation of an extraordinary array of sources gave his account the credibility that made it the official history of the conquest for most of the nineteenth century. His interpretation of conquest history catered directly to the political and economic liberalism of Laso’s generation. On the subject of Gonzalo Pizarro, he contested the views of the most significant early history of his rebellion, Garcilaso de la Vega’s General History of Peru (1617), an account that sympathized with the conqueror and justified the uprising, in which the author’s father had taken part. Prescott, who accused Garcilaso of being partial to Gonzalo, was openly hostile to the conquerors, whom he portrayed as greedy, uncouth soldiers responsible for the destruction of a grand civilization. As Guillermo Lohmann has observed, Lagasca ended up being the only true hero in his account. Gonzalo’s memory was curiously revived after independence. Peru’s earliest historical novel, Manuel Ascencio Segura’s Gonzalo Pizarro (1844), portrays his uprising as the setting for a story of romantic intrigue, which the author turned into a parable of political opportunism (the country had yet to emerge from one of the most unstable periods of caudillo factionalism). Ricardo Palma also devoted one of his earliest plays, La hermana del verdugo (1851), to the figure of Juan Enríquez, Pizarro’s executioner. And although Gonzalo appears only in the background of the cycle of tradiciones that he dedicated to the conquest, Palma was captivated by the cruel and despotic figure of his follower Francisco de Carbajal, “El Demonio de los Andes.”

The Indian Late eighteenth-century writers had already denounced the unfathomable cruelty of Gonzalo Pizarro and his associates. Hipólito Unanue’s “Idea general sobre los monumentos del antiguo Perú” (1791), one of the most influential early texts on Peruvian archaeology, placed the blame for the destruction of pre-Columbian monuments squarely on Gonzalo’s greed, explicitly attacking his atrocities: Lawlessness and havoc are inevitable in great conquests; but those of the nefarious Carbajal and his friend Gonzalo Pizarro reached unheard-of excess. He tormented many unfortunate Indians so they would disclose the sepulcher of Inca Viracocha, which was said to be full of riches. He found it in the valley of Xaxahuana six leagues away from Cuzco. And not satisfied with having satiated his cupidity, despoiling him of his riches, burned the body of that monarch and dispersed his respectable ashes.

There was another aspect of the conqueror that would also gain prominence in the local historical imagination: his status as defender of Creole rights and distant predecessor of Peruvian independence. The national museum in Lima actually kept a portrait of Carbajal bearing an inscription that presented him as an early national martyr. It is this view that Buntinx associates with Laso in his reading of the relationship of the Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro to the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras. Yet for most historians of the period, Gonzalo’s rebellion against the Spanish Crown did not justify his inclusion among the nation’s precursors. Chilean historian Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna placed Pizarro’s uprising in the pantheon of early precedents of independence, yet he cast it as an episode of conquest history and a manifestation of the “Castillian spirit.” Later, Palma also cited Pizarro as forerunner, yet he too emphasized that he fought not for freedom, but for “profit and privilege.” More explicitly, he would assert that he “would not be chosen by God to create the Peruvian nationality. In crowning himself he would have created special interests in the country, and men would have allied their destinies to that of the monarch.” Gonzalo Pizarro was a conqueror, not a Creole; he was a man corrupted by power and driven by greed. Rather than a heroic battle for separation from Spain, his rebellion was an act of personal ambition. The facts of Gonzalo’s life further evoked issues that had become vital to postindependence Peruvian intellectuals. The New Laws against which he fought had abolished the abusive system of the encomienda, prohibited enslavement, and ordered humane treatment of the indigenous population. If Gonzalo, fighting only to defend personal privilege, was the evil figure in Prescott’s account, the Dominican Las Casas—whose struggle to defend indigenous rights led to the promulgation of the New Laws—became its hero. Prescott explicitly compared Las Casas to contemporary liberal reformers, and interpreted his vindication of the native American population as a defense of political liberties. Historians generally agreed that in rising up against the New Laws, Gonzalo Pizarro had failed to defend the right cause. Even Paz Soldán, who was ambivalent toward the conqueror, finally attributed Lagasca’s victory to the “good cause

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Inventing Indigenism he defended.” From the standpoint of modern liberalism, the New Laws became a model for nineteenth-century defenders of indigenous rights—and Las Casas, the exemplary guiding figure of their cause. In 1867 he was made patron of the Sociedad Amiga de los Indios (Society of Friends of the Indians), for which Francisco de Paula González Vigil prepared a historical essay on the Dominican. Gonzalo could only be the cruel and abusive representative of conquering and retrograde Spain. For decades after independence, no positive assessment of the Spanish legacy had, in fact, been possible. Early Creole patriotism had been built on the Black Legend of the Spanish conquest. National leaders claimed to have broken free from centuries of oppression in order to renew their society and embrace the ideas and customs that the Spanish government had closed off to them. As in the rest of Latin America, the process of reconciliation with the Spanish legacy would eventually emerge in a decidedly conservative context. The founding moment of this new Hispanism was the sermon read in the Cathedral of Lima by the conservative priest Bartolomé Herrera on the twenty-fifth anniversary of independence in 1846. Reflecting on the upheavals of recent Peruvian history, Herrera concluded that they were the result of the misguided philosophic ideas of the French Revolution. Upholding the doctrine of the divine origin of law, he proposed an aristocratic and authoritarian social ideal based on the principle of obedience. The sermon prompted one of the broadest political debates of the period. To the aristocratic order envisioned by Herrera, liberal writers opposed the principle of popular sovereignty. Laso’s father was among the first to contest Herrera’s opinions, declaring his views “subversive” and “anti-social.” To the chaos of early Republican Peru, Herrera contrasted a placid and idealized image of the colonial past. His unapologetic defense and justification of the conquest as a heroic evangelizing mission led him to propose a new definition of the nation. In reclaiming Peru’s Hispanic past, Herrera viciously attacked all forms of Incaism, arguing that the pre-Columbian period was beyond retrieval. The violence of his explicit racism sustained the argument that the Peruvian nationality rested on Spanish foundations: independence was but a divinely ordained “emancipation” marking a natural stage in the nation’s path to maturity. The conclusion he derived from this line of reasoning was that the conquerors had “formed the new Peru, the Spanish and Christian Peru, whose independence we celebrate.” In the early 1850s, Herrera’s views polarized Peruvian intellectuals, generating a schism among the students of San Carlos, for whom, nonetheless, he remained a respected figure. In 1851, Laso himself, a declared anti-Hispanist, painted a haughty portrait of the cleric, which students carried proudly into the streets of Lima to celebrate their professor. Herrera’s active involvement in politics as the most visible member of Echenique’s cabinet contributed to the revival of the debates of the late 1840s, though liberals now focused their attacks on his Hispanist position. All of Peru’s problems—its economic stagnation, political conservatism, and social injustices—were attributed to the Spanish legacy. The classic text of Peruvian anti-Hispanism was Juan Espinosa’s La herencia española de los americanos

The Indian

FIGURE 1.12. Francisco

Laso, Study for the Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro, ca. 1855. Pencil on paper, 27.6 × 20 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima. Prado Family Bequest, V 2.01019. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

(The Spanish heritage of Americans). Published in 1852, the book was intended to counteract the retrograde teachings being imparted at the School of San Carlos by a “cleric who preached in favor of the conquest, on the day of the anniversary of independence.” Espinosa saw signs of the survival of the colonial spirit everywhere in Peruvian society, pervading economic ideas, the arts, forms of religious belief, and social customs. Writing in defense of his Aguinaldo in 1854, Laso publicly praised Espinosa’s book, setting it as an example of the kind of stringent criticism necessary to awaken the nation’s conscience. Yet if Espinosa was primarily concerned with political institutions and economic ideas, Laso privileged the critique of customs. Years later an anonymous writer described the painter as “an Aristarchus, zealous in fighting social prejudices and the remnants of a bad Spanish education.” As the image of the paradigmatic conqueror, Laso’s portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro directly engaged these debates. The painter left no room for the depiction of the vivid scenarios that contemporary historical painting was then intent on re-creating, and to which the epic of the Spanish conquest ideally lent itself. Laso’s composition reveals his deter-

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FIGURE 1.13. Francisco

Laso, Study for the Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro, ca. 1855. Black and white chalk on paper, 30.8 × 18.6 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.0-1015. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

mined rejection of historical narrative and, specifically, the literary implications of the genre historique. The preparatory sketches for the painting show him working through a gradual simplification of the initial idea. In what appear to be the earliest of these drawings, Laso started from a full-length figure with one hand on the belt and the other on the hilt of the sword, which he framed and cropped so as to reduce the portrayal of the figure to three-quarters length. Further sketches show Laso working on the conqueror’s position with respect to the viewer, while placing a greater emphasis on facial expression, turning the severe features into a glaring scowl that evokes literary descriptions of Pizarro’s character. In later drawings, Laso moved toward even greater simplification; the conqueror’s body is now in profile, the head turns to look out at the viewer, the short cape disappears, and

The Indian the size of the golilla (stiff collar) is attenuated. The final painting reduces the composition to a simple bust portrait. Everything is now concentrated on the conqueror’s physiognomy, and all distracting historical accessories carefully avoided. Though there is a menacing harshness in Gonzalo’s gaze, Laso was no longer focusing on a specific facial gesture. As he eliminated even the faintest suggestion of narrative, he created a psychological portrait—a singularized image of the Spanish character. Ultimately, Laso’s Gonzalo Pizarro did for the notion of a Hispanic tradition what

FIGURE 1.14. Francisco Laso, Study for the Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro, ca. 1855. Pencil and chalk on paper, 30.5 × 15 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.0-1051. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

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Inventing Indigenism the Inhabitant had done for the idea of an indigenous legacy. The cultural definition of the nation implicit in these paintings produces history as genealogy and embeds the present in the narrative of the past. With the idea of descent comes that of an essence or a spirit that survives in what is conceived as both a lineage and an ethnic memory, as both a condition and a willed identification. It is thus significant that Laso should have modeled the Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro on one of his closest friends. The claim that the painting was conceived as a portrait appears in a critical commentary made upon the work’s first showing in Lima in 1861, though the author provides no further details on the identity of Laso’s friend. The association with José Antonio de Lavalle y Arias de Saavedra is nonetheless inevitable, not only for the physical resemblance, but also because of ideological affinities. A decade younger than Laso, Lavalle, perhaps the most reactionary figure among his peers, was the very image of the Creole aristocrat. In character with his convictions, in 1852 he had joined the diplomatic mission led by Bartolomé Herrera to the Papal States. He then apparently met with Laso in Rome, and perhaps also in Paris, roughly around the time he began to prepare for the Universal Exposition. The fledgling diplomat was the son of Juan Bautista de Lavalle y Zugasti, count of San Antonio de Vista Alegre, and Narcisa Arias de Saavedra y Bravo, daughter of the first count of Casa Saavedra, an aristocrat on both sides who could claim descent, if not directly from the conquerors, from at least some of the oldest Spanish families established in Peru. His literary evocations of colonial history, often signed under the telling pseudonym of Perpetuo Antañón (Perpetual Yesteryear), are comparable to Palma’s Tradiciones and among the most significant early formulations of Creole identity. Though Laso would take distance from his extreme conservatism, he would remain one of his closest friends. It is hard to imagine a better model to personify Gonzalo Pizarro or to embody the character of the conquerors. It was that spirit which, Laso claimed, continued to pervade Peruvian society. His Aguinaldo criticized Peruvian education precisely for the failure to eradicate the vices inherited from Spain: Mexico and Peru have had the same origin, and their march towards destruction is parallel. Mexico and Lima were the favorite cities of the conquistadors; they made a center of pleasures of each of them, and the brutal soldier with the generosity of a bandit, dilapidated large sums, established luxury, gambling and all the other vices that are associated with places of prostitution. The Spaniards, ever since they raised the monuments torn down by grapeshot in the capital of Motezuma [sic], and in laying out the first bases of pliant mud in the city of Kings, impressed on Mexicans and Peruvians the seal of ignominy. Our degradation is chronic; original sin weighs over us; and instead of purifying us at birth, our parents corrupt us with a bad education and example; in the end each generation perfects the vices invented by its generatrix.

It is this “original sin” that weighed over Laso and determined the dubious genealogy and the decadence of Creole society. He could himself claim a Spanish

The Indian

FIGURE 1.15. Francisco

Laso, Self-portrait, ca. 1850–1855. Oil on canvas, 72 × 58 cm. Private collection, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

genealogy traceable on both sides to the earliest moment of conquest, a memory preserved in documents, coats of arms, and other relics that proved the family lineage. Thus, the denunciation of Spain here involves a form of self-incrimination. Tomás Pérez Vejo has stressed this central paradox of Latin American nationalisms, in which elites define their own ethnic and cultural legacy as other. Laso’s self-representations constantly refer to the stigma of Creole character and history. This is nowhere made more explicit than in the remarkable correspondence between the portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro and a self-portrait that Laso made in the early 1850s, one that, significantly, was owned and preserved by Lavalle. The paintings are almost identical in size and format, and they share the dark palette and a similar composition that places their subjects looking out at the viewer in three-quarter profile. Laso’s white collar and the conqueror’s golilla serve to set off their faces so that only slight distinctions of physiognomy and the fact that they are reversed differentiate the works. The two paintings are virtually mirror images; they seem to establish a dialogue between the Creole past and its present, between traditionalist and modernizing elites, between the continuity of history and its contemporary disavowal. The memory of the one in the other reveals a complex process of identification, an exposure of Creole guilt that would remain as part of the discourse of Peruvian elites into the twentieth century.

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The Indian as Cultural Concept Placed side by side at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1855, the Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro and the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras posed the image of the nation in the form of a dichotomy. This dualism also defined the paintings that Ignacio Merino presented at the same exhibition. He had shown three works, a portrait of the painter Francisco Masías; a historical scene, Christopher Columbus and His Son Receiving Hospitality in the Convent of Rábida (Spain); and Resting Place of Peruvian Indians. Although the third painting is now lost, contemporary critics describe it as a dark, brooding landscape showing a group of Indians surrounded by “fantastic” ceramics. Both painters represented the nation through oppositions—Spanish and Indian, foreign and native—yet they characterized them differently. Appealing to the genre historique, Merino depicted an anecdotal moment in Columbus’s career, and his indigenous scene would seem to fit into the standard conventions of genre painting. All evidence suggests that his paintings lacked the critical intent of Laso’s works. The significance of these juxtapositions was not lost on the Peruvian journalists in Lima covering the Universal Exposition. In a long article in which Corpancho translated some of the French reviews, he offered one of the few extended discussions of his friend’s painting. Not having seen the works, he could only describe the associations that the two images evoked in him: Also worthy of national gratitude is the thought which [Laso] has carried out in his two paintings and which show how the memories of the fatherland are alive in his heart. In designing two figures which represent the two civilizations, the two opposed types of the European and the Indian, of the sons of the Cid and the descendants of Manco-Capac, Mr. Lazo has brought forth the opposed elements which intervened in the fusion of the two races in America, practically explaining to the Europeans how, from the unequal struggle between two races, whose superiority is revealed at first sight, could result that conquest which has been and will always be the amazement of centuries. Here thus, how two figures are worth a great epic and two personages can explain an entire history.

Corpancho’s text reflects the perspective of an enthusiastic Hispanophile, a position his contemporaries questioned and which Laso’s paintings evidently challenged. Yet writing from a distance, Corpancho could not imagine how disparate and unequal the paintings actually were. It is, in fact, difficult to conceive of them as pendants, and they were never shown or discussed together again. At the first national exhibition of 1860 in Lima, Laso exhibited only the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, and when later that same year he included the painting among the works he presented to the Peruvian state, he excluded the Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro from the offering. When shown together at the Paris Universal Exposition, the two paintings had proposed an unbalanced and asymmetrical dyad. Critics who discussed the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras recog-

The Indian nized it as a powerful work, while they barely noticed or even mentioned the Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro. The Inhabitant was a self-sufficient painting, a powerful and complex composition that could evoke on its own the pre-Columbian past, the conquest, and the future of the Peruvian nation; the understated bust of Pizarro, placed in isolation, remained only a token representation of the character of the Spanish conquerors. It is thus not surprising that while Laso’s Inhabitant led to his fame as an artist, his imaginary portrait of the conqueror faded into the background and disappeared from memory. The nation was personified in the Indian. In asserting the primacy of indigenous culture, Laso went beyond critical anti-Hispanism. Referring to the showing of the Inhabitant at the Paris Universal Exposition, Torrico claimed in retrospect that Peru was to have “in the Indian its most genuine representation.” The choice of words significantly appealed to notions of authenticity that defined the idea of the nation as the expression of an original and irreducible spirit, tying the emergence of the Indian to a broader shift in national discourse that exceeded the political language of early Creole patriotism. Modern notions of cultural difference had already emerged in late colonial texts (some of which are discussed in the following chapter), but the transition from the singular idea of culture as cultivation to a plural and relativistic concept of diversity clearly consolidated in this period. The term culture itself would remain a marker of learning and sophistication until the turn of the twentieth century, and it was in this sense that it appeared in Laso’s own writings, but the concept of plural ethnicities shaped by particular worldviews already pervaded international bourgeois thought. In the same way in which it articulated the discourses of the Paris Universal Exposition, it broadly determined popular visual culture. The notion of a local character as it emerged in literary costumbrismo, of which Laso’s Aguinaldo is an example, also marks an important chapter in the evolution of the idea, but of equal or greater significance is the tangible figuration of typicality that marked the visual counterpart of the genre. Costumbrismo’s shaping of the nation as a cultural artifact through popular formats contributed to the spread of imprecise though powerful notions of culture and nation that would only later come to be formally articulated in academic discourses. The diffuse, transnational expansion of these modern cultural nationalisms occurred in patterns of traffic and exchange that Joep Leerssen has compared to an “epidemiology.” Though their impact was greater and more profound, popular manifestations of the culture concept have received far less attention than academic reflections on its appearance in the disciplinary histories of archaeology, anthropology, and history. The broad shift in the understanding of culture can nonetheless also be traced to intellectual debates. The mid-nineteenth century was a moment when elements of German philosophy entered the region: directly through Edgar Quinet’s early French translations of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity, and indirectly through the influence that he exerted on French intellectuals such as Germaine de Staël and Victor Cousin. The writers Esteban Echeverría in Argentina and José Victorino Lastarria in Chile introduced the discussion

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Inventing Indigenism of a national literature into broader debates on the cultural definition of Latin American nations, ideas that circulated through print culture and the travel of intellectuals to neighboring countries in the 1830s and 1840s. Early on, Lastarria celebrated the notion of literature as “an expression of society,” “a mirror that will reflect our nationality,” urging his contemporaries to search for a “work that we can call our own.” How these ideas were received in Peru is as yet unclear, but it says much that Laso befriended Lastarria along with Federico Errázuriz and the Arcos brothers in the early 1850s, when the Chileans found themselves exiled in Lima. The impact of Romantic nationalism is, however, but part of that broader structural shift that established the cultural discourses of modernity. The Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, in effect, visually materialized the broad and complex movement of ideas that led to the imperative that art express the nation. But what constituted the fundamental spirit of Peru was a fraught question. Reading on the surface or between the lines of Creole images and texts of the period reveals the paradigm of the nation as the spirit of a people bound by place, history, culture, and language clearly at work. Yet identifying indigeneity as the distinctive character that would differentiate Peru in the larger community of nations, as Laso did, unsettled elite identities. In his famous sermon of 1846, Herrera attacked Peruvian critics of the conquest by taking their assertions to their logical deduction: The legitimacy of Spanish government, it has been said, originates in the conquest, in an usurpation that can never be legitimized. If he who thinks this way is White, Mestizo, Mulatto, in short, of any race that is not the one that inhabited Peru before the conquest, then he must agree that he has no patria, because the conquest brought him here.

He not only made claims regarding political legitimacy; he explicitly evoked the notion of nativism to oppose the originary Indians to the foreign conquerors. Creole anti-Hispanists arrived at similar conclusions, and still today the term Peruvian functions in certain contexts as a synonym of Indian. The Semanario de Lima, mouthpiece of the literary generation of 1848, referred to the indigenous population as those “that can truly be called ‘peruano,’” thus clearly stating this was a title to which no other ethnic group could lay equal claim. In contemporary literature, Indians are frequently defined as the “authentic Peruvians,” as the “originary owners of the land,” or as “Peru’s primitive peoples.” These are the charged terms of a new paradigm, one that again questions the foundations of an emerging elite identity bound to international bourgeois culture. Francisco García Calderón’s authoritative dictionary of Peruvian legislation defines the term indígena (indigene) as “the descendants of the ancient inhabitants of Peru who have not modified their race through crossing with the Spaniards, or with other individuals who entered the territory after the conquest.” A similar set of ideas marked the ethnic classification of the country in Mateo and Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán’s Geografía del Perú of 1862. National territory was divided between

The Indian a majority, belonging to “the primitive indigenous race, which still preserves its language and customs,” and the rest, composed of descendants of the Spaniards, who, more or less mixed with Indians and Africans, engendered “races of different colors and physiognomies.” This recalls the fiscal and legal separation between “Indians and everyone else,” which Sarah Chambers has identified as an organizing principle of colonial and early national ethnoracial orders. Yet the distinction is no longer juridical. It has become an assertion of racial and cultural purity distinguishing those who can trace a native genealogy from those descended from conquerors or later immigrants. Implicit is the idea of the transmission of a primordial spirit embodied in the Indian, a merger of cultural and biological considerations that coalesce in the construct of the indigenous race. The term, which is rare in colonial texts but appears frequently in this period (Laso used it in his own writings), clearly bears the marks of modern racialist thought. It is significant that Paz Soldán should further distinguish between the Indian, considered pure, and the rest of the population, engendered through miscegenation. Classification is rationalized according to a logic based on the ideas of racial purity and cultural priority, revealing a new framework for the definition of ethnoracial concepts. This cultural emphasis determined the dualistic ordering of the nation’s symbolic space into a Europeanized Creole coast and the Indian highlands, an ideological configuration of geography of the sort that was everywhere part of nineteenthcentury mappings of the nation. Laso himself would divide Peruvian society between the people of the coast and the trans-Andeans, or serranos, claiming that “it is a fact that the coast and the sierra form two somewhat different nations; diverse climate and habits must make for different characters.” The broader consequences of this dichotomy explain why images of Lima incorporate Blacks, Chinese, and Mestizos but rarely, if ever, Indians, who are generally absent from the repertoire established in the descriptive literary and visual tradition of costumbrismo. Indians do appear as one among the many urban characters of the city, yet they are also usually defined as transient figures. Labels such as Indian from Jauja, Indian from the Sierra, and Muleteer Indian, which recur in watercolors and book illustrations, imply that these are migrant characters temporarily passing through the city—that they are somehow misplaced in Lima (figs. P.9, 3.3). “The Cholo is as peculiar to the coast, as the Indian is to the Sierra,” wrote Pedro Paz Soldán, “and though one and the other can be found in each and the other, they are only there but in passing, yearning to take flight; the Indian to return to his punas and his llama, the Cholo to descend upon the coast, to be a deputy, a magistrate or president of the Republic.” This vision, of course, does not correspond to the city’s actual ethnic makeup, which had always been shaped by a large indigenous population. The acculturated urban Indians of Lima did not quite qualify in either the new geographic imaginary or the emerging ethnolinguistic definitions of indigeneity, inextricably tied to the ever more distant Andean highlands. The Indian that next emerged in Creole discourse was, like the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, a cultural concept, imagined through the notion of the persistence of the pre-Columbian past in the present. Traditional dress and native language are

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Inventing Indigenism the token material signs of this construct, which raised particular cultural forms to the status of generic definitions and served to level the diversity of Peru’s indigenous populations. This is when the term Indian became synonymous with the traditional culture of the Quechua-speaking peasantry, a formulation so naturalized that its arbitrariness often goes unperceived. Laso’s Indian is not quite made up of social facts: it is not just any peasant or rural worker, nor can it be identified with the street sellers of Lima, the muleteers of the central highlands that provided agricultural goods to the capital, or the indigenous groups of the Amazon region. It is also not the urban artisans of Lima, the active subjects of the nation with whom Laso entered into contact as a politician. This figure of the Creole imagination does not pretend to refer to any specific social group; it only indirectly engages the contested conflicts of local politics and contemporary debates over indigenous tribute and land ownership. Laso’s particular construct forges its image specifically as a distinct cultural and historical ideal. The notion of a pure and authentic culture gradually transformed national discourses in other spheres. Within the emerging field of Andean philology, César Itier has identified the first attempts to purge Quechua from Spanish elements in this period. As he notes, the phrase “Empire of the Quechuas” construes linguistic and ethnic community as one and the same thing, a conflation that was not necessarily made prior to the nineteenth century, when it was generally known as lengua general. As the “language of the Incas,” it was now incorporated into the process of invention of national traditions through which the indigenous population came to be increasingly conceived of as a singular differentiated culture, a self-contained linguistic and cultural community. Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras is the first image to shape this new conception of the Indian. The pre-Columbian ceramic, as we have seen, was mistakenly taken as Incan and, thus, as originating in Cuzco. So too is the dress, associated with the Quechua of the southern Andean region. There are few pictorial precedents for his depiction, and none that describe it with the same careful precision. Despite scarce records, the French traveler Charles Wiener published an image of a comparable hat, which he described as the typical montera from Andahuaylas, widely used among Indian men from Cuzco to Puno. Period photographs of indigenous Quechua subjects wearing similar hats reveal that, in fact, Laso seems to have stylized the brim to exactly follow the curve of the figure’s shoulders. Less information is available on the woven cap that the figure wears under the hat, of which the only visible parts are the two lappets that fall to either side. The textile designs are clearly associated with weaving traditions of Cuzco, and there are indications that this type of headdress had a ceremonial use in Andean villages, which would not only explain their rarity but also allow us to suggest it may have been intended as a sign of the figure’s rank. Dress forges a relationship between indigenous culture and the nation in a way that may be taken as evident today, but was not yet a widely established proposition until the mid-nineteenth century. One need only evoke here once more the changing dress of Martínez Compañón’s multiple Indians to realize that ethnic

The Indian categories were always relational and in constant flux. This is substantially different from the fixity suggested by the conflation of certain traditional Andean garments with the Indian and the nation, as was expressly done, for example, by Rivero and Tschudi. In referring to the figures of an indigenous couple at the foot of the imaginary portal on the title page of his Antigüedades peruanas, they described them as wearing the “national costume” (fig. 2.11). In this context the pre-Columbian ceramic in Laso’s painting effectively calls forth images of the ancient past as the origins of both the Indian and the nation. This relationship forges an argument that revises the propositions of traditional Creole Incaism, in which, as Cecilia Méndez and Mark Thurner have noted, the idealized Inca past was generally confronted with the Indian’s present misery. Though considered “relics of the past,” as Stefanie Gänger phrases it, and thus temporally displaced, the Indian now came to be identified as the legitimate heir of the great pre- Columbian civilizations. The underlying idea of cultural continuity forged in the visual juxtaposition of contemporary indigenous figures and archaeological objects emerged as a central element of national discourses. The notion would paradoxically question that other narrative of a shared heritage, expressed in the Creole state’s symbolic appropriation of the pre-Columbian legacy, founded on José de San Martín’s 1822 decree claiming the ancient monuments of Peru as the property of the nation, because “they belong to the glories that derive from them.” The contradictory notion of the ancient past as a common heritage of a national imaginary divided into Creoles and Indians subsisted, as Thurner points out, in the conflicted genealogy of modern Peruvian history. Thus, though the administration of this legacy would remain an academic elite prerogative, Creole rights over what had become “national patrimony” will be open to question in parallel accounts that define the indigenous population as the only legitimate claimants to that past. In the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, artifact and dress establish a cultural context that the painting’s title further associates with a specific geography. It is interesting that, as Deborah Poole has noted, Alexander von Humboldt’s writings associated the development of ancient civilization in the Andes with the specific geographic determinants of the mountain ranges. The term cordilleras in Laso’s title was likely informed by Humboldt’s famous book, as Buntinx has suggested, but the Andes were also fast gaining more specific local connotations as an insurmountable barrier to elite visions of progress. The mountain ranges helped to create the idea of a separate space, as if indigenous society and culture were determined and physically contained by place. In a letter that Laso wrote to José Casimiro Ulloa from Belgium in the second half of 1855, he informed his friend that the French critics had spoken well of his pobre andino (poor Andean). This reference to the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras is perhaps the first appearance in Peruvian discourse of andino as more than an adjectival designation for a mountain range. It now became synonymous with an ethnic group. Laso’s statement leaves no doubt about the nature of the figure depicted in the painting; it is not the representation of a specific Indian but

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Inventing Indigenism a symbol of Andeanness: an inhabitant of an already mythicized and exoticized geography. Native, Indian, and Andean had become equivalent labels used to describe a separate people, culturally confined and physically anchored to place and time. Each of the three terms, respectively, adds a particular inflection to the concept of indigeneity as that which is originary to the land, ethnically distinct and geographically specific: Indians are not merely natives of Peru; they are also the original people of the highlands. These terms evoke the idea of culture as a bound whole, which Arjun Appadurai has described as set in notions of containment and confinement. In visual terms, they materialize powerfully in the type, or the related construct of the allegorical figure. As a reference to the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, andino thus emerges as a complex designation for a sort of cultural fi xity that can be associated only with that powerful homogenizing notion that would later become the concept of the Andean world. To claim that the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras forged the image of the Indian as a cultural concept may seem overly simple. Yet it actually reflects a major change in a broader understanding of both human diversity and society. This conception of culture as an almost unassailable spirit that translates into concrete customs and products was based on a definition that, as Gyorgy Markus has noted, now acquires “a supraindividual and objectified sense,” “as something made by earlier human generations” that can be remade or recovered in the present. The modern image of the Indian is founded on this concept of indigeneity as a coherent culture that finds material expression in the persistence of traditions that give a people continuity over time. The Inhabitant’s allegorical anonymity gives visual form to this concept, which invokes culture as collective tradition. Laso did not seek to reconstruct the past; he attempted to find it in the living present. In a broader regional context, the rhetorical structure of his painting can only be compared to the nondescript plumed figures of traditional allegory, the naked Indians that, like Montero’s representation of Peru, avoided specificity in favor of abstract conventional attributes. Yet Montero’s nude allegory, painted in the colors of the Peruvian flag, was restricted to a political understanding of the nation; echoing the opening lyrics of the national anthem, its broken chains evoked independence in terms of political freedom. Laso, by contrast, literally clothed the Indian in culture—understood in its modern sense as a unified organic entity formed in the dense correspondence between race, land, language, history, and customs. The difference that separates Montero’s allegory from Laso’s painting thus marks a key change in the foundation of modern nationalism; it marks the initial moments of a decisive transformation that led from a political to a cultural definition of the Indian—and the nation.

Creole Failures If the Indian had become the dominant element of a dual image of the nation, the hanging of Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras next to the Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro

The Indian in 1855 suggested a false dichotomy. The former refers in complex ways to a new cultural category, while the latter was framed by a different genre, that of historical portraiture, which gives the image a specificity that the other lacks. This juxtaposition opposes the general anonymity of one representation with the specificity of the other’s named individuality. The relative size of the canvases suggests that Laso, too, was conscious of the imbalance. He seems to have struggled to find the right image to place next to the Inhabitant. The very process of conceiving the Gonzalo Pizarro portrait reveals that he attempted to create a generic symbol out of the imaginary portrait, seeking to convert the historical figure into a typological representation of Hispanic character. Seen in perspective, it is evident these are not comparable images—that Laso did not produce an equivalent Creole national emblem that could stand up to his Inhabitant of the Cordilleras. The notion of criollismo (Creoleness) had by then evolved and coalesced in a series of texts and images that effectively constructed what could be defined as its cultural image. Costumbrista authors had built up a repertoire of Lima types that managed to identify the capital as the cradle of Creole culture. Within the vast visual tapestry of watercolors and prints that the genre produced, one type dominated above all others: the veiled tapada woman of Lima, the only image that could be taken as an emblem of Creole identity, and as the structural equivalent of Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras. The tapadas were fundamentally White women in the saya and manto (skirt and mantle), the costume that gave them their name. The dress has its distant origins in late fi fteenth-century Spain, where Moorish women were prohibited from covering their faces and forced to exchange the traditional veil for the Castilian shawl. Muslim women, however, went on to use the shawl to hide their faces, often leaving only one eye uncovered. The fashion spread to Spanish women and later to the colonies. Allowing them to walk the city streets unchaperoned and unrecognized, the veil gave women an unsuspected freedom, letting them evade patriarchal structures, which gained the tapadas a reputation for licentiousness and disorder. Although it had been widely used by Creole women throughout Peru, by the early nineteenth century the tapada had come to be exclusively associated with Lima, and had become the city’s most conspicuous symbol. The dress acquired the status of a national costume associated with the capital and, at times—through a sort of imperial extension—the nation at large. Contemporary texts explicitly point to the Sevillian origins of the tapadas as a way of defining the Hispanic foundations of Creole customs and traditions. They also stress the tapadas’ whiteness, a sign of beauty and high social standing, but also one increasingly asserted as a central element of Lima bourgeois identities. The mysterious Creole woman thus became the emblem of an aristocratic elite that ruled over a city of castes. As Deborah Poole has noted, the veil separated tapadas “from the dark-skinned classes who dominated Lima’s urban streets.” It was an image built on the foundations of Creole fears and racial anxieties. Writers recurrently expressed their dread that the “hideous” face of a woman of color could lurk beneath the cover. José Victorino Lastarria described one such encounter, when the shawl of a tapada he had been admiring caught in his coat button

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FIGURE 1.16. Francisco (Pancho) Fierro, Tapada limeña (Lima Tapada Woman), ca. 1850–1860. Watercolor on paper, 25.8 × 19.5 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, 1995.5.5. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

and swept away the veil to leave her face exposed as that of a “snub-nosed Chola with a prominent mouth.” The tapada was clearly a figure of whiteness under threat, subject to the same probing questions that challenged the Creole obsession with genealogy and purity of blood. A contested racial status was not the only weak flank of the Creole image of Lima. Although the tapadas had survived official viceregal prohibitions, they were unable to withstand the onslaught of French fashions after independence. Midnineteenth-century writers wrote obsessively of the disappearance of the tapadas and exhorted Limeño women to retain their customs. Newspaper chroniclers cheered from their daily columns when upper-class women dressed in the saya y manto appeared in religious processions and on other special occasions. In 1850, Lastarria claimed that Lima’s high society was “no longer limeño” because men and women had “adopted the manners and dresses of Europe.” Resigned to the losses, he could only dream of a hero of the stature of Bolívar or San Martín to combat the new “colonialism of fashion” to which Lima’s elites had humiliatingly submitted. If Limeños survived the battle, Lastarria claimed, “there would at least be one original country in this wretched America.”

The Indian The predicament of Creole originality in the face of change arose from notions of cultural dependence intimately tied to a new concept of culture, one that was, in turn, crucial for emerging notions of identity. Thus, the need to create a visual image of the tapada grew precisely to the degree that the actual dress disappeared from Peruvian public life. Modernization implied a necessary fall from grace for modernizing elites, a loss of originality that was counterbalanced by the exoticized Lima they erected through criollismo. The figure of the tapada is the emblematic example of how Creole elites compensated for this loss. Although costumbrismo as a visual and literary genre may have been able to elude explicit historical narrative, it was in fact determined by the historical accounts of modernity. In describing the present, costumbrismo configured the past and envisaged the transformation of Peruvian society. The genre served to invent a local Creole tradition as a sort of nationalized Hispanism built on remnants of the colonial past that still survived in the present. Lima was religious, devout, traditional, hierarchical, and in every way fragile and precarious. The social customs portrayed were those that were perceived to be disappearing in the face of an inevitable modernization (even if it was yet more imagined than real), thus creating the image of a Lima de antaño (Lima of yesteryear) always on the verge of disappearing. Criollismo allowed Peruvian elites to differentiate themselves from their past, to embrace international bourgeois fashions and customs while simultaneously preserving an untouched Creole culture in images and texts. The tapada was thus clearly a cultural symbol, the same sort of construct as the modern Indian that Laso’s generation imagined. As shaped in the discourses of costumbrismo, Creoleness was complex and contradictory. Lima was generally described in terms of erotic indulgence and careless excess, an image that is clearly projected in Merino’s Jarana (probably painted in the mid-1850s), an iconic painting of a group of Creoles singing to the music of a guitar and the cajón, the Spanish instrument playing in counterpoint to the Afro-Peruvian version of the drum. Like the different ethnicities represented in Merino’s painting, criollismo depended on the inclusion of plebian sectors, typified by the Black water-carriers, Mulatto laundresses, and Mestizo street sellers who formed an integral part of the city’s aristocratic and simultaneously popular image. The diversity of ethnic groups maintained an internal consistency as a sort of minor local originality, which in fact served to confirm Lima as a non-Indian city. The mixture of social groups also evoked images of disruption, as if Lima’s failings were somehow caused by the dissolution of ethnoracial hierarchies. Like other derogatory stereotypes of the city, the image can be traced to Esteban de Terralla y Landa’s furiously satirical Lima por dentro y fuera (Lima inside and outside) (1790), a text so widely cited and reproduced in the nineteenth century that it came to be fully assimilated into the discourse of costumbrismo. Dexter Zavalza has pointed out the precise editorial strategies through which the 1854 edition, published in Paris with illustrations by Ignacio Merino, managed to transform the colonial text into a commentary on republican Peru. Collapsing time was, in effect, a central trope of criollismo, and Lima came to be explained as a decadent extension of colonial

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FIGURE 1.17. Ignacio Merino, Jarana, ca. 1857. Oil on canvas, 129 × 97 cm. Museo

Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú, Ministerio de Cultura del Perú, RN 7604. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

The Indian society. It was a city of dubious character and morals that was set up as a critical mirror for modernizing elites. Poole has shown how the tapadas, typically accused of recklessly squandering their husbands’ money, came to be associated with a feminine extravagance that symbolized the “availability of Peru as a post-colonial market.” However, this image was produced not only by foreign travelers of what Mary Louise Pratt defined as the “capitalist vanguard,” but also by Lima elites. Typical Creole males, as described by costumbrista writers, were similarly presented as profligate, frivolous, irresponsible, and prone to adopt uncritically all European fashions and customs. As Patricia Oliart has pointed out, in contrast with the strict work ethic and sense of responsibility attributed to European immigrants, Creole men were portrayed as neglecting the most basic patriarchal duties. Laso himself wrote some of the defining texts of Creole self- criticism: unflinching portrayals of feeble, decadent male elites. To the political illegitimacy of Creoles was added a cultural and moral failure. A constant theme in Peruvian literature—from Felipe Pardo y Aliaga to Ramón Rojas y Cañas and into the twentieth century—this negative image cannot be mistaken for a form of self-representation. By depicting elites as irresponsible and morally reprehensible, modernizing Lima intellectuals distanced themselves from traditional Peruvian society and defined, through a process of systematic criticism, the difference they exemplified. Their insertion into an international bourgeois network depended on their assimilation, and that supposed creating ever more distance from both local traditions and local ethnicities. Laso’s intellectual circle formed Peru’s modern vanguard, an elite that left behind the trappings of the colonial traditions that gave Lima a cultural and a complex ethnic identity. As the local past of a cosmopolitan elite poised for the future, criollismo could thus be understood as a strategy of self-representation through negation. It was also a cultural artifact that could be used, deployed, and discarded at will, much like the tapada costumes that Lima ladies would rescue from dusty trunks to wear for processions—not as a form of disguise, but as a selective staging of one’s own multiple, shifting, and complex identities. Traditional Lima was a city where women ruled over men; they imposed their authority on feminized Creole men wanting in originality, legitimacy, and ultimately, virility. It is significant in this regard that since the eighteenth century the homosexual Black male should have figured as a dominant image of the city, almost as constant a presence as the dissolute covered women. As the tapada visually figured the capital as female, in literature the city is also quite literally personified as a woman, embodied as a temptress who wins over her visitors through her powers of seduction. In the play of contrasts and oppositions that structured Creole national ideologies, Lima’s feminized image explains why the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras should be figured as male. The presence of the moustache—scant enough as considered typical in contemporary texts, yet clearly visible, as it had also been in Montero’s allegory of Peru—signals virility. The figure’s upright pose, rigid symmetry, and bold stance evoke, by opposition, the sinuous feminine con-

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FIGURE 1.18 . Francisco Laso, The Laundress, 1859. Oil on canvas, 106 × 61.3 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima. Gift of Manuel Cisneros Sánchez and Teresa Blondet de Cisneros, 1978.4.12. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

tours of its frail Creole other. Conceived in gendered terms, the strength of the nation lay in the male Indian figure. The secondary character of Creole Lima was further expressed in the status of costumbrismo as a pictorial and literary genre. The cuadro de costumbres flourished in newspapers and journals but rarely consolidated into major literary works. In the visual terrain, costumbrismo was similarly confined to minor genres—watercolors, prints, book illustrations, and other popular formats—and rarely, if ever, raised to the heights of academic painting. The few exceptions are Merino’s Jarana and Laso’s The Laundress and The Three Races, both exhibited in Lima in 1859. Much as

The Indian he had done with the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, in The Laundress, Laso gives shape to a consciously idealized image of a laboring Afro-descendant woman, a painting that strives to set itself apart from popular costumbrista imagery. Where Francisco “Pancho” Fierro’s watercolors and the prints they inspired cast their subjects against an invariably blank background, generally evading direct representation of the urban context, Laso’s laundress stands on a carefully described Lima rooftop, a borderline space suggesting that she is the domestic equivalent of Fierro’s street figures. Every element is studiously defined to create a delicate, classically balanced composition. As she raises her arms to place a garment on the line to dry, her clothes cling to her body, marking her physicality in a way unlike any costumbrista image and evoking the erotic stereotypes associated with Afro-descendants. The very choice of source for the composition, a lithograph appearing in the book Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos (The Mexicans as painted by themselves), published in 1854 and 1855, reveals Laso’s conscious determination to distance himself from

FIGURE 1.19. Anonymous, La lavandera (The Laundress). Lithographic illustration in Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos: Tipos y costumbres nacionales, por varios autores (Mexico City: Imprenta de M. Murguía, 1854–1855), 291.

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Inventing Indigenism local costumbrismo. The comparison of painting to source reveals a clear dependence on the printed model but also on Laso’s careful process of elaboration, from the definition of the figure’s ethnicity to the abstract idealization of both body and surroundings. Her calm gesture and the studied folds of the dress purposefully recall classical models of the female figure. Yet in an open contestation of European ideals of beauty, and no doubt referring to this painting, Laso claimed, shortly after, that if Phidias were to return to life, he would probably find better models for a nude Venus among “American quadroons than among white Poles, Russians or Norwegians.” It is significant that of all the myriad Lima types locally available, Laso selected precisely one that did not exist in the local repertoire that had been defined by Fierro. It was a way of creating his own image of Lima, one that could mark a distance from local visual culture. For a painter who forged most of the emblematic images of the Peruvian national imagination, it is highly significant that the tapada should be largely absent from Laso’s work. Lima women in traditional dress appear only occasionally in his drawings as images he would consider, somehow play with, but which he would not commit to painting. These light, thoroughly tentative drawings seem to hesitate in the description of their object, as if the tapada could not quite acquire the substance of a national representation. Significantly, on the margins of one of his undated drawings of a tapada, Laso drew a pre-Columbian ceramic in the lower corner of the sheet: not a careful study of an actual object but a quick annotation, almost an afterthought, appearing at the bottom of the page as if to signal the tapada’s absence. The pre-Columbian object performs a sort of compensation for Creole failures, in much the same way that the Inhabitant emerges to affirm the authenticity of the Indian and the nation. We must return yet again to Montero’s allegory, for in making his personification male, the painter marked a turning point in the gendering of the nation. The sensuous allegorical images of America, invariably shown as half-nude female figures in feathered hats, had been transfigured into the severe classical allegories of national iconography. Largely drawn from the repertoire of French revolutionary imagery, these personifications of country, liberty, and republican virtues invariably defined the early images of the nation in official letterheads, seals, and coins. Yet from Montero and Laso up to the present, the male Indian invariably dominates over his female counterpart in national representations. It follows that José Sabogal’s Varayoc of Chinchero (Indian Mayor of Chinchero) became an emblem of indigenist painting, while its pendant, Wife of the Varayoc, was relegated to a secondary position, almost disappearing entirely from public view. The Indian will be consistently associated with strength and virility in twentieth-century indigenist discourses, significantly constructed on geologic and telluric tropes that confirmed the strict relationship tying culture to geography. El indio is the singular masculine term that emerges to confront the feminine (and usually plural) tapada. Over the following decades the nation and its history would be represented through such oppositions. In some cases the Hispanicizing

The Indian

FIGURE 1. 20. José Sabogal, Varayoc of Chinchero (Indian Mayor of Chinchero), 1925. Oil on canvas, 169 × 109 cm. Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Merino, Metropolitan Municipality of Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

tapadas would take precedence in the battleground of national images, as they did, for example, at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878. They significantly ousted and replaced two “savage” indigenous warriors standing guard at the entrance of the national pavilion, as they later overtook other figurations of the country that emerged around Peru’s centennial celebrations. Once established, the order of priorities could be reversed, and, in fact, priorites changed in the mid-1920s in favor of indigenism. Yet the image of the Indian as the foundation of a national culture never fully disappeared after it first acquired body and purpose through opposition to an alienated, secondary, and illegitimate coastal elite in the midnineteenth century. It was to remain in the emerging discourses of cultural nation-

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FIGURE 1. 21. Peruvian Pavilion at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878 (detail). Illustration in Simon de Vandières, Exposition universelle de 1878 illustrée (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1879), 101.

alism as the fetish that fulfilled the demands of authenticity that the Creole’s indeterminate and incomplete identity could not satisfy.

The Indian as Allegory and Symbol In the preceding pages I have attempted to verbalize the broad range of signification proposed by a single painting. In its enduring resonance, Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras engages a deeply complex concept, fixing into visual form a multifaceted array of ideas that had until then circulated mostly in textual form. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, we could propose that the image here plays a mediating role, where “concepts enable phenomena to participate in the existence of ideas.” Laso’s painting is a complex visual construct that brings together a constellation of fragments. It is precisely the composite nature of the image that explains its capacity to gather and condense so many dense layers of meaning. The figure’s frontal position, its immobility, the abstract background—all evoke the standard compositional conventions of the allegorical image. As in all allegories, the Inhabitant openly exhibits the elements through which it signifies. Yet

The Indian there is something different in Laso’s image, a mood that is as readily sensed as it is difficult to define. The face, though inexpressive, is nonetheless given a specificity that personifications usually lack; it appears to be simultaneously an abstraction and an actual presence. In fact, every detail of the painting conveys the suggestion of things directly perceived. Unlike the flat lithographic images reproduced in Rivero and Tschudi’s album, Laso’s treatment of the ceramic translates the smooth, matte quality of the surface and the dry texture of actual preColumbian vessels. The meticulous depiction of the pre-Columbian object, the verisimilitude of the dress, and the care with which the figure’s body is painted give one the impression of being confronted by an actual presence. Such specificity does not match the idealized character associated with the conventional rhetoric of the allegorical image. The painting thus hovers ambiguously between genre and history painting, between symbolic and allegorical form; it shapes a tense dialectic between pictorial genres and their rhetorical conventions. This productive tension unleashes a dense web of meanings. We could read the main figure as a personification and the ceramic as its allegorical attribute. Yet this is not quite the nature of the relationship between these two elements. The main figure defies interpretation as a personification; rather than standing in for a concept, it refers back only to itself as the anonymous Indian comes to represent an ethnic group. The singularized Indian would seem to function much like the Romantic symbol in Coleridge’s aesthetics: as a natural image, a kind of extended synecdoche, as that which “is always itself a part of that, of the whole of which it is the representative,” or to use his neologism, as a “tautegorical” image. Similarly, the ceramic is not merely an attribute but is itself an allegory, one that stands in metaphorically for the Indian’s oppression, and metonymically for the destruction of pre-Columbian societies. Were we to think of the ceramic vessel as an attribute of the main figure, its function would be simply reduced to that of fi xing or clarifying an identification. Yet no such continuity is evident. The relationship between the main figure and the object he holds introduces time and places the painting allegorically within the discourse of history. There is a temporal displacement between the two, as Laso takes pains to show that the main figure cannot be contemporaneous with the ceramic, which is clearly a pre-Columbian artifact. This disjunction is supplemented by a relationship of complementarity. In its frontality and outward gaze, as even in the very shape of its contour, the preColumbian ceramic seems to double the figure holding it. Yet this is a dialogue of contrasts: as the prisoner is bound, so the main figure is free; as the former is an inanimate cipher from the past, so the latter is an actual, living presence. It is precisely this dialogic tension that activates the full complexities of the image. In a kind of imaginary substitution, the ceramic is held near the main figure’s navel, as if his vitality somehow derives from the ancient object he holds. But we could also reverse this reading and see the virility of the Indian figure as that which compensates for the castration inflicted on the ceramic, and as that which renews the ancient past through recognition and vindication. Following the

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Inventing Indigenism string of reciprocities that Laso established between the two elements, we could, no doubt, define the ceramic as the Indian’s possession. The logical consequence of the discourse of authenticity framing the painting and its interpretations, the pairing of the indigenous figure and the pre-Columbian ceramic gives visual shape to the concept of cultural heritage as an inalienable right, handed down in the concrete form of property. Like so many of the concepts taking form in this period, the emergence of the idea preceded its verbal formulation at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet Laso’s painting had already affirmed the notion of an ethnic nation deriving from the genealogical view of history that modern nationalisms helped to forge. Genealogy involves time. In a text written shortly after Laso’s death in 1869, Federico Torrico explained the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras as a portrayal of the Indian of the future. We may suppose, on the evidence of the critic’s close friendship with Laso, that his interpretation was informed by his own conversations with the painter. For Torrico, the Inhabitant represented that race which conceals under its apparent immovability, great instincts that will one day make it reconquer a personality that has not disappeared. Lazo [sic] cherished this conviction and his Indian, who presented before the advanced European industry the shapeless product of its most notable industry—pottery—symbolized the Peru of the future. The parallelism of the lines observed in the painting indicates the immobility of that race; and the nobility in the attitude, the serenity of the character and its beauty revealed the powerful personality that the artist dreamed for Peruvians.

From the past, through the present of its viewing, and into the future, the painting acquired a further layer of allegorical meaning, now proposing the fulfi llment of history through the promise of redemption from bondage and submission. Seen in this light, the painting acquires a predictive, even prophetic tone. It is as if the multiple meanings and associations generated by the painting somehow exist as strata, the ones below covered by those that come after. Yet there is nothing hidden in Laso’s painting. Its allegory is not a veiled, obscure language made up of recondite emblems available only to the initiate. In fact, the composition gives everything immediately away: it is legible and direct, in appearance utterly unproblematic. One could rather think of a concatenation of relations emerging from the way in which the juxtaposition of the two elements in the painting triggers and unleashes a broad range of associations. For all its instantaneous, synthetic immediacy, the painting was composed through a pervasive temporality that evokes Paul de Man’s structuralist conception of allegory, one that makes time the fundamental constitutive category that bridges the distance between signs. Yet there is another aspect to this temporality pertaining to the process of reading, described already in the writings of the German Romantics. There is in Laso’s painting a time of viewing, extended through the gradual appearance of distinct

The Indian associations and meanings that emerge from a careful thinking out of the visual parallels, juxtapositions, and substitutions that play out in the painting. In this sense, the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras is a painting about history, yet not quite a history painting. Narrative is evoked without recourse to the representation of an event or of a sequence of actions. The painting thus fulfills one of the ambitions of academic theory since Quatremère de Quincy (who brought Gotthold Ephraim Lessing into the sphere of Romantic idealism): the instantly legible image that suspends action in a visual synthesis that avoids the literary pitfalls of narrative. It stands like an emblem, marking Laso’s adherence both to French academic ideals and to his efforts to found a national imagery. In the synthetic narratives of Laso’s painting—built upon reflection, redundancy, and doubling— the Indian emerges as an autonomous subject, an ethnic essence, and a historical product. It is a concept that is deftly constructed through the rhetorical dialogue built around the opposition of allegory and symbol within the image. In its composite form, as it achieved its programmatic intention as an image of the nation, the Indian came to represent Peru, and at that point in its reading, the image turned, once more, inevitably, from symbol back again to allegory.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Scene of Approximation

The Country of Melancholy: The Creole Invention of the Andean World There are those who say that a native will not speak to a white man. Error. No man will speak to his master; but to a wanderer and a friend, to him who does not come to teach or to rule, to him who asks for nothing and accepts all things, words are spoken by the camp-fires, in the shared solitude of the sea, in riverside villages, in resting-places surrounded by forests—words are spoken that take no account of race or color. One heart speaks—another one listens; and the earth, the sea, the sky, the passing wind and the stirring leaf, hear also the futile tale of the burden of life. Joseph Conr ad [A]n imported and contrary melancholy could not prosper among us. V en t u r a Garcí a Ca l derón

In 1852, Laso posed for a group photograph in Paris. In the image, the poet Manuel Nicolás Corpancho sets his right arm on Laso’s shoulder and looks in his direction. Opposite Laso, the painter Ignacio Merino leans forward and rests his weight on the small table in the middle. In their engaging attitudes, Merino’s and Corpancho’s poses galvanize the composition, bringing the three figures together. Laso, on the contrary, sits apart, his hands on his lap and his head tilted slightly downward. The withdrawn attitude, the absorbed look, and the serious, even grave expression are the basic elements of the image that the artist presents to the viewer, one that consistently reappears in other self-representations of the painter. This is the image of the melancholic, the Romantic ideal of the solitary, alienated artist that Laso introduced among Peruvian painters. It is also a characteristic mark of his generation’s modern sensibility.

The Scene of Approximation

FIGURE 2.1. Anonymous photographer, Ignacio Merino, Francisco Laso, and Manuel

Nicolás Corpancho, Paris, ca. 1852. Private collection, Lima.

Literary critics have questioned this despondent inclination as a form of poetic artificiality, as the thoughtless mimicry of European forms. For Ventura García Calderón, writing in the early twentieth century, the Peruvian Romantic generation “wept because Lamartine and Musset had wept.” Theirs was not a sincere sentiment but a simple affectation; it was not “a state of the soul but a literary pastime.” “Even by dying young,” García Calderón famously insisted, “Peruvian poets seemed to plagiarize the French.” This questioning of local Romantics—a recurring motif in literary criticism—elaborates on nineteenth-century discourses on the frivolous and Europeanizing culture of Lima. It builds on notions of failed originality and on the cultural alienation of Latin American elites that would be central to the construction of Laso’s paintings and of his self-image. But while the painter’s self-representations were shaped by this context, they also suggest a more specific cause for this disposition. The key to this alternative source of melancholic sentiment is Laso’s self-portrait in indigenous dress, for which he posed sometime between 1857 and 1865. Here, sitting on the ground and wearing a poncho and a chullo, his rueful self-image encounters its other, that of the melancholic Indian (fig. 0.2). The earnestness of Laso’s demeanor makes clear that this is no empty gesture of playful impersonation. There is a serious empathy in his adoption of the other’s

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Inventing Indigenism dress, one that materializes broader Creole anxieties and desires. It touches on those larger narratives of cultural authenticity that displaced the poets of his generation to a secondary, derivative sphere. It also points to the widespread discourse on the melancholic poetry and music of the native yaraví, a tradition that formed a central strand of national identity through the writings of urban intellectuals, many of whom can be counted among his closest friends. His self-portrait in indigenous dress is a crucial piece in a tight and subtle history of Creole approximations to the Indian, largely forged through the sadness that also shapes the complex compositions known under the collective title of the Pascanas. The interweaving of the literary, musical, and pictorial strands of indigenous melancholy allows us to reconstruct what is doubtless the master trope of modern indigenism. At midcentury the easiest path to the Indian was through Romantic sentiment. Ventura García Calderón’s brother, Francisco, spoke for an entire generation: [W]e have heard the yaraví sung by the natives that sought with their work the money for the tribute with which they paid their slavery. Nature, half-asleep, the dense shadows of the night, the silence of the valley, the sad echoes formed by the surrounding hills, the miserable condition of the native: all this helped to give such sentiment to the yaraví, that it tore our hearts. The Indian was for us the interpreter of the sorrows of the land, and his tender song a plight raised to the firmament.

The poetic elevation of pain can be traced to Romantic notions of melancholic beauty and its inscription onto nature, themes that were also widespread among Latin American writers. Poets produced uncountable odes to the Andes, and its mountainous landscape became the site for the language of the sublime and the poetics of pain. But although Laso’s generation idealized indigenous sadness, the stereotype of the melancholic Indian has a much older and revealing history. From its origins in the colonial period through independence and until the present, it has dominated the popular imagination as a recurring image, one that converges with that of the victimized Indian to shape a stereotype so pervasive, it has determined almost every aspect of modern Andean cultural history. The reduction of the Indian’s character to sadness is central to nineteenthcentury discourses, as is the adscription of the Indian’s grief to the yaraví, the elegiac songs of the Andes. It was precisely in discussions of the origins and nature of this musical form that the crucial image of the melancholic Indian as a cultural construct first emerged. Colonial chroniclers describing the Inca past defined the harawi as a generic term for all sung stories. In his Historia del Nuevo Mundo, the chronicler Bernabé Cobo described the arabi as a primarily joyful song used to remember past ordeals, extol great exploits, and sing in praise of the Incas. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the term had become synonymous with the elegy, and its themes reduced to the portrayal of sorrowful love songs. Half a century later, the traveler Clements R. Markham claimed that the songs of the Indians “almost all are melancholy and despondent in their tone.”

The Scene of Approximation Little is known of how this transformation was effected and when, exactly, yaraví became a term used only and exclusively to describe elegiac songs, but it appears to have been so defined in the eighteenth century. Aurelio Miró Quesada finds the earliest reference to the term in its modern usage in an early eighteenth- century manuscript in which the yaraví, characterized as a simple and sincere popular expression, is opposed both to foreign songs and to the artificiality and frivolity of other musical forms. Discussions of the yaraví developed in reference to notions of cultural differentiation that, as Juan Carlos Estenssoro has noted, formed part of the Enlightenment’s classificatory impulse to describe and distinguish the country’s diverse “nationalities.” What they further reveal is the global expansion of a broader interest in expressions of what could be considered distinctive, pure, and organic cultures, a process that Peter Burke describes as the “discovery of the people,” and which Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs identify as a central script of modernity. The yaraví as a sign of idealized difference finds its most revealing synthesis in an article signed under the pseudonym Sicramio, published in 1791 in Mercurio Peruano, the central forum for the discussion of Enlightenment ideas in Peru. Written with the objective of praising and validating the yaraví as a musical form, and establishing sorrow and melancholy as the defining element of Peruvian character, the text was instrumental in the enactment of an emerging Creole identity. For Sicramio, the yaraví is “originary of our Fatherland” and also the distinguishing music of the Indian, standing in opposition to other festive songs that he associates with Spain. He claims that though the nations of the world each have their own character, they also borrow constantly from each other, forming an “agreeable miscellany.” But the yaraví is an exception, so that only the character of the Indian remains inimitable. Sicramio’s text performs a curious reversal of cultural dependence, defining the European character as weak and permeable in opposition to the strength and uniqueness of Peruvian music, a distinction that prefigures indigenism and its trope of Indian vitality. To claim originality, this Creole writer was forced to find it in a culture not immediately his own. The Indian’s uniqueness is a natural, hence inalienable, condition that suffuses his every act and manifestation: His genius and humor, all is inclined to panic and sadness: his lodgings are dark, with low ceilings and of melancholic fabrication: his food is spare and most frugal: his bed is humble and set on the floor: even his wardrobe is of strange and sad colors: in consequence all the Indian does, says and thinks is accompanied by a natural gravity that their temperament inspires them . . . because only that which is tenebrous suits them.

For Sicramio to participate in this Indian sentiment, he must claim it as his own, and though the yaraví’s power is unavoidable, and all who listen to it succumb to its overwhelming sorrow, Sicramio claims a special prerogative. Thus, when he describes the powerful effects that yaravís exert over his senses, he claims that the

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Inventing Indigenism pleasure he takes in them derives from the fact that his “organic disposition is inclined to that which is pathetic.” Sicramio’s identification with the characteristic emotion of the Indian is thus an evident precedent to Laso’s doubly appropriated melancholy, a crucial if forgotten strand in the history of Creole identity, one defined through the idealization of the Indian and the Andean landscape. There is, however, a very different take on the yaraví in another essay in the Mercurio Peruano. Written by José Toribio del Campo in response to Sicramio’s text, it highlights many of the issues that Sicramio silences. Del Campo denounces the stereotype of the Indian’s melancholy as a reductionist move that omits more than it reveals: he emphasizes the diversity of Indian musical typologies and points to examples of Indian songs expressing opposite, festive, and pleasant sentiments. He exclaims, “What, the Indians have no other passions than those of pain? Do they not sing the triumphs of Mars and those of Cupid? Will they intone only their misfortunes?” But del Campo goes further, and by associating the yaraví with the vulgarity and plainness of other popular songs, he simultaneously questions its originality and aesthetic value, judging it to be of “little merit.” Denying that the yaraví is inimitable, he goes so far as to insinuate that it derives not from an original indigenous tradition but from Spain. Faced with the choice of these two contrasting views, nineteenth-century writers unanimously chose Sicramio’s version. The text was reproduced with some amendments in the Cuzco journal El Museo Erudito in 1839 and recurrently cited or indirectly evoked, almost obsessively, over the course of the nineteenth century. But the oblivion into which del Campo’s version fell did not owe only to the way it questioned Creole claims for originality. Whereas Sicramio described the yaraví as a love song, del Campo found another source for the Indian’s sorrow, one that directly threatened the legitimacy of the Creole appropriation of this Indian form. He suggested that what the Indians cried for in the yaraví was the loss of the Inca Empire, “the dethronement of the Peruvian Prince.” Del Campo defies Sicramio: “Ah! what wouldn’t Mr. Sicramio say, when he had heard and seen the tender moans of the Collas; those painful gesticulations, those sad expressions that manifest the cause of their pain.” Implicit in del Campo’s challenge is the threat that it poses to the legitimacy of Sicramio’s version, questioning the Creole appropriation of the Indian’s sorrow. The discourse on the yaraví came to acquire an instrumental role in the cultural legitimation of the Creole. For Estenssoro, del Campo’s text reveals the underpinnings of a decisive change in late eighteenth-century Creole attitudes toward indigenous culture, and his unease derives from his disapproval of the growing taste for the yaraví among urban writers in the years following the Túpac Amaru Rebellion. César Itier has described a comparable process with respect to elite attitudes toward Quechua during the same period. In both cases one finds a similar gesture of appropriation and neutralization of the perceived subversive potential of indigenous cultural forms at a moment when Creoles were increasingly attempting to fill the social and political vacuum created by the dispersal of the eighteenthcentury “Inca renaissance.” The stereotype of melancholy and the discourse on the yaraví are key elements in what can be considered a new Creole offensive.

The Scene of Approximation While functioning on the surface as a simple expression of romantic love, the sorrow reflected in the yaraví simultaneously entered into a politically charged rhetorical tradition. Music had been perceived early on as a gauge of political tensions, and as Estenssoro demonstrates, the Indian’s sadness was thus generally associated with the tragedy of the colonial situation. In 1776, for example, Francisco Antonio Ruiz Cano, in his Drama de dos palanganas veterano y bisoño, referred to the leadership of the 1750 rebellion as “Indians who still cry for their decapitated Inca in their Yaravís.” The plaintive tone associated with indigenous oppression would be a constant in petitions and appeals to the Spanish Crown. In 1750 the Andean noble Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca addressed injustices against the Indians by paraphrasing the lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah. Little more than half a century later, Laso’s father wrote a poem about Spanish authority based on the same biblical text, entitled “Oración de Jeremías: Traducción libre aplicable al Perú” (Prayer of Jeremiah: Free translation applicable to Peru). Melancholy had become a central element of Creole political rhetoric. The process of independence transformed Sicramio’s essay on the yaraví into a model for patriotic sentiment. Use of the lamentation to promote the patriot cause was advanced by the poet and hero Mariano Melgar, among the first to adopt the yaraví and to put into writing what had been a mostly oral tradition. As in Sicramio, the explicit source of Melgar’s melancholy was impossible love, and the motivation behind the appropriation of an indigenous form was the assertion of Creole patriotism. It is no coincidence that Benito Laso, author of the most important Incaist poems of the period, should have also been one of the participants in the Arequipa literary salons where Melgar composed his yaravís. His poem “El Perú esclavizado” (Enslaved Peru) of 1811 or 1812 had linked patriotic sentiment to the desire for vengeance for the lost Inca Empire: Oh dear Patria [homeland], sweet and tender name! the long night of mournful sorrow which you suffered under the most impious yoke, I will sing in sad meter. To sing, I say not, to cry is just the cruel pain of the Fatherland, because a fierce and ungrateful sensation opposes harmony in the accent.

Like Benito Laso, others who wrote about the yaraví would evoke Edward Young’s The Complaint, or Night Thoughts (1742–1745) as an appeal to a sentiment that could serve the patriot cause. In identifying with contemporary Indians as heroic victims of centuries of oppression, the Creole also elaborated an early idealization of the pre-Columbian past. These forms of Incaism have been denounced as superficial approximations that contrast with the more sincere indigenisms that, like Melgar’s inspiration in popular culture, are said to have shaped a truly authentic literary mestizaje. Yet Melgar’s poetry is part of the same ideological project: a tightly formulated strategy of Creole legitimation. Later interpretations of the yaraví as a

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Inventing Indigenism type of Mestizo song evoke a fluid and seamless fusion that does not reflect the tensions implicit in Creole uses of these indigenous forms, for the appropriation of the Inca past and the Indians’ sorrow enacted in this literature neutralizes the supposed political subversiveness of Incaist nostalgia by representing the Inca Empire as a closed and sealed epoch. That the indigenous population could have a separate and independent political project was fresh in the minds of Creoles in the aftermath of the Túpac Amaru Rebellion, and the stereotype of melancholy forged in Creole texts helped to displace this imaginary possibility. Although the yaraví came to be increasingly defined as a love song, it never lost its associations with the political situation of the indigenous population, nor its use as a tool for denouncing oppression. Framed as a narrative of a love lost, broken by distance or by death, the lamentations of the yaraví evoke the pre-Columbian past as a moment beyond retrieval. Nineteenth-century writers and artists obsessively reenacted the death of the Inca. Luis Montero’s large academic machine representing the Funeral of Atahualpa is, of course, the pictorial culmination of this fascination with the fall of an empire (fig. P.10), a theme that, as Maraliz Christo has demonstrated, would be central to Latin American history painting over the following decades. In the theater, works like the Death of Atahualpa or The Conquest of Peru inevitably ended with the scene of the Inca’s demise. The yaraví, which was already a recurring element in Lima’s theatrical repertoire, came to be associated with these representations. In 1851, for example, some “yaravíes del Inca” were sung at the beginning of the fourth (and last) act of La conquista del Perú y muerte del Inca Atahualpa (The conquest of Peru and death of the Inca Atahualpa), a popular play by Manuel de Santiago Concha. The drama by Isidro M. Pérez on Manco II (Manco II o el coloniaje en el Perú), presented in Lima in 1858, also concluded with the scene of the “death of Manco” set to the music of a yaraví composed by Pedro Bajas. The yaraví had by now been converted, quite literally, into a song of mourning.

Melancholy’s Modern Transformations The space given here to the yaraví is justified by the extent and continuity of what can be identified as a dominant discursive formation defining the indigenous population in modern Peru. Significantly, it also traces an elite ideological genealogy. There is a straight line running from the Mercurio Peruano to the writers of Laso’s generation, who were grouped around La Revista de Lima, where Benito Laso’s poetry of the independence era would be reprinted during the 1860s. Melgar’s popularity among elite intellectuals also thrived as his poems were reproduced in newspapers and journals, a campaign led by Francisco García Calderón and Mateo Paz Soldán, but also by Miguel del Carpio, Melgar’s nephew and a benefactor of Laso’s generation. The yaraví became an established literary form for poets such as Clemente Althaus and the writers later grouped around La Revista de Lima and the salons of Juana Manuel Gorriti, who claimed to continue the tradition initi-

The Scene of Approximation ated by Melgar. These were all members of Laso’s intimate circle: through friendship or marriage, the painter’s family maintained close ties to García Calderón, the Paz Soldán brothers, and del Carpio. It was within this tightly knit group of liberal intellectuals that the stereotype of the melancholic Indian would acquire the greatest force. While poetic empathy had been revealed through the literature of the sublime, the Romantic subjectivism that emerged in the 1850s gave a new impetus to the trope of the artist who identifies with the suffering of others. “El poeta,” an extensive poem written by Manuel Nicolás Corpancho in honor of his friend Manuel Castillo, a poet from Arequipa and follower of Melgar’s tradition of the yaraví, wrought the motifs of Romantic poetry—both funerary themes and evocations of the redeeming potential of Christianity derived from Chateaubriand—with Andrés Bello’s images of American nature and the yaraví. The final verses return to the local imagery of melancholy: You have the intonation of the cascade; The strength of the sea angrily thundering; The loving tenderness of the QUENA; No, you cannot die. The pure spirits of the forests Where the legions that brought from Spain the banners to Columbus’ world cannot penetrate, They have prepared a crown With flowers from their richest trees That Atahualpa left the HARAVICOS Of his fair nation. When to the venerable HUACAS you solicit The gay history of my homeland, You have the melancholy tune Of the tender YARAVÍ: The Incas in their tombs arise To hear the song of the poet; God made you as modest as the violet, The crown is yours.

The photograph of Laso in a poncho and chullo that began this discussion can help explain how his generation assumed and transformed the discourse of melancholy. The portrait was used in preparation of the Haravicu, one of the paintings in the Pascana series, which depict resting places in the Andes. These works have

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FIGURE 2. 2. Francisco Laso, Haravicu (The Storyteller), ca. 1860–1869. Oil on canvas, 103.4 × 139.3 cm. Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

been recurrently discussed through the idea of melancholy. Though music is not directly represented, Indians do appear playing indigenous instruments such as the quena in some of the preparatory drawings and the final version of Indian Encampment, which can be considered the first work in the sequence. Critical writing on the paintings has also insisted on the theme of sadness. Following a long tradition, Francisco Stastny wrote in 1969 that in front of Laso’s works, “the spectator is confronted with a world of tense harmony and serene lucidity; but from which emanates a profound melancholy.” For some, this melancholy derives from the painter’s style; for others, it originated in the very character of the Indians represented in the paintings. Flores Aráoz claimed in 1939 that the Pascana in the Cordillera “gives a sensation of quietism and melancholy, characteristic of the soul of our autochthonous inhabitants.” Guillermo Salinas Cossío similarly described Indian Encampment as “full of the mysterious silence of the puna, which leaves in the spirit the same disconsolate sadness that indigenous music provokes.” For nineteenth-century writers the term yaraví derived from haráuec (or arabicu, its modern form), the name given to the official poets of the Inca court charged with guarding collective memory. The theme of suffering is made explicit in this painting and in the Pascana in the Cordillera—the second and possibly the only finished work in the series—through the same Moche ceramic of a prisoner

FIGURE 2. 3. Francisco Laso, Pascana in the Cordillera (Resting Place in the Cordillera), ca. 1860. Oil on canvas, 126 × 194.5 cm. Club Nacional, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 2.4. Francisco Laso, Indian Encampment, ca. 1850-1857. Oil on

canvas, 138 × 147 cm. Courtesy of Museo Central, Banco Central de Reserva, Lima (PO-029). Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

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FIGURE 2.5. Francisco Laso, Study for “Indian Encampment,” ca. 1850-1857. Pencil on

paper, 22.4 × 25.8 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.0-1028a. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

that Laso used in his Inhabitant of the Cordilleras to signal the contrast between the Indian’s present dejection and a glorious past. Laso’s paintings point to the conquest as the traumatic historic origin of the Indian’s sadness, but they also define nostalgia and melancholy as a marker of ethnoracial character, evoking the notions of cultural authenticity that had previously informed discussions of the yaraví. Cultural originality set up a problematic framework for the expression of a Creole identity. As García Calderón wrote, the yaraví is not “the song which we owe to the Europeans”: It is, as we have already stated, the elegy with which the suffering heart accompanies his tears. The natives taught it to the Spaniards; and since then it has been made into a national song in music; and a completely special song in our literature.

The Scene of Approximation The Creole can participate in this national music but not its authenticity for it does not originate with them. If the Indian is the inventor of the yaraví, then, when sung by the Creole, it can only be interpreted as an appropriation. García Calderón is thus forced to admit that the verses of the yaraví “have in Quechua a sweetness and expression such that Spanish could not reproduce.” For him, the yaraví is the “primitive poetry of the natives,” and those that are sung in Spanish are nothing more than “translations or imitations of them.” The yaraví can only be artificially appropriated by cosmopolitan elites who have no defined place within the emerging ideal of cultural authenticity centered on ancestral origins and culturally differentiated traditions. It is no coincidence that the theme was vigorously developed during the 1850s and 1860s, a period of growing internationalization of cultural production in Lima. Yet the problem had been defined by previous writers. In the early nineteenth century, Hipólito Unanue attempted to solve this contradiction by explaining that the inhabitants of Lima, under the influence of its climate, had been “more or less affected by the melancholic character of its inhabitants.” While Unanue could nationalize the Creole through a form of climatic determinism, as the century progressed, melancholy increasingly became a sign of difference. Only political or aesthetic empathy could help bridge the cultural distance separating Creoles and Indians. The stereotype of melancholy was key in giving ideological shape to this separation, for the process through which intellectuals sought an approximation to the Indian’s authenticity was the same that defined the Creole as non-Indian. This difference will be symbolically extended to the country’s geography. To be truly authentic, the yaraví had to be sung in its natural scenery: the Andean highlands. This idea, already implied in Sicramio’s text, was developed further in Unanue’s Observaciones sobre el clima de Lima (Observations on the climate of Lima) (1806) and was taken up by the anonymous author of the additions to Sicramio’s text as it was published in the Museo Erudito in 1839. For this author, yaravís alongside the decorations and the etiquette, of the elegance of the dresses and of the furniture and adornments and the bustle with which they concur at once in theaters, philharmonic societies and other reunions, no longer produce all their effects, as when they are transferred to the tranquil and peaceable air of the countryside: while the yaravís sung in these places take on an inconceivable magic, they penetrate better into the heart and invite tears of sweet melancholy. . . . All of nature appears to have put itself in the service of the harmony of the yaravís.

What emerges, even before it would come to coalesce in professional geography, is a national topography defined by notions of race and culture. Taking his cue from these precedents, Paz Soldán, the first modern geographer, would later evoke the Indian who flees the “social bustle” in order to play his mournful music amidst the solitude and the silence of nature. The Andes are implicitly contrasted with the city and, by extension, with a Creole culture that, as we have seen, had come to be identified with festive, carefree, and joyful music. These contrasts

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Inventing Indigenism structured a larger narrative that came to oppose tradition to modernity. Francisco García Calderón wrote: “Yes, we repeat: you men of society cannot understand the yaraví, because this composition is like the plants which only grow and develop in the place from which they originate; and which, when transplanted to another place, are weakened, and no longer produce fruit.” The image of the melancholic Indian had become inseparable from the Andean landscape. The Indians in Laso’s Pascanas are not simply set in the midst of isolated landscapes. Seated on the ground, their figures seem to merge with the mountainous scenery of the punas. The Indian and Andean geography finally merge to create the “equation of mountain landscape and Indian essence” that Orlove so eloquently described. In 1869, after spending time in the coastal town of Huacho, where he and his wife had bought a second home, Laso wrote: Be it for the beauty of the place or because of the good rewards that the Indian obtains for his work in his own plot, it seems as if the Indian’s character had been modified in these places, because the natives, even when they preserve a certain gravity of race, walk with their bodies erect, look forward, speak and even take the liberty of singing as if they were White or Black. It is a truth that richness and liberty always infuse aplomb, and the Huachano is powerful in face of the comparatively poor serf of the Indian of the Sierra.

Laso appeals to the precepts of mid-nineteenth-century liberal thought in invoking the ideal Indian as a free, property-owning individual, yet he inevitably evokes stereotypical images of racial and geographic determination. Indeed, only a radical inversion of the political and natural order could produce the contented labor of the Indians of Huacho. The basic elements of Andean telluricism (that overpowering and inexorable bind tying racial forces to Andean geography), which would later dominate twentieth-century indigenist discourse, had been definitely fixed. This process of idealization is double-edged: it is built on long-standing stereotypes regarding the Indian’s indolence and passivity. Melancholy’s dark side, in fact, leads to immobility and even to suicide. Sicramio eloquently described its paralyzing force: The truth is, that in general this intonation appears to have the same effect on everyone: I have known a person that has remained afflicted for many days, and that has deprived himself as much as he could from hearing them so as not to feel so vividly the sensations of those compositions, from which he fell ill: such is its power and its natural gravity.

Unanue later identified a pathological melancholy that prevailed, of course, in the “deserted sites” of the Andes. An early critic of Laso’s Pascana in the Cordillera wrote in 1861 that “the painting of Indians, by Mr. Lazo [sic] . . . makes us feel the climate, the temperature, the accidents of the land, as well as the indolent character and the passive customs of its inhabitants.” There is no clear line dividing

The Scene of Approximation melancholy and indolence. Its paralyzing effects are curiously similar to the consequences that three centuries of oppression were said to have produced in the indigenous population. Evoking the discourse of the victimized Indian, Laso himself simultaneously spoke of the melancholic and dejected character of the Indians of the sierra. Melancholy cannot be seen simply as the positive side of a negative stereotype. Laso’s paintings contributed to the construction of the Andean highlands as a still and isolated world where there is no action save for the expression of sadness. This collective paralysis is represented through compositions that show neither the development of a story nor the representation of an action. His Indians generally remain motionless, literally bent over and self-absorbed, in a posture of noble suffering that, ultimately, cannot escape the negative associations of the stereotype: in the last instance, heroic sorrow and dejected lethargy produce similar effects. Impaired by a terminal passivity, transfixed by their sadness, Laso’s Indians participate in the invention of an immutable Andean order. It should not be surprising that Laso rarely, if ever, represented the Indian engaging in any sort of action. One exception is Sowing, a drawing in the collection of the Museo de Arte de Lima showing a group of Indians industriously working the land. But this image, dominated by a tone of reverie, is precisely the representation of an ideal world: the presence of a strange allegorical figure that follows behind the peasants diligently sowing the land situates the scene in a fictional space, perhaps that of the inverted order of the Indians of Huacho. The melancholic stereotype sustains the image of a gentle and easily accessible Andean world whose passive inhabitants would not claim any rights nor rebel to defend them. For Francisco García Calderón, the lamentation expressed in the yaraví was but a weak “moan,” devoid of the “ardent accent of hatred” or the “devouring expression of vengeance.” And according to Paz Soldán, these “descendants of Manco,” with no “voice to complain, with no strength to defend themselves, lacking the resources to demand or obtain justice,” had abandoned themselves to the “most profound melancholy.” This impotent Indian could not question Creole power. Thus, melancholy became a justification for elite paternalism and for the perpetuation of colonial tutelage. Social inequality was naturalized at the same time that Indian subjection acquired the character of biological fact. The effectiveness of this stereotype derives from the subtlety with which it is deployed. Legal and political issues regarding the status of the Indian could be broadly discussed, but not the nature of the Indian’s inherent temperament. This explains the resilience and persistence of the melancholic stereotype into the twentieth century. As Jorge Guillermo Nugent and others have stressed, the modern discourses of anthropology and sociology helped to perpetuate the image of an Andean world captured in a “‘frozen,’ arrested time.” While the stereotype of melancholy serves to denounce the oppression of the Indian, it simultaneously serves to determine its character; while it defines the Indian as a heroic figure, it also perpetuates older stereotypes. There is an attempt to approach the Andean world, but at the same time that world is created as a separate and distinc-

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FIGURE 2.6. Francisco Laso, Sowing, n.d. Pencil and pastel on paper, 22.2 × 25.5 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.0-1028 (reverse). Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

tive space. The image of the isolated Andes that Laso’s generation shaped has only recently been questioned through historical explorations of the sustained relationship between indigenous groups and the national state. Creole attitudes toward Indian music can be defined as an incipient indigenism, as we may refer to these Creole approximations to the Andean world, an ideologically charged cultural concept constructed precisely in the very process of Creole approximations. Laso’s paintings condense and perpetuate the complex history of Peruvian melancholy. Formed in the aesthetic discussions of a small group of intellectuals, it would only be through the dissemination of certain key texts— classics such as the Mercurio Peruano, Unanue’s Observaciones sobre el clima de Lima, La Revista de Lima, and Mateo and Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán’s Geografía del Perú, among others—that it would come to be fixed as a hegemonic image. Melancholy emphasized the symbolic division of the nation into two opposing and separate worlds: the Indian and the Creole, the Andes and the coast, Cuzco and Lima. It

The Scene of Approximation served, consequently, to eliminate numerous social and ethnic groups from the national imagination, to level complex traditions, and to exclude, through a dichotomous ordering, the country’s geographic diversity. Melancholy framed the tense and contradictory gestures of Creole approximations through that double anxiety—both cultural and political—that would mark elite appropriations of indigenous cultural forms into the twentieth century. It thus seems logical to end by returning to the two photographs with which this chapter began: in one, the artist is represented in the bourgeois setting of a Parisian photography studio next to two important cosmopolitan Peruvian intellectuals; in the other, the artist assumes a costume that is evidently not his own, clothing that can only be taken as a disguise. Laso’s empathetic gesture is determined by previous traditions of Creole approximations, by dominant stereotypes of the Indian, but, above all, by the complex and ambiguous status of elite constructions of indigenous culture. It is significant that it should have been precisely within the cosmopolitan framework of an emerging cultural and, specifically, literary field that indigenous melancholy came to be imagined.

An Andean Legend: The Burial of the Priest Sadness, mourning, and loss. These were the themes that structured the melancholic stereotype—that combination of Romantic love and political dispossession, of aesthetic sentiment and ethnic identification—through which writers forged a space for their encounter with the Indian. Laso’s Pascana series literally builds on these ideas to construct both the process and the scene of approximation. The three major paintings that form the sequence insistently explore the theme as a central subject of Laso’s pictorial project. The last work in the series is the large canvas whose original title we do not know, but which has significantly come down to us as the Haravicu. This still group, this painting that denies and suppresses all narrative, is paradoxically a painting about storytelling—or, as I will subsequently argue, about communication. Its title probably derives from the Mestizo chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, who in his Royal Commentaries of the Incas defined the haravicus as the poets of the empire who “told of the deeds of their kings and other famous Incas and chief curacas in verse, and taught these poems to their descendants as a tradition, so that the good deeds of their ancestors should be remembered and imitated.” The term, significantly, gained extraordinary popularity in literary circles in the late nineteenth century as the ancient equivalent of modern poets. Laso’s painting owes its title to the figure who sits at the far left and gestures to indicate that he is speaking. His hands are emphasized by contrast to the hands of his companions, which are either hidden from view or tightly clasped together. The narrator’s importance within the painting is subtly emphasized. Unlike the others, who sit directly on the ground, he is seated upon a bundle of textiles that elevates him slightly above the rest. His seniority is stressed by the presence of a

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FIGURE 2.7. Francisco Laso, The Burial of the Priest, ca. 1860-1868. Oil on canvas, 71 × 328 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V-2.0-0213. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

walking stick that lies on the ground beside him. Though the viewer cannot know the specifics of the stories he narrates, the title evokes the haravicu’s poetry, from which the yaraví was said to derive, and which was traditionally associated with the elegy. Indeed, the lowered heads of the figures in the painting, the seriousness of their expressions, and the general gravity that pervades the composition suggest that they are hearing a tragic episode from their history. By midcentury the figure of the storyteller had become a central theme of literary discussion in Laso’s circle. In 1859, La Revista de Lima published an essay on the importance of Peruvian oral history written by René Enrique Tabouelle, secretary of the French delegation in Lima. The text criticized the scant interest that Peruvians demonstrated for their nation’s history, claiming that they knew more of the “conquests of Genghis-Khan than of the great rebellion of Túpac Amaru.” The author expressed his astonishment that no one should have thought of gathering “in the vast expanse of the Republic, those precious memories that are orally transmitted” and “which are the chronicles of the youth of modern nations.” He had no doubt that, given the “innate taste of the Indians for songs and the multitude of their legends,” historians might discover among the “poems disseminated in the mysterious valleys of Peru . . . something analogous to the Ionic epic or, at least, to those of the Middle Ages.” The urgency with which Tabouelle prompted Creoles to record Peruvian oral tradition was based on his conviction that it was a knowledge doomed to perish, a belief based on the bourgeois premise of the weakness of traditional customs and the inability of indigenous populations to withstand the expansion of modernization. Yet Indian customs and society were not perceived by Peruvian Creoles as a

The Scene of Approximation

fading culture, soon to disappear under the pressures of capitalist progress. Instead, they imagined an almost contrary situation in which the indigenous population was conceived as largely impervious to the influx of modernity and the advances of civilization. Tabouelle was further apparently unaware that an interest in oral traditions had a strong presence among the collaborators of the very journal he was writing in. This interest was, however, not expressed in the form of a rigorous ethnography, and there is scarce evidence that any sort of conscientious fieldwork was carried out in this period. Nonetheless, contemporary literature was framed and defined by the idea of oral traditions. The tradición, the genre of short historical stories created by Ricardo Palma (which, significantly, first appeared in La Revista de Lima), evoked orally transmitted stories, as did many of Juana Manuela Gorriti’s Andean tales. Laso himself undertook the representation of an oral tradition in one of his most ambitious works, a bizarre frieze-like composition generally known as The Burial of the Bad Priest, but which, I argue here, should be more correctly identified simply as The Burial of the Priest. The painting is key for understanding the consistency of the discourses of melancholy and approximation that dominated the Creole imagination at midcentury, and it must be addressed before continuing with the discussion of the Pascana series. The painting’s very format evokes the idea of narrative development: the extended horizontal frame presents the movement of a funeral procession. There is a corpse led and flanked by monks, followed by a group of grieving Indians holding large candles. Two glowing angels with flaming swords pave the way for this cortege. Their posture is assured but cautious, their swords of fire raised in defense as they open the way for the group. They march toward the threatening pres-

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Inventing Indigenism ence at the far left of the canvas, where a group of devils dance around what looks like an open grave, or perhaps the mouth of hell, the source of a macabre reddish glow that illuminates this unnaturally dark area of the painting. Nothing is known for certain about this work. In fact, there is no reference to this strange painting before the twentieth century. It has been proposed that Laso painted it in Paris (probably during his third trip to Europe between 1863 and 1864), where tradition states that it was rejected from a salon. The impressive number of preparatory drawings and sketches that survived show that he devoted a great deal of time and effort to this work, a fact that is confirmed by conservation reports pointing to his laborious reworking of the composition. In format as well as in subject, it recalls a number of influential paintings of rural processions presented to the Paris salons in the 1850s, from Gustave Courbet’s Burial at Ornans of 1849 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) to Jules-Adolphe Breton’s Blessing of the Wheat of 1857 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Arras) and Placement of a Calvary of 1858 (Palais BeauxArts, Lille). The first reference to the canvas dates to 1915, when the painter and critic Teófilo Castillo saw it at the home of Laso’s widow. He identified it as The Burial of the Bad Priest and associated it with his own painting, Manchay-puytu, whose daring subject caused a small stir when shown in Lima in 1887. Castillo read Laso’s painting through the lens of his own work, partly inspired by one of Palma’s tradiciones that told the story of the sacrilegious love affair between Don Gaspar de Angulo y Valdivieso, priest of Yanaquihua, and a girl by the name of Ana Sielles. This prohibited love ended tragically when the young priest returned from a journey to Arequipa to find his lover dead. Angulo then desecrated the tomb in desperation and covered the corpse with the jewelry that he had brought his lover. Taking an Indian flute (a quena) and introducing it in a special vessel (known as the puytu), he draws from it a lugubrious sound with which he improvises a yaraví later known as the Manchay-puytu, a Quechua phrase supposedly evoking the horrors of hell (infierno aterrador). The story ends with the priest’s excommunication and a Church prohibition against playing of the song. Castillo’s version of Palma’s story captures the moment after the priest disinterred the body, which lies on the floor in the middle of the room, precisely when he was about to play the quena in the puytu. The macabre detail of the woman’s mutilated foot reveals that Castillo took elements from earlier versions of the story in which the flute was made out of the woman’s femur. The scene is set in a barrel-vaulted room with Spanish tiling, where the only Andean reference is the ceramic puytu on the ground beside the woman’s body. This is the first and earliest image of this bizarre instrument, otherwise known only through artifacts associated with twentieth-century southern Andean indigenists. Like the puytu’s refined black surface, Castillo’s historically imprecise composition exploits the more fantastic and melodramatic aspects of the story. His own reading of Laso’s painting detected an anti-clerical message, proposing that the work condemned the excesses of exploitative priests, a constant theme in liberal defenses of the indigenous population. The critic identified the angels as the virtues and describes them

The Scene of Approximation

FIGURE. 2. 8 . Teófilo Castillo, The Invention of the Quena (Manchay-puytu), 1886. Oil on canvas, 123 × 180 cm. Private collection, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

as humbled by their defeat in the battle for the priest’s soul, which they lose to the vices that await the corpse on the far left. This interpretation is improbable in light of what is known about Laso’s Catholicism, a faith he was able to accommodate to his liberal politics, but it is also disproved by elements in the painting itself, for if the priest had been condemned, why do the angels lead his corpse, and if he has exploited his flock, why do the Indians follow in such evident grief? The source of the confusion seems to lie in the association of Laso’s painting with Palma’s story of the Manchay-puytu, which was published in 1877, long after Laso’s death. Yet this was but one among many variants that circulated in Peru during the nineteenth century. Laso most likely drew on La quena, the most elaborate and widely known narrative by Gorriti, a writer close to the painter’s circle, whose text first appeared as a serial in El Comercio in 1851 and was reprinted at least three times during Laso’s lifetime. One of the few literary versions published before Palma’s tradición, Gorriti’s text traced the origins of the quena to the priest’s gesture of singing sad melodies with a flute fabricated from the dead woman’s femur. Unlike most versions of the story, where the woman is the Indian victim of a White figure of authority represented by the priest, in Gorriti’s version the situation is reversed. The woman, Rosa, is the daughter of a powerful nobleman, and the priest, Hernán de Camporeal, the illegitimate son of a Spanish aristocrat and a noble Indian woman of Inca descent. Romantic love serves to allegorize ethnoracial differences through stories that allude to the transgression of established hi-

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Inventing Indigenism erarchies and to always unrealized or fruitless desires in which national unification is continually subverted by unlikely unions and their tragic outcomes. In Gorriti’s tale, the love that unites the couple is conflicted by both class and race, but Rosa succumbs to the romantic evocation of Camporeal’s heroic Inca ancestors. As the last survivor of a noble lineage, Camporeal is the guardian of the Incas’ secrets. In Gorriti’s version, a simple account of the romantic origins of the lugubrious sound of the quena is framed by the story of the Indians’ heroic resistance to colonial authority, a fight that would be made possible by fantastic treasures hidden in a secret underground city, for Camporeal has a double identity: he is also Chaska Naui Inca, the name he adopted in the sacred, covert recesses holding the treasure that he is to use to liberate his people from the Spanish yoke. In Gorriti’s story, Camporeal is not originally a priest, for he only takes his religious vows after being deceived by an evil rival into believing that Rosa has betrayed him. The grieving Indians who follow the priest’s corpse in Laso’s painting are thus not the victims of the evil machinations of a country priest, but a nation grieving the death of their leader. Laso’s Manchay-puytu could thus be interpreted as nothing less than a representation of the burial of the last Inca. When Camporeal abducts Rosa’s corpse, he takes her to his house, a palace built over the ancient ruins that hold the treasure and the promise for liberation. This, it seems, is the building that appears to the far left of Laso’s painting. Carefully distinguished from the landscape in the background, this promontory is clearly not a natural phenomenon but an old ruin, on top of which can be seen the bell tower and the outer walls of a colonial structure. This would be the secret retreat, “the palace constructed over pagan ruins,” where Camporeal took Rosa. But if Laso’s painting is clearly indebted to Gorriti’s story, the moment he chose to represent—the burial of the priest—is absent from all published versions of the legend. A rather different account, recorded by Clements Markham in his diary of travels through the southern Andean province of Ayacucho, concludes with the image of the dead priest being carried away to hell by three demons. Versions of similar narratives recorded by twentieth-century anthropologists also tell of the souls of sinners being carried away by “cars of fire.” Laso’s painting thus seems to be an elaboration of the story, combining elements from various versions of this widely circulated legend. Obscure and multiple, the origins of the Manchay-puytu point in different directions. Nicole Fourtané has traced its distant sources to a fi fteenth-century Spanish sermon book containing an exemplary story of the illicit love affair of a priest, as well as to José Cadalso’s Noches lúgubres (Lugubrious nights) of 1772. It was apparently in this form, as a moralizing story for missionary use, that it entered Andean oral tradition. Other aspects, such as the macabre origins of the quena, were vaguely insinuated in late eighteenth-century sources. The fact that these musical instruments could be made from animal bones apparently gave rise to versions of the story in which they were also manufactured from human remains. But although Sicramio loosely refers to the “painful and lugubrious” source of the instrument, there is no mention of this specific version before the mid-nineteenth

The Scene of Approximation century, when the two strands of the story, couched in the language of Romanticism, were brought together in the Manchay-puytu. The indigenous origins of the narrative cannot be ascertained because we know of it mostly through literary accounts. Not a single version of the story in the form of an indigenous oral tradition has been recorded by anthropologists apart from a yaraví that seems to evoke earlier literary versions. Two related stories transcribed by anthropologists in the course of the twentieth century, “Issichay puytu” and “Malika y el cura,” relate the tale of the desperate man who desecrates the tomb of his lover but do not account for the invention of the quena, nor for the melancholic music associated with the puytu. Everything points to the fact that both the legend and the mythical instrument that it evokes are, rather, indigenist creations. One of the first complete formulations of the narrative appears in an unpublished diary written by the French doctor Carlos César Deglane in 1848. He recounts how he was awakened by a haunting melancholic sound in the middle of the night and, unable to resist its beckoning, rushed out into the dark streets of Arequipa to find a group of Indians playing the puytu. The legend is proposed as an expression of the Creole encounter with the Indian: the account centers on and is validated by the experience of direct personal contact with the indigenous informant. This confrontation marks the very core of the Manchay-puytu as it simultaneously defines its literary value. In some cases, as in Palma, the story arises out of a popular song; in others, as in Markham, the legitimacy of the yaraví is produced by describing the circumstances under which the story is recorded. Gorriti, too, claims to be transmitting an oral tradition through the subtitle of her narrative of the origins of the quena as a “Peruvian legend.” These stories are cast by those who wrote them not as original literary texts, products of the writer’s imagination, but as direct transcriptions of prior traditions and, specifically, of indigenous legends. Creole intellectuals played a curious role in this process. Their relevance as authors, their literary originality, derived from their ability to transcribe rather than to invent, to repeat rather than to create. The stories they chose to retrieve gave shape to a local folklore (a notion itself defined within the framework of modern ideas of cultural originality) in which their texts were conceived as creative individual interpretations of anonymous collective works. Literature thus provided a strategy that allowed urban intellectuals to participate in the collective creations of a people. Yet the emerging Creole interest in indigenous culture confronted the obstacle of language. Though it had been known and used by elites during the colonial period, in modern Peru most educated urban intellectuals no longer knew Quechua. Regional notables, who tended to associate it with a lowly plebeian culture, left it behind, as did those who increasingly settled in the capital, where Quechua seems to have had a lesser presence since the eighteenth century. It is doubtful that public figures such as Laso would have known more than a few words of Quechua, most likely remnants of an informal familiarity with the language, usually acquired through proximity with indigenous servants in childhood. In theory

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Inventing Indigenism and in practice, Quechua was not a valid official tongue: elites only envisioned the incorporation of the indigenous population into the modern nation through the effective abandonment of native languages and traditions. How to reconcile the explicit interest in indigenous oral traditions with the dominant vision of elite national progress? It is no coincidence that one of the clearest early statements on the status of Quechua should appear in a text written in 1874 on the poetic value of “the Peruvian language,” in which Manuel de Mendiburu proposed the forced teaching of Spanish to the indigenous population as the only means of avoiding the situation of perpetuating “two nations that look upon each other with mischance and disdain; the one very numerous and ignorant, on the other side of the cordillera, another that speaks for itself and by itself in the name of unity and national autonomy.” This is a powerful acknowledgment of Creole supremacy over representation, to which we will return, but in terms of the discussion on language, it demonstrates that the archaeological, historical, and literary value of Quechua was a scholarly Creole prerogative: it was not studied as a living tongue, but as a practical tool used by religious institutions for missionary purposes, or distantly examined by philologists for its archaeological interest. The remaking of a colonial drama such as Ollantay into an emblem of an ancient Inca literary tradition reveals how language was transformed into an archaeological artifact. Folklore and ethnography would develop late in Peru. Even toward the end of the century one finds only scattered fragments of an incipient ethnography that emerged as part of a more sustained interest in reconstructing the vestiges of a glorified Inca past. But this general indifference to actual indigenous contexts nonetheless coexisted with an avowed elite interest in Andean storytelling and a certain indigenist obsession with communication. We could claim that the insistent retelling of the Manchay-puytu elaborated the ideal of ethnography, not by forging a discipline founded on field work, but by materializing, perhaps for the first time, an ethnographic desire. Once the Manchay-puytu entered the literary repertoire of urban intellectuals, it fostered a spate of repetitions. Gorriti’s story would be followed by versions by Ricardo Palma in the 1870s, Clorinda Matto de Turner and Germán Leguía y Martínez in the 1880s, and Dora Mayer de Zulen as late as 1928. This sequence traces the history of the formation of a national literary tradition: Leguía’s drama would be supervised by Ricardo Palma, and Matto de Turner would closely follow Gorriti’s version. For this folklore to exist as a recognizable entity, it had to be put into play, recounted, recorded, and repeated: paradoxically constituted in the very act of its reconfiguration into something else, at the very moment when it is construed as passing from an oral to a literary tradition, from anonymous collective expression to the authority of the named individual voice, from the bounds of the vernacular to the logic of an international bourgeois culture, or as Bauman and Briggs conclude, as they erected the binary structure of tradition and modernity. As the history of the Manchay-puytu enacts the appropriation and reinvention of an Andean legend through the tale of an impossible love between a Creole and

The Scene of Approximation an Indian, it asserts the difference that separates those categories. Like the melancholic sentiment that unites the poet with nature, or which bridges the gap between urban intellectuals and the rural peasantry, the modern aesthetic and literary field was itself constructed through its others: the imaginary and never fully present indigenous poets. As elites affirmed their inscription in international bourgeois intellectual circuits, they produced a figure of indigenous culture: the antinomy of the high and the popular that characterized modernity was further grafted onto an ethnoracial divide. That separation itself becomes the central subject of these stories, which insistently project the fantasy of communication. It is no doubt significant that these narratives came to be paradoxically fixed within another widespread stereotype, that of the inscrutable Indian, which the following section explores.

The Inscrutable Indian Narratives of approximation evoke and presuppose the image of the silent Indian who refuses to communicate with the Creole, an enduring figure in the elite imagination. As did other stereotypes that resurfaced in the writings of Laso’s generation, the theme originated in the early colonial period but gained new relevance in the context of the rise of archaeology and descriptive geography in the late eighteenth century. When in 1794 an anonymous author accused the editors of the Mercurio Peruano of always returning to the same topics and thus limiting the scope of the journal, the editors responded by arguing that this was partly to be explained by the fact that it was difficult to have access to ancient monuments given the “mysterious prudence with which they are concealed by those who possess them, perhaps without benefit for themselves.” The ideas contained in this short statement—that the Indians are the only rightful heirs of the pre- Columbian past and its archaeological remains, that out of fear or egotism they refuse to share their heritage with non-indigenous elites, and that they lack the ability to make their knowledge and their properties productive—would be repeated and recreated obsessively during most of the nineteenth century. Together they form the basis of the stereotype of the inscrutable Indian. As with the image of melancholy, a simple character trait immediately evokes a complex yet highly codified set of associations that structure and explain inequality. The inscrutable Indian thus became an obstacle for elite knowledge. As the image of the insurmountable Andes had already become a symbol as a barrier to progress, the character of its inhabitants now became a further impediment for the constitution of modern Peru. The Indian’s physiognomy was described as inexpressive, taken as a solidly opaque surface that could not be read, that was completely impenetrable to the outsider’s gaze. This inscrutability metaphorically justified and defined the marginalization of the indigenous population from society that was enacted in other spheres. A parallel can be drawn with nineteenthcentury liberal discourses that stressed the incorporation of the indigenous pop-

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Inventing Indigenism ulation into civic life at the same time that very population was being increasingly isolated and segregated. The Indians’ silence, a form of self-imposed exclusion, amounted to the creation of a space that resists scientific description and ultimately the mapping of the national territory. These arguments fit official political discourse, which could transfer onto the indigenous population the fault for their own marginalization from the nation: it was they, not the Creole state, who were to be blamed for the separation. It should not be surprising that among the best-known and most widely disseminated legends of the nineteenth century, stories of Inca gold secretly guarded by the suffering Indians for the moment of liberation should have served to perpetuate the stereotype of the inscrutable Indian. The theme already figured in the background of Gorriti’s La quena and would later emerge as the central subject of her story El tesoro de los Incas (Leyenda histórica) (The treasure of the Incas [Historical legend]), first published in Lima in 1864. As do so many modern narratives centered on the indigenous population, it evokes and revives older colonial discourses. Clements Markham recorded two versions in the early 1850s, and one of his informants, Modesto Basadre, later published his own account. Palma and Matto de Turner also included similar stories in their tradiciones, and the legend would continue to be reenacted well into the twentieth century. The very mention of gold inevitably evokes the originary moment of conquest. The revival of the Black Legend during the nineteenth century had placed greed, not religion, as the primary motivation of the conquerors. In the stories spun around this theme, the hidden treasures are usually part of the ransom offered to the Spaniards by Atahualpa, which the Indians hide upon hearing of the Inca’s death. They then make an oath to conceal the gold and use it only for the collective project of liberation. This explains why stories of hidden treasure are often centered on the moment of independence. One popular version describes how the curaca Mateo Pumacahua financed the 1814 Cuzco Rebellion with Inca treasures. The very element that was perceived to be the basis of the colonial system was also to be its undoing. The probity of Indians—who, rather than squander the treasure, choose to live in poverty and sacrifice personal riches in favor of a collective cause—contrasts with the greed motivating the conquerors and their descendants. When an Indian, through torture or seduction, betrays the secret, death and depredation immediately follow. Related stories collected by Johann Jakob von Tschudi tell how the Indians withheld their knowledge of the location of rich mines in order to avoid ensuing exploitation as laborers. The examples he cites serve to prove “the reluctance of the Indians to disclose the secret of their hidden treasures, and their indifference about obtaining wealth for themselves.” In Gorriti’s tales, the Incas’ treasure is described not merely as gold bullion but as objects and idols wrought from precious stones and metals. The emerging recognition of the archaeological and aesthetic value of pre-Columbian material culture, and the market that arose to capitalize this value, no doubt permeated these fantastic narratives of love and intrigue. Yet this was also a time when exploiting

The Scene of Approximation pre-Columbian sites was a generalized and legitimized entrepreneurial undertaking, blatantly considered a variant of mining. Companies formed by scientists and merchants, set up under names like Huacas del Inca, formally and openly undertook the business of treasure-hunting. In a context where the dividing line between looting and archaeology was mostly inexistent, the exploitation of ancient treasures resonated with ideas of cultural legitimacy, political conquest, and economic dispossession. The implicit avowal of exploitation and abuse leads to imaginings of revenge: in La quena, Hernán de Camporeal is charged by his mother to liberate his people, not with “hatred, that would want the blood of their masters, but with enlightenment that will make them equal.” These stories thus establish an apology for silence and a confession of guilt, a fear of rebellion and a muted belief in its justification. Gorriti subtly (but sometimes explicitly) evokes these contradictory feelings of culpability and remorse. The moral high ground always rests with the indigenous population. Laso himself, in defending the Indian’s character from accusations of mistrust and avarice, wrote: If, in general, the Indian is cautious, avaricious and ungrateful, it isn’t because these bad qualities are organic to the indigenous race. In the same circumstances as our Indians, Caucasians would also be reserved and would answer everything with their manan cancho. . . . How could the Indian be expansive or happy when he is brutalized by authorities and masters? . . . The Indian then, has every reason to be distrustful, as would an Englishman if he were treated in the same manner.

He claims that when an Indian is well treated, as in the coastal town of Chorrillos, he is sociable and does not refuse the Creole his goods. As did other liberal writers, Laso rejected biological and determinist explanations in favor of social and political causes for the Indian’s mistrustful character, yet he ultimately affirmed the basic elements of the stereotype. Approximation presupposes this inscrutable Indian. The image of treasure simultaneously evokes both the distance separating Creoles and Indians, and the Creole desire for communication. Paradoxically, storytelling, the medium through which this separation is ideally to be resolved, also becomes the medium through which it is enacted. Hidden in deep underground recesses, natural caves, and subterranean cities, the treasures become metaphors of darkness and concealment, of inaccessible knowledge and exclusion. The Indian, wrapped in Romantic mystery, becomes a privileged object of Creole desire. In El tesoro de los incas, Gorriti asks, What thoughts burn under the patient resignation with which they endure their misfortune? That festive costume, preserved always next to their eternal dress of mourning, what hopes does it reveal? and, what is that secret, transmitted from generation to generation and so religiously guarded among the tatters of their misery? Learn their beautiful language and hear the stories of their long nights around

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Inventing Indigenism the fire of their huts, and you will believe to hear the symbolic dirges of the exiles of Sion under the willows of Babylon.

Gorriti creates the scene of approximation, a space where difference is simultaneously asserted and sublimated. The Creole’s interest in oral traditions did not emphasize content; they were not so much interested in specific indigenous knowledge, customs, or folklore as obsessed by the idea of contact. The Indian who speaks thus became a privileged figure in the Creole imagination. Texts by urban intellectuals are frequently framed as originating in the words of the Incas or their rightful heirs, the contemporary Indians. The use of the idea of an oral tradition in the cultural and political legitimation of the Creole can be traced to the period of independence. In 1824, Unanue—who had previously written about the stubborn, distrustful, and mysterious character of the Indian—offered an early demonstration of the utility of this rhetorical stratagem. The author recounts wandering through the ruins of Santa and being plagued by questions about the origins and history of those who had created the ancient monuments, which force him to reflect upon the problems involved in the reconstruction of pre-Columbian history: The dead do not speak. In peoples of recent origin oral traditions can fill the gaps of history. From the conquest of Peru until the present, a few generations are enough to form it. In these rustic places, men live long, and from father to sons they recount the things of the past.

FIGURE 2. 9. Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo. Frontispiece in Mariano Eduardo de

Rivero and Juan Diego de Tschudi [Johann Jacob von Tschudi], Antigüedades peruanas (Vienna: Imprenta Imperial de la Corte y del Estado, 1851). Private collection, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

The Scene of Approximation

FIGURE 2.10. Leopold Muller, lithographer, frontispiece in Mariano Eduardo de

Rivero and Juan Diego de Tschudi [Johann Jacob von Tschudi], Antigüedades peruanas: Album (Vienna: Imprenta Imperial de la Corte y del Estado, 1851). Museo de Arte de Lima Library. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

In the middle of this thought, an elderly Indian appears and strikes up a dialogue with the author. The words Unanue attributes to his informant are but paraphrases from Garcilaso about Inca Yupanqui’s magnanimous government and peaceful conquests, yet they help frame his praise of the patriot armies and validate his opinions about the course of contemporary events. A similar strategy is very evidently deployed in the frontispiece of the 1851 edition of Rivero and Tschudi’s Antigüedades peruanas, in which a generic Inca extends his arm outward, apparently pointing to a landscape in the distance. Although the figures are not identified, the lithograph is based on an image previously published by Rivero in the short-lived newspaper El Ateneo Americano of 1847 under the heading “The Inca Manco Capac and the Coya Mama Ocllo Huaco, his wife, founders of the Inca Empire.” The frame of the image limits our view of the landscape, barely allowing a glimpse of a city in the background but insinuating a vast territorial expanse. Placed in the context of the book itself, the extended arm of the Inca serves another function: by also pointing in the direction of the title page, it serves to represent Rivero’s work as an extension of the Inca’s words.

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FIGURE 2.11. Leopold Muller, lithographer, View of the Ruins of the Temple of Pacha-

camac. In Mariano Eduardo de Rivero and Juan Diego de Tschudi [Johann Jacob von Tschudi], Antigüedades peruanas: Album (Vienna: Imprenta Imperial de la Corte y del Estado, 1851), plate 54. Museo de Arte de Lima Library. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

This legitimating strategy is repeated on the title page of the album that accompanies the book. Here a rather bizarre reconstruction of the gateway known as the Portal of the Sun in Tiahuanaco serves as a frame for a series of portraits of the Incas. Below the gateway an Indian man points to the banner bearing the names of the authors and the title of the work. The theme reappears in one of the album’s final illustrations, in which an Indian gestures toward a view of ancient ruins while addressing the traveler or archaeologist who sits at his feet and appears to listen attentively to his words. Buntinx has perceptively noted the crack separating the two figures, a detail that emphasizes the distance that needs to be bridged. The contemporary Indian, heir of the Incas, thus becomes the intermediary between the Creole republic and the legacies of the pre-Columbian past. The Creole who holds the privilege of communication with the Indian in turn becomes authorized to speak on the Indian’s behalf. Elites act as ventriloquists, entitled to speak not only for the indigenous populations but also for their history, an authority that would be reaffirmed as the modern disciplines of archaeology, philology, and anthropol-

The Scene of Approximation ogy steadily consolidated over the following decades in spaces of knowledge far distant from those whose histories were being told.

The Rhetoric of Approximation: The Pascana Series Laso’s Pascana series weaves together the different strands of Creole discourses of approximation and the emerging tropes of an idealized indigenous culture. It is a sequence formed by what are apparently straightforward paintings, almost selfevident in their compositional clarity. Yet these simple depictions of Indians resting in the Andean sierra evoke the paradoxical impression that they need to be deciphered. Confronted by these paintings, we somehow sense that more lies beneath the surface than is immediately evident. I suggest that these are performative pieces, that what we see is a dense synthesis of a complex pictorial process, one that is structured through the idea of Creole approximations to the Andean world. The Haravicu’s explicit reference to storytelling evokes not only Creole literary narratives but also the contemporary European interest in oral traditions and the pictorial iconography that developed in its wake. Often set in rural landscapes, European images of storytelling built upon the longing for rural forms of life in the context of the rapid industrialization of the countryside. The Haravicu evokes the sort of attentive, even pious, listening present in contemporary French scenes of rural life. It reveals a similar nostalgia for the authenticity of traditional cultures that draws from the surge of peasant themes that erupted on the European scene in the 1850s. It is not by chance that Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras was compared to the peasants of Léopold Robert, or that it should have appeared on the same page of L’Illustration as a reproductive engraving of an anecdotal Halte des bohémiens (Bohemians Resting) by German artist Ludwig Knaus, a student of Couture who also showed work at the 1855 Paris Universal Exposition, an event that gave new legitimacy to peasant themes. At the same exhibition Rudolph W. A. Lehmann, another German student in Paris, presented a scene from Alphonse de Lamartine’s Graziella (1852) showing a group of Italian peasants attentively listening to stories being read by the protagonist, a painting that more clearly evokes the compositional clarity of Laso’s Pascana series. The equivalence between different traditional cultures was inescapable at a moment when European painting undertook the larger project of establishing its modernity through the figuration of its others. Italian, Bohemian, and Peruvian peasants play a similar role in an international bourgeois discourse built around a sequence of oppositions between orality and literacy, provincialism and cosmopolitanism, local and universal that historically determined the very idea of modernity. Yet the painter’s relationship to his subjects presupposes neither the relative cultural proximity of French or German artists to the peasantry, nor the vast geographic and cultural distance separating European artists from their Orientalist subjects. In fact, Laso builds on these discourses but radically transforms and reframes European pictorial precedents. This difference becomes apparent through com-

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Inventing Indigenism parison to a major European painting of a comparable subject, Horace Vernet’s The Parliamentary and the Medjeles (also known as Arab Chief Telling a Tale), first exhibited at the 1834 Paris Salon. The viewer is given immediate and unrestricted access to the scene and allowed to survey the landscape from a dominant and privileged position. The figures in the foreground do not sit in a closed circle but leave an open space that serves as a point of entry to the scene. The viewer looks through this empty space in the middle of the canvas, only to be guided to the figure of an Arab man who, in turn, looks behind him. It is difficult to focus on the main group. The broader composition, organized along two diagonals that seem to meet in the far horizon, serves as a sort of funnel, literally forcing the viewer to focus on the vast landscape in the background and the events taking place there. None of the figures look out at the viewer; immersed in their activities, they are oblivious to the fact that they are being watched. Vernet deploys the illusion of transparency and the picturesque strategies that Linda Nochlin so keenly describes, and that allows the “controlling gaze” of the West to fix upon an exoticized and distant Orient. Laso produced a painting that resists transparency. Favoring the broad definition of masses and minimizing superfluous items, he rejected the illusionism created by the minute description of costumes and ethnographic details in Vernet’s painting. He also constructed a scene that forefronts and complicates the place of the viewer. The Indians at the center occupy almost the entire surface of the painting, effectively blocking the view of the landscape. The standing figure in the foreground has her back turned to the viewer, further deflecting the spectator’s gaze. As the midpoint of a triangle formed by the slanting backs of the storyteller on the left and the figure on the other extreme, it also serves to anchor and unify the composition. But the imaginary sides of this triangle do not function as orthogonals; rather, they run parallel to the picture surface, negating any indication of depth. The viewer is thus constantly forced to focus on the foreground rather than the landscape behind. The storyteller in Laso’s Haravicu, depicted in a strict profile, clearly does not direct himself to the viewer. His audience is formed by the group of Indians who sit with him, their heads tilted slightly downward, attentively concentrating on his words. He speaks to them, and he does so in a space—the Andean landscape— that had already been defined as distant and inaccessible. In denying from the outset an easy access to the scene, the painting resists the viewer’s gaze and refuses to legitimate its narratives of mastery. Yet the composition does not block out the viewer entirely. The standing figure is placed slightly off-center to the left so that the circle formed by the group of Indians is not completely closed. A space is left open, allowing a point of access to the scene. It is precisely at this point on the right-hand side of the painting that the viewer’s gaze is met by that of an Indian woman, the only figure who is not entirely self-absorbed. She serves a crucial function within the painting: by acknowledging the viewer, she initiates the exchange around which the entire composition is structured, for it is her gaze that turns the spectator into a participant.

The Scene of Approximation

FIGURE 2.12. Horace Vernet, The Parliamentary and the Medjeles (also known as Arab

Chief Telling a Tale), Paris Salon of 1834. Oil on canvas, 39 × 54½ in. Musée Condé, Chantilly, PE438, © RMN-Grand Palais (domaine de Chantilly)/René-Gabriel Ojéda.

Her signaling outward is what bridges the distance between the spectator and the scene represented in the painting. The open space is what we could call a “constitutive blank,” to borrow the notion that Wolfgang Kemp usefully introduced to art history from German reception aesthetics, pointing to the constructive character of the “carefully calculated discontinuities” and the focused incompleteness of works that must necessarily be “brought to completion in and through the beholder.” Yet the viewer in Laso’s painting not only observes the scene but is, in turn, observed in a way in which the power of the spectatorial gaze is actually reversed. The beholder here is clearly not the privileged omniscient viewer that Orientalist painting presupposed but rather a figure dependent on the gaze of the woman in the painting, who offers the only significant possibility of penetrating the mysterious composition. Yet her side glance is ambiguous, almost questioning; it functions more as an acknowledgment of the viewer than an invitation to the scene. Far from being in control of the situation, the beholder’s place is determined by that outward gaze and by the organization of the painting, which further decenters her position, locating her in a marginal place within the represented scene. Laso makes no effort to facilitate this imaginary exchange. The tense dialogue that the painting establishes with the viewer forms the very essence

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FIGURE 2.13. Anonymous, Preparatory Photograph for the

“Haravicu,” ca. 1857–1865. Albumen silver print on cardboard, 23.3 × 27.7 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.11-0056. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 2.14. Anonymous, Preparatory Photograph for the “Haravicu,” ca. 1857–1865. Albumen silver print on cardboard, 21 × 23.8 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.11-0055. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 2.15. Anonymous, Preparatory Photograph for the “Haravicu,” ca. 1857–1865. Albumen silver print on cardboard, 18.5 × 24.5 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.11-0054. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 2.16.

Anonymous, Preparatory Photograph for the “Haravicu,” ca. 1857–1865. Albumen silver print on cardboard, 26 × 22.5 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.11-0053. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

The Scene of Approximation

FIGURE 2.17. Anonymous, Preparatory Photograph for the “Haravicu,” ca. 1857–1865. Albumen silver print on cardboard, 26 × 22.5 cm. Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

These photographs operate as a sort of fragmented tableau vivant, posed and acted out to be later projected onto the pictorial stage. Laso’s method perhaps explains why the stillness of his compositions evokes the motionless pause of the live tableau rather than the arrested movement of the photographic instant. The correspondence between the studies and the figures in the final painting reveals that Laso had already decided on the general arrangement of the composition before the photographs were taken. They seem to take the place of the usual preliminary drawings and possibly preceded the oil sketch now in the collection of the Museo de Arte de Lima, in which Laso regrouped the figures in the photographs to give shape to a unified composition. Save for a few changes, such as the significant replacement of the oxen in the background for llamas, and the use of a lighter palette, the final version of the painting closely follows the sketch. The direct relationship between the preparatory photographs and the final work points to the importance of both the existence of the photograph of Laso in indigenous dress and its crucial omission from the sketch and from the painting. By excluding

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FIGURE 2.18 . Francisco Laso, Study for the “Haravicu,” ca. 1860–1869. Oil on canvas, 27.1 × 34.9 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.0-217. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

The Scene of Approximation The Pascana in the Cordillera seems to have been created in the late 1850s, after the Indian Encampment and before the Haravicu. When it was shown in 1861 (apparently it was the only painting in the series to have been exhibited in Laso’s lifetime), a critic reviewing the exhibition mentioned that the work had been lying in the painter’s studio for a long time, which would confirm a date in the 1850s. Finally, all evidence indicates that the Haravicu is the last work in the series. Traditionally it has been assigned to 1868, though with no supporting evidence. The date can, however, be confirmed by Laso’s appearance in the photograph, where he seems to be older than in portraits of the previous decade. A later date could also explain the imprecise quality of the landscape in the background if we imagine that perhaps Laso’s death in mid-1869 interrupted the completion of the painting. The Indian Encampment, Laso’s first exploration of the subject, is the only painting in the series for which numerous preparatory drawings and sketches survive. The central figure, a woman spinning, is based on a drawing and a small oil painting that Laso made during his trip to southern Peru in 1849. Save for the addition of a wide-brimmed hat, or montera, the figure in the painting is virtually the same as the one represented in these early sketches. The image of a man carrying a load uphill, to the right, is also based on an undated preparatory sketch in the Museo de Arte de Lima. Other sketches reveal Laso exploring alternative compositions, some organized around the figure of a man playing music with a quena (fig. 2.6). A more finished study, arranged in an elongated horizontal format, develops all the main groups that are present in the final painting. The relaxed poses and the sense of community of the mute conversation represented on the canvas suggest that Laso first conceived the scene as an idyllic and idealized Andean pastoral. The solemnity and the contrived arrangement of the figures in the final version of the composition point to a different conception. There is a clear evocation both in subject and style of Jean-François Millet’s Harvesters Resting (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), exhibited at the 1853 Salon and which he could have seen during his second stay in Paris. The paintings, cast in golden tones, depict a similar arrangement of figures grouped around the preparation of a meal. The biblical title that Millet originally gave his painting (Ruth and Boaz) indicates a clear intention to elevate the peasant subjects through reference to historical genre. Yet Laso’s final composition marks a departure from standard European representations of peasant subjects. The Indian Encampment includes a figure that transforms the meaning of the composition, suggesting that the issue of approximation was already at the center of Laso’s pictorial program. Sitting among the main group in the foreground, at the very center of the canvas, is a figure dressed in a simple poncho with his back to the spectator. His tightly cut hair contrasts sharply with that of the rest of the figures as it does not seem to correspond to the image of the indigenous subjects of the painting, who are identified by monteras or by the arrangement of their hair in thick black tufts or braids. Although the fact that this figure turns his back to us makes any definite identification impossible, both the cut and the overall shape and turn of the head recall Laso’s self-portrait of 1851

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FIGURE 2.19. Francisco Laso, Indian Woman Spinning, 1849. Oil on canvas, 40.5 × 23.5 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima. Gift of Manuel Cisneros Sánchez and Teresa Blondet de Cisneros, 1986.1.10. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

(fig. 1.15). The figure’s ambiguous identity is further enhanced by Laso’s placement on the ground beside him of a montera and a walking stick. If he were to wear this hat, he would be indistinguishable from the other figures represented in the painting. Though he cannot be identified with any degree of certainty, the suggestion that it could be a non-Indian immediately evokes the issue of approximation. The veiled personal references in the painting show Laso struggling to find ways of framing an encounter, though there is yet no obvious attempt to engage the viewer in this quest.

FIGURE 2. 20. Francisco Laso, Figure Carrying a Load, Study for the “Indian Encampment,” ca. 1850–1857. Pencil and charcoal on paper, 27 × 21.6 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.0-1007. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 2. 21. Jean-François Millet, Harvesters Resting (Ruth and Boaz), 1850–1853. Oil

on canvas, 26½ × 471/8 in. (67.3 × 119.7 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Mrs. Martin Brimmer, 06.2421.

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Inventing Indigenism The Pascana in the Cordillera, clearly the next painting in the series, directly derives from both the disposition and the gestures of the three figures in the background of the Indian Encampment, which had previously been represented as a subsidiary grouping in one of the preparatory sketches for the painting and was later to be developed further in a separate drawing. These three figures become the center of the Pascana in the Cordillera, where they acquire a life-size presence and a new monumentality. Filling the entire frame of the painting, they are pushed to the foreground and confined to a dramatically compressed pictorial space. The viewer is confronted by the massive volume of the life-sized figures that come together to form an almost monolithic barrier, one that obstructs access to the landscape. The composition at once translates and contests elite visions of the Andes as an impediment to the nation’s material progress and to their mastery over the land. The viewer’s low eye level, an unusual and unexpected viewpoint in nineteenth-century images, negates the surveyor’s gaze and any dominance over the scene. The effect on the viewer is an overwhelming sense of displacement and subjection. Yet the composition also opens up a space that establishes the final dialogic intent and points to the visual strategies that Laso was to deploy in the Haravicu. Here, too, the viewer is placed on a slightly off-center axis, and the entry to the painting is mediated by the outward glance of the crouching figure to the right. His face is barely visible, partly covered by the folded arm, partly hidden in the shadows cast by the hat, so that the viewer cannot distinguish the nature of his outward gaze, which is nonetheless confrontational. The presence of the pre- Columbian ceramic of a bound figure that Laso had already used in the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras to represent the Indian’s oppression here appears in an even more broken and ruinous state. It brings forth one of the central subtexts of the painting, that of an Indian memory marked and defined by the conquest, a dualistic history in which Creoles came to be generally figured as heirs of the conquerors. These paintings re-create the double, simultaneous movement of approximation and distancing that was already implicit in Creole representations of communication. Although in the Indian Encampment Laso created a more distant scene, in the Pascana in the Cordillera he pushed the figures aggressively to the foreground in a way that almost seems to invade the viewer’s space, making the presence of the Indian figures both impossible to dominate or to avoid. This confrontation is more subtly managed in the Haravicu, where Laso created an imaginary space for the viewer, who is more clearly and openly interpellated by the female figure on the right. Seen as a sequence, Laso’s Pascana series reveals a process of exploration of ways of engaging and involving the viewer. The complex construction of this explicit address, which has few parallels in contemporary painting, reveals a profound thinking through of both pictorial practice and the ethical import of a national painting. Each painting in the series can, in fact, be understood as a partial solution to a similar problem: turning the surface of the painting into a stage that actively constructs and enables the process of an approximation to the Andean world.

The Scene of Approximation Though I have presupposed a Creole viewer, I have not directly confronted the question of the possible audience for these works. There is no doubt that they were intended for the intellectual circles of the capital, the context in which they were created, first exhibited, and discussed. Yet Laso repeatedly expressed his skepticism regarding the possibilities of an informed public for art in Peru. In rejecting colonial traditions and reframing the status of painting, Laso’s generation also undermined the social foundations on which pictorial practice had been grounded. Painting became a privileged and even aristocratic profession, which made it a limited and paradoxically marginal practice in Peruvian society. The task of creating an informed public was imagined as a long-term project, the results of which only future generations of Peruvians would see. In their own time, however, Laso’s generation could only lament the absence of the public they sought. The difficulties that Laso imposed on viewers of his paintings, demanding of them both will and effort to enter into an imaginary engagement with his Indian subjects, suggests that he probably envisaged an ideal, hypothetical spectator, a citizen of a future and more enlightened society. In 1860 Laso wrote: Such is the essence of the Indian’s goodness, that even when he shouldn’t compromise with the race of the oppressors, he knows how to be grateful when he finds some superior being who shows him consideration. There are a thousand deeds of gratitude on the part of the Indian towards their protectors. In what province is it not told that such and such a man has become rich because an Indian friend disclosed a treasure? Aren’t there many officers who relate abnegated acts of Indian soldiers?

Behind these words lies the paternalism that pervades the writings of even the most radical Creole defenders of the indigenous population. His references to oppression and melancholy inevitably stand as an appeal to the feelings of one of those “superior beings” of which he writes. Likewise, if the Pascanas suggest the possibility of communication, their effect ultimately depends on the willingness of the (Creole) viewer to participate in the exchange. The extent to which this ambiguous invitation was heeded by Laso’s contemporaries is difficult to assess. There is a general absence of extensive discussions of these works, both during and after Laso’s lifetime. The only contemporary reference to the painting is as brief as it is telling. Reviewing the exhibition of 1861 in which the Pascana in the Cordillera was first shown, an anonymous critic simply wrote that Laso’s painting “will always be retained by amateurs as a most faithful reproduction of a mute scene of our poor natives” (emphasis added). We could ultimately propose that the ideal viewer of Laso’s Pascanas is none other than the painter himself—not, however, in the generic understanding of the artist as first beholder of the works, and less in the sort of bodily projection or merger that Michael Fried imagines in his interpretation of Gustave Courbet’s relation to his own paintings. The veiled biographical references in this complex series are largely invisible to the spectator, but as in other works by Laso, these per-

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Inventing Indigenism sonal projections purposefully structure the conception of the paintings. The photographic studies for the Haravicu involve him among the figures that will make up the final composition, which implies his participation in the Indians’ conversation. Yet the photographs also betray their staged nature. This is not a group found in the Andean highlands, but figures that have been presented and posed, some perhaps also even clothed in borrowed dress. Laso is not the only non-Indian in this sequence; at least one other unidentified friend, his face lowered and hidden under an unusual, probably industrial, striped cloth—significantly transformed into an Andean woven textile in the painting—also figures in a photograph, though he does not actually wear the indigenous garments but has them thrown over his own clothes (fig. 2.15). Significantly, this figure is included in the final painting, his face barely visible, shadowed by the cloth covering his head. His presence in the composition unsettles the more evident readings of the painting, while at the same time it effectively realizes the incorporation of the non-Indian into this Andean conversation. Laso’s public images were evidently conceived through the exploration of his own place in society. The subjects presented to the viewer are part of the artist’s personal fantasy, and the act of painting, the medium for deliverance from the problems of Peruvian society. The painting can be read in at least two different registers. One reflects the ambition of creating paradigmatic and easily legible images that could represent the nation; the other reveals a pictorial challenge defined by a more personal project. Laso constructs public allegories through personal narratives that transform the practice of painting into a site of redemption. Yet the artist’s gestures are simultaneously bound and determined by previous traditions of Creole approximations, by prevailing stereotypes of the Indian, and, above all, by the complex and ambiguous way in which elites redefined them within the imaginary bounds of the nation.

CHAPTER THREE

Picturing Race

If ever the debate surrounding indigenism could be summarized in a single instance, it is perhaps in the juxtaposition of a photograph by Lola Álvarez Bravo and an article by the Surrealist poet and artist César Moro on the same page of the short-lived journal El Uso de la Palabra, published in Lima in 1939. The image shows a woman dressed in traditional Mexican clothes, apparently caught off guard, reacting to some unexpected presence. Her face is drawn into an expression of fear or shock; she is disheveled, in some way upset, and visibly out of balance. The bars behind her suggest confinement, and the title it has traditionally been given, Culpas ajenas (The Faults of Others), evokes an injustice. It is not by any sort of chance that the photograph should preside over the title of Moro’s article on Peruvian painting, which remains one of the most scathing attacks directed against pictorial indigenism. Moro questioned the false sentimentality of indigenist rhetoric that forged that “cardboard myth” promoted by those who “consciously or unconsciously flatter the dominant class by painting for them, and only for them, deformed Indians, which the said class accepts in their houses of terrible taste on condition that they come framed and without that peculiar smell of wool that, according to them, characterizes the Indian.” Though not named, the main target of Moro’s criticisms was José Sabogal, then the influential director of the Lima National School of Fine Arts. “Indigenist painters do not believe in the currency of the Indian,” Moro wrote, “because such presentness implies the loss of the bright colors and the decline of the picturesque and, before losing their subject, they prefer to perpetuate at all costs the state of things that guarantees fresh, good, ready-made pieces of easily exportable paintings.” In this context, Álvarez Bravo’s precisely positioned image serves as a graphic retort to Sabogal’s stylized paintings, an allusion to the actual Indian that indigenist rhetoric failed to adequately represent.

FIGURE 3.1. Lola Álvarez Bravo, photograph illustrating a page of the journal El Uso de la Palabra 1 (December 1939). Museo de Arte de Lima Library, Collections Committee, 2013. Gift of Thierry Mutsaars.

FIGURE 0.1. Francisco Laso, Inhabitant of the Cordilleras of Peru, 1855. Oil on canvas,

145 × 90 cm. Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Merino, Metropolitan Municipality of Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE P.7. Attributed to Cristóbal Lozano, No. 2. Yndios serranos

tributarios civilizados. Yden (Highland Indians Civilized Tributaries. The same), ca. 1770. Oil on canvas, 100 × 125 cm. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Madrid. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE P. 8 . Attributed to Cristóbal Lozano, No. 3. Español. Yndia serrana o café[tada]. Produce Mestiso (Spaniard. Highland Indian or Coffeed Woman. Produce Mestizo), ca. 1770. Oil on canvas, 100 × 125 cm. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Madrid. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE P. 3. Anonymous, Cuzco School, Manuela Tupa Amaro, Ñusta, ca. 1777. Oil on canvas, 167 × 106 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima. Gift of Petrus and Verónica Fernandini Collection, 2013.12.1. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 0.4. Francisco Laso, Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro, ca. 1854. Oil on canvas, 79.5

× 71 cm. Courtesy of Museo Central, Banco Central de Reserva, Lima (PO-024). Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 1.15. Francisco Laso, Self-portrait, ca. 1850–1855. Oil on canvas, 72 × 58 cm.

Private collection, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 1. 2. Luis Montero, El Perú libre (Free Peru), ca. 1849–1850. Oil on canvas,

223 × 156 cm. Congreso de la República del Perú, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 1.17. Ignacio Merino, Jarana, ca. 1857. Oil on canvas, 129 × 97 cm. Museo

Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú, Ministerio de Cultura del Perú, RN 7604. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 1.18 . Francisco Laso, The Laundress, 1859. Oil on canvas, 106 × 61.3 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima. Gift of Manuel Cisneros Sánchez and Teresa Blondet de Cisneros, 1978.4.12. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE E. 3. Francisco Laso, The Three Races (or Equality Before the Law) ca. 1859. Oil on canvas, 81 × 106 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Alicia Lastres de la Torre Fund, 1998.7.1. Photograph by Eduardo Hirose.

FIGURE 2.19. Francisco Laso, Indian Woman Spinning, 1849. Oil on canvas, 40.5 × 23.5 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima. Gift of Manuel Cisneros Sánchez and Teresa Blondet de Cisneros, 1986.1.10. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 2.4. Francisco Laso, Indian Encampment, ca. 1850–1857. Oil on canvas, 138 ×

147 cm. Courtesy of Museo Central, Banco Central de Reserva, Lima (PO-029). Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 2. 3. Francisco Laso, Pascana in the Cordillera (Resting Place in the Cordillera), ca. 1860. Oil on canvas, 126 × 194.5 cm. Club Nacional, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 2. 2. Francisco Laso, Haravicu (The Storyteller), ca. 1860–1869. Oil on canvas, 103.4 × 139.3 cm. Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 2.7. Francisco Laso, The Burial of the Priest, ca. 1860–1868. Oil on canvas, 71 × 328 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V-2.0-0213. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 3.5. Francisco Laso, Palemón Tinajeros, ca. 1860–1863. Oil on canvas, 51 ×

39.5 cm. Private collection, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

Picturing Race Such arguments against indigenism are but the most extreme in a common thread that cuts across a long history of criticism. Sabogal himself decried the falsehood of preceding artists, specifically objecting to Laso’s pioneering paintings, which his own work claimed to have superseded (though there are signs he held a secret admiration for his predecessor). And the painter Fernando de Szyszlo later sought to overcome the failures of Sabogal’s form of figuration through his own abstract works, considered to be a less literal and more authentic representation of indigeneity. Contemporary debates in literature also followed a similar script. Even at the dawn of indigenism in the mid-nineteenth century, critics would dispute the ethnic verisimilitude of the many figures in Luis Montero’s Funeral of Atahualpa. The charge is clear: under false motivations, artists produced fake Indians. As the discourses of indigenism centered on the idea of empathy, approximation, and truth to their subject, critics questioned their representations on the fundamental counts of insincerity, distance, and unrealism. Behind these arguments lies the assumption that the Indian, however defined, refers to a clearly demarcated reality existing before representation. Like other critics of indigenism, Mirko Lauer has questioned this central myth, stating that there is progress to be made “towards the replacement of indigenism with the representation of a ‘true Indian,’ when anthropology and reality tell us that, properly speaking, such a thing does not exist.” This chapter departs from this proposition—and, more generally, from the truism that ethnoracial categories are social constructs—to explore the complex reception of Laso’s paintings. It takes on, in a specific historical context, the process by which the “classificatory conceit of type,” as Deborah Poole has phrased it, transforms bodies into “idealized racial categories with no single referent in the world.” The exercise allows us to trace the evolution of the racial gaze over time, from the inception of indigenism through its moment of greatest expansion in the twentieth century. It also reveals the ultimate failure of those ever-persistent attempts to give visual form to the modern fictions of the Indian.

A Critical Fortune of Racial Readings The preceding chapters take as a given that Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras and his Pascana series represent Indians or, to be more precise, that they are images of indigeneity. Yet the identification of the ethnoracial status of the figures represented in the paintings has been an issue of intense contestation. Generally accepted as representations of Indianness, they have been doubted as images of Indians. There are two facets to this questioning, which, in fact, follow each other chronologically. One, dominant until the mid-twentieth century, claims that Laso stylized the Indian to the point that his images ceased to be accurate representations. The other facet, which surfaced later, postulates that the painter had not actually intended to depict Indians—that his works represent Mestizos. These contrasting views point to a number of crucial issues in Peruvian ethnic nomination and raise important questions regarding the visual representation of race: how it

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FIGURE 3. 2. A. Marc, engraver, Francisco Laso’s “Inhabitant of the Cordilleras.” In “Peruvian School: Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, painting by M. F. Laso,” L’Illustration, Journal Universel 26, no. 670 (December 25, 1855): 428.

is thought to be perceived and how its visual definitions have changed and evolved over time. It is difficult to recover how Laso’s paintings were initially understood in the absence of a consistent body of critical writing about art in the nineteenth century. Yet the few early references that have come down to us all confirm that the painting was taken to represent an Indian. A mention describing it as “An Indian of the Andes” in 1884 left no doubt as to its figurative and literal place in the Creole imaginary. By the early twentieth century it had come to be popularly known as the Indian Potter, a title that admits no imprecision. We can recall only one instance where it seems that the Inhabitant was perceived not to be Indian enough, a visual comment in the form of a reproductive engraving that appeared in the French journal L’Illustration when the painting was first shown in 1855. The engraver emphasized certain features of the figure’s face, flattening the nose and enlarging the lips, while he harshened the shadows cast by the hat to generate the effect of a darker complexion. The man’s hands were similarly depicted in a greater contrast of shades to make the image conform to the illustrator’s idea of indigeneity. Yet the questioning image strikes an isolated note in a larger arch of silence regarding the figure’s identity.

Picturing Race It seems to have been only after the 1930s that the status of the figures in Laso’s works became problematic. Until then, no one seems to have doubted their indigenous identity. In 1917, referring to the figures in Laso’s Haravicu, the critic Emilio Gutiérrez de Quintanilla wrote that their “pallid and cuprous flesh” reflected the despondent “soul of the [Indian] race” and the “sadness of the Andean landscape.” For Juan Manuel Peña, writing on the Inhabitant in 1929, Laso had represented the “Indian of bronzed skin,” while José Antonio de Lavalle y García later described the figures in Laso’s Pascana in the Cordillera as Indians whose “bronzed faces energetically reflect the racial characteristics.” The earliest documented signs of doubt regarding the identity of Laso’s figures appeared in 1937 with the first major exhibition of his work. José Flores Aráoz then wrote that the physiognomies of the subjects of Laso’s Indian Encampment were “a bit stylized with regard to ethnic veracity,” yet he did not thereby claim that they did not represent Indians. While recognizing Laso’s merit in initiating the “treatment of Indians as a pictorial motif,” Carlos Raygada pointed out not only the painter’s inability to “feel” the Indian, but argued, in reference to the photographic studies for his Pascana series, that his paintings were not based on rigorous observation and that, in fact, their inaccuracy derived from the painter’s use of “Mestizo models” “disguised as Indians” (italics in the original). To critics of his work, there seems to be no contradiction in claiming that his images could simultaneously be appropriate images of indigeneity and failed images of Indians. Although Laso was criticized in 1937 for “stylizing” or creating “false” Indians, no one claimed that he had not intended to paint Indians. This changed by the time of the next important exhibition of his works in 1969. Juan Acha then wrote that even if Laso’s Pascanas could be described as Indian or indigenist scenes, they actually represent “an allegory or symbolism of Peru as a coexistence of races” because, he argues, “the character on the left is the same Mestizo as in the Indian Potter (the painter Masías as model?), the one in the center is decidedly ‘Indian’ and there is a great resemblance to the Three Races.” In 1978, Eduardo Calvo claimed that, in fact, the figures in the Pascanas are “Europeans or Mestizos and even the artist in Indian dress.” Gustavo Buntinx later revisited these interpretations to suggest that the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras represented for Laso the ideal of mestizaje. He stated that the figure has “Occidentalized features,” that it is a “White Indian,” but did not hesitate to refer to it in the same essay as a representation of an Indian and to describe both the Inhabitant and the Pascanas as images of indigeneity (lo indio). The author further affirmed that the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras represents a Mestizo, while claiming simultaneously that it has Creole features. Nearly every possible designation is applied to the painting while effectively skirting direct confrontation with the issue of ethnoracial nomination. Buntinx believes this lack of definition was actively sought by the artist, and concludes that the Inhabitant is both a representation of the ideal of mestizaje and a manner of incorporating the Creole into the image of the Indian. This interpretation, framed in the present, deploys current definitions of those terms, assuming the stability of racial stereotypes and perceptions over time. It does not consider that the reading of the Inhabitant as a Mestizo only became pos-

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Inventing Indigenism sible at a particular historical juncture—when the concept of mestizaje as a social process (figured in the massive internal migration to the capital beginning in the 1940s) and as a national ideal (involving the sublimation of socio-racial differences) had become generalized. To support his thesis, Buntinx quotes fragments from Laso’s “La paleta y los colores” (The palette and the colors) of 1859, which he reads as a defense of mestizaje in its modern sense, as the ideal fusion of the Creole and the Indian. Laso’s essay, however, does not praise any single mixture but rather questions the Creole preference for racial purity. In his defense of the universal ideal of equality and the benefits and advantages of diversity, Laso denounced the widespread notion that Peru’s social problems derived from its heterogeneous population. He questioned the importance of racial differences in determining the social hierarchy, arguing instead that education and equal opportunity would resolve Peru’s ethnic divide. His arguments can hardly be interpreted as a defense of mestizaje, a concept that, as we have seen, then lacked the symbolic importance that it would acquire after the third decade of the twentieth century. Yet the historical improbability of this interpretation does not cancel out the fact that such a reading did become possible at a given time.

Reading Race: The Role of the Viewer Discussions of Laso’s paintings are shot through with contradiction and inconsistency. In the shifting readings of his works, one can distinguish two broad arguments. One takes as a given that his paintings depict Indians, however failed; the other, that they represent other social groups, Creoles or—alternatively or simultaneously—Mestizos; that is to say, they explain what they consider to be the lack of definition of the subjects depicted in the paintings as the figuration of an ambiguous social group. Both start from the premise that ethnoracial categories exist as an instance prior to perception, and that they can be expressed through a particular set of traits. They foreground similar notions regarding the concrete materiality of race and the possibility of apprehending it visually. Yet it is precisely the ultimate infigurability of race that throws the critics, for while the paintings are evidently ambiguous to modern viewers, it seems more difficult to ascertain precisely where this indeterminacy lies. The element of disturbance seems to emerge from the depiction of phenotype, with the identity of the Inhabitant becoming ambiguous only when the focus is placed exclusively on the body. In every other respect, the figure may remain unproblematically an image of Indianness. It is evident that if the figure in Laso’s painting were shown with his back to the viewer, no one would question his identity as an Indian. The implication is that race can be read through the body, beyond the evident attributes of indigeneity in which Laso’s figures are clothed. Where Laso “fails” is in his depiction of phenotype, for the attributes themselves cannot fi x the perceived instability of the physical bodies they cover. Phenotype, a purportedly visual sign, is taken as a verifiable trait.

Picturing Race This is crucial for a history of pictorial depictions, for race is generally thought to be apprehended visually. Thus, even if we focus on a fictional image, its reading parallels generalized beliefs on how race is perceived in face-to-face encounters. I want to clarify that by this I don’t mean that race can be apprehended visually, nor that an unmediated visual perception of race is possible, nor that it is somehow reasonable to believe that there are racial categories corresponding to physical traits that can be visually apprehended. Yet this attitude of viewing is a central part of how society deploys its racializing imagination, of how, as W. J. T. Mitchell has proposed, race is not “a content to be mediated, an object to be represented visually or verbally, or a thing to be depicted in a likeness or image,” but is “itself a medium and an iconic form” that determines a framework of viewing. This has proved to be the central problem in readings of Laso’s paintings—as in other images expressly framed through racial categories: that they construct a visual product that plays into and shapes generalized beliefs on ethnoracial groups and their perception. Even though vision plays only a partial role in the definition of race, racial categories, and the manner in which they are commonly applied, posit that visual perception is, in fact, decisive and that races are tangible, visible objects in the world. There is a performative power in the gaze, exerted through the arguments of vision to establish race as visual fact. Yet admitting the fallacy of race does not require the denial of those visible differences that set individuals apart. In attempting to counter the essentialist force of the racializing gaze that Frantz Fanon so poignantly describes, the body and its perception are paradoxically elided from critical discussion. Unsurprisingly, it has been largely through Fanon that a return to the corporeal schemas of race, as Stuart Hall termed it, become possible anew. Recent work in philosophy by Linda Alcoff and Charles W. Mills, among others, has started from the acceptance of the actuality of race as embodied materiality, including the salience of physical appearance, without discarding the notion of racial categories and identities as overdetermined social constructs. Phenomenology, like psychoanalysis, has played a critical role in this rethinking of racial figuration. Yet phenomenological approaches to racial perception have relied on interpersonal encounters, largely leaving aside the role of depictions. The reception of Laso’s images helps us to rethink the place of visual representations in the complex process of racialized viewing. Images fi x—to a point—what are otherwise fluid social interactions in everyday encounters. Take the reaction of one nineteenth-century reader to an image labeled Indios de la Sierra in Manuel Atanasio Fuentes’s 1866 illustrated book on Lima. This reader struck out the word Indios from the caption and wrote beneath it: “Seen by a Frenchman!” The viewer attributed the error to a foreigner, ignorant of how a real Indian actually looks, and the exclamation mark betrays his indignation, his judgment of the image as a misrepresentation. The sense of deceived expectations recalls that which accompanied indigenist statements about the inappropriateness of Laso’s Indians. Such questionings would likely be expressed similarly even in reference to photographs—as they have been in the case of the images that Laso used as models for

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FIGURE 3. 3. Anony-

mous, engraving of Indios de la Sierra in Manuel Atanasio Fuentes, Lima (1866). Rare Books Section, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

the Haravicu—which have a relationship of indexicality with the subject portrayed. Were the same viewer who questioned Fuentes’s image to be presented with the actual photograph that served as a basis for the engraving, he would in all likelihood argue that what is inappropriate is the label. It would seem that viewers apply similar procedures of identification and nomination in different situations, from engagement with representations such as paintings, engravings, and photographs to actual persons. Perhaps the most salient difference is the consciousness that viewers may have of certain images as representations, that they will see them as one of many possible interpretations of the term. The issue would not be with the actual depictions but with the captions they were given, with their interpretation. The confrontation with images evokes the fluidity of relational and situational processes and contexts of naming that historians such as Joanne Rappaport have identified in the study of colonial Mestizos, and which recent phenomenological debates on race have differently recovered. Put another way, the claim could be made that the central issue of dispute in the visual representation of ethnoracial terms does not lie in the image itself, but in categories and the process of their application; that is to say, in the contested scenario of interpretation. The situation is posed differently in textual discourse. Any term, whether read in a newspaper or spoken, has a kind of determinacy. Disagreement may arise over its application, but rarely over the term itself. Indian, as a written or spoken word, carries with it a certain fixity; it gives shape to a category that is, in a sense, tautological. Isolated from an object thus named, it may remain unproblematic. It is

Picturing Race when the term is applied to a specific image that it becomes anchored to a particular representation, and it is at this point that the viewer will contrast the term, now taken as a label, with what in the viewer’s mind is the designated object. Which brings us back to the central matter of verification, to the not always so evident fact that there is no actual physical referent for the category Indian. Depictions of racial categories are abstractions, concepts that do not exist in the same way that objects or persons exist in the world. Specific phenotypic signs do exist, and there are human beings that share particular traits—and who are alternatively privileged or discriminated against based on these traits—but the manner in which these signs are named and defined under broader categories is not prediscursive; they cannot exist prior to representation. As Peter Wade argues, racial phenotype cannot be seen as a neutral biological base for perception, but rather as a historical construct, for “it is not just any phenotypical variation that has become racialized (in any of the changing definitions of ‘race’), but a specific set of variations that have become salient in long-term encounters.” If we depart from the generally accepted claim that racial categories are symbols for complex systems of convention, the issue at stake is the nature of these constructs. They are not necessarily images, nor merely words, but overdetermined objects, a synthesis of different elements, what Mitchell defines as a multisensory and multisemiotic field. We may approach the fallacy of visual depictions of ethnoracial categories by evoking the way viewers imagine verification to take place. One would tend to assume that viewers contrast the perceived representation with an equivalent mental image that he or she may consider appropriate. But this is not quite what actually occurs. As Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological investigations of the imagination subtly demonstrate, there is little such stability in mental images. Sartre forcefully describes their synthetic, spurious nature: they are “[a]mbiguous, poor and dry at the same time,” he claims, “appearing and disappearing in jerks; they are given as a perpetual ‘elsewhere’, as perpetual evasion.” A mental image of, in this case, an Indian would not provide a visual image similar to the one we can apprehend through perception. And since the mental image cannot be either shared or sustained in a way that would allow direct comparison, the consequence is that simple notions of verification become compromised. The instability of mental images can thus contribute to help to confound the already complicated matter of viewer’s responses to visual images that purport to represent race. Yet there is more to Sartre’s study of mental images that can help us understand the process through which we imagine to perceive race. For Sartre, mental images are willed, defined by intentions that are in turn motivated by knowledge, “since one represents in image only what one knows in some sort of way and, reciprocally, knowledge here is not simply knowledge, it is an act, it is what I want to represent to myself.” More significantly, this knowledge is not simply information added on to the image, but rather constitutes “the active structure of the image.” This becomes evident when we think of what actually happens when we attempt to imagine an Indian (or, for that matter, any ethnoracial category). What may occur is that we will envisage only specific instances of people we assign these terms to, or

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Inventing Indigenism other visual representations, or things that we associate with the term—an item of dress, a landscape, a song, perhaps even the smell of a particular meal associated with the concept. What appears before us is not an image as we perceive images in the world, but a complex synthesis of a wide array of elements framed by discourse and conventions. Sartre’s description of the complex experience of thought works to undermine the privilege given to sight in discussions of race, but it also foregrounds the way in which the infinite heterogeneity of individual experience confounds racial categories. This is why generalized consensus on racial identification has proved to be so elusive, and why caricatural excess and rigidity define most consensual stereotypes. Sartre’s phenomenology of the imagination thus leads us, along what is perhaps an unexpected path, to the generally accepted proposition that images of race, like other images, are concepts always already constituted through particular cultural, social, and historical conditions. Similar assumptions are implicit in the ways we use direct observation to identify and classify in daily life. The processes of perception, recognition, and nomination involved in direct confrontation are evidently shaped in discourse and mediated by stereotypes and social expectations. Yet the fluidity of actual social situations that shape and define quotidian nomination are absent from the singular image fixed through pictorial representation. In order to be convincing, the image must be clearly established and anchored by highly codified conventions. Whether they be stereotypes of morphology and phenotype, or assigned moral attributes, these conventions can be naturalized or become consensual only through repetition. A single image can hardly establish a visual convention. It is evident that through their influence on the elaboration of mental images, depictions play an important role in stabilizing and fi xing the elusive nature of racial images, contributing to the constitution of collectively sanctioned stereotypes. It is also important to note that though we generally focus on depictions, the role of the viewer remains, as we have seen, a key element, one which is often left out or neutralized through recourse to an ideal of a transcendent, constant subject. That leads us to lose sight of the historical specificities and contingencies of viewing, as in the successive readings of Laso’s works, where the indeterminacy of his Indian figures only became apparent to viewers raised on more rigid stereotypes. One could locate a first significant shift in the formation of visual conventions of indigeneity in the emergence of indigenist painting in the early twentieth century. This was a moment when highly schematized representations consolidated into a consensual image of the Indian, one that would be spread and sustained with the coincident expansion of print culture and the mass media. By 1937, when the first qualms about Laso’s Indians came to be voiced, pictorial indigenism had already established a particular manner of representing the concept. Drawing on the organicist and vitalist currents of early twentieth-century thought, indigenists forged a theory of telluricism in which, through the conflation of biological and geographic notions, the Indian body was made to express the power of the mountainous Andean landscape. The “man of bronze” of the Andes was an

Picturing Race ideal that could easily accommodate both the political vindications and the geographic determinism of the period. Informed by racialist thought, the exaltation of a virile and forceful Indian body emerged as an obsession among these painters and writers, who exaggerated specific physical traits as elements of indigeneity. The views of Laso’s critics were defined by these representations. Raygada, for example, was a strong advocate of Sabogal’s indigenism, the movement that did the most to perfect the visual stereotypes generally associated with the Indian. Indigenists claimed they had captured the essence of the race. This was not merely an aesthetic but also an ethical and political assertion, for it implied that their images derived from close physical and spiritual proximity with the Indian. The coarseness of the fabrics on which they painted and the intentional crudity of their images became signifiers of proximity, and their claims to greater realism were, in fact, founded on caricaturization. Sabogal once told an interviewer that Laso’s Indians, “painted after his return from Europe,” looked like “Tibetans” and that even his llamas “lacked character.” The evident implication is that Laso’s works were inadequate because the painter was geographically distant and spiritually detached from his models. What indigenists claimed as realism was, however, only a different aesthetic and racial paradigm. As we have seen, the same dismissal in the name of realism which Sabogal and others turned against Laso was later used to question the painted Indians of the indigenists. Each generation’s “horizon of expectations,” in Hans-Robert Jauss’s terms, frames the readings of the painting. A history of reception such as the one we have briefly attempted here can account for the place of convention and social determinations in the varying interpretations of images that purport to represent race. At the same time, as the readings of Laso’s paintings clearly demonstrate, it also reveals the radical instability, the contradictions and the complexities, of racial picturing.

The Construction of the Indian Image It is difficult to evoke how Laso constructed his Inhabitant of the Cordilleras. No preliminary studies have survived, nor any documentation that would allow some insight into the way in which the painting was conceived. His was the first image of its kind, the earliest representation of the Indian as a collective singular. For a long time it would remain a unique and isolated image. At the moment of its creation, it had marked a strict contrast with the seriality of costumbrista watercolors, and it would later stand apart from the rigid regularity that dominated the logic of photographic types. We do not know who the model was or if there was one, although Acha timidly, and probably incorrectly, suggested that it could have been the painter Francisco Masías, who was in Paris when the Inhabitant was painted. What is evident from the final painting is that Laso ultimately placed the weight of identification not on the body of the figure but on attributes, chief among them the pre-Columbian ceramic held out to the viewer. In relating the main subject— which we can assume to be a contemporary figure—to the pre-Columbian past, he

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Inventing Indigenism creates a genealogical argument that claims a line of continuity running from the ancient people of Peru to the contemporary Indian, an account that would take an obsessive hold over time in the classic postcards of the early twentieth century showing indigenous men and women posed in front of Inca monuments. As if time had collapsed, the contemporary Indian was integrated into a distant past, which his figure ultimately makes present. Much like the ideal image of Peru projected through postcards, the pre-Columbian ceramic in Laso’s painting frames that continuity in terms of a spiritual bond, one that ultimately also affirms the idea of biological permanence. Though hidden under the hat and poncho, the Indian body cannot but be implied in a broader narrative that is at once genealogical, historical, and biological. The conflation of notions of lineage and culture in the embodiment of indigeneity would be variously affirmed through other visual approaches. A decade after Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, Luis Montero would force a different strategy to similar effect in the process of composing the image of the Inca for his large academic machine representing the Funeral of Atahualpa (fig. P.10). In his challenge to evoke the lost portrait of the ancient ruler, Montero turned to modeling from the death mask of his friend Palemón Tinajeros, a Peruvian artist and humble draftsman who died in Italy at the time the painter was preparing his large canvas. Laso had previously painted a portrait of Tinajeros, an artist’s artist and likely a friend. The painting is a direct portrait that evokes in its simplicity its subject’s social ori-

FIGURE 3.4. Eduardo Polack-Schneider, Ruins of the Palace of Inca Manco Capac, Cusco,

ca. 1901–1910. Postcard, G. Morgenroth & Cía. Private collection, Lima.

Picturing Race

FIGURE 3.5. Francisco

Laso, Palemón Tinajeros, ca. 1860–1863. Oil on canvas, 51 × 39.5 cm. Private collection, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

gins. His features are clearly different with respect to those of the many artists, intellectuals, and politicians of his closest circle whom Laso painted in the course of his life. There are intimations that allow us to determine that contemporaries identified Tinajeros as a man of indigenous descent. What matters here is that Laso clearly defined his image as a portrait. Montero used portraiture differently, taking the features of an actual person to give the Inca the semblance of an individual, and his painting the aura of verisimilitude that his historical composition demanded. In extended discussions of Montero’s painting as it made its grand tour from Florence to Lima, critics pointed to the specificity of the death portrait of Tinajeros, which they opposed to the improbable appearance of the Inca’s women, described as vulgar Italian types. Implicitly, a contemporary person of indigenous ascent was made to represent a group conceived to remain constant over time, linked by an imaginary bloodline (though there is, of course, no clear relationship between the specific Inca ruler and the man chosen to portray him). With this operation, Tinajeros the individual was transformed into a racial type. Inevitably, and perhaps unwittingly, Montero contributed to the construction of a racialist definition of the Indian—not by way of scientific discourses but through what

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Inventing Indigenism are essentially popular notions of biological continuity. The net effect, however, may not be so different from the arguments that physical anthropology would propose in the last third of the nineteenth century. The scientific discourses of type were already present in the discursive projection of photography when Laso’s Inhabitant was painted, though they had not yet locally materialized in the form of a systematic visual project. The typological framework implicit in contemporary series of costumbrista watercolors lacked the methodical rigor that later image systems would pretend to assume. It was with the rise of the carte-de-visite photographic format at the tail end of the 1850s that the  first sustained repertoire of indigenous subjects appeared. Yet Lima studios generally imitated the poses, tone, and even the randomness of previous costumbrista imagery. The methodical consistency of the scientific gaze that would later sustain the arguments of physical anthropology first emerged in the work produced by Ricardo Villaalba in Arequipa and La Paz in the 1860s and 1870s. Most likely undertaken on commission—or at least created to satisfy external demand— his extensive series of portraits of Aymara and Quechua subjects appears to be the earliest systematic undertaking of a new form of racial depiction. The example of a paired large-format set of photographs of a man and a woman taken in Arequipa in the early 1860s points to the intention and the uses of these images. Their deadpan language gives the evident uneasiness of the subjects a poignancy that speaks to photography as a practice of subjection, which the inscriptions written on the reverse by their anonymous owner violently reaffirm by fixing them as racial types: “Indian woman / such as seen in Arequipa / Perfect specimen”; “Indian, such as seen in Arequipa. Good type.” The figures become “specimens” of an idea always already prefigured by the premises of racialist thought; the actual portraits of specific persons, subjected to anonymity, are made into illustrations of a concept. It was through the abstract regularity of the serial nature of its commercial formats that photography devised the instrumental language of typology. But the anonymity of the subjects in this genre of images is significantly different from the abstract allegorical namelessness of Laso’s Inhabitant. The painting could perhaps have been modeled on an actual person, maybe even a portrait photograph, yet it is offered and read not as index but as symbol and as icon. Indexicality remained as the central promise of racialist figuration. In the extreme, the will to embody racial categories that was conjured in these very different images led to the creation of sculptures or casts of actual people to represent ethnoracial categories, a strategy that claimed to literally capture the complex elements that configured modern ideas of indigeneity in the form of the externality of a body. This was the definitive appeal to the real, to the concrete physical trace that would supersede even the indexical referentiality of photography. Perhaps one of the earliest instances of this procedure is the statue of a Peruvian boy whom a French traveler, Charles Wiener, abducted from the heights of Vilque in Cuzco and took to Paris as an anthropological specimen. In 1878 the sculptor Émile Soldi exhibited the image of the nameless twelve-year-old—whom he described as having the “characteristic traits that attest to the purity of the race”— at the Paris Universal Exposition’s Peruvian pavilion. He later donated the piece

Picturing Race

FIGURE 3.6. Ricardo Villaalba, Man from Arequipa, ca. 1860s. Albumen silver print, 21.59 × 15.88 cm. Private collection, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

FIGURE 3.7. Ricardo Villaalba, Woman

from Arequipa, ca. 1860s. Albumen silver print, 21.59 × 15.88 cm. Private collection, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

to the new Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. The boy, who died in France in 1880, was fixed into a type to serve as a token museum object of Andean indigeneity. An enthusiast of what he termed the “unknown arts,” Soldi described his admiration for the figures that the boy sculpted from clay while posing in his studio as evidence that the “race to which he belonged must have valued and cultivated the arts with profit.” The sculpture shows him in the act of holding a lump of unshaped clay, in a gesture that somehow evokes the role that the ancient ceramic plays in Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras as the atavistic memory of a people. The Indian comes to be figured as the embodiment of an ancestral memory that, impervious to historical change, persists as a constant over time. Cultural notions of an underlying ethnic unconscious are thus inextricably framed through biological conceptions of racial lineage and typology. Yet there were, as we have seen, questions regarding the relationship between ancient and modern Peruvians, arguments that claimed that the Indian body had been so degraded by oppression that it could not adequately stand for “the race.” So the past could then serve to model the present. In the search for the authentic image of the Indian, pre-Columbian portrait vessels came to be perceived as direct evidence of ancient physiognomies. The idea was visually elaborated in 1877 by traveler Ephraim George Squier in his engraving based on a photograph of

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FIGURE 3. 8 . Georges Profit, Portrait of a Child Born in Cuzco (Peru) in 1866, Died in Paris in 1880. Statue (life-size) by Émile-Soldi, donated by the artist to the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro. Illustration in Émile Soldi, Les arts méconnus (Paris, 1881), 339. Private collection, Lima.

what he described as a “modern Peruvian head”; it shows a man posing next to two pre-Columbian portrait ceramics, an image that establishes a direct relationship between the ancient material past and its embodied present. Moche portrait vessels would remain the privileged reference for twentieth-century artists attempting historical reconstructions. This continuity implies a charged racialist proposition. The suggestion of biological permanence would be more direct and explicitly made through the use of ancient crania, considered scientifically accurate tools that could assist artists in shaping correct indigenous portraits. Behind that search was the persistent notion of the tangible materiality of racial categories as measurable embodied essences. One could perhaps trace many of the assumptions behind the popular figuration of the Indian as the embodiment of cultural and biological elements to the rise of scientific racism in the nineteenth century. But it would be a mistake to limit the explanation of this complex racialist concept to academic debates in physical anthropology and related fields. Deborah Poole has suggested that the notion of

Picturing Race “type” as a visual and physiognomic construct with an essence or object- status of its own emerged independent of—and prior to—the full-blown taxonomic and biological discourse that would later become associated with “scientific” theories of race. The massive circulation of visual collections of costume books and ethnic types in the late eighteenth century and the development of local traditions of costumbrista watercolors and photographs to which it gave rise probably exerted greater influence, though it could be argued that they, too, ultimately derived their organizing logic from the taxonomic impulse of earlier scientific debates. The interlocking visual arguments of body and artifact already carried with it the racialist notions that would persist into the twentieth century. Laso’s archaeological framing of the contemporary Indian body in Inhabitant of the Cordilleras fixed precisely that formula in the garments of culture. The modern idea of the Indian that entered the popular imagination in the nineteenth century was, indeed, a complex construct that combined genealogical, biological, and cultural arguments in the shaping of an overdetermined figure of alterity. The many strategies used by artists to create their figurations of the Indian reveal the suppositions behind these images, as well as the uncertainty that underlies the project of giving ethnoracial categories visual form. Laso seems to have been aware of the challenges and the dangers of embodying abstractions. His Indian figures are barely visible under their heavy garments and the broad-

FIGURE 3. 9. Modern Peruvian Head. In Ephraim George Squier, Peru: Incidents of Travel

and Exploration in the Land of the Incas (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1877), 184. Private collection, Lima.

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FIGURE 3.10. Camilo Blas (José Alfonso Sánchez Urteaga), Study of Moche Portrait Ceramic, ca. 1932–1933. Pencil on paper, 22.4 × 29.1 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima. Gift of Petrus and Verónica Fernandini Collection, 2008.3.1316. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

brimmed hats that cast their faces in shadows. It is as if the depiction of the body of an other was something too daunting for the painter. More generally, one senses that there always seems to be some degree of consciousness in the producer or the viewer of the fallacies that underlie the project of racial figuration. Yet the quest for the “true” image of the Indian would nonetheless persist through other venues and approaches with the same obsessive insistence that it would be contested once and again.

Impossible Images Neither the individuals, biologically considered, their forms of speech, nor their cultures “fall into” types; they are classified into types by the observer or by themselves. The number of classifications theoretically possible is limited only by human powers of observation. H ar ry Tschopik Jr., “On the Iden tif ication of the Indi a n in Peru” 

We have yet to discuss an issue central to the discussions and debates that we have been addressing, which is the actual indeterminacy of ethnoracial designations in

Picturing Race the Andean region, where the intrinsic complexity of nomination is confounded by the latent instability of racial categories and images, for the Indian is not an isolated concept, but a designation fi xed relationally with regard to other ethnoracial terms, an element that exists in what is perceived to be a subtly graduated continuum. In between the two defining poles—the Indian and the Spaniard/Creole— lies an almost infinite series of varying physical traits and cultural forms that escape attempts to establish distinctions. The difficulty in identifying and classifying people has been conceived as a crucial social problem since the colonial period, and actual experiences in daily life generally described as fraught with indeterminacy, ambiguity, and doubt. Images somehow seek to fix this instability, but the failure of this will to define and classify races was made evident from the moment these categories took the form of visual objects in the late eighteenth century. Take, for example, the series of images of Indians and other ethnic groups represented in Bishop Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón’s Trujillo del Perú. The dozens of Indian figures in this collection are distinguished through subtle social and ethnic origin; so subtle, in fact, that in the absence of labels, they would be unrecognizable as Indians to most of us today. One can barely imagine a casta painting without captions. In the absence of their labels, carefully spelled out next to each figure, most in-between categories would remain undecipherable: the openness of the possible readings would betray their intended narratives. The fear expressed in debates on the identification of racial identities equals the compulsion to label and fi x their meanings. The simplistic claims to the eminently visual character of race are betrayed by the necessary recourse to the written word. The fact that visuality is conceived as a critical factor is both significant and misleading, considering that ethnoracial categories are evidently complex constructions determined by so many other variables of language, dress, social position, and phenotype. They are also processual, relational, and situational, and subject to the readings and changing perspectives of viewers. They are further perceived to change over time. Ethnoracial categories look to the past, to the biological or social origins of the subject, but also forward, to an anticipated next stage of miscegenation and transformation. Referring to early colonial ethnoracial classifications, Thierry Saignes and Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne conceive a scenario that could lead society to imagine Mestizos not only as “a new biological product, but as a reproductive chain with no end.” Their remark points to the dynamism that pervades perceptions of racial categories in the Andean region not just as perceived differences, but, perhaps more importantly, as differences that are imagined to evolve over time, where any specific instance of racial classification necessarily imagines the consequences of miscegenation. Racial designations are not fixed in the present; they involve a broader social and historical imagination that moves fluidly between the past and the future. It is in this scenario of perpetually changing categories and fluctuating identities that ethnoracial depictions must be framed. The fact is that racial terms and taxonomies attempt to create a degree of consistency for a system that has none. They propose a program of classification based on labels. As Christian Metz has

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Inventing Indigenism observed, a “society lexicalizes and perceives the distinctions for which it has the greatest need.” So of all the diverse terms in the apparently endless chain of racial gradations in the Andean region, only a few are significant. The extremes Creole/ Indian and the one term that designates all in-between terms, Mestizo, are symbolically central. Yet these, too, are not fixed or determined. In the absence of attributes, props, or labels, racial representation appears to be forever compromised. Visual images of ethnoracial categories betray their complex, overdetermined nature as images that purport to represent racial categories through the human figure, but which, in fact, confirm that as a signifier of race, the body remains an unassailable and paradoxically intractable object of representation. This is nowhere more evident than in the visual image of the Creole. That the tapada should have been the emblem of Creole culture is significant, especially considering the contested racial status of traditional Lima elites. It should thus not be surprising that the dominant Creole image should be a faceless woman whose proverbial beauty could not usually be seen. Writers focus only on the contours of her body, her feet, the uncovered arms—and particularly on the single, disembodied eye. It is the dress as costume, as attribute of Creoleness, that substitutes for her physical body. As one North American visitor, arguing against the reputation of the women of Lima, starkly put it: The departures from this standard [of beauty] are many, even among those of untainted Spanish lineage, and innumerable among others of impure blood and degraded caste. It is probable that if those who formerly testified to a universal Limeña loveliness, could see the women in later fashions of dress, they would conclude that the saya-y-manto, the mysterious garment then worn, did much to shape their opinions.

Thus, the beauty—and, implicitly, the whiteness—of the women of Lima paradoxically depended on its invisibility. It is difficult to imagine how else the racial status of the Peruvian upper classes could have been represented. Like all racialist designations, whiteness is a relative and debated status, as was the always suspect racial status of Creoles. Precisely for this reason, the tapada became the perfect medium through which to assert the image of a Peruvian upper class anxious about the purity of its “untainted Spanish lineage.” The only way the abstract notion of racial purity could be represented was by detour. The Mestizo posed other challenges to representation. Returning to the reading of Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras as a Mestizo, we could propose that it fails to account for the basic question of whether a figure dressed as an Indian could effectively represent another ethnoracial figure. In the Peruvian social imagination, the Mestizo is generally described as an Indian who has abandoned traditional values—as a displaced urban Indian. This dislocation breaks apart the expected coherence between indigeneity, geography, and culture that marks the modern image of the Indian. Thus, a Mestizo who assumes indigenous clothing would cease to be one, either through the inauthentic assumption of another’s dress or

Picturing Race

FIGURE 3.11. José Sabogal, Garcilaso de la Vega, 1949. Oil on canvas, 80 × 80 cm. María Jadwiga Sabogal Collection, Lima. Archivo Digital de Arte Peruano. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

through the return to its indigenous origins. In the absence of labels, the category is virtually impossible to represent visually. The radical instability of the Mestizo explains its absence from a larger history of visual representations. The ideal Mestizo, conceived by Peruvian intellectuals of the early twentieth century as the perfect fusion of the Indian and the Spaniard, remains unsteady, defined and framed by its components. José Sabogal attempted to represent this ideal through the paradigmatic figure of mestizaje, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. In his painting, Sabogal assembled a strange composite figure of unresolved hybridity, almost a monster. A strict vertical line divides the composition and its subject into two distinct color fields, but also Garcilaso’s face, leaving the truncated half of the figure’s moustache and beard awkwardly to one side. To further fix each of the racial poles, Sabogal associated them with historical emblems. On one side of the background he placed a building with the typical Inca trapezoidal gateway; on the other, a quill, a sign of Hispanic literacy. The ideal Mestizo is figured conceptually as a combination of both biological and cultural factors, as an image of the modern notions of race and of ethnicity. The result is a purely symbolic image, one in which both extremes are present, but in which the fusion between the two cannot be represented. To be effective, the image must foreground iconographic attributes. It should not be surprising, then, that throughout the twentieth century the Mestizo would not be represented through recourse to the human figure, but visualized mainly through art and material culture, through the objects considered emblematic products of a Mestizo culture. Indigenist painters ob-

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FIGURE 3.12. Manuel María del Mazo (drawing) and Léon Williez (lithographer), Break these Chains!! Elevate the Indian from Prostration!! Let us Conquer Immortality!!!, no. 18 of the Adefesios series. Lithograph on paper, 31 × 43.7 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, 2009.2.17. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

sessively depicted the retablos, ceramics, engraved gourds, and paintings that they claimed captured the spirit of a Mestizo popular art. Like Sabogal’s image of Garcilaso, mestizaje can be represented only as allegory, one that admits, however unwillingly, the impossibility of a naturalistic representation of any racial category. One could argue that caricature is an exception to this rule, that it is a kind of image where, more than any attribute, it is the body itself that becomes a central site of meaning. Yet the schematics of caricature work through the emphasis on bodily aspects that acquire a symbolic content. Caricature plays with the notion of naturalist representation, yet it functions by turning phenotypical and morphological elements into attributes. Caricature, too, functions allegorically, building its legibility through the deployment of visual conventions. Like the allegorical images that abound in academic painting, Laso’s Indian gives visual shape to an abstraction. Academic theory was largely devoted to problems deriving from the need to give abstract categories visual form. Allegorical attributes are tied to convention, to accrued meanings fi xed through a history of representations; they generally signify through arbitrary signs such as the ones that identify Laso’s Indians: the costumes they wear, the landscapes they in-

Picturing Race habit, and the pre-Columbian ceramic that appears in both the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras and the Haravicu. These attributes serve to anchor his Indians as representations of andinos, as Laso himself described the Inhabitant. The bodies of these figures are almost completely covered by these signs of indigeneity. Only the hands, and the faces shadowed by the wide-brimmed monteras, remain visible. The same occurs in most of Laso’s representations of Indians, where the figures’ bodies remain hidden from view. In fact, Laso’s paintings work toward a systematic avoidance of bodies, placing most of the signifying weight on other attributes of indigeneity. The failure of Laso’s Indians could be taken as the failure of expectations regarding the naturalist figuration of race, for no matter how much they are fixed by their ethnic attributes, they remain, as images of bodies, also, inevitably, images of race. In a society bound by fears of ethnoracial passing and changing identities, the dress and attributes are taken as superficial elements for identification. Viewers forego these evident props to search in the figure’s body for what is perceived as the fundamental basis of its racial identity. Put another way, although Laso’s painting is an allegory—a composite image, a fiction imagined by the artist—it ends up being treated by its viewers as a naturalist representation of an existing subject. This is how racial images are usually interpreted, even though, as I have argued, all images that purport to represent race are allegorical and function through arbitrary signs. For later critics, the failure of Laso’s Indians could be attributed not only to the painter’s distance from his subjects, but also to the pictorial formulas of academic painting, which imposed a conventional language on local subjects. But we could reverse this view and recover the notion, widely held by nineteenth-century academic writers, that the ideal did not exist in nature but was actively constructed in the artist’s mind. This acceptance of pictorial conceptualism, opposed to later naturalist narratives, could allow us to claim that with regard to images of race, the academic notion of representation is more honest than realist conceptions, and that it comes closer to the actual processes by which we give certain concepts visual form.

The Elusive Indian To end where we began this chapter, Moro’s use of Álvarez Bravo’s photograph works through shock, attempting a sort of short circuit on indigenist painting, as if a higher dose of realism could unmask and expose painting’s distance from the real. The gesture plays into the arguments of both proponents and detractors of the movement. The image appears to denounce social injustice by exposing the harsh truths of indigenous life; its very title points to its programmatic intentions. The fact that it is a photograph—a privileged medium in the modern pursuit of realism—also alludes to a more direct relationship to some order of reality that, by implication, indigenist painting would have missed. In his vindication of

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FIGURE 3.13.

Courret Hermanos, Lima, page from the sampler album Recuerdos del Perú, ca. 1863-1873. Luis Eduardo Wuffarden Collection, Lima, in custody of the Museo de Arte de Lima. Archivo Digital de Arte Peruano. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

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Inventing Indigenism photography as a tool for revealing a more faithful representation of indigenous life, Moro appears to lay claim to the arguments of realism, though the imprecision of what is denounced and the uncanny nature of the disorienting, off-balance composition resolve the issue in favor of the contradictory Surrealist take on the photographic image as both primal visual object and sign. It also, perhaps unwillingly, returns to the trope that would equate indigenous reality with the abject. For all its critical intention, the juxtaposition ends up playing into indigenism’s very premises, as if there were no recognition that where the object of debate is a complex ethnoracial category, there can be no escape from the web of representation. As Mitchell reminds us, “irrealism” has an important role to play, “not as a philosophy that ‘supplants’ realism, but as a therapeutic thorn in its side, a way of keeping realism honest.” The paradox of indigenist discourse is that while it is grounded in the rhetoric of realism, it operates through the insistent evasion of a realist idiom. This explains the commercial failure of photographs of indigenous subjects produced in the 1860s and 1870s. The extreme rarity of these images in Bolivia and Peru, as well as the telling fact that they are mainly preserved in foreign collections, indicates that they were produced for a specialized audience of scientists and travelers. It is likely that most were, in fact, initially produced as commissions. The steady regularity, in particular, of Ricardo Villaalba’s photographs of indigenous subjects clearly belies a different set of conventions than those that defined the narrative tone of the figures appearing in costumbrista photographs put out by Lima studios, in which indigenous figures are not a dominating subject. It is also telling that these photographs were rarely, if ever, reproduced widely in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries and had such little impact on the construction of a collective imaginary. Instead, it was the rise of the postcard industry that produced a different genre of images in which indigenous figures generally appear in elaborate dress or set against the scenery of pre-Columbian sites (fig. 3.4). This is a very different sort of photographic language, one that evades both the frontal confrontation of the studio type and its descriptive rhetoric. It says much that the more successful photographs were clearly those that derived from pictorialism. Painting, in fact, was to remain the dominant model for the visual culture of indigenism. There is no doubt that Laso’s works have had an infinitely greater impact in shaping narratives of the nation. Photographic realism, pace Moro, was not to be indigenism’s undoing. The central issue is that the visual configuration of the Indian is not merely a false representation of an existing reality, but a false proposition that betrays the deeply problematic nature of any attempt to give singular collectives tangible form. Ethnoracial images propose the fallacy that racial types exist as concrete entities, that they reside in bodies, that they can be represented through cultural, morphological, and phenotypical signs—in short, that they can be made visible— so even if the visual figuration of ethnoracial categories constantly betrays its own impossibility, it sustains and perpetuates the fictions through which they are imagined. And it is the danger of images that they play into these presuppositions, that

Picturing Race through their impulse to objectify, they produce the promise, and the reality, of positing racial subjects. The ultimate argument of indigenist realists was that the issue of the representation of the Indian would be resolved politically. This involved eliminating its intellectual mediators. As José Carlos Mariátegui declared in an influential text, “If an indigenous literature finally appears, it will be when the Indians themselves are able to produce it.” Yet that objective would also be elusive, even where indigenous artists could be found. Photographer Martín Chambi, for example, seemed to fulfill that promise. Hailed by his contemporaries as a “representative of his race,” an “Andean man,” an artist of “profound Indian sentiment,” Chambi’s identity as an indigenous photographer helped to establish his place as a key figure of early twentieth-century Cuzco intellectual circles. One would think that if ever someone could transcend the demands of the harshest critics of indigenism, it would have been a Quechua artist wielding a camera, the paradigmatic instrument of realist representation. Yet this did not keep his work from being called into question. His friend José Uriel García claimed that Chambi often yielded “to the romanticism of tourists and foreign photographers, whose vision of Peru conforms to a mere picturesque episode.” García suggested that Chambi thus needed to “delve deeper into the complexities of the life of the people” and “discard that idealism so dear to the dominant classes.” The reality of Indian life could elude even the indigenous photographer. There is perhaps no better evidence of the power that the Indian had acquired in the national imagination, and no better proof that indigenism had become the screen through which society would come to be perceived and imagined. The Indian became a “medium,” to use Mitchell’s words, a “prosthesis that produces invisibility and hypervisibility simultaneously,” but also a factor operating across practices. The overpowering force of the modern concept of an indigenous essence explains the difficulties that anthropologists encountered in identifying the Indian in the field, the frustration of archaeologists attempting to define the recondite meanings of an ideal pre-Columbian spirit, and the unfruitful musings of intellectuals considering the concept of the Andean world. The history of indigenism could be summed up as the narrative of a permanent failure: the pursuit of an always elusive referent. Indigenist discourses of authenticity and realism construct an unattainable object so that its figures of otherness are conceived and subsequently exposed as representations. In this narrative of deceived expectations, the Indian remains somewhere beyond reach, as a phantasm, elusive in its power. The struggle with depictions sustains the distance already imposed through the discourses of approximation, so that the consciousness of the inadequacy of texts and images in relation to the actuality of the indigenous population—its supposed referent—translates into the rhetoric of a separation impossible to bridge.

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Epilogue Personal Narratives, Public Images

Laso is the central though invisible protagonist of his own paintings. In the veiled identification with Gonzalo Pizarro, established in dialogue with the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, he defined his complex relationship with the Hispanic heritage responsible for the oppression that his painting denounced. The desire to resolve that situation projected the conflicted search for approximation that the Pascana series insistently explored. These are more than pictorial strategies; they are the expression of a struggle with unresolved issues, but also intensely political gestures that placed the painter and his practice squarely within the public sphere. This personal engagement with the subjects of his paintings produced a series of complex images that were at once public and deeply personal. The procedure was consistent across a number of other works that are not discussed in this book, some of which should perhaps be briefly mentioned. There is Laso’s most enduring image, Saint Rose of Lima, which tradition states, and resemblance would further appear to confirm, was based on the physiognomy of his wife, Manuela Henríquez, who is also said to be represented as the figure of Liberty in the large-scale allegory of American Unity, painted for the American Congress held in Lima in 1864. And there is his large and enigmatic The Concert (fig. E.1), first exhibited in October 1859, which can be read as an allegory of the arts, and possibly even as Laso’s aesthetic manifesto. It shows three monks engaged in music in an interior modeled on the architecture of the Italian Palazzo del Podestà in Pistoia. The two standing figures have been identified as his friends Manuel de Osma and the painter Toribio Alfonso Calmet. Much as he had done in the Pascana series, Laso projected himself—or his alter ego—into the scene at the moment of conceiving the painting, only to erase the signs of his presence in the final composition; in fact, preparatory sketches for the work show that the singer to the left was originally intended to be a painter at his easel (fig. E.2). The stark concentra-

Epilogue

FIGURE E.1. Francisco

Laso, The Concert, ca. 1855–1859. Oil on canvas, 214 × 134 cm. Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Merino, Metropolitan Municipality of Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

tion of the musicians and the rarefied religious atmosphere evoke a community of artists sharing a spiritual and aesthetic ideal. Yet in its conventual associations, the painting is also an image of seclusion that speaks to the Romantic trope of artistic isolation from bourgeois society and, simultaneously, to the distance separating elevated aesthetic pursuits from the ordinariness of mundane life. This raises questions regarding the audiences that Laso imagined for his work, but also evokes the way in which his practice confounds the division between the public and the private spheres. There are a number of ways to think through this permeability. One is Laso’s conviction, drawn from standard elite narratives and made explicit in his writings, that the reformation of Peruvian society could only be achieved by radically affecting customs and traditions. Moral renewal began in the home. Laso’s Aguinaldo

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FIGURE E. 2. Francisco

Laso, Study for “The Concert,” ca. 1855–1859. Oil on board, 31.5 × 23.5 cm. Gustavo and Analía Barrios Collection, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

had been dedicated to the ladies of Lima, charged with the responsibility of undoing a system of Peruvian education that had until then produced weak leaders wanting in public spirit. His Creole bildungsroman exposed the private world of Lima elites, publicly attacking their moral corruption. Laso’s understanding of the fateful interdependence of domestic context and civic life, of individual and society, marked his conviction that the reform of the private realm was indispensable for the improvement of society. But beyond Laso’s explicit reflections, there are other forms of considering this interdependence, this tension between private worlds and public imagery. Laso’s self-image was constructed and played out in public, in the spaces of the theater and the press where his generation first assumed their roles as public intellectuals and later as the operators of the national state and its politics. The consolidation of the administrative organization of government at midcentury affirmed their position, which could allow for Mendiburu’s claim regarding Peru’s dual social structure and his explicit avowal of the coastal elite’s control of the means of

Epilogue national representation. Laso’s procedure of making friends and family embody and personify the nation is a telling mark of that co-option of the public sphere. The coincidence of these particular circumstances with the rise of the modern role of author—one clearly aware of his persona, and one whose personal sentiments may become a matter of public concern—creates a powerful combination of effects that transforms the sense and meaning of individual identity and autobiographical reference. Laso’s essays recurrently fictionalize his life. In “Un recuerdo” (A memory), he describes his friendship with the French painter Eugène Daméry; in “Mi cumpleaños” (My birthday), he recounts an anxious meditation on the passing of time; and in “Tiempos pasados” (Times past), he constructs a fictional account of his European travels. The author’s voice is explicitly present through self-references and interjections of personal opinions, accounts of dreams, and autobiographical fragments. The Aguinaldo is exemplary of this narrative strategy. While Laso criticizes the young Manongo of the story, he repeatedly refers to his own life in a gesture of self-criticism and even self-deprecation, as if the child’s upbringing were somehow a reflection of his own process of growing up. Coming of age is also an undertone of The Three Races, a painting first exhibited in April 1859 in the lithographic store of Emilio Prugue in Lima. In the first description of the work, by an anonymous El Comercio critic, it is said to depict “a boy who plays cards in the company of a chola and a zamba, three entirely different types that Mr. Laso has deftly demarcated.” There is no suggestion here of the artist’s obvious use of allegorical convention, and there would be none in ensuing discussions. A critic who commented on its showing at the first national exhibition of 1860 succinctly described it as a “nice cuadro de costumbres,” and José Antonio de Lavalle later included it among Laso’s “humorous sketches.” The notion that the painting was but a light, descriptive scene continued into the twentieth century. Carlos Raygada welcomed the composition as a respite in the context of Laso’s “meditative and severe” production. The painting plays with this ambiguity. There is a sense of calm repose in the scene, reflected in the key detail of the way the young Afro-descendant woman has comfortably let her shoe slip and fall casually to the ground. Yet the painting resists the motifs and visual devices of costumbrismo. The linear, almost abstract definition of the figures differentiates the painting from the sketchy immediacy that sustains the visual rhetoric of costumbrista watercolors. Crucially, the fact that the group is depicted in a domestic interior radically sets it apart from the street scenes that had, until then, almost exclusively defined the genre’s imagery. Much in the same way that the liminar placement of The Laundress marks a distance from public life and associates her with the privacy of the home, the domestic servants in The Three Races establish a link that bridges popular urban life with elite interiors. The upper-class household is placed on view, and private spaces are made public. As he had done in his writings, Laso penetrated and exposed the traditionally sheltered space of Lima elites. It is revealing that behind Laso’s austere painting should lie the distant memory of Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834, Musée du Louvre)

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FIGURE E. 3. Francisco Laso, The Three Races (or Equality Before the Law) ca. 1859. Oil on canvas, 81 × 106 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Alicia Lastres de la Torre Fund, 1998.7.1. Photograph by Eduardo Hirose.

(fig. E.4). Laso’s formal language conceals that debt, but the traces are there: in the intimacy of the setting, the languid eroticism of the Black servant, the inclined head of the boy, the rigid posture of the Indian girl, and, tellingly, the loose slipper in the foreground. We know that Laso studied the painting through a partial oil sketch he made of the central figure during his time in Paris. The evocation is not simply formal. Creole writers and travelers had constructed a parallel between Lima’s dissolute society and Orientalist decadence, an idea that framed Laso’s Aguinaldo and appears as the veiled subtext of the painting. That the scene should be apparently set in the estrado, the sheltered space in traditional Lima homes reserved for women and children, confirms the gendered implications of elite questionings of Creole culture. As a remnant of colonial customs tainted by Spain’s Oriental and, specifically, Moorish heritage, the raised seating platform (then being displaced by chairs) further spoke to a decadent Creole culture that was impervious to the advances of modernity. The game of cards that brings this group together also evokes tropes of Creole unproductivity, a recurring theme of Laso’s Aguinaldo, in which cards and gambling are the key signs of

Epilogue Manongo’s dissolute life, even from childhood. More generally, Marcel Velázquez has noted how gambling had taken “the place of an absent education” in the literature on Lima since the eighteenth century, and it is significant that the fight against illegal bets should have been one of Laso’s activities as syndic of the Lima municipal council. The Three Races cannot but be seen in this greater scheme of elite reform and modernization. The painting’s recourse to allegory helps to place the work within the sphere of public discourse. The hieratic composition, the solemnity of the figures, and the calm seriousness with which the two children engage in the game suggest that the painting transcends both the descriptive nature of costumbrismo and the anecdotal character of genre painting. In a text written years after his friend’s death, Lavalle mentioned that Laso had, in fact, titled the painting Equality Before the Law. There is more than a hint of irony in the designation, for the group is presented in a context in which the social hierarchy is not denied but emphasized. It is, of course, hardly possible to imagine a gathering of individuals of differing ethnic origins in a Lima domestic interior that is not defined by gross inequality. The signs of

FIGURE E.4. Eugène Delacroix, Women of Algiers in Their Apartments, 1834 Salon. Oil on canvas, 180 × 229 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, INV3824, © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Jean-Franck Raux.

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Epilogue such disparity are subtly suggested. The contrast between the formal dress of the fair-skinned boy and the simple, more casual garments of the girl and woman indicates evident class differences. He is the master of the house, and they, the servants. The signs are evident in the modest informality of their dresses and the casual ease of what is evidently an intimate and quotidian relationship binding the three figures together. Only the lower social status of the woman could allow for the erotic suggestions of her naked foot and her shoulder left bare by the dress that slips down her arm. This Lima interior captures the frictions that undermine hypothetical equality with concrete specificity. The fact that it is the boy’s turn to play would seem to suggest that his dominant position is only temporary, and narrative projection can lead us to imagine that it will inevitably pass on to the other players in the succeeding turns of the game. They are probably playing the popular game of tresillo, also known as rocambor, which, like society, had strict rules and regulations, significantly described in period manuals as the “laws” of the game. Though there were only three active players, the game included a fourth whose function was to deal the cards, which Mario Montalbetti has noted is an absent presence in the painting. This invisible participant, perhaps the viewer or the artist, opens an unsuspected space for dialogue with the viewer in a composition that at first sight seems more self-contained than any of Laso’s other works. The fact that two of the painting’s subjects are children exposes a structural inequality defined by birth. Yet in representing the group engaged in playing cards, which is a game of chance, Laso seems to propose that the situation portrayed could, and would, inevitably change. In fact, the gesture of the indigenous girl picking a card from her hand indicates that her moment comes next, as it also suggests the constant deferral of equality: to each their turn, as if republican law could compensate for structural injustices. The paradox of Laso’s card game is precisely that the next turn is permanently forestalled in the static pictorial image. In 1859, the same year he first exhibited the painting, Laso published “La paleta y los colores” (The palette and the colors), his frontal attack on Peruvian racism in which he questioned determinist arguments that explained inequality through notions of inherited ethnoracial differences in order to defend the idea that an egalitarian society would be achieved if elites could establish a level playing field for all its citizens. Yet this liberal idea is unrepresentable, as Montalbetti notes in his reading of The Three Races as a painting both of a game that cannot affect reality and one that figures an inexistent parity as a loss. Equality is an abstraction that can be evoked only through negation, through the contrast between the egalitarian ideal that the title proposes and the pictorial image that denies it. The unequal relationship between family and servants had been exposed in Laso’s Aguinaldo, in a passage that denounced the exploitation of indigenous children as domestic workers. There was little difference between the status of these servants, or cholitos, and that of the Afro-descendant slaves working in Peruvian households. Their subjection was the demonstration of “absolute power on a domestic scale,” as Alberto Flores Galindo described it. The rewards offered by Lima

Epilogue families for escaped workers in the newspapers reveal the assumption of a right of ownership over them. This servitude was carried out with impunity. Tacitly allowed by provincial authorities and supported by an increasing urban demand that rose in proportion to the decrease in the availability of domestic slaves, the trade in indigenous children seems to have grown significantly in the 1850s, when many liberal writers came out to denounce what had by then become a symbol of indigenous exploitation. Carlos Aguirre has demonstrated how uprooted indigenous servants were actually at a disadvantage in relation to slaves, who were protected by special laws and aided by local networks of support. They were thus hardly equal, but citizens with limited rights. Laso’s “Story of Manuquita,” inserted in the Aguinaldo, tells of a young indigenous girl who served in his house when he was a child, and whom he bitterly described as “a piece of furniture or an animal that a deputy or subprefect had given to my sister as a gift [emphasis in original].” The autobiographical story, an episode that occurred when Laso was barely six years old, revolves around his sister’s pearl and gold rosary, stolen by an abusive older friend who threatened him into silence. When, inevitably, the child Manuquita was accused of stealing the rosary, Laso sided with his friend, kept the secret, and became an accomplice in crime. Beaten by a public official and bullied by the family into admitting an offense she had not committed, the child servant suffered the consequences of Laso’s silence. Justice arrived in the figure of Laso’s father—literally the magistrate, who assumed the role of the judge and acquitted the girl. Yet the paternalistic pardon would not erase her tarnished reputation or the stigma of an accusation of theft. Laso, who did not confess his guilt, remained unpunished. The piece ends with a tragic tone amid intimations of the unknown circumstances of Manuquita’s early death. Laso’s text is the first public staging of Creole social guilt, the earliest public narrative of the embarrassment of racism that would dominate Peruvian literature, setting the foundations of a theme that reached a culminating point in Alfredo Bryce Echenique’s novel Un mundo para Julius (1970). The painter’s personal experience acquires the exemplary status of a parable of social inequality. The narrative projects what Gonzalo Portocarrero has described in another context as a central pattern of social domination in Peru, defined by “a punishment that seeks a fault that explains it and a fault that cannot find the punishment that it deserves”: the shame of inequality. In recounting the story, Laso establishes the incident as his torment, as a pivotal episode in the narrative of his own life: What a miserable being I was! It is something that I have never forgiven myself for; and that confession weighs on me as a fatal sentence.

Confession is the only sentence possible, and penance the only reparation for a fault that cannot be undone or repaid. It is no stretch to establish a correspondence between Manuquita and the indigenous girl in The Three Races. Poised to draw a card—“steal” it, as the language of the game actually specifies—she is placed in a privileged position as the apex of

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Epilogue the pyramidal composition that structures the painting. Even the clearly marked orthogonals on the floor converge at a point slightly above her head. Her frontal, prominent placement within the painting contrasts with her unassuming figure and modest clothing. Significantly enough, the only element that serves to distinguish her is a small rosary hanging from her neck. But rosaries are not made to be worn as adornments, so one cannot but assume that its placement responds to a conscious intention to link the painting to the story told in the Aguinaldo. There can be no doubt that The Three Races was meant as a tribute to Manuquita. If Laso used the written text as a confessional, the act of painting became a form of expiation. Beyond the simple image of a domestic interior, the painting transcends the anecdotal character of costumbrismo to resolve, on the surface of the canvas, the social contradictions at the heart of Peruvian society. What Laso condemned in his writings, he redressed in his paintings. These personal references define the conceptual architecture of the paintings, but they are not there to be seen. They are not properly self-portraits, gestures of public exposure like that of Ignacio Merino, who included himself as an actor in his major painting Columbus before the Council of Salamanca (1863). In Laso’s works, personal allusions are not simply inserted into a traditionally conceived composition, but shape the very conception of his paintings. As in The Concert or in his Pascanas, Laso incorporated direct self-references only in the sketches used to think through the concept, later erasing the visible traces of his presence from the final works. In this, as in much else, Laso aligned himself with contemporary academic theory, which considered preparatory studies a private aspect of the creative process that were not meant to be exposed. The personal narratives in his works are perceptible only when the paintings are placed under close scrutiny, or when the retrospective work of historians gathers evidence that would not have been available to contemporary viewers. At most, these references would have been noticeable only to a small circle of acquaintances. The paintings are literally acted out by his intimate circle of friends and family to the point that not only is the conception of public images based on the incorporation of private references, but public symbols are given proper names. In the case of The Three Races, family tradition also holds that the boy represented in the painting is Laso’s nephew, Juan Norberto Eléspuru y Laso (1846–1923) (the son of his sister Juana Manuela), whose appearance in the painting coincides with his age at the time the painting was created. It is not surprising that modern critics should have read self-portraits of the painter even where such identifications are improbable, or that they should have given such an important place to the artist’s biography, even beyond traditional art-historical convention. Laso’s personal circle was, in fact, his only certain “public.” He painted portraits of many of his friends and family members, and with few exceptions, they were the ones who kept his works and maintained his memory as an artist. It is significant that he should have chosen to give The Three Races to his friend Mariano Álvarez, and that the painting should have remained outside of public view until recently. His paintings would be remembered and re-created through tableaux vivants en-

Epilogue acted by his circle in the late nineteenth-century literary salons in which his sister Juana Manuela participated, a practice continued in elite cultural associations into the twentieth century. The staging of Laso’s works somehow recovers the process of their making, their construction as imaginary scenes played out by his peers. The embodiment of public symbols in the secluded spaces of elite intellectual circles exposed the contradictions between the ideal of a broad political public sphere and its denial in the constitution of an oligarchic society, which also surfaced in Laso’s practice as a politician. He created public images that could both embody and constitute the nation. He had also created the context within which he would act out his identity. Yet his ambition was contradicted by his practice, his aristocratic understanding of painting, and his simultaneous skepticism about the possibilities of forging an art public in Peru. The very limitations of the artistic field—the absence of criticism and a public sphere for art—unhinged painting from broader discourses. It was a placeless practice in which the state barely had a stake, and where the market exerted no real pressure. It is difficult to imagine what social inscription painting could have had, and what frameworks could have sustained its legibility. There was a certain freedom in operating within such a practice, which Laso engaged through a dialogue with an ideal spectator—a placeless citizen of a later time—and ultimately, with himself. There is a performative function in the painter’s imaginary incorporation into his own paintings, a sort of symbolic resolution of personal and social contradictions. His works actively engage the problems of the society in which he lived, but as a placeless practice defined in a deferred utopian future, painting also allowed Laso the possibility of envisioning a different order of things. My reading of The Three Races explains the personal narratives that structure the painting but does not fully engage the way in which those references are shaped by the dialogue that the work establishes with broader discourses. Laso broke apart the abstract solidity of figural conventions by creating a modern allegory, a work that transforms generic visual forms by thrusting them into the conflicted context of specific social narratives. This was a strategy that painters like Courbet and Millet variously engaged in during the 1850s, a decade that served as a pivot in the transition to the pictorial modernity that Édouard Manet would push radically forward in the early 1860s. Yet Laso maintained his figures within a visual generality that resists forms of realism to produce an image bound to the rhetoric of academic abstraction. The Three Races is a national allegory; its synthetic compositional simplicity makes it immediately legible as a painting of racial diversity. It finds its textual counterpart in Laso’s “La paleta y los colores,” a piece that clearly, almost explicitly, refers to the subject of The Three Races and The Laundress, paintings he had exhibited earlier the same year. Laso’s meditation on ethnoracial difference is illustrated by analogy to his own practice. If his paintings engaged the nation and its predicaments, his texts resituated painting as the paradigm through which the nation could be radically reconsidered. The central argument disputes the claims of “Peruvian statesmen” who “fatally affirm that the country cannot be constituted”:

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Epilogue They give one and a thousand reasons for this, and the first, their hobby horse, is the diversity of races. The wise men have given their unappealable verdict and have proclaimed the heterogeneity of the citizens of this great Republic; that is to say, they have declared our society a true potpourri [emphasis in original].”

And as he goes on to refute this idea of a nation made impossible by difference, he turns for arguments to the practice of his own art. Laso’s insistent inscription of painting in society is nowhere made more explicit than in his comparison of the crowds gathered in Lima streets and public spaces to a “great human palette” defined by an infinite variety of colors resulting from the mixture of Europeans, Indians, and Africans. There is no color that is superior to another, he argues, and the more colors in the painter’s palette, the better. The notion frontally opposes the ideal of a homogeneous nation, which had become one of the fantasies of post-independence elites. Laso questioned the model republican subject as an abstract universal citizen, for if all subjects are equal before the law, they are also different. Peruvian national discourses produced this difference with an insistence that made it impossible to imagine either a common citizenry or a singular people. Even the discourses of homogenization started from the premise of insurmountable differences. The nation existed in spite of these—or through overcoming them or their dissolution. Moving beyond a simple defense of diversity, Laso denies the very notion “that in Peru there is heterogeneity of races, though its citizens may be of different colors.” In an argument even more exceptional for the times, he turns the tables against the defenders of racial purity, those who considered miscegenation a factor of racial degeneracy, to claim that the combination of races actually produced superior “products.” One need not search far for evidence of the rationalizations of inequality that Laso attempts to counter—present, for example, in José Antonio de Lavalle’s commentaries on Felipe Pardo y Aliaga’s constitutional project, which appeared precisely in 1859. In his entry on the principle of equality before the law, Lavalle concluded that leveling all citizens “would be absurd in theory, and impossible in practice; because such a procedure would oppose the immutable laws of nature and introduce disorder in society.” Hierarchies would be preserved as a central element of daily life, and they would be violently affirmed, even among Laso’s closest circle, including figures such as Pardo, whose portrait he painted, and whose profoundly racist satirical writings have been exposed by Cecilia Méndez. The public evidence of those texts suggests the pervasive presence of more private expressions, lost to the historical record but which surface occasionally in the casual remarks that betray deep structures of discrimination. Lavalle could tellingly describe The Three Races, almost in passing and matter-of-factly, as a scene showing “a carefully clothed boy of white race, playing cards with a dirty Black woman and a ragged Indian child.” Laso’s text explicitly exposes and counters these racist frameworks. His writings further resist the narratives of ethnic purity and undermine the notion of the fixity of racial identities. Yet writing and painting are not commensurable, so The

Epilogue Three Races actually fixes and makes concrete the very idea of the races that Laso’s writings had attempted to question. The painting may suggest a future change of status between the three figures, but not the disappearance of the entities they allegorically represent. In giving them visual form, Laso ultimately reaffirmed the three races as distinct conceptual categories, the notion of race as type that, through different routes, was gaining ground in both scientific thought and the popular imagination. But what the image fixes, the text persistently attempts to undo. The painter’s arguments turn once and again to social mobility, to situations where, whether by talent or education, passing is similarly interpreted as a path toward ethnoracial transformation: “If instead of complaining of issues of epidermis, Indians and Zambos received instruction, then only through education would Indians and Zambos become White [emphasis in original],” wrote Laso. There are numerous racist slips in the text that evoke the structures of discrimination that he is consciously trying to question, as when he argues that were the indigenous population to be educated, instead of having “abject and ignorant” Indians in Congress, Peru could count them as enlightened representatives who would not play the role of “of a ram or a llama.” He cannot escape the tropes of abjectness and bestiality that form the base of the discourse of the victimized Indian, on which even the most enlightened forms of indigenous vindications seem grounded. As he describes the rise of subaltern groups in society, Laso openly falls into reaffirming their status as servants. The Indian who achieves power, he claims, will not be resentful or vengeful, but will adhere to the other races “to serve them and fraternize with them.” Ultimately, passing involves a cultural mutation: No one can doubt that an Indian, no matter how Indian he is, if he has the fortune of dressing in coattails, will be elected a congressman. Once a congressman, this Indian will become a senator, counselor, and finally minister of state. And before that Indian senator, counselor, or minister Whites and Mulattos will bow to him to obtain a post or any other benefit.

Power “whitens.” Laso asserts it as a matter of fact, which suggests that equality can be achieved only through assimilation. The uprooted indigenous Manuquita of Laso’s childhood narrative is precisely a cholita, the figure of displaced indigeneity. The Three Races cannot be seen in isolation, but as one image of the nation among others, a painting that must be read against the powerful presence of the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras and the Pascana series. The Indian is the paradoxical figure of national narratives, at once other and essence, a founding element that does not properly represent a “people” to the extent that the nation was not conceived as a unified whole. No matter how far he broke from standard discussions, or how original he was as an essayist—and that he was—there is ultimately nothing in Laso’s writings to recall the subtle but powerful visual phrasing of cultural authenticity that is materialized in the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras. That modern figuration, textually paral-

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Epilogue leled in the literary and musical discussions of the yaraví, barely appears elsewhere in public discourse of the period. It articulates a new field that maintained relative autonomy from other discussions that explicitly confronted the indigenous population’s marginal place in the nation. The order of discourse that determined this separation is one that exceeded even Laso’s powerful personal vision. It was still present more than half a century later, when José Carlos Mariátegui undertook his influential address of “the Indian problem” in his Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. If the main thrust of his discussion focuses on economic explanations for the situation of the indigenous population, those arguments are not undone in the final, lengthy, and even central chapter he devotes to the process of literature, in which he expands on the displacement of Hispanism by the rise of indigenism, as he would be the first to name it. Mariátegui wrote at the time of the greatest expansion of ethnolinguistic nationalisms, the moment when the different strands of genealogical notions of culture that Laso and other writers of his generation had somehow prefigured finally consolidated into the naturalized image of the nation that the rise of mass culture would transform into a central paradigm of twentiethcentury thought. Seen together, Laso’s images of the nation thus perfectly summarize the Creole construction of indigeneity as a cultural substance, a timeless essence that sustains the nation’s originality, and, simultaneously, as a fragile concept waiting to be undone by the narratives of Republican progress. There is no contradiction in this apparent inconsistency if one imagines the Indian as the nation’s past, and the citizen as a figure poised in the present and projected into the future. The perspective of time decisively determines Creole national images, built upon the dichotomies of tradition and modernity, permanence and change, the fetishization of difference and the will to homogenize. In fact, the expectation of a culturally normalized population as the outcome of progress takes as a given the notion of cultural loss. The idea of modernity and of modernization that shaped the rise of a global bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century was predicated upon this nostalgia and this promise. It was the framework for Laso’s pictorial and political project, and his struggle to produce a national narrative. For The Three Races and the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, the images of the subjected indigenous worker and that of the ideal Indian are two faces of the same coin. Their separateness—as well as their interdependence and the tensions and contrasts that bind them together and set them apart—stages the predicament of modern indigenism.

CHRONOLOGY

1823 1825

1826 1827 1830

1831

1836

1838

Francisco Laso is born May 8 in Tacna to José Benito Laso de la Vega (1783–1862) and Juana Manuela de los Ríos (d. 1830). Gamarra names Benito Laso speaker of the new Court of Justice of Cuzco, and Simón Bolívar appoints him president of the Junta de Calificación. He is later deputy for Puno at the National Congress. Benito Laso publishes his tract in favor of Bolívar. He is named prefect of Puno and speaker of the Arequipa Superior Court. With Bolívar’s departure, Benito Laso is exiled to Bolivia, where he settles with his family in La Paz. (April) Favored by Gamarra’s return to the presidency in 1829, Benito Laso is reinstated as speaker of the court in Arequipa. On August 7, during the family’s journey back to Arequipa, Laso’s mother, Juana Manuela de los Ríos, dies in Copacabana (Bolivia). On March 10, 1831, Benito Laso marries Petronila García Calderón y Crespo in Arequipa. Francisco Laso studies at a preparatory school in Arequipa. Constitutional reform of the courts of justice forces Benito Laso out of his post. (February) Andrés de Santa Cruz forms the Peru-Bolivia Confederation. Benito Laso, a friend and supporter of Gamarra, Santa Cruz’s rival, is dismissed from his positions in the Arequipa court. He moves his family to Lima. Francisco Laso studies at the National Drawing Academy in Lima under Francisco Javier Cortés. He later enters the secondary school of Clemente Noel. (August) President Gamarra names Benito Laso minister of government and foreign relations. Laso’s sister, Juana Manuela, marries Norberto Eléspuru.

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1839

1840–1841 1841

1842

1843

1847

1848

1849

1850

Laso gives drawing lessons while an intern at the school of Clemente Noel. He continues to live and teach there after finishing his coursework. He audits courses at the School of San Carlos. Laso is listed as a painter in the first class of taxpayers in the Lima registry of patentes. His address is listed as Trinidad 37. (January) Battle of Yungay, where Gamarra defeats Santa Cruz. Benito Laso is deputy at the Congress of Huancayo and speaker of the Supreme Court of Justice, a post he maintains until his retirement in 1858. Francisco Laso serves as assistant director of the National Drawing Academy, then directed by the painter Ignacio Merino. (October) Gamarra invades Bolivia. On November 18, Peruvian forces are defeated at Ingavi, where Gamarra is killed. A young Francisco Laso then joins the Batallion “Comercio 1” of the National Guard as a volunteer in the war against Bolivia. Benito Laso is named minister of instruction during the short-lived presidency of General Juan Francisco de Vidal. He supports the National Drawing Academy. With the support of his sister Juana Manuela, Laso organizes his trip to Europe. In Paris he enters the atelier of Paul Delaroche, which is closed down in July 1843 after a hazing episode. In October he forms part of the group of Delaroche students that establishes a new atelier under Charles Gleyre. On May 5–6, Laso obtains visas for Geneva, Tuscany, and the Vatican from the Chilean delegation in Paris. Laso is in Grenoble in May, after which he undertakes travel to Venice, stopping along the way in Turin, Novara, Milan, Ticino, and Verona. In September he begins travel through Ferrara, Bologna, and Prato on the way to Florence. He is in Venice by July. Laso is in Rome in July. His passport is sealed at the Chilean delegation near the Holy See. He obtains a visa for Naples and the Baths of Acquasanta. (February) Laso travels through Florence, Livorno, Genoa, and Marseilles on his way to Paris, where he remains until April, when he obtains a pass to travel to Lima via England. On July 14 Laso arrives in Lima and sets up a studio in Gremios Street, where he will later paint the portraits of Miguel del Carpio, Juan Norberto Eléspuru, and the Chilean exiles Federico Errázuriz and the Arcos brothers. He also paints his large-scale religious painting The Burial of Christ. He is in Arequipa at the end of the year. (May) Laso is an examiner of the drawing class directed by Manuel Dositeo Carvajal at the Beausejour school in Lima. Between June and September, Laso paints the decorations of the new Salon de las Artes theater in Lima. In Merino’s absence, Laso serves as acting director of the Drawing Academy.

Chronology 1851

1852 1853

1854 1855 1855

1856

1856

1857

1858

1859

1860

(April) Laso serves as instructor at the school of Noel. He paints the portrait of Bartolomé Herrera. He obtains a government pension to continue his studies in Europe. On October 26 he travels to Cuzco before leaving the country. Laso leaves Lima for Europe sometime in early March and by April is in Paris, where he sets up a studio on Grenelle Street. During the summer of 1853, Laso undertakes a painting trip to the Grave region of France accompanied by his friends Henri BlancFontaine and Diodore Rahoult, students of Léon Cogniet from Grenoble. Laso’s Aguinaldo pamphlet is published in Paris. (January) Aguinaldo is published in the Lima newspaper El Comercio. Laso’s Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro and Inhabitant of the Cordilleras are exhibited at the Paris Universal Exposition. Laso travels to Belgium during the second half of the year, returning to Paris by October, and finishes his painting Justice. His government pension is withdrawn. On August 15 Laso sails from Le Havre to return to Peru. In September he signs a petition to aid Lamartine by promoting the Spanish translation of his Cours familier de littérature. On November 21, in response to a government petition, he produces a plan for the creation of a school of fine arts. General Vivanco’s revolution declares the abolition of the 1856 Constitution, which had been promulgated by Castilla in October. Laso arrives in Arequipa early in the year to begin a painting of Saint John for the Cathedral, which he delivers toward the end of the year, when he receives the commission to paint the three remaining evangelists and Saint Peter. He is in Arequipa when General Vivanco retreats to Arequipa from Lima. Laso sympathizes with Vivanco’s position. By January 12, Laso has already returned to Lima. He would continue to work on the Arequipa Cathedral commission throughout the year. In February Laso marries Manuela Henríquez. On April 15, Laso exhibits The Three Races and The Laundress at the lithographic store of Prugue and Co. On August 3, he exhibits his Saint Rose of Lima at Prugue and Co. On October 15, he exhibits The Concert at Prugue and Co. That same month he presents three paintings of the evangelists to the Arequipa Cathedral. He also cofounds the editorial board of the bimonthly La Revista de Lima, the most influential journal of the period, for which he collaborates as an essayist until 1863. (February) Laso presents four paintings, including Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, to the state. (August) Laso participates in the first national exhibition held at the convent of Saint Peter in Lima. He exhibits Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, Justice, Saint Rose, and The Three Races, as well as his portraits of Josefa Anglade de Noriega and Felipe Pardo y Aliaga.

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1862 1863

1864

1865 1866

1866

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1868 1869

(September) He exhibits Pascana in the Cordillera, a painting of a Roman girl, and a “portrait of a fi fteenth-century gentleman” at the second national art exhibition. On January 14, Benito Laso dies in Lima. Laso signs his last article for La Revista de Lima before traveling to Europe. He is in Paris until mid-July, when he departs for Vevey, where he remains until the end of August. Laso is in Rome during the winter, until the end of January, when he travels to Paris, returning to Lima by the end of the year. He paints his large work Unión Americana (National Library, Lima) to commemorate the American Congress held in Lima. On November 28, Laso supports Mariano Ignacio Prado’s coup against President Pezet. (January) Laso is elected syndic of the municipality of Lima and placed in charge of the public works commission. Laso is named to the theater censor board. On April 12, Laso signs a petition presented to the municipal council expressing concern over the Spanish attack on Valparaiso and warning that the same could occur in Callao. Preventive measures are proposed, including the acquisition of water pumps for the capital. On May 2, as captain of the municipal fire brigade, Laso leads a force of more than two hundred volunteer artisans in the battle of May 2, 1866, in which Peruvian forces repelled the attack of the Spanish fleet. (September) Laso presents a proposal to tear down the city walls and sell the land to build an alameda (public walk) and a prison. (November) Laso informs the city mayor of the ruinous state of the church of San Marcelo and asks for its reconstruction. Laso is a representative for Lima at the Congress called to draw a new constitution. He becomes a founding member of the National Academy and editor of the newspaper La Tribuna, which appeared in support of Prado’s presidency. He is director of the Beneficencia Pública de Lima and participates in the fight against the yellow fever epidemic. (January) Laso’s ill health takes him to Huacho, where he and his wife buy a house. (February–March) Laso is in charge of the weekly column “Bazaar semanal” in the newspaper El Nacional. In his first column he already mentions the limitations imposed on his work by an undetermined illness. He forms part of the Junta de Notables in charge of electing a new mayor of Lima. On May 14, Laso dies in the town of San Mateo on his way to Jauja, where he was traveling to recover his health.

NOTES

Introduction 1. There is consensus regarding Laso’s foundational status in histories of modern indigenism. See, for example, Edgardo Pérez Luna, “Los primeros destellos del indigenismo en la pintura de Francisco Laso,” El Comercio (Lima), December 9, 1959; or, notably, Mirko Lauer’s Introducción a la pintura peruana del siglo XX (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1976). 2. Though my focus is on Peru, there are parallels to similar processes in other Andean countries. See Blanca Muratorio’s pioneering compilation on the image of the Indian in Ecuador, Imágenes e imagineros: Representaciones de los indígenas ecuatorianos, siglos XIX y XX (Quito: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales Sede Ecuador, 1994). For twentieth-century Bolivia, see Javier C. Sanjinés, El espejismo del mestizaje (La Paz: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, Fundación Programa de Investigación Estratégica en Bolivia, 2005); for Ecuador in the same period, see Michele Greet, Beyond National Identity: Pictorial Indigenism as a Modernist Strategy in Andean Art, 1920–1960 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). 3. “En même temps que pour preuve de l’inexistance de la nation, l’Indien est tenu pour le fondement sur lequel elle puisse jamais se bâtir. Identifié au peuple, il est considéré comme le dépositaire des valeurs nationalisantes. Et s’il est condamné à s’abolir dans la société, c’est pour diffuser en son sein ces valeurs qui donneront à la nation une spécificité irréductible.” Henri Favre, L’indigénisme, Que sais-je? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 4. 4. On archaeological perspectives and the denigration of the contemporary indigenous population, see Cecilia Méndez, “Incas Sí, Indios No: Notes on Peruvian Creole Nationalism and Its Contemporary Crisis,” Journal of Latin American Studies 28, no.  1 (February 1996): 197–225; and Mark Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial Nationmaking in Andean Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 10–12. Rebecca Earle extends this argument to a regional perspective in

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Notes to Pages 2–3 The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 3. 5. Stacie G. Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexican Painting (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996). See also Ida Rodríguez Prampolini’s pioneering “La figura del indio en la pintura del siglo XIX: Fondo ideológico,” in La polémica del arte nacional en México, 1850–1910, ed. Daniel Schávelzon (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), 202–217. 6. “It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way around.” Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 55. On the political conception of nations in the process of independence, see José Carlos Chiaramonte, Nation and State in Latin America: Political Language during Independence (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2012), 71–77, 127–144, 243; Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided, 5–6. 7. The emergence of notions of cultural originality are generally located in the early twentieth century. See, for example, Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided, 5–7; Brooke Larson, Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 62n37; Marisol de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Eric Hobsbawm’s tracing of the rise of ethnolinguistic nationalisms to the 1870s helps to explain the expansion of indigenism in the early twentieth century; see Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 101–110. The timing of these concepts is crucial for understanding the evolution of the image of the Indian. 8. As Favre does, for example, in L’indigénisme, 9–16. 9. Studies of nineteenth-century discourses on the indigenous population include Luis Enrique Tord, El indio en los ensayistas peruanos, 1848–1948 (Lima: Editoriales Unidas, 1978); José Tamayo Herrera, Historia del indigenismo cuzqueño, siglos XVI–XX (Lima: INC, 1980); Efraín Kristal, The Andes Viewed from the City: Literary and Political Discourse on the Indian in Peru, 1848–1930, American University Studies, series 19, vol. 6 (New York: Peter Lang, 1987); Manuel Andrés García, De Peruanos a Indios: La figura del indígena en la intelectualidad y política criollas (Perú: Siglos XVIII-XIX), Colección Encuentros Iberoamericanos 10 (Seville: Universidad Internacional de Andalucía, 2007). For a more nuanced and better documented perspective, see Maud Yvinec, “‘Los peruanos conocidos antes con el nombre de indios’: Les discours sur l’Indien au Pérou, de la guerre d’indépendance à la guerre du Pacifique (1821–1879)” (PhD diss., Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2014). For a brief overview of standard accounts, see Rolando Rojas, La república imaginada: Representaciones culturales y discursos políticos en la época de la independencia (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2017). 10. The distinction can be traced to José Carlos Mariátegui’s contrast between mere “nativism” and an “authentic indigenism.” See Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928), trans. Marjory Urquidi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 271–272. Indianism was interpreted as romantic exoticism in early literary studies. See Antonio Cornejo Polar, La novela indigenista: Literatura y sociedad en el Perú (Lima: Lasontay, 1980), 36–37. Nineteenth-century indigenism, however, was no less and no more political or engaged than any of its later counterparts. 11. George W. Stocking names culture as a central element of the modern social scientific paradigm in “Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective,” American Anthropologist 68, no. 4 (August 1966): 879–880. See also Gyorgy Markus,

Notes to Pages 3–4 “Culture: The Making and the Make-Up of a Concept: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” in Culture, Science, Society: The Constitution of Cultural Modernity, Social and Critical Theory 10 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 305–306. 12. Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 8. 13. The inevitable reference is to Edward Said’s influential formulation of the Orient as “essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality” in Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 5. The parallel has been broadly drawn. See, for example, Orin Starn, “Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru,” Cultural Anthropology 6, no. 1 (February 1991): 66–67; and Alcida Rita Ramos, Indigenism: Ethnic Politics in Brazil (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 6. 14. For an account of Ricardo Güiraldes and gaucho dress, set against a larger regional discussion of literary autochthony, see Carlos J. Alonso, The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 79–81. For parallels with North American stagings of identity, see Philip Joseph Deloria’s survey Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 15. I explored this understanding of indigenism in Majluf, “El indigenismo en México y Perú: Hacia una visión comparativa,” in Arte, historia e identidad en América: Visiones comparativas, ed. Gustavo Curiel et al., XVII Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte, Estudios de Arte y Estética 37 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1994), 2:611–628. Mirko Lauer later developed this idea through the concept of “indigenismo 2” in Andes imaginarios: Discursos del indigenismo 2 (Cuzco: Sur and Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de las Casas,” 1997). Lauer refers to “indigenismo 2” as an ideological trap and false consciousness, alluding to its failure to influence politics (15–17, 38–39). In locating cultural indigenism as a secondary manifestation in relation to social vindications, Lauer cannot escape the Marxist focus that framed his classic Introducción a la pintura peruana del siglo XX. He does not see culture itself as a determining field, but rather falls back to pointing out its failings with respect to a reality discourse cannot affect. 16. The Peruvian Ministry of Culture, established in 2010, officialized this divide by giving the vice-ministry of intercultural affairs responsibility over a number of issues relating to indigenous citizenship, including the right to indigenous consultation. 17. See Ann Laura Stoler’s reading of “discursive bricolage” in Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 61, 90. 18. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Malden: Blackwell, 1993). See also Peter Wade’s extensive exploration of these problematic distinctions in Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (London: Pluto, 2002), 7–8. For the Andean region, see Mary Weismantel and Stephen F. Eisenman, “Race in the Andes: Global Movements and Popular Ontologies,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 17, no. 2 (1998): 121–142. 19. My use of the term ethnoracial relies on Peter Wade’s discussion of the tenuous distinctions between race and ethnicity (though he prefers to keep the terms separate and does not use the combined form) in Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, 2nd ed. (London: Pluto, 2010), chap. 1. 20. Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 103.

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Notes to Pages 5–8 21. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995). 22. De la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos, 28. 23. On the two central meanings of the term in modernity, see Markus, “Culture: The Making and the Make-Up of a Concept: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” in Culture, Science, Society, 306–306. On the racialized nature of this division, see Young, Colonial Desire. 24. Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Lauer’s explanation of indigenism as a reaction to modernity—a concept he names reversión— approximates this idea. See Lauer, Andes imaginarios, 25–28. 25. An important early source is José Antonio de Lavalle y Arias de Saavedra’s biography, “Francisco Laso,” El Perú Ilustrado 3, no. 137 (December 21, 1889): 1126– 1127. See also José Flores Aráoz, Catálogo de la exposición Francisco Laso (Lima: Sociedad Entre-Nous, Imprenta Torres Aguirre, 1937); and Francisco Laso, Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú y otros ensayos, 1854–1869, ed. Natalia Majluf (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos and Museo de Arte de Lima, 2003). I am currently completing a catalogue raisonné of Laso’s work. Focused essays by Gustavo Buntinx, Mario Montalbetti, and Ramón Mujica are cited in the course of this book. 26. The biographical information in the following pages (and in the chronology) draws on the documented narrative in my dissertation: “The Creation of the Image of the Indian in Nineteenth-Century Peru: The Paintings of Francisco Laso (1823– 1869),” 2 vols. (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1995). 27. Ricardo Kusunoki Rodríguez, Ignacio Merino, pintor de historia: 200 años, Munilibros 9 (Lima: Municipalidad Metropolitana de Lima, 2017). 28. Ricardo Kusunoki Rodríguez, “Mercados libres y artes liberales: El tránsito de las tradiciones pictóricas locales al academicismo en Lima (1837–1842),” Illapa 6 (2009): 47–59. See also Majluf, “Time and Place: Notes on the System of the Arts in Latin America,” in A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art, ed. Alejandro Anreus, Robin Greeley, and Megan Sullivan (Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell, 2021), chap. 31. For Cuba, see Paul Niell, “The Coloniality of Aesthetics: Regulating Race and Buen Gusto in Cuba’s 19th-Century Academy,” in Academies and Schools of Art in Latin America, ed. Oscar Vázquez (New York: Routledge, 2020), 81–93. 29. Carlos A. Forment offers a revealing description of how the new Sociedad Médica, established in 1854, displaced traditional Chinese, Mulatto, and female medical workers in La formación de la sociedad civil y la democracia en el Perú (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2014), 327–332. 30. Alejandro Losada’s La literatura en la sociedad de América Latina: Perú y el Río de la Plata, 1837–1880, Editionen der Iberoamericana (Frankfurt: Verlag Klaus Dieter Vervuert, 1983), 206, remains a key reference. See also Ricardo Palma’s classic account, “La Bohemia de mi tiempo,” Tradiciones peruanas completas, ed. Edith Palma (Madrid: Aguilar, 1964), 1293–1321; and Oswaldo Holguín Callo’s documented Tiempos de infancia y bohemia: Ricardo Palma (1833–1860) (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1994), 139–196. Given the close relationship between literature, art, and politics, it seems strange that Ulrich Mücke should claim that Lima’s bourgeoisie were uninterested in culture. See Mücke, Política y burguesía en el Perú: El partido civil antes de la guerra con Chile (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2010), 38–40. 31. Mücke, Política y burguesía en el Perú, 31–34.

Notes to Pages 9–11 32. For aspects of this understudied process through consumption patterns, see Alicia del Águila, Los velos y las pieles: Cuerpos, género y reordenamiento social en el Perú republicano (Lima, 1822–1872) (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2003). 33. For a classic expression of this view, see Heraclio Bonilla, Guano y burguesía en el Perú, Perú Problema 11 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1974). The most influential narrative of this failure of elites remains Julio Cotler, Clases, estado y nación en el Perú (1978), 6th ed., Perú Problema 17 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1992). By contrast, Jorge Basadre’s work as a historian of the Republic sought to demonstrate the importance of the period for understanding the twentieth century. See Basadre, “Explicación inicial,” in La iniciación de la República: Contribución al estudio de al evolución política y social del Perú (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2002), 1:51. For a broader regional vindication of Laso’s generation, see James E. Sanders, The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2014). 34. For postwar writing on the nation, see Jorge Basadre, Perú: Problema y posibilidad: Ensayo de una síntesis de la evolución histórica del Perú, Biblioteca Peruana (Lima: F. y E. Rosay, 1931), 156–157. Though Basadre points to González Prada, the narratives of failure emerged earlier, as Laso’s own writings demonstrate. For a lucid critique of this discourse, see Magdalena Chocano, “Ucronía y frustración en la conciencia histórica peruana,” Márgenes 1, no. 2 (October 1987): 43–60. See also Méndez, “Incas Sí, Indios No.” 35. In fact, exclusion and economic subjection of the indigenous population increased at the turn of the twentieth century. See, for example, Alicia del Águila, La ciudadanía corporativa: Política, constituciones y sufragio en el Perú (1821–1896) (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2013). On the indigenous right to vote, see Gabriella Chiaramonti, “A propósito del debate Herrera-Gálvez de 1849: Breves reflexiones sobre el sufragio de los indios analfabetos,” in Historia de las elecciones en el Perú: Estudios sobre el gobierno representativo, ed. Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada and Sinesio López, 2nd ed. (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Jurado Nacional de Elecciones, 2018), 343–378. 36. See recent literature on defense of indigenous rights; e.g., Carmen McEvoy, “Indio y nación: Una lectura política de la rebelión de Huancané (1866–1868),” in Forjando la nación: Ensayos de historia republicana (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, University of the South, Sewanee, 1999), 61–118; and Martín Monsalve Zanatti, “Opinión pública, sociedad civil y la ‘cuestión indígena’: La Sociedad Amiga de los Indios (1867–1871),” A Contracorriente 7, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 211–255. Yvinec traces close parallels in the discourses of pre- and postwar defenders of Indian rights in “‘Los peruanos conocidos antes con el nombre de indios,’” 351–359, 379, 394, 409. 37. Natalia Majluf, Escultura y espacio público: Lima, 1850–1879, Documentos de Trabajo, Serie Historia del Arte 2 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1994). 38. I am indebted to the vast literature on Latin American painting and nationbuilding, impossible to cover here, but to which I will selectively refer in the course of my arguments. For Mexico, see the systematic project undertaken by Esther Acevedo, Jaime Cuadriello, and Fausto Ramírez in the exhibition projects under the general rubric of Los pinceles de la historia. See De la patria criolla a la nación mexicana, 1750– 1860 and Los pinceles de la historia: La fabricación del Estado, 1864–1910 (Mexico City: Conaculta, Museo Nacional de Arte, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, 2000, 2003).

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Notes to Pages 11–13 39. For a perceptive critique of Peru’s “popular ideology,” see Fernando Fuenzalida V., “Poder, raza y étnica en el Perú contemporáneo,” in El indio y el poder en el Perú, ed. Fernando Fuenzalida V., Enrique Mayer et al. (Lima: Moncloa-Campodónico and Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1970), 15–30. 40. This contradicts Francesca Denegri’s suggestion that diversity disappeared from the visual field in this period. See Denegri, “Distopía poscolonial y racismo en la narrativa del XIX peruano,” in Familia y vida cotidiana en América Latina, siglos XVIII– XX, ed. Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy et al. (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2003), 117–135. See also Denegri’s El abanico y la cigarrera: La primera generación de mujeres ilustradas en el Perú, 3rd rev. ed. (Lima: Ceques Editores, 2018), 115–120. 41. The bibliography on these emblematic types is significant and impossible to summarize. For literary archetypes, see Alonso’s important The Spanish American Regional Novel. For visual iconographies, see, among others, Bonifacio del Carril, El gaucho a través de la iconografía (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1978); Roberto Amigo, “Carlos Morel: El costumbrismo federal,” Caiana: Revista de Historia del Arte y Cultura Visual del Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte 3 (December 2013), http://caiana.caia.org.ar /template/caiana.php?pag=articles/article_2.php&obj=115&vo l=3; María del Carmen Vázquez Mantecón, “La china mexicana, mejor conocida como china poblana,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 77 (2000): 123–150. For a survey of European ethnotypes—the study of which is termed “imagology” in literary studies—see Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, eds., Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters: A Critical Survey, Studia Imagologica 13 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). 42. For a subtle reading of twentieth-century criollismo, see Julio Ortega, Cultura y modernización en la Lima del 900 (Lima: CEDEP, 1986). Luis Gómez Acuña traces the term’s modern meanings through musical history in “Lo criollo en el Perú republicano: Breve aproximación a un término elusivo,” Histórica 31, no. 2 (2007): 115–166. 43. Bernard Lavallé, Las promesas ambiguas: Ensayos sobre el criollismo colonial en los Andes (Lima: Instituto Riva-Agüero, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1993), 15–21. See also Marcel Velázquez Castro, La mirada de los gallinazos: Cuerpo, fiesta y mercancía en el imaginario sobre Lima (1640–1895) (Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2013), chap. 4. 44. Sebastián Salazar Bondy’s reading of twentieth-century criollismo remains a tour de force; see Lima la horrible, Letras Latinoamericanas 3 (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1964). See also Peter Elmore’s critical commentary on this work in “La ciudad enferma: ‘Lima la horrible,’ de Sebastián Salazar Bondy,” in Mundos interiores: Lima 1850– 1950, ed. Aldo Panfichi H. and Felipe Portocarrero, rev. ed. (Lima: Universidad del Pacífico, 2004), 289–313. 45. Taking his cue from the debates of the 1920s, Cornejo Polar reflected on such dualisms in “El indio: Heterogeneidad y conflicto,” in La novela indigenista, 1–29. He explains them, through Marxist categories, as a way in which indigenists negotiated an actual preexisting dualism. For a further development, see Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean Literatures, trans. Lynda J. Jentsch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 126–131. 46. On ethnicity and place see Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, 16–17, 20. For historical accounts of racialized geographies, see Raymond B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-

Notes to Pages 13–16 sity Press, 2004); Magali M. Carrera, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Amarí Peliowski and Catalina Valdés, eds., Una geografía imaginada: Diez ensayos sobre arte y naturaleza (Santiago: Universidad Adolfo Hurtado and Metales Pesados, 2015); Nancy Appelbaum, Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of NineteenthCentury Colombia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 47. Benjamin S. Orlove, “Putting Race in Its Place: Order in Colonial and Postcolonial Peruvian Geography,” Social Research 60, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 301–336. 48. Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 201, 200–202, 272–273. In this same book, see his discussion of Federico More’s description of the dualism (200–202). In discussing Luis E. Valcárcel’s Tempestad en los Andes, Cornejo Polar notes that “the opposition between Indians and whites is repeated in a geographic dichotomy having psychosocial overtones: the highlands, symbol of masculine strength and asceticism, and the coast, representing feminine sensuality and fawning, resolved in the author’s fervent adherence to the former” (Writing in the Air, 129). 49. Patricia Oliart, “Poniendo a cada quién en su lugar: Estereotipos raciales y sexuales en la Lima del siglo XIX,” in Mundos interiores: Lima 1850–1950, ed. Aldo Panfichi H. and Felipe Portocarrero, rev. ed. (Lima: Universidad del Pacífico, 2004), 286. See also Sarah C. Chambers, “Little Middle Ground: The Instability of a Mestizo Identity in the Andes, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, ed. Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 32–55. 50. José Varallanos, El cholo y el Perú: Introducción al estudio sociológico de un hombre y un pueblo mestizos y su destino cultural (Buenos Aires: Imprenta López, 1962), 12, 32. 51. Varallanos, 79, 96; José Uriel García, El nuevo indio: Ensayos indianistas sobre la sierra surperuana (Cuzco: H. G. Rozas, 1930). 52. Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 279–282. 53. On the centralization of elites, see Mücke, Política y burguesía en el Perú, chaps. 1 and 2. 54. For a useful survey of state formation in this period, see Paul Gootenberg, “Seeing the State in Peru: From Nationalism of Commerce to the Nation Imagined, 1820– 1880,” in Studies in the Formation of the Nation-State in Latin America, ed. James Dunkerley (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, 2002), 254–274. 55. Mücke, Política y burguesía en el Perú, 41. 56. Paul Gootenberg, “Population and Ethnicity in Early Republican Peru: Some Revisions,” Latin American Research Review 26, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 109–157. 57. Laso, “La paleta y los colores,” La Revista de Lima 1, no. 5 (December 1, 1859): 236. Reprinted in Laso, Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú y otros ensayos, 106. 58. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot,” in Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies, ed. Bruce M. Knauft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 221–223. For the process of centralization through which elites imagined the nation, see Daniel del Castillo, “Un deseo de historia: Notas sobre intelectuales y nacionalismo criollo en el siglo XIX a partir de La Revista de Lima,” in El hechizo de las imágenes: Estatus social, género y etnicidad en la historia peruana, ed. Narda Henríquez (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2000), 99–195. On the visual construction of this narrative, see Natalia Majluf, “Traces of an Absent Landscape: Photographers in Andean Visual Culture,” History of Photography 24, no. 2 (2000): 91–100.

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Notes to Pages 16–17 59. This was central to Manuel Pardo’s Civilista dream, only fully realized posthumously with the 1893 law favoring European immigration, a moment coinciding with more overt strategies of legal discrimination, demonstrated through limits imposed on indigenous voting rights. See Carmen McEvoy, Homo politicus: Manuel Pardo, la política peruana y sus dilemas, 1871–1878 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2007); Carlos Contreras and Marcos Cueto, Historia del Perú contemporáneo: Desde las luchas por la Independencia hasta el presente, 5th ed. (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2013), 160, 189–190; Del Águila, La ciudadanía corporativa. 60. Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided, 1, 16. 61. George Kubler, The Indian Caste of Peru, 1795–1940: A Population Study Based Upon Tax Records and Census Reports, Smithsonian Institution, Institute of Social Anthropology, Publication 14 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973). Gootenberg’s influential “Population and Ethnicity in Early Republican Peru” updates and expands on Kubler. See also Nils Jacobsen, “Liberalism and Indian Communities in Peru, 1821–1920,” in Liberals, the Church, and Indian Peasants: Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America, ed. Robert H. Jackson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 123–170; Adrian J. Pearce, “Reindigenización y economía en los Andes, c. 1820–1870, desde la mirada europea,” Historia Mexicana 67, no. 1 (July– September 2017): 233–294. 62. For a synthesis of these arguments, see Larson, Trials of Nation Making. Studies providing more nuanced perspectives on indigenous people as significant historical actors include, among many others, Marta Irurozqui, “The Sound of the Pututos: Politicisation and Indigenous Rebellions in Bolivia, 1826–1921,” Journal of Latin American Studies 32, no. 1 (2000): 85–114; Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Cecilia Méndez, The Plebeian Republic: The Huanta Rebellion and the Making of the Peruvian State, 1820–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Charles Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780–1840 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 63. As suggested by José Carlos de la Puente Luna (personal conversation, October 2020). 64. As Gootenberg states, “Peruvian governments had neither the capacity nor the will to mount thorough surveys of their scattered and elusive Andean subjects” (“Population and Ethnicity in Early Republican Peru,” 109). On the electoral and political effects of social mapping, see Gabriella Chiaramonti, “La redefinición de los actores y de la geografía política en el Perú a finales del siglo XIX,” Historia 2, no. 42 (July–December 2009): 329–370. 65. For similar processes in Mexico, see Claudio Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism, Public Worlds 9 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), especially chap. 12. 66. Magnus Mörner, “Historical Research on Race Relations in Latin America During the National Period,” in Race and Class in Latin America, ed. Magnus Mörner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 225. 67. Critical contributions include de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos; Lauer, Andes imaginarios; Gerardo Leibner, El mito del socialismo indígena: Fuentes y contextos peruanos de Mariátegui (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1999); Juan Ulises Zevallos Aguilar, Indigenismo y nación: Los retos a la representación de la subalternidad aymara y quechua en el “Boletín Titikaka” (1926–1930) (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andi-

Notes to Pages 17–18 nos, 2002); Yazmín López Lenci, El Cusco, paqarina moderna: Cartografía de una modernidad e identidades en los Andes peruanos (1900–1935) (Lima: CONCYTEC and Fondo Editorial de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2004); Jorge Coronado, The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). A clear formulation of the neoliberal perspective on the issue is Mario Vargas Llosa’s La utopía arcaica: José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996). 68. De la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos, 23. 69. Méndez, “Incas Sí, Indios No,” 197–225. On the deceptive nature of positive stereotypes that coexist with segregation in the United States, see Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 70. Possibly because of its perceived failures, there has been a limited focus on nineteenth- century elite national discourses. Valuable contributions include del Águila, Los velos y las pieles; Denegri, El abanico y la cigarrera; Paul Gootenberg, Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru’s “fictitious Prosperity” of Guano, 1840–1880 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, chap. 6; Mark Thurner, History’s Peru: The Poetics of Colonial and Postcolonial Historiography (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011); Marcel Velázquez Castro, Las máscaras de la representación: El sujeto esclavista y las rutas del racismo en el Perú (1775–1895) (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Banco Central de Reserva, 2006). 71. What Orlove calls “naturalized regional differences”; see “Putting Race in Its Place,” 302, 325. Orlove’s ideas have been central to my work on elite territorial constructions in “Traces of an Absent Landscape.” They have also inspired Evelyne Mesclier’s important exploration of twentieth-century geographic ideas in “De la complementariedad a la voluntad de ‘aplanar los Andes’: Representaciones de la naturaleza y pensamiento económico y político en el Perú del siglo XX,” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Études Andines 30, no. 3 (2001): 541–562. Based on these precedents, Cecilia Méndez usefully translates these arguments into a discussion on Peruvian historiography in “De indio a serrano: Nociones de raza y geografía en el Perú (siglos XVIII-XXI),” Histórica 35, no. 1 (2011): 53–102. On the hierarchies of place, see also Arjun Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place,” in Rereading Cultural Anthropology, ed. George E. Marcus (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 34–47. 72. Marisol de la Cadena undertakes an important critique of the essentializing category of lo andino in twentieth-century anthropology and history in “De utopías y contrahegemonías: El proceso de la cultura popular,” Revista Andina 8, no. 1 (July 1990): 65–76. See also Starn, “Missing the Revolution.” I refer to Roland Barthes’s conception of myth as a motivated mode of signification that naturalizes history through reductive and essentializing tactics; see Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). 73. On ambivalence and stereotypes, see, especially, Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 94–120. 74. See Kristal’s attempt to frame discourses on the Indian with specific class factions in The Andes Viewed from the City, along with Cecilia Méndez’s response in her review in Revista Andina 10, no. 1 (July 1992): 253–254. 75. For indigenism as a current and a movement, see Favre, L’indigenisme, 7–8; Coronado, The Andes Imagined, 6–7.

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Notes to Pages 19–21 76. Deborah Poole, “An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies,” Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (2005): 172. 77. As with Said’s vision of the Orient, this proposition takes distance from the notion of the Indian as a false representation; see Orientalism, 272–273, 322. It approximates Gilles Deleuze’s affirmative and disruptive concept of the simulacra as summarized in “Plato and the Simulacrum,” October 27 (Winter 1983): 45–56. Ramos explores the figure of the Indian through Jean Baudrillard’s notions of contemporary hyperreality and simulacrum in Indigenism, 275–276. Though in passing, Widdifield likewise refers to the Indian as the “simulacra of the authentic in the picture of the nation itself” in The Embodiment of the National, 121 (see also p. 10). For a psychoanalytic perspective on these issues, see Bhabha, “The Other Question.” 78. Peter Wade, “Racial Identity and Nationalism: A Theoretical View from Latin America,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, no. 5 (2001): 845–865. 79. In tracing the phrase to Jorge Basadre’s “Colofón sobre el país profundo,” an epilogue added to the 1947 edition of his classic La multitud, la ciudad y el campo, Enrique Mayer rightly notes the misrepresentation of Basadre’s concept in the popular imagination; see “Peru in Deep Trouble: Mario Vargas Llosa’s ‘Inquest in the Andes’ Reexamined,” Cultural Anthropology 6, no. 4 (1991): 466–504. For similar notions of cultural continuity and depth in Mexico, see Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México profundo: Una civilización negada (Mexico City: Conaculta and Grijalbo, 1990).

Precedents 1. See Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s influential “El concepto de indio en América: Una categoría de la situación colonial,” Anales de Antropología 39, no. 2 (1972): 105–124. On the homogenizing term, see also the first part of Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1978). 2. Lauer, Introducción a la pintura peruana del siglo XX, 89–90. For the absence of European images of the American Indian, see Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 23. 3. On early modern images, see John F. Moffitt and Santiago Sebastián, O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 126–132; Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 84–117. 4. Rolena Adorno, “The Depiction of Self and Other in Colonial Peru,” Art Journal 49, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 110–118; Gabriela Ramos, “El rostro de la discriminación: Litigios y probanzas de caciques en el Perú colonial temprano,” Fronteras de la Historia 21, no. 1 (January–June 2016): 64–88. For the association of indigeneity with sin in colonial paintings, see Ananda Cohen Suarez, “Making Race Visible in the Colonial Andes,” in Envisioning Others: Race, Color and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America, ed. Pamela A. Patton (Boston: Brill, 2016), 187–212. 5. The most significant survey of such representations remains Teresa Gisbert, Iconografía y mitos indígenas en el arte (La Paz: Gisbert y Cía., 1980). 6. Carolyn J. Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 161. See, especially, chap. 7. 7. On definitions of ethnicity, see Richard Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), 10–16. In the Andes, the colonial material culture that sur-

Notes to Pages 21–28 rounded the memory of an imperial past or gave continuity to pre-Columbian traditions through typologies of such things as textiles, kero cups, or tupu pins certainly affirmed a cultural difference; however, this question far exceeds the scope of this book. 8. For the curacas’ differentiation from the indigenous population, see Thomas B. F. Cummins, “We Are the Other: Peruvian Portraits of Colonial Kurakakuna,” in Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Rolena Adorno and Kenneth J. Andrien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 203–231. On the structures of discrimination affecting the status of curacas as Indians, see Ramos, “El rostro de la discriminación,” 70–73. 9. Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, chap. 3. See, especially, Marta Penhos, Ver, conocer, dominar: Imágenes de Sudamérica a fines del siglo XVIII (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2005). For an account in English of Spain’s Enlightenment expeditions, see also Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 6–10. 10. For a full facsimile of Martínez Compañón’s collection of watercolors, see Trujillo del Perú, 12 vols. (Madrid: Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional, 1985–1991). 11. The argument about the emergence of an abstract and singular Indian as part of a dual image of the nation is the subject of the dissertation that this book is based on. I expanded on the idea of the transition from multiple identities to a collective singular in the seminar “Picturing Race: The Paintings of Francisco Laso (1823–1869),” University of Cambridge, Centre of Latin American Studies, April 24, 2007; and in the lecture “Picturing Race/Viewing Race” at the symposium The Image of Peru: History and Art, 1550–1880, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, October 18, 2008. These ideas have been part of an extended conversation with Cecilia Méndez on the importance of the visual in Peruvian figurations of race. Méndez evokes these conversations in “De indio a serrano.” 12. On Mexico, see Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth- Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). For the import of such categories, see Thomas B. F. Cummins, “Review: Casta Paintings: Images of Race in Eighteenth- Century Mexico by Ilona Katzew; Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings by Magali M. Carrera,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 1 (March 2006): 185–189. On the Peruvian series, see Juan Carlos Estenssoro, “Los colores de la plebe: Razón y mestizaje en el Perú colonial”; and Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, “Los lienzos del virrey Amat y la pintura limeña del siglo XVIII,” in Los cuadros de mestizaje del Virrey Amat: La representación etnográfica en el Perú colonial, ed. Natalia Majluf (Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 2000), 48–65, 67–107. 13. Peter Wade, Race, Nature and Culture, especially chap. 3. 14. Nemo, “La Exposición Universal de París: Segunda carta: Sección peruana,” El Comercio (Lima), July 6, 1878; Carril, El gaucho, 244. Poole mentions the case in the context of concerns over European perceptions of Peru in Vision, Race, and Modernity, 165. I discuss this case further in chapter 1 of this book. 15. Natalia Majluf, “Pattern Book of Nations: The Costume Book in Asia and Latin America, ca. 1800–1860,” in Reproducing Nations: The Costume Book in Asia and Latin America, ca. 1800–1860 (New York: Americas Society, 2006), 15–56. 16. Poole’s Vision, Race, and Modernity examines the work of mostly European scientists and travelers. Her work has been central to understanding the role of vision in the

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Notes to Pages 28–32 formation of Andean racial concepts, though she does not look to nineteenth- century Peruvian visual culture proper save for a chapter on Manuel Atanasio Fuentes’s Lima. Costumbristas like Francisco Fierro and academic painters like Laso thus remain outside her scope. 17. Carolina González Undurraga turns to Reinhart Koselleck’s reflections on the collective singular to describe the changes to the concept of race in the nineteenth century, which, in contrast to my own argument, she defines as a transition to scientific definitions. See Carolina González Undurraga, “De la casta a la raza: El concepto de raza: Un singular colectivo de la modernidad, México, 1750–1850,” Historia Mexicana 60, no. 3 (January-March 2011): 1491–1525. 18. Save for Monvoisin’s images of Caupolicán, most history paintings of indigenous subjects emerged later. See Jaime Cuadriello, El éxodo mexicano: Los héroes en la mira del arte (Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arte, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Universidad Nacional Autónoma, 2010); Maraliz de Castro Vieira Christo, “Atahualpa en la corte imperial brasileña,” in Luis Montero: “Los funerales de Atahualpa,” ed. Natalia Majluf (Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 2011), 102–131; Laura Malosetti Costa, Tabaré cosmopolita: 130 años/1888–2018: Migraciones y ambivalencias del héroe trágico (Montevideo: Museo Zorrilla, Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, 2018). 19. Lauer, Introducción a la pintura peruana del siglo XX, 90. 20. Both genres coexist productively in the work of Juan Manuel Blanes. See Roberto Amigo and Gabriel Peluffo Linari, Juan Manuel Blanes: La nación naciente, 1830– 1901 (Montevideo: Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan Manuel Blanes, 2001). 21. Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National, 105–111. 22. Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National. 23. As Raúl Alcides Reissner points out, although these terms are generally synonymous in Latin America, they are not etymologically related. See El indio en los diccionarios: Exégesis léxica de un estereotipo, Serie de Antropología Social 67, Colección INI (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1983), 39. See also my “El indigenismo en México y Perú,” 618n35. Ana Luz Ramírez Zavala pursues this insight in “Indio/indígena, 1750–1850,” Historia Mexicana 60, no. 3 (January-March 2011): 1643–1681.

Chapter 1: The Indian 1. Francisco Stastny succinctly described the painting as an allegory of Indian oppression in Francisco Laso, 1823–1869: I Centenario (1869–1969): Exposición conmemorativa (Lima: Museo de Arte, 1969), cat. no. 9. 2. Original titles in French: Portrait de Gonzalo Pizarro, un des plus célèbres conquérants du Pérou, frère de Francisco Pizarro, and Habitant des Cordillières [sic] du Pérou. See Exposition universelle de 1855: Explication des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, gravure, lithographie et architecture, des artistes vivants étrangers et français, exposés au Palais des Beaux-Arts Avenue de Montaigne le 15 Mai 1855 (Paris: Vinchon, Imprimeur des Musées Impériaux, 1855), cat. nos. 1653, 1654. 3. See Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 39. 4. See Exposition universelle de 1855, 16. Regulations left the selection of works to the national committees, but the Peruvian delegation deferred that privilege, asking the artists to submit to the French jury. See Francisco de Rivero, letter to the minister of

Notes to Pages 32–35 foreign relations in Lima, November 28, 1854, Archive of the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Lima, “Legación en Francia” 1854, file 5–14/5, no. 165. 5. For the reception of Laso’s works, see my “‘Ce n’est pas le Pérou’, or, the Failure of Authenticity: Marginal Cosmopolitans at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 868–893. For the impact of later world fairs on the definition of Latin American nations, see, especially, Blanca Muratorio, “Nación, identidad y etnicidad: Imágenes de los indios ecuatorianos y sus imagineros a fines del siglo XIX,” in Imágenes e imagineros, ed. Muratorio, 109–196; and Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 6. Ulloa, “Noticia biográfica,” in Manuel Nicolás Corpancho, Ensayos poéticos de Manuel Nicolás Corpancho precedidos de varios juicios escritos en Europa y América (Paris: Imprenta y Litografía de Maulde y Renou, 1854), 1–3. 7. Federico Torrico, “El arte y los pintores peruanos en la primera exposición nacional,” El Nacional (Lima), August 2, 1869, 2. 8. For Laso’s letter offering his works as well as the government’s acceptance, see El Peruano (Lima), February 11, 1860, 47. Simón Irigoyen, director of the museum, accepted the offer on February 12. Document from the Archivo General de la Nación, Lima; photocopy held at the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, Lima, no. D-12103. Laso claimed the offer was made in fulfillment of a promise made to President José Rufino Echenique. 9. See the extensive documentation compiled in Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, La figure de la République: Le concours de 1848, Notes et documents des musées de France 13 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1987). 10. The best account of the artistic upheavals of the Second Republic and its outcomes remains T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Looking further ahead, see also Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism: or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 11. “El talento peruano llama la atención en Europa,” El Peruano (Lima), September 21, 1850, 96. 12. In 1853 a copy by the young painter Juan de la Cruz Palomino generated debate. See Unos, “Cuadros nacionales,” El Comercio (Lima), October 21, 1853. 13. See Stanton Loomis Catlin’s overview of the genre in “Nature, Science and the Picturesque,” in Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820–1980, ed. Dawn Ades (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 63–100. 14. For Vilar’s studies of pre-Columbian objects for his Malinche and Moctezuma, see Salvador Moreno, El escultor Manuel Vilar (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1969), fig. 49; Widdifield, Embodiment of the National, 81–83, 100. 15. See J. J. [Johann Jacob] von Tschudi’s description of the museum in Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, Into the Primeval Forests, rev. ed., trans. Thomasina Ross (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1854), 57–58. See also Stefanie Gänger, “Of Butterflies, Chinese Shoes, and Antiquities: A History of Peru’s National Museum, 1826–1881,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas 51 (2014): 283–301. 16. Stefanie Gänger stresses how the presence of archaeological objects in institu-

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Notes to Pages 35–37 tional collections and in the public imagination grew out of the private sphere in Relics of the Past: The Collecting and Study of Pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837– 1911 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7–9. 17. See Mary Louise Pratt’s important survey of Humboldt’s influence in Latin America, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), especially chaps. 6 and 8. 18. Pascal Riviale, Un siècle d’archéologie française au Pérou (1821–1914) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), 265–268. For a detailed description of the galleries, see “Le Musée naval du Louvre,” Magasin Pittoresque (Paris) 15 (January 1847): 11–14. 19. See Sara Castro-Klarén, “The Nation in Ruins: Archaeology and the Rise of the Nation,” in Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in NineteenthCentury Latin America, ed. Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen (Washington, DC, and Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 193. 20. Mariano Eduardo de Rivero and Juan Diego de Tschudi [Johann Jacob von Tschudi], Antigüedades peruanas, 2 vols. (Vienna: Imprenta Imperial de la Corte y del Estado, 1851). Mark Thurner places this publication in the context of national histories in “Peruvian Genealogies of History and Nation,” in After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas, ed. Andrés Guerrero and Mark Thurner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2003), 152–154. 21. “Musée des antiquités américaines au Louvre,” Magasin Pittoresque (Paris) 20 (June 1852): 195–199; 21 (March 1853): 83–85; 22 (April 1853): 123–127. See also B. H. Révoil, “Monuments des Muyscas au Pérou,” L’Illustration, Journal Universel (Paris) 21, no. 531 (April 30, 1853): 283–286. 22. Francis de Castelnau, Expédition dans les parties centrales de l’Amérique du Sud, de Rio de Janeiro à Lima, et de Lima au Para, Exécutée par ordre du gouvernement français pendant les années 1843 a 1847, 14 vols. (Paris: P. Bertrand, 1850–1859). The volume titled Antiquités des Incas et autres peuples anciens recueillis pendant l’Expédition dans les parties Centrales de l’Amérique du Sud . . . appeared in 1854. 23. On the ambivalent aesthetic status of pre-Columbian antiquities in this period, see Elizabeth A. Williams, “Art and Artifact at the Trocadéro: Ars Americana and the Primitivist Revolution,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking Jr., History of Anthropology 3 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 146–166. 24. [Dans l’impossibilité où ils furent d’entrevoir la nature sous son aspect le plus noble, ils s’ingénièrent à créer des combinaisons bizarres . . .] Adrien de Longpérier, Notice des Monuments exposés dans la salle des antiquités américaines (Méxique et Pérou) au Musée du Louvre (Paris: Vinchon, 1850), 6. 25. Longpérier, 10. 26. On the relation of non-Western art to classical norms, see Frances S. Connelly, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725–1907 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), especially chap. 1. 27. Document in the Archivo General de la Nación, Lima; transcribed from a photocopy in the collection of Juan Manuel Ugarte Eléspuru. Laso was granted permission to travel on October 24. He left for southern Peru on October 26 and had returned by the end of February. The exact route he took and the places he visited remain unknown. 28. Angrand served in Lima from 1834 to 1839. See J. Edgardo Rivera Martínez,

Notes to Pages 37–39 “Introducción,” in Léonce Angrand, Léonce Angrand: Imagen del Perú en el siglo XIX (Lima: Editor Carlos Milla Batres, 1972), 17–18. It is also very likely that Laso had contact with Rivero, who served as Peruvian consul in Belgium from 1851. 29. Ignacio Noboa, “Política: La poesía y el arte (Don Francisco Laso),” La Semana 5 ([October 30], 1851): 6. 30. The exacting details of the Inhabitant’s garments are proof that Laso brought those sketches to Europe. In fact, documentation at the Museo de Arte de Lima reveals that his small Indian Woman Spinning (1849, Museo de Arte de Lima, 1986.1.10, reproduced here) was acquired in France by Manuel Cisneros Sánchez from Hector Rosset de Salency, a relative of Laso’s friend Henri Blanc-Fontaine. 31. Majluf, “‘Ce n’est pas le Pérou.’” 32. Intended to be read in mid-November 1867, the lecture was postponed and possibly never held because the Academy’s meetings were suspended by December following the political upheavals that led to President Prado’s downfall and the closing of Congress. See “Crónica: Academia Nacional,” El Comercio (Lima), September 9, 1867; November 14, 1867; December 17, 1867. 33. Laso, “Algo sobre bellas artes,” La Revista de Lima 1, no. 2 (October 15, 1859): 78. 34. Rivero and Tschudi discussed what they termed “plástica peruana” in chap. 9, “Estado de las artes entre los antiguos Peruanos,” in Antigüedades peruanas, 1:209–257. 35. In “Algo sobre bellas artes,” Laso argued that the most important constructions in Cuzco had not been built by the Incas but by a superior race that preceded them. 36. At the time of Laso’s visit in late 1851, Cuzco had a small public museum (established in 1848) and a few private collections. Gänger (Relics of the Past, 45–48) cites Castelnau’s reference to the ceramic of a sleeping man. The naturalist recalled seeing “chez M. Alarcon une figurine représentant un Indien endormi; elle était composée d’une sorte de porcelaine d’une extrême finesse, et l’apparence du sommeil était rendue avec habilité.” In 1854 Castelnau illustrated this piece in the lithographic album Antiquités des Incas et autres peuples anciens recueillis pendant l’Expédition dans les parties Centrales de l’Amérique du Sud (vol. 3 of Expédition dans les parties centrales de l’Amérique du Sud), plate 56. Rivero and Tschudi had previously mentioned it in Antigüedades peruanas (1:227n1). The rarity of the Moche ceramic and its provenance suggest that Centeno may have acquired it from Alarcón. It is praised as “la mejor obra que se ha visto de los indios; se calcula que fue una alhaja de algún príncipe Inca” in Catálogo del museo de la señora Centeno, Cuzco (Lima: Imprenta de la Merced, 1876), 19n310. We cannot ascertain where Laso saw it, but he likely drew from Castelnau; see Castelnau, Expédition dans les parties centrales de l’Amérique du Sud, 4:243. I thank Manuela Fischer for her help in obtaining a photograph of the piece, now in the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (VA 8033). 37. Laso, “Algo sobre bellas artes,” 78. Laso countered the generalized European tendency to view three-dimensional non-European art as irrational and deviant. See Connelly, The Sleep of Reason, chap. 4. 38. Laso, “Algo sobre bellas artes,” 78. 39. Gustavo Buntinx mentions Rivero’s album as a source in “Del ‘Habitante de las Cordilleras’ al ‘Indio Alfarero’: Variaciones sobre un tema de Francisco Laso,” Márgenes 6, nos. 10–11 (October 1993): 32–35. For an earlier version of this text, which was in fact published later, see Buntinx, “El indio alfarero como construcción ideológica: Variaciones sobre un tema de Francisco Laso,” in Arte, historia e identidad en América: Vi-

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Notes to Pages 39–42 siones comparativas, ed. Gustavo Curiel et al., XVII Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte, Estudios de Arte y Estética 37 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1994), 1:69–101. For Merino’s illustration, see Simón Ayanque [Esteban de Terralla y Landa], Lima por dentro y fuera: Obra jocosa y divertida la da a luz Simón Ayanque para escarmiento de algunos y entretenimiento de todos (1797) (Paris: Librería Española de A. Mézin, [1854]), 175. Ramón Mujica Pinilla also points to Merino’s illustration as a possible source in “De alfarero civilizador a artesano insurgente: El trasfondo político de un lienzo de Francisco Laso,” in La imagen transgredida: Ensayos de iconografía peruana y sus políticas de representación simbólica, ed. Ramón Mujica Pinilla (Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2016), 659–660, fig. 7. 40. The most prominent pre-Columbian collector in France at that time was the diplomat Léonce Angrand, who had spent long periods in Bolivia and Peru, and whom the Peruvian artists no doubt knew. It is also likely that Peruvians in Paris brought ceramics with them to Europe. For an extensive list of French collections in this period, see Riviale, Un siècle d’archéologie française au Pérou, 361–408. 41. Laso, “Algo sobre bellas artes,” 78. 42. Rivero and Tschudi, Antigüedades peruanas, 1:320. 43. In his association of Rivero and Laso, Buntinx offers a suggestive psychoanalytic reading of the painting through the theme of castration, though his interpretation differs from my own. See Buntinx, “Del ‘Habitante de las Cordilleras’ al ‘Indio Alfarero,’” 31–37. 44. “El Perú esclavisado, poema,” El Sol del Cuzco, June 18, 1825, [3–4]. Godofredo Corpancho, Lira patriótica o Colección escogida de poesías sobre asuntos patrióticos para ejercicios de declamación (Lima: self-published, 1873), 14–16, reproduces fragments and dates it to 1812. Jorge Guillermo Leguía dates it to 1811 in “Biografía de Don Benito Laso,” in Estudios históricos (Lima: Asociación Cultural Integración, 1989), 30. 45. “Sentencia pronunciada en el Cuzco por el Visitador D. José Antonio de Areche, contra José Gabriel Túpac-Amaro, su muger, hijos, y demás reos principales de la sublevación,” Cuzco, May 15, 1781, in Carlos Daniel Valcárcel and Guillermo Durand Florez, eds., La rebelión de Túpac-Amaru, Colección Documental de la Independencia del Perú (Lima: Comisión Nacional del Sesquicentenario de la Independencia del Perú, 1971–1972), 2:765–773. 46. John Miller, Memoirs of General Miller in the Service of the Republic of Peru, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1829), 2:226. 47. Mateo Paz Soldán and Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán described the contemporary Indians, “vistiendo el negro ropaje del dolor,” in Geografía del Perú (Paris: Fermin Didot, 1862), 1:30. Auguste Borget, who was in Peru in 1838, wrote that the inhabitants of Tacna still dressed in mourning for the last Incas. See his notes in David James, En las Pampas y en los Andes: Treinta y tres dibujos y textos sobre Argentina, Chile y Peru de Auguste Borget (Buenos Aires: Pardo-Emece, 1960), 31. See also Ernest Grandidier, Voyage dans l’Amérique du Sud: Pérou et Bolivie (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1861), 72. The Cuzco writer Pío Benigno Mesa likewise referred to “El luto que antes usaban los Incas era el color pardo; y sin duda seria negro el que llevaba el pueblo, pues que ahora mismo son de ese color los vestidos de duelo que llevan los indígenas de raza pura (la llocolla, la montera, el uncú, el accsu &a). Tan rigoroso es el luto que llevan constantemente, por la muerte de Huáscar y Atahuallpa, algunas provincias de Puno y Cuzco, que da pena y honda tristeza el verlos.” See Los anales de la ciudad del Cuzco o las cuatro épocas de su historia, narradas breve y sencillamente por Pío B. Mesa (Cuzco: Tipografía de la Convención

Notes to Pages 42–45 por Jacinto Carrasco, 1866–1867), 2:205nA. Tschudi mentions that blue was the color of indigenous mourning dress. See Travels in Peru, 335–336. 48. As the authors of the catalogue remarked, news of the Soult sale had “l’éclat et le retentissement d’un événement.” See [Charles] George and Ferdinand Laneuville, Catalogue raisonné des tableaux de la Galerie de feu M. le Maréchal-Général Soult, Duc de Dalmatie dont la vente aura lieu à Paris dans l’ancienne Galerie Lebrun (Paris: Imprimerie de Guiraudet et Jouaust, 1852). Laso likely visited the exhibition held at the Galerie Lebrun between May 16 and 18, 1852. The version probably studied by Laso, considered a workshop copy, was sold in the Soult sale in 1852 and is now in the Saint Louis Art Museum (inventory no. 47–1941). See also Julián Gállego and José Gudiol, Zurbarán, 1598–1664, trans. Kenneth Lyons (London: Secker and Warburg, 1977), 95, cat. no. 226. A smaller version, now in the Princeton University Art Museum (sometimes considered a workshop copy of the painting in Saint Louis), formed part of LouisPhilippe’s Galerie espagnole at the Louvre. See Jeannine Baticle and Cristina Marinas, La Galerie espagnole de Louis-Philippe au Louvre, 1838–1848, with Claudie Ressort and Chantal Perrier, Notes et documents des musées de France 4 (Paris: Ministère de la Culture, 1981), n368. On the reception of Spanish art, see Ilse Hempel Lipschutz, Spanish Painting and the French Romantics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 207–211, 402n36. 49. Ulloa, “Noticia biográfica,” in Corpancho, Ensayos poéticos de Manuel Nicolás Corpancho, 2. 50. A. J. [Augustin-Joseph] du Pays, “Exposition des beaux-arts: Écoles diverses,” L’Illustration, Journal Universel 26, no. 670 (December 25, 1855): 428. 51. Ramos, “El rostro de la discriminación,” 67–69; Caroline Cunill, “El indio miserable: Nacimiento de la teoría legal en la América colonial del siglo XVI,” Cuadernos Intercambio 8, no. 9 (2011): 229–248. See also David Brading’s discussion of Bartolomé de las Casas in The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State (1492–1867) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Pablo Macera, “El indio visto por los criollos y españoles,” in Macera, Trabajos de historia (Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1977), 3:317–324. 52. For Colombia, see Hans-Joachim König, “Símbolos nacionales y retórica política en la independencia: El caso de la Nueva Granada,” in Problemas de la formación del estado y de la nación en Hispanoamérica, ed. Inge Buisson, Günter Kahle et al., Lateinamerikanische Forschungen 13 (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1984), 395–398. See also my “De la rebelión al museo: Genealogías y retratos de los incas, 1780–1900,” in Los incas, reyes del Perú, ed. Natalia Majluf (Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú, 2005), 257–258. Rebecca Earle draws further regional examples in The Return of the Native, chap. 1. 53. Cited in Ascensión Martínez Riaza, La prensa doctrinal en la independencia del Perú, 1811–1824 (Madrid: ICI, Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1985), 177–178. 54. Originally published in Lima in the press of José María Concha in 1826. I cite from Laso, “La famosa exposición de don Benito Laso en pro de la permanencia de Bolívar en el Perú [1826],” Boletín del Museo Bolivariano 1, no. 3 (November 1928): 50–51. 55. For discourses of denigration, see Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando un inca: Identidad y utopía en los Andes (1988), 3rd ed. (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1994), 226– 231. These have been subtly explored by Andrés Guerrero, “The Construction of a Ventriloquist’s Image: Liberal Discourse and the ‘Miserable Indian Race’ in Late 19thCentury Ecuador,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29 (October 1997): 561–566, 576–

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Notes to Pages 46–49 579. See also Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National, 141–142. On the association of the indigenous population with animals in later Creole discourse, see Oliart, “Poniendo a cada quien en su lugar,” 274. 56. Guyatt, Bind Us Apart, 38. 57. See Méndez, The Plebeian Republic; and Patrick Husson, De la guerra a la rebelión (Huanta, siglo XIX), Archivos de Historia Andina 14, Travaux de l’IFEA 67 (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de las Casas,” Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 1992), 32–33, 101. On the paternalist Creole response to the Huancané uprising, see McEvoy, “Indio y nación,” 61–118. 58. Carlos E. Pasta, Juan Vicente Camacho, and Juan Cossío, ¡Pobre indio! Zarzuela escrita por Juan V. Camacho y Juan Cossío: Música del maestro Carlos E. Pasta (Lima: Imprenta Liberal, 1868). Francisco García Calderón’s legal dictionary offers a most explicit statement of indigenous submission, claiming that the indigenes were accustomed to passive obedience since pre-Columbian times; see the entry “Indígena” in Diccionario de la legislación peruana (Lima: Imprenta del Estado, 1860–1864), 2:293–294. Denegri’s examples of dangerous others in texts by women writers of the period are mainly drawn either from narratives related to Afro-descendants or to those of other countries (Argentina and Panama). See Denegri, “Distopía poscolonial y racismo en la narrativa del XIX peruano.” 59. Laura Malosetti Costa, Rapto de cautivas blancas: Un aspecto erótico de la barbarie en la plástica rioplatense del siglo XIX, Hipótesis y Discusiones 4 (Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1994), 9. 60. For the photographs Paz Soldán used for the engravings, see Natalia Majluf and Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, “El primer siglo de la fotografía: Perú, 1842–1942,” in La recuperación de la memoria: El primer siglo de la fotografía: Perú, 1842–1942 (Lima: Fundación Telefónica and Museo de Arte de Lima, 2001), 74–76, illustrations 103–105. 61. Pearce has contrasted these images with the contributions of the indigenous population to the Peruvian economy in “Reindigenización y economía en los Andes, c. 1820–1870, desde la mirada europea,” 251–255. 62. Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán, Atlas geográfico del Perú (Paris: Fermin Didot Hermanos, 1865), 65. 63. Laso [El baron de poco me importa], Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú (Paris: Imprenta de Maulde y Renou, 1854). This version, as well as the notes to the 1869 edition of the text, are included in Laso, Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú y otros ensayos, 1854–1869, 53–54. The text appeared under the same pseudonym in El Comercio (Lima), April 24, 1854, [3]; April 25, 1854, [3]; April 26, 1854, [2–3]. 64. The text was published in 1867 by anonymous enemies who counted Laso among those who “van a naciones extrañas a forjar mentiras que recojidas por la ignorante multitud forman el descrédito de una nación.” See “Dos palabras,” anonymous prologue to El Aguinaldo: Colección de recriminaciones, ultrajes y denuestos, inferidos al Perú y a su sociedad, según pública voz por el Ciudadano Don Francisco Lazo diputado por Lima al congreso constituyente: Hallándose en Europa viviendo y educándose á espensas de la Nación: Dado a la prensa por unos patriotas en las actuales circumstancias para que se conozcan de todos los indignos manejos de este Representante (Lima: Imprenta de “El Liberal,” 1867). For the debates this text generated, see my “Francisco Laso, escritor y político,” in Laso, Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú y otros ensayos, 1854–1869, 13–46. For Juan Espinosa’s defense, see Juan Espinosa [El P. Anselmo], “Comunicados: ¡Pobre mi amigo Lazo!” El Comercio (Lima), April 28, 1854, [4]; April 29, 1854, [4].

Notes to Pages 49–54 65. “Derechos adquiridos,” El Comercio (Lima), May 22, 1867; also published in El Nacional (Lima), May 22, 1867. 66. José Casimiro Ulloa, El Perú en 1853: Un año de su historia contemporánea (Paris: Imprenta de Moulde y Renue, 1854). Some have mistakenly attributed this pamphlet to Laso. 67. For a basic narrative of events, see Jorge Basadre, Historia de la República del Perú (Lima: Ediciones “Historia,” 1961), 4:81–122. 68. Carlos Contreras, “El impuesto de la contribución personal en el Perú del siglo XIX,” Histórica 29, no. 2 (2005): 67–106. For broader context and more focused interpretations of the process, see Víctor Peralta Ruiz, En pos del tributo: Burocracia estatal, elite regional y comunidades indígenas en el Cusco rural (1826–1854) (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de las Casas,” 1991); and Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided, especially chap. 2. 69. For detailed coverage of these debates, see Yvinec, “‘Los peruanos conocidos antes con el nombre de indios,’” 385–390. 70. Buntinx, “Del ‘Habitante de las Cordilleras’ al ‘Indio Alfarero,’” 16–17. 71. The painting was first exhibited at the Salons of 1808 and 1810. See Walter Friedlaender, David to Delacroix, trans. Robert Goldwater (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 57–58, plate 31. For the influence of Prud’hon on Laso, see Alberto Jochamowitz, “Consideraciones sobre la obra pictórica de Francisco Laso,” in Pintores y pinturas: Crítica de arte (Lima: Imprenta Torres Aguirre, 1949), 107–108. 72. “Esposición [sic] de pinturas,” El Comercio (Lima), August 15, 1860. Buntinx also cites this passage in “Del ‘Habitante de las Cordilleras’ al ‘Indio Alfarero,’” 17. 73. José Casimiro Ulloa, “El Aguinaldo,” El Comercio (Lima), September 10, 1854. See also my introduction to Laso, Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú y otros ensayos, 21–25. 74. Laso, “La causa de la juventud,” El Comercio (Lima), February 5, 1855. 75. See, for example, “Crónica: Leva,” El Heraldo de Lima, November 13, 1854. See also the entry in García Calderón’s Diccionario de la legislación peruana; and José Casimiro Ulloa, “Crónica de la quincena,” La Revista de Lima 4, no. 10 (November 15, 1861): 426–432. 76. Francisco Laso, “Croquis sobre el carácter peruano,” La Revista de Lima 2, no. 7 (October 1, 1860): 307. Reprinted in Laso, Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú y otros ensayos, 118–119. 77. Prescott inspired the first Peruvian school history textbook, written by the Chilean liberal Manuel Bilbao for distribution in public schools: Compendio de la historia política del Perú, escrito para el estudio de los jovenes cursantes de humanidades (Lima: Imprenta del Pueblo por J. M. Ureta, 1856). 78. William Hickling Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru, with a Preliminary View of the Civilization of the Incas (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1847), book 4, chap. 9. 79. Guillermo Lohmann Villena, “Notes on Prescott’s Interpretation of the Conquest of Peru,” Hispanic American Historical Review 39, no. 1 (February 1959): 46–80. Lohmann cites Prescott’s claim in an 1844 letter to Pascual de Gayangos that “Pizarro would need every chivalric illusion to be made into a respectable figure” (80). Lagasca’s portrait figures in the frontispiece of an early Mexican edition, published as Historia de la Conquista del Perú con una ojeada sobre la civilización de los incas, trans. Joaquín García Icazbalceta (Mexico City: R. Rafael, 1850). 80. Long forgotten in studies of Peruvian literature, Segura’s text was first pub-

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Notes to Pages 54–55 lished in the feuilleton of El Comercio (Lima), May 13–15, 17–18, 20, 1844, and has been published as Gonzalo Pizarro, ed. Ricardo Silva-Santisteban (Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, 2004). 81. See Holguín Callo, Tiempos de infancia y bohemia, 293–294. 82. Palma wrote: “Crueldades aparte, es Francisco de Carbajal una de las figuras históricas que más en gracia me ha caído.” See Tradiciones peruanas completas, 85. Palma’s tradiciones devoted to Carbajal are “El Demonio de los Andes” [1872], “Los tres motivos del oidor” [1879], “El que se ahogó en poca agua” [1877], “Si te dieren hogaza, no pidas torta” [1875], “Comida acabada, amistad terminada” [1879], “Es sueño de un santo varón” [1879], “Los postres del festín” [1879], “Las hechas y por hacer” [1883], “Maldición de mujer” [1883], “¡Ay, cuitada! y ¡Guay de lo que aquí andaba!” [1883], “Un hombre inmortal” [1883], “El verdugo real del Cuzco” [1877], and “El robo de las calaveras” [1877], 76–98, 103–105, 109–111, 180–182. Most were gathered under the title El Demonio de los Andes in 1883. 83. Hipólito Unanue [pseud. Aristio], “Idea general de los monumentos del antiguo Perú, e introducción a su estudio,” Mercurio Peruano 1, no. 22 (March 17, 1791): 203n2. 84. José Victorino Lastarria, “Lima en 1850,” in Viajeros en el Perú republicano, ed. Alberto Tauro, Comentarios del Perú 6 (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1967), 89–90. According to Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán, the inscription on the painting read: “Del Perú la suprema independencia / Carbajal ha tres siglos quería / Y por ella en el cadalso / Rindió el último aliento de su vida” (Geografía del Perú, 121). Palma cites these verses in “El Demonio de los Andes” [1872] in Tradiciones peruanas completas, 78. Dates for Palma’s works are taken from Merlin D. Compton’s “Las tradiciones peruanas de Ricardo Palma: Bibliografía y lista cronológica tentativas,” Fénix 28–29 (1983): 99–129. 85. Buntinx sees the Inhabitant as a representation of a Mestizo, turns Laso into a proponent of a Mestizo utopia, and interprets the juxtaposition of the two paintings as an allusion not to the tragedy of the conquest but to the “[momento] ilusionado de la rebelión que se quiso mestiza.” See “Del ‘Habitante de las Cordilleras’ al ‘Indio Alfarero,’” 50. He describes Gonzalo as “un rebelde que habría pretendido fundar una monarquía independiente y mestiza en el Perú” (italics in the original), 16, 49n68. These affirmations lack historical grounding. Gonzalo did not propose but rather rejected Carbajal’s suggestion that he marry an Indian princess and crown himself king. See Garcilaso de la Vega, Historia general del Perú (1617), 2 vols. (Lima: Editorial Universo, 1970), book 4, chaps. 40, 41. 86. Vicuña Mackenna found the true origins of independence in the cycle of late eighteenth-century rebellions, which he considered the first manifestations of a “movimiento puramente criollo y americano que produjo la emancipación y cuya primera aparición eminentemente criolla nos ha parecido trazar en Quito catorce años antes (1766) del levantamiento de Túpac Amaru.” See Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, La independencia en el Perú (1864), prologue by Luis Alberto Sánchez (Buenos Aires: Editorial Francisco de Aguirre, 1971), 55, 57n1. 87. “El robo de las calaveras [1877],” in Palma, Tradiciones peruanas completas, 181. Palma relates that the inscription placed on the site of Carbajal’s home was taken down by the “sons of the Republic” after independence. Palma, however, noted that this was not done to vindicate Carbajal, but as a gesture of respect toward the dead. See “El Demonio de los Andes [1872],” in Palma, 82.

Notes to Pages 55–60 88. Palma, 78. 89. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru, book 4, chap. 7. 90. Prescott, book 4, chap. 7. 91. Paz Soldán and Paz Soldán, Geografía del Perú, 120. 92. Francisco de Paula González Vigil, “Sección Indios: Bosquejo histórico sobre Bartolomé de las Casas,” El Comercio (Lima), November 28, 1867, 8, 13–15, 18, 21, 26. On nineteenth-century disputes over Las Casas, see Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, “The Specter of Las Casas,” in The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006). 93. For Mexico, see David Brading, The Origins of Mexican Nationalism, Latin American Miniatures (Cambridge: Centre of Latin American Studies, Cambridge University Press, 1985). 94. Carlos M. Rama, Historia de las relaciones culturales entre España y la América Latina: Siglo XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982), especially chap. 2. 95. See Fernando de Trazegnies’s analysis of the sermon in La idea del derecho en el Perú republicano del siglo XIX (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial, 1992), 90–100. See also Daniel Gleason, “Anti-Democratic Thought in Early Republican Peru: Bartolomé Herrera and the Liberal-Conservative Ideological Struggle,” The Americas 38, no. 2 (October 1981): 205–217; and Jorge Guillermo Leguía, “La pasión patriótica de Bartolomé Herrera,” in Estudios históricos, 96–106. 96. The sermon and the debates that it prompted, including the articles written by Benito Laso, are reproduced in Bartolomé Herrera, Escritos y discursos, ed. Jorge Guillermo Leguía, 2 vols. (Lima: F. y E. Rosay, 1929–1934), 1:66–111. 97. Herrera, 1:76. 98. See Jorge Guillermo Leguía, “Bartolomé Herrera, maestro,” in Herrera, Escritos y discursos, 2:iii-li. 99. Juan Espinosa, La herencia española de los americanos: Seis cartas críticas a Isabel Segunda por el Coronel Juan Espinosa, seguidas de otros escritos de interés público (Lima: Imprenta del Correo, 1852), 10. The book reproduces articles first written by Espinosa for El Correo, the newspaper run by Benito Laso. 100. Laso, “La causa de la juventud,” El Comercio (Lima), February 5, 1855. The article, dated in Paris in November 1854, is in the form of a letter to José Casimiro Ulloa, then in Lima. 101. P., “Inconsecuencias,” El Nacional (Lima), May 23, 1867. Aristarchus of Samos was a Greek astronomer active in the third century BC, indicted for claiming that Earth rotates and revolves around the Sun. 102. See also the two other preparatory drawings for the Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro (not reproduced here), both held at the Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.0–1012 and V 2.0–1016. Segura’s short novel emphasizes the intensity of Gonzalo’s glance. His description of the conqueror’s physiognomy, including the broad forehead and round black beard, also evokes Laso’s depiction. 103. “. . . otro de un amigo del artista vestido como los personages del siglo quince, cuales los representan los pintores flamencos; este parece una copia de Velázquez por la gravedad del personaje, por el trage de balona, y la vetustez del colorido.” “Lima: Esposición [sic] de pinturas,” El Comercio (Lima), September 18, 1861. Though the critic does not identify the painting as a portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro, there is no doubt that he is referring to the same painting. 104. Guillermo Lohmann Villena, “José Antonio de Lavalle y Saavedra,” Revista de

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Notes to Pages 60–63 la Universidad Católica 4, vol. 3, no. 20 (December 1935): 733–765. See the genealogical tree produced with the assistance of Paul Rizo Patrón that appears as appendix 1 in Cristina Ana Mazzeo, El comercio libre en el Perú: Las estrategias de un comerciante criollo: José Antonio de Lavalle y Cortés, Conde de Premio Real 1777–1815 (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1994), 87. 105. That distance is reflected in a letter to Manuel Pardo, written from Rome, that makes reference to Lavalle’s position: “Ya le vuelvo a hacer ver los inconvenientes de su espontaneidad de publicar, sin necesidad y sin sentirlo, que su ideal era el gobierno de Felipe II y la Inquisición.” Letter dated Rome, January 23, 1864. Archivo General de la Nación, Lima, Colección Cartas de Manuel Pardo, D2–23–1544. 106. Laso, Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú, 6. 107. Teófilo Castillo stressed his genealogy and reproduced some of these family relics in “Interiores limeños, XI. Casa de la Sra. Manuela Henríquez de Lasso,” Variedades 11, no. 369 (March 27, 1915): 1929–1934. José Flores Aráoz traces his genealogy in “Francisco Laso: Ensayo biográfico-crítico,” El Comercio (Lima), January 31, 1937. 108. Tomás Pérez Vejo, España en el debate público mexicano, 1836–1867: Aportaciones para una historia de la nación (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2008), 10–12. 109. Though not documented, it has traditionally been assigned to 1851, a date that would be confirmed by its similarities to Laso’s appearance in a photograph taken in Paris in 1852. Buntinx also notes the resemblance but frames it through his interpretation of Laso’s supposed identification with an idealized Mestizo nation (“Del ‘Habitante de las Cordilleras’ al ‘Indio alfarero,’” 49). 110. The catalogue lists the Portrait de M. J.M.; Christophe Colomb et son fils recevant l’hospitalité dans le couvent de la Rabida (Espagne); Halte d’Indiens Péruviens. See Exposition universelle de 1855, cat. nos. 1650–1652. The portrait of Masías is now at the Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Merino, Lima. Merino painted at least three versions of Columbus at La Rábida, two of which are in the Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Merino. For a description of the scene of the resting place (present whereabouts unknown), see Edmond About, Voyage à travers l’Exposition des Beaux-Arts (Peinture et sculpture) (Paris: Hachette, 1855), 64–65; and Pedro Escandón, La industria y las bellas artes en la Exposición Universal de 1855 (Paris: Imprimerie Centrale de Napoléon Chaix et Cie., 1856), 155–156. 111. Corpancho, “Exposición Universal, D. Francisco Lazo [sic],” El Heraldo de Lima, December 12, 1855. Corpancho spent time with Laso as a medical student in Paris between 1852 and 1853. 112. Corpancho’s early plays and poems sing the praises of Spanish crusaders and Portuguese explorers. His choice of subjects is discussed in the introductory texts to his Ensayos poéticos de Manuel Nicolás Corpancho. 113. “Esposición [sic] de pinturas,” El Comercio (Lima), August 15, 1860. For Laso’s letter of offering, see El Peruano (Lima), February 11, 1860, 47. He did exhibit the painting, among a lesser selection of works, at the next national exhibition in September 1861. See “Lima: Esposición [sic] de pinturas,” El Comercio (Lima), September 18, 1861. 114. Majluf, “‘Ce n’est pas le Pérou.’” The portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro was barely mentioned or reproduced before it was acquired as a painting of a “Spanish Gentleman” by the Banco Central de Reserva, Lima. 115. Torrico, “El arte y los pintores peruanos en la primera exposición nacional,” 2.

Notes to Pages 63–65 116. George W. Stocking traces this transformation to the turn of the twentieth century in the discourses of anthropology in “Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective,” 867–882. He would later admit the earlier emergence of the concept in Herder. These ideas, however, had become broadly generalized even before they were theorized in academic circles. 117. Majluf, “Pattern Book of Nations,” 15–56. 118. Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 26. Though his discussion is limited to Europe, it can be extrapolated to Latin America, as I have previously explored. 119. On the circulation of Herder’s ideas in Chile in the early 1840s, see Iván Jaksic´, Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 137–38, 145. As Jaksic´ notes, in the French translation, the Idées sur la philosophie de l’histoire de l’humanité was discussed in the session of Santiago’s Sociedad Literaria on April 4, 1842. On Echeverría, see Ronald Villamil Carvajal, “La filosofía romántica de la historia en Herder y sus aportes a La Joven Argentina del siglo XIX,” Historia y Crítica 30 (July-December 2005): 139–161. 120. José Victorino Lastarria, Discurso de incorporación de D. J. Victorino Lastarria a una sociedad de literatura de Santiago, en la sesión del tres de mayo de 1842 (Valparaiso: Impr. De M. Rivadeneyra, 1842), 7–9. Lastarria invoked his contemporaries: “. . . debo deciros que mui poco tenemos que imitar: nuestra literatura debe sernos exclusivamente propia, debe ser enteramente nacional.” 121. Majluf, “Francisco Laso, escritor y político,” 28–29. 122. Herrera, Escritos y discursos, 1:93. 123. “No fijemos nuestra atención sobre el pueblo que verdaderamente puede llamarse “peruano.” See “Literatura: De la literatura considerada en sus relaciones con la sociedad: 3º Estado literario del país,” El Semanario de Lima, Revista Literaria 1, no. 4 (September 16, 1848): 27. 124. María Isabel Remy cites President Gamarra making an even more direct use of the term in “La sociedad local al inicio de la República: Cusco 1824–1850,” Revista Andina 12, no. 2 (December 1988): 452. For a similar usage of peruano as a synonym for the indigenous population, see Jacobsen, “Liberalism and Indian Communities in Peru, 1821–1920,” 131. 125. García Calderón, Diccionario de la legislación peruana, 2:293. It is interesting that the formulation is almost identical to that presented by Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 273. 126. Paz Soldán and Paz Soldán, Geografía del Perú, 1:24. 127. Chambers, “Little Middle Ground, 43. 128. Significantly, Rivero and Tschudi’s second chapter on the ancient inhabitants of Peru focuses on the subjects concerning the “antropologista o sea al historiador físico” (the anthropologist or the physical historian); that is, to the “race” of the Incas in the context of references to Pieter Camper’s facial angle and to the racialist craniometry of Samuel Morton. See Antigüedades peruanas, 1:21–36. 129. See, especially, Raymond B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico; Laura Malosetti Costa, “Politics, Desire and Memory in the Construction of Landscape in the Argentine Pampas,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 5, nos. 1–2 (2006): 107–119; Carrera, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico; Peliowski and Valdés, Una geografía imaginada; and Appelbaum, Mapping the Country of Regions. 130. Laso, “Croquis sobre el carácter peruano,” 304.

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Notes to Pages 65–67 131. Majluf, “The Creation of the Image of the Indian in 19th-Century Peru,” 1:44– 46. See also Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 158. 132. The quote is drawn from the entry for cholo in Pedro Paz Soldán y Unanue, Diccionario de peruanismos (1860–1893), Biblioteca de Cultura Peruana 10 (Lima and Paris: Desclée, De Brouwer, 1938), 170–171. 133. The disappearance of the Indian from the image of the city affects even the writing of its history, as Javier Flores Espinoza notes in “Hechicería e idolatría en Lima colonial (siglo XVII),” in Poder y violencia en los Andes, ed. Henrique Urbano and Mirko Lauer, Debates Andinos 18 (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de las Casas,” 1991), 18, 53–56. 134. It would take intellectuals from northern Peru who felt excluded from this construct to notice its arbitrariness. The Cajamarca intellectual Nazario Chávez Aliaga denounced the fact that “el Indio del norte no ha encontrado quien le exprese.” See “Notas del mes: Instituto de Maestros,” La Regeneración Escolar: Órgano de la Sociedad de Preceptores [Cajamarca, 1930], 13. I thank Ricardo Kusunoki for pointing me to this article. 135. Majluf, “Francisco Laso, escritor y político,” 31–33. Ignoring distinctions between emerging cultural and political discourses, Mujica argues that the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras represents Peru’s future as a country of artisans and, contradictorily, that the figure of the Indian Potter vindicated Mestizo artisans (“De alfarero civilizador a artesano insurgente,” 668, 678–679). 136. César Itier, “Quechua y cultura en el Cuzco del siglo XVIII: De la ‘lengua general’ al ‘idioma del imperio de los Incas,’” in Del siglo de oro al siglo de las luces: Lenguaje y sociedad en los Andes del siglo XVIII, ed. César Itier (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos ‘Bartolomé de las Casas,’ 1995), 89–111. 137. Charles Wiener, Pérou et Bolivie: Récit de voyage suivi d’études archéologiques et ethnographiques et de notes sur l’écriture et les langues des populations indiennes (Paris: Hachette & Cie., 1880), 663–664. Wiener claims that the hats originated in Spanish models. See the photograph Quechua Indians, albumen print, 15.5 × 9.8 cm, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 2004.29.10635. 138. None of the known colonial embroidered examples of lappeted hats quite correspond to the piece shown in the painting. I thank Elena Phipps for her comments on the textiles in Laso’s painting. See her catalogue entry in Diana Fane, ed., Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America (New York: Brooklyn Museum, Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 187n53. 139. “Un indio con su mujer llevando un hijo á las espaldas en trage nacional adornan este cuadro” (Rivero and Tschudi, Antigüedades peruanas, 1:315). 140. See Méndez, “Incas Sí, Indios No,” 197–225; Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided, 10–12. 141. Gänger, Relics of the Past, 80–81. 142. See the documents published by Julio C. Tello and Toribio Mejía Xesspe, “Historia de los Museos Nacionales del Perú, 1822–1946,” Arqueológicas 10 (1967): 1–2. 143. See Thurner, “Peruvian Genealogies of History and Nation.” 144. Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 72. Relying closely on Mary Louise Pratt’s analysis of Humboldt, Buntinx explores possible visual influences on Laso in “Del ‘Habitante de las Cordilleras’ al ‘Indio Alfarero,’” 20–28. On elite perspectives on the Andes as an obstacle to progress, see my “Traces of an Absent Landscape.” 145. The letter, addressed to his friend José Casimiro Ulloa in Paris, was written

Notes to Pages 67–70 while Laso was in Belgium during the second half of 1855. A photograph of the last page of the letter, where this information is contained, was reproduced by José Flores Aráoz in “La exposición de pintura de Francisco Laso,” La Prensa (Lima), December 8, 1937, 2. According to the author of the article, the letter is now lost. 146. The concept of lo andino as a cultural category only emerges fully in a number of different authors in the 1920s. Yazmín López Lenci traces it to Julio C. Tello’s perspective on a monogenetic and autochthonous Andean culture in Introducción a la historia antigua del Perú (1921). See López Lenci, El Cusco, paqarina moderna, 263–272. Enrique López Albújar’s Cuentos andinos (1920) is another literary precedent of such use, one that completely defines Luis E. Valcárcel’s work of the 1920s. This usage is related to but distinct from the notion of the Andean world that would emerge in the midtwentieth century with the development of anthropological area studies. On this latter construct, see Marisol de la Cadena, “De utopías y contrahegemonías”; and Starn, “Missing the Revolution.” 147. See Orlove, “Putting Race in Its Place,” 321–328. 148. Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place,” 34–38. 149. To my knowledge, it would not appear in this sense again until it came to be affirmed in twentieth-century nationalist debates. 150. Markus, “Culture,” 324, 306. For Markus, culture now emerges as a synonym “for all those objectified results of human creativity by and due to which the ‘natural constitution’ of human individuals—their inborn needs, drives and propensities—become modified, developed and supplemented, and which is inherited by each generation from its predecessors as its legacy to be appropriated and changed by its own activity” (323–324). 151. On the tapada’s early history, see Laura R. Bass and Amanda Wunder, “The Veiled Ladies of the Early Modern Spanish World: Seduction and Scandal in Seville, Madrid, and Lima,” Hispanic Review 77, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 97–144. For tapadas in Arequipa in the 1830s, see E. de Sartiges [E. S. de Lavendais], “Viaje a las repúblicas de América del Sur” [1851], in De Sartiges-Botmiliau: Dos viajeros franceses en el Perú republicano, ed. Raúl Porras Barrenechea, trans. Emilia Romero (Lima: Editorial Cultura Antártica, 1947), 15–16. 152. Manuel Atanasio Fuentes, Lima, or, Sketches of the Capital of Peru, Historical, Statistical, Administrative, Commercial and Moral (Paris: F. Didot, 1866), 98–101. 153. “Trajes y costumbres: De la saya y manto, y de las tapadas de ojo,” El Amigo del Pueblo (Lima), no. 1 (March 21, 1840): [3–4]. This early text stresses the tapada’s Hispanic origins and already deploys most of the racialized tropes present in later writings. 154. Poole’s suggestive readings of the construction of the tapada interprets this process as a negotiation between the self-representations of tapadas and images created by European observers. Her narrative ignores local sites of production in the constitution of criollismo. See Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 104. 155. “En lugar de desenredarme digo: ‘perdone usted señorita,’ y clavándole mi vista con avidez doy un grito de espanto: había visto el rostro deforme de una chola ñata, con boca prominente y que tenía tuerto el ojo que llevaba tapado!” Lastarria, “Lima en 1850,” 101. For similar accounts, see Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 93– 94. In the eighteenth century, Simón Ayanque [Esteban de Terralla y Landa] already warned: “Jamas á mujer tapada / Vayas a echarla requiebros, / Que puede ser una negra / O algún horrible esqueleto (Lima por dentro y fuera, 188).

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Notes to Pages 70–73 156. As one chronicler wrote in praise of the appearance of the tapadas at the Corpus Christi procession: “Lima, la ciudad que se había hecho medio francesa, medio inglesa y se había olvidado de si misma, recordó ayer su tipo primitivo, su carácter especial que le han hecho siempre una ciudad excepcional.” In “Cronica interior: Corpus cristi,” El Heraldo de Lima, June 16, 1854. See also “Noticias varias de la capital,” La Revista (Lima), June 23, 1851; “Crónica Interior: Corpus Cristi: Antaño y ogaño,” El Heraldo de Lima, June 14, 1854. On the disappearance of the tapada and the transition to international bourgeois fashions, see del Águila, Los velos y las pieles, especially 127–138. 157. Lastarria, “Lima en 1850,” 103. 158. Antonio Cornejo Polar described costumbrismo as a literature capable only of engaging the present, unable to construct a national project or establish a productive relationship with the colonial tradition. See La formación de la tradición literaria en el Perú (Lima: CEP, 1989), 25–31. 159. Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 160. As Julio Ortega writes: “Por otra parte, esta Lima que se fue, esta Lima que se va, no ha dejado de estarse yendo desde el comienzo mismo del discurso sobre Lima” (Cultura y modernización en la Lima del 900, 17). 161. Ortega, 23. 162. Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee, “Ilustrando la república a través de la sátira colonial: Ignacio Merino y la reconfiguración de Lima por dentro y fuera,” in Estudios de la sátira hispanoamericana colonial: Estudios da sátira do Brasil-Colônia, ed. Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee and Eduardo Viana da Silva (Frankfurt: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2019), 99–104. Terralla y Landa himself draws on contemporary discourses of Lima’s decadence, also figured in Mercurio Peruano and other contemporary texts. 163. Nadia R. Altschul explores how Latin American culture was displaced to the past in the discourses of modernity in Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). 164. Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 86. These images are comparable to those that emerged contemporaneously in Mexico. See Pérez Vejo, España en el debate público mexicano, 1836–1867, 104–105. 165. Pratt, Imperial Eyes. 166. Oliart describes this image of Creole elites in detail, though she proposes that it served to differentiate elites from the even more reprehensible indolence of the poor, or to disguise their power. At certain points she appears to suggest these stereotypes adequately represent actual Creole elites. See Oliart, “Poniendo a cada quien en su lugar,” 269. 167. Majluf, “Francisco Laso, escritor y político,” 21. 168. See especially the cuadro “El limeño criollo y el afrancesado,” in Ramón Rojas y Cañas, Museo de limeñadas: Colección de artículos de costumbres: Obra ilustrada, escrita en Lima por Ramón Rojas y Cañas (Lima: Imprenta de Justo Montoya, 1853), 55–56. I thank Oswaldo Holguín for kindly allowing me a photocopy of this rare book. For Lima as a false and illegitimate construct, see also Salazar Bondy’s Lima la horrible; and Elmore, “La ciudad enferma,” 296, 304–305. 169. The complexities of elite identities in relation to criollismo has led critics like Cornejo Polar to identify a sort of “schizophrenia,” as for example in José de la RivaAgüero’s portrayal of Creoles (La formación de la tradición literaria en el Perú, 75).

Notes to Pages 73–80 170. Velázquez Castro, La mirada de los gallinazos, chap. 4. See also Magally Alegre Henderson, “Androginopolis: Dissident Masculinities and the Creation of Republican Peru (Lima, 1790–1850)” (PhD diss., Stony Brook University, 2012). 171. Clemente Althaus, “‘Á Lima [1862],” in Obras poéticas de Clemente Althaus (1852– 1871) (Lima: Imprenta del Universo de Carlos Prince, 1872), 222–225. For a description of Lima as a woman possessed by foreigners in the context of the war with Spain, see also “Á Lima [1865],” 356–357. 172. The Mexican collection was published serially between October 1854 and September 1855, appearing in book form only in late 1855. The image of the laundress appeared without a text at the tail end of the series. María Esther Pérez Salas, Costumbrismo y litografía en Mexico City: Un nuevo modo de ver (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2005), 278–281. See also the introduction by Andrés Henestroza to Hilarión Frías y Soto’s La lavandera (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1993), 9–12. I thank Angélica Velázquez for help locating this source. 173. Laso, “La paleta y los colores,” 232. 174. There are no images of laundresses among the hundreds of watercolors that make up Francisco Fierro’s production between 1840 and 1860. The exception, Lavandera del Pichincha (Museo de Arte de Lima, Donación Gustavo Chopitea Barreda), painted in the 1870s, is part of a series of late, and atypical, narrative compositions. 175. Pencil on paper, 40 × 25 cm, Ex Juan Manuel Ugarte Eléspuru Collection, Lima. 176. Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 183–185; de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos, chap. 3. 177. For the battle of representations enacted in the 1878 Peruvian pavilion, see the firsthand account by Nemo, “La Exposición Universal de París: Segunda carta: Sección peruana,” El Comercio (Lima), July 6, 1878; and Clovis Lamarre and Charles Wiener, L’Amérique centrale et méridionale et l’Exposition de 1878 (Paris: Librairie Chap. Delagrave, 1878), 198–199. The two warriors were suggested by Charles Wiener and taken down by Juan Mariano de Goyeneche, president of the official commission, with the support of other Peruvians living in Paris. On the Hispanicizing celebrations of Peru’s independence, see Natalia Majluf and Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, Sabogal (Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 2013), 30–41. 178. Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 34. 179. See Terry Eagleton’s discussion of the fragment in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 1990), 328–329. 180. John A. Hodgson, “Transcendental Tropes: Coleridge’s Rhetoric of Allegory and Symbol,” in Morton W. Bloomfield, Allegory, Myth, and Symbol (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 273. 181. Buntinx, “Del ‘Habitante de las Cordilleras’ al ‘Indio Alfarero,’” 13–14. 182. For the emergence of the concept, see Jane Anderson and Haidy Geismar’s introduction to The Routledge Companion to Cultural Property, ed. Anderson and Geismar (London: Routledge, 2017), 7. On the implementation of cultural property legislation in Latin America, see Earle, The Return of the Native, 140, 143–144. 183. Torrico, “El arte y los pintores peruanos en la primera exposición nacional,” 2. 184. See Doris Sommer’s description of the forward-looking allegorical movement

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Notes to Pages 80–84 of the early Latin American novel in Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 185. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 207. 186. Alice A. Kuznair, “The Temporality of Landscape: Romantic Allegory and C. D. Friedrich,” Studies in Romanticism 28, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 69–93. 187. James Henry Rubin, “Allegory versus Narrative in Quatremère de Quincy,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44, no. 4 (Summer 1986): 383–392.

Chapter 2: The Scene of Approximation 1. Joseph Conrad, “Karain: A Memory,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 162, no. 985 (November 1897): 641–642. I owe this citation (as well as further inspiration) to Johannes Fabian, “Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 771–772. 2. “Melancolía importada y a redopelo, no era posible que prosperara entre nosotros.” In the preliminary note to Ventura García Calderón, ed., Los Románticos: De Melgar a González Prada, Biblioteca de Cultura Peruana 8 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1938), 13. 3. The date of 1854 is inscribed in the copy owned by Juan Manuel Ugarte Eléspuru. However, it must have been taken earlier, as Laso and Corpancho only coincided in Paris during 1852. Corpancho’s book Brisas del mar: Recuerdos poéticos (Lima: Tipografía del “Mensajero,” 1853) was signed aboard the frigate Amazonas on January 7, 1853. 4. García Calderón, Del romanticismo al modernismo: Prosistas y poetas peruanos (Paris: Sociedad de Ediciones Literarias y Artísticas, 1910), ix. For a brief genealogy of the idea of the inauthenticiy of Peruvian Romanticism, see Cornejo Polar, La formación de la tradición literaria en el Perú, 43–44n1. 5. Indian melancholy had a long history in the Andes. Like most stereotypes, it has been recovered and re-signified over time. On early colonial melancholy, see Germán Morong Reyes, “El indio melancólico y temeroso: Representaciones de alteridad en dos textos de Indias, Perú colonial, siglox XVI-XVII,” Diálogo Andino 45 (December 2014): 27–38. 6. Francisco García Calderón, introduction to Mariano Melgar, Poesías, ed. Manuel Moscoso Melgar (Lima: En los depósitos del autor, 1878), 32. 7. Mario Praz discusses these themes in The Romantic Agony, translated from Italian by Angus Davidson (New York: Meridian, 1956), 25–45. 8. José Manuel Valdez y Palacios wrote: “Y en las bases de los Andes, en cuyas faldas ondea la melancolía y sobre cuyas cumbres existe lo sublime, no habrían recibido las impresiones de la poesía?” In Bosquejo sobre el estado político, moral y literario del Perú en sus tres grandes épocas (1844), preliminary study by Estuardo Núñez, translated from Portuguese by Carmen Sologuren (Lima: Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, 1971), 44. 9. See Juan Carlos Estenssoro’s pioneering study of the melancholic Indian in the late eighteenth century in “Música, discurso y poder en el régimen colonial,” 2 vols. (MA thesis, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1990), 2:535 10. The legacy of the melancholic Indian, associated with the yaraví, would mark

Notes to Pages 84–85 local music production, especially in the first half of the twentieth century; for example, Tristeza andina by composer Carlos Valderrama (1887–1950), identified as a yaraví; and Cuando el indio llora of 1929 by Carlos A. Saco (1894–1935) (Brunswick matrix E30343). 11. Raoul D’Harcourt and Marguerite D’Harcourt, La música de los incas y sus supervivencias, translated from French by Mosca Azul Editores (Lima: Occidental Petroleum Corporation of Peru, 1990), 169. 12. “Los que eran de regocijo i alegría se decían ‘arabis’; en ellos referían sus hazañas i cosas pasadas, i decían lores al Inca.” Cited in D’Harcourt and D’Harcourt, La música de los incas, 169, no. 28. A similar definition was given by Diego González Holguín in the seventeenth century: “Haraui o yuyaycucuna o Huaynaricuna ttaqui. Cantares de hechos de otros o memoria de los aucentes y de amor y afición y agora se ha recibido por cantares deuotos y espirituales.” Cited in Consuelo Pagaza Galdo, “El yaraví del Cuzco,” Folklore Americano 8, vol. 9, nos. 8-9 (1960–1961): 86. 13. D’Harcourt and D’Harcourt, La música de los incas, 168–173, especially 169. The most complete compilation of definitions of the yaraví can be found in Aurelio Miró Quesada Sosa, Historia y leyenda de Mariano Melgar (1790–1815) (Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica del Centro de Cooperación Iberoamericana, 1978), 162–172. In tracing the definitions of the yaraví, Miró Quesada cites a revealing example: in the first edition of Diego de Torres Rubio’s Arte de la lengua quichua of 1619, the yaraví is a generic name for song; in the third edition of the dictionary, published in 1754, the yaraví is defined as a “sad song” (canción triste). See Miró Quesada Sosa, 165–166. 14. Clements R. Markham, Markham in Peru: The Travels of Clements R. Markham, 1852–1853, ed. Peter Blanchard (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 67. 15. Antonio Cornejo Polar rejects the notion that the yaraví, defined as “a sorrowful love song,” is the result of a progressive reduction of the meanings of the arawi as an all-inclusive category. He argues that the term may derive from a specific form, the jaray arawi, or from the urpi, sorrowful lyric love songs. The distinction between different forms of the yaraví, however, is not made in colonial sources, and Cornejo seems to follow twentieth-century definitions created by Jesús Lara. Also lost from this history of the yaraví is the role of Creole interpreters, as well as its association with the melancholic Indian. See Cornejo Polar, “La poesía tradicional y el yaraví,” Letras 38, nos. 76– 77 (1966): 103–125. 16. Miró Quesada Sosa, Historia y leyenda de Mariano Melgar, 165–166, no. 59. Although the manuscript, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, bears no date, it is found in a volume containing papers dating from 1682 to 1712. Miró Quesada also traces the first instance of the current spelling of yaraví to this source. 17. Estenssoro, “Música, discurso y poder en el régimen colonial,” 2:517. On the Enlightenment origins of racial classification and its importance for modern racisms, see George L. Mosse, Towards the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), especially chaps. 1–4. 18. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1978), especially chap. 1; Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity. 19. Sicramio, “Rasgo remitido por la Sociedad Poética sobre la Música en general, y particularmente de los Yaravíes,” Mercurio Peruano 101 (December 22, 1791): 284–291. Pagaza Galdo mistakenly identifies Sicramio as J. M. Tirado in “El yaraví del Cuzco,” 77n4. Estenssoro emphasizes the official nature of Sicramio’s text, which is presented

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Notes to Pages 85–87 as a proposal of the Sociedad Poética”; see “Música, discurso y poder en el régimen colonial,” 2:536. 20. Sicramio, “Rasgo remitido por la Sociedad Poética,” 285, 290–291, 287. “Por exemplo: el Español remeda a veces al Italiano y al Francés: estos al Español y al Ingles, y aquellos al Portugués y Alemán: de manera, que se forma una miscelánea agradable, aunque sea con la imitación de diferentes estilos: solo el carácter del Indio es inimitable; y sus Yaravíes, son regla de excepción a esta parte.” 21. Sicramio, 287. 22. Sicramio, 286. 23. T. J. C. P. [José Toribio del Campo], “Carta sobre la música: En la que se hace ver el estado de sus conocimientos en Lima y se critica el Rasgo sobre los Yaravíes impreso en el Mercurio num. 101,” Mercurio Peruano (February 16 and 19, 1792): 112, 114–116. Juan Carlos Estenssoro identifies the author in Música y sociedad coloniales: Lima, 1680–1830, Colección de Arena (Lima: Editorial Colmillo Blanco, 1989), 32. D’Harcourt and D’Harcourt would also vindicate the Indian against the melancholic stereotype (La música de los incas, 170). 24. Sicramio, “Concluye el artículo sobre la música en general y empieza el de los yaravíes,” Museo erudito 2, nos. 13–15 (September 10, 20, 30, 1839), 5–7. Sicramio’s text is here interwoven with additions, including popular love stories stressing the romantic nature of the Indian’s melancholy. A reprint of the Mercurio Peruano published by Manuel Atanasio Fuentes in the 1860s contributed to the journal’s popularity among Laso’s generation. See also Mesa, Los anales de la ciudad del Cuzco o las cuatro épocas de su historia, 1:202–203; Paz Soldán and Paz Soldán, Geografía del Perú, 1:33; Francisco García Calderón, introduction to Melgar, Poesías 37n1. Pedro Paz Soldán y Unanue is one of the few authors of this period to question the yaraví following Del Campo’s arguments without citing him. See Diccionario de peruanismos (1860–1893), 388–389. Even in the early twentieth century, García Calderón evoked Sicramio in his introduction to Melgar’s work in Los Románticos, 16. 25. Del Campo, “Carta sobre la música,” 112. 26. Estenssoro, “Música, discurso y poder en el régimen colonial,” 2:537. Estenssoro and Miró Quesada agree that the yaraví became popular among urban Creoles only during the late eighteenth century. Under the spell of the nationalist paradigm of mestizaje (which he promoted), Miró Quesada sees the yaraví as a perfect fusion of popular Indian and elite Creole culture. See Historia y leyenda de Mariano Melgar (1790– 1815), 171ff. In demonstrating the widespread adoption of the yaraví by urban Creoles, Estenssoro questions its idealization as an expression of cultural fusion and stresses its manipulation for political ends. 27. Itier, “Quechua y cultura en el Cuzco del siglo XVIII,” 89–111. 28. See Estenssoro, “Música, discurso y poder,” 2:533. 29. Estenssoro, 1:79–80. 30. Cited in Miró Quesada Sosa, Historia y leyenda de Mariano Melgar, 166–167. 31. Estenssoro, “Música, discurso y poder,” 1:523. 32. Benito Laso, “Oración de Jeremías: Traducción libre aplicable al Perú,” La Revista de Lima 1, no. 12 (March 15, 1860): 574–579. A note claims that it was written in 1813 in honor of General Belgrano’s victory at Vilcapuquio, but I am unaware of earlier editions. This poem was mistakenly attributed to Francisco Laso by Ventura García Calderón and partially published in his anthology Costumbristas y satíricos (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1938), 2:43–45.

Notes to Pages 87–89 33. Miró Quesada Sosa, Historia y leyenda de Mariano Melgar, 73–74. 34. “El Perú esclavisado, poema,” [3–4]. 35. The extended influence in Peru of Edward Young, whom Unanue described as the “poet of sadness,” has yet to be studied. See Hipólito Unanue, Los ideólogos: Hipólito Unanue, ed. Jorge Arias-Schreiber Pezet, Colección Documental de la Independencia del Perú 1 (Lima: Comisión Nacional del Sesquicentenario de la Independencia del Perú, 1974), 8:134. A volume of one of the many Spanish editions of Young’s “The Complaint” is listed in the 1833 inventory of Unanue’s library. See Unanue, 7:146. On the political uses of the sublime in Europe, see Hugh Honour, Neo-Classicism, Style and Civilization (New York: Penguin, 1988), 141–146 36. Among others, Miró Quesada, Historia y leyenda de Mariano Melgar, especially 171–172 and 184–185; and José Varallanos, El harahui y el yaraví, dos canciones populares peruanas (Lima: Editorial Argos, 1989). 37. Christo, “Atahualpa en la corte imperial brasileña,” 102–131. 38. For example, yaravís were composed by “una señorita” for the “Función Lírica Dramática” of February 2 and 7, 1851. See El Comercio (Lima), February 2, 1851. For other examples, see Estenssoro, Música y sociedad coloniales, 58n70. 39. “Teatro,” El Comercio (Lima), March 26, 1851. The traveler Paul Marcoy described the melancholic sound of the “cantata of Manco Capac” sung by the daughter of the British Consul in Islay. He also related it to the lamentations of Jeremiah and the “glorias extinguidas de los hijos del Sol.” He would later describe the extreme melancholy of a then-famous yaraví titled “Pica-flor de Huascar Inca.” See Marcoy, Travels in South America: From the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, 2 vols. (London: Blackie and Son, 1875), 1:7, 192. 40. “Teatro principal,” El Comercio (Lima), December 15, 1858. I thank Cecilia Méndez for this reference. 41. The influence of the Mercurio Peruano in the nineteenth century has not been sufficiently explored. To cite but one example, the prospectus “A los amantes de la ilustración” in the first issue of the journal El Instructor Popular o Gabinete Curioso de Literatura y Ciencias Naturales, published in Lima in 1841, proposed to reissue the Mercurio Peruano, “una obra clásica: digna no solo de conservarse en los archivos de los ilustrados hijos de Manco-Capac, sino que nuestra juventud aprendiese en ella los primeros rudimentos del saber.” 42. Francisco García Calderón, along with Mateo Paz Soldán, was among the first to publicize Melgar’s poetry and refers to his popularity in his 1865 introduction to Melgar, Poesías, 5, 11. For a history of Melgar’s reception, see also Miró Quesada, Historia y leyenda de Mariano Melgar, especially 152–155. 43. Althaus, “Yaraví [1857],” in Obras poéticas de Clemente Althaus (1852–1871), 44. See also Juana Manuela Gorriti, ed., Veladas literarias de Lima, 1876–1877 (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Europea, 1892), 301–302, 406–408, 452ff; especially the yaraví “Imposibles” by Manuel F. Escobedo and the poem on “El yaraví peruano” by Carolina García de Bambaren. For one among many possible examples of later reflections, see G. Lozano, “El yaraví,” El Perú Ilustrado 3, no. 152 (April 5, 1890): 1681. 44. Benito Laso was related through marriage to Francisco García Calderón (through his second marriage to Petronila García Calderón), whom he aided in writing his famous Diccionario de la legislación peruana. He named his friend Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán as excecutor of his will. On February 13, 1862, shortly after his death, in a gesture of friendship, his son Francisco wrote to Paz Soldán, then a member of the Su-

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Notes to Pages 89–94 perior Court of Lima, to offer him his father’s medal as speaker of the same court. Letter in the collection of the author. 45. Corpancho, “El Poeta,” in Ensayos poéticos de Manuel Nicolás Corpancho, 185–186. 46. Martha Hildebrandt, Peruanismos, Biblioteca Básica Peruana 6 (Lima: Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, 1994), 320–322. The original titles of these paintings are unknown. The titles they are given here—Indian Encampment, Pascana in the Cordillera, and Haravicu—follow only the practical need of distinguishing between them in the text. 47. Stastny, “Francisco Laso, pintor moderno,” in Francisco Laso, 1823–1869, n.p. The painter and critic Teófilo Castillo, for example, described the Haravicu as “una escena rústica sencilla henchida de paz y melancolía” (“Interiores limeños,” 1934). Later, Edgardo Pérez Luna would claim a sorda melancolía (silent melancholy) as the defining trait of Laso’s work; see Pérez Luna, “Un siglo de Laso,” in Suceso, supplement of Correo, July 27, 1969. 48. Flores Aráoz, in Catálogo de la exposición Francisco Laso, cat. no. 19. 49. The same author further wrote: “Al indio peruano, lo ha representado Laso en dos actitudes; unas veces encorvado bajo el peso de una melancolía invencible, o sumido en el misterio de su propio pensamiento, como aparece frecuentemente en sus Pascanas; o bien, hierático sin soberbia, digno, pero siempre triste y desconsolado, como en el Indio alfarero.” “Apunte crítico,” in Flores Aráoz, Catálogo de la exposición Francisco Laso, n.p. 50. Garcilaso de la Vega defines the haráuec, or harauicus, as poets (book 2, chap. 27; book 7, chap. 10); and also as guardians of collective memory (book 6, chap. 9). See the English translation of Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru (1609), trans. Harold V. Livermore (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). 51. “Arabicus. Nombre de los Poetas Peruleros; de aquí nació el de yaravíes que se da a sus canciones elegiacas.” Unanue, “Idea general de los monumentos del antiguo Perú,” 207n9. 52. See Stastny, Francisco Laso. 53. García Calderón, introduction to Melgar, Poesías, 35. 54. García Calderón, 32. The traveler J. J. von Tschudi also wrote that “The yaravie [sic] has been imitated by the Spaniards in their own language, and some of the imitations are beautiful; but they have not been able to reach the deep melancholy of the Quichua elegy.” See Tschudi, Travels in Peru, 343. 55. Unanue, Observaciones sobre el clima de Lima y sus influencias en los seres organizados, en especial el hombre (1806), in Los ideólogos: Hipólito Unanue, 8:135. 56. Anonymous, “Concluye el artículo sobre la música en general y empieza el de los yaravíes,” 5. The same author continues, paraphrasing Sicramio: “Los yaravíes que por si mismos son tan tristes y espresivos aumentan su fuerza e influencia, cuando son cantados en el campo . . .” 57. See Orlove’s account of the rise of a racialized geography in “Putting Race in Its Place,” 307–308. For Colombia, see Appelbaum, Mapping the Country of Regions. 58. Paz Soldán and Paz Soldán, Geografía del Perú, 1:30–31. 59. García Calderón, introduction to Melgar, Poesías, 33–34. 60. Orlove, “Putting Race in Its Place,” 325. 61. F. L. [Laso]], “Huacho à vuelo de pájaro,” El Nacional (Lima), February 13, 1869, 1. Reprinted in Laso, Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú y otros ensayos, 221. Informa-

Notes to Pages 94–100 tion on the house in Huacho is contained in his widow’s will. See Archivo General de la Nación (Lima), siglo 20, protocolo 3, notario Manuel Iparraguirre, September 27, 1902, fol. 847v. 62. Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 183–185. 63. Sicramio, “Rasgo remitido por la Sociedad Poética,” 286. 64. Unanue, Observaciones sobre el clima de Lima, 135. 65. “Lima: Esposición [sic] de pinturas,” El Comercio (Lima), September 18, 1861. 66. Laso, “Croquis sobre el carácter peruano,” 309. 67. A second drawing closely follows the composition. See Study for Agricultural Scene, ca. 1856–1869, pencil on paper, 26.2 × 47.7 cm, Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest. 68. García Calderón, introduction to Melgar, Poesías, 34. 69. Paz Soldán and Paz Soldán, Geografía del Perú, 1:30. 70. “La exclusión de las comunidades indígenas en la costa y en la sierra no significó únicamente un despojo de tierra y de derechos públicos. Significó sobre todo abrir el espacio para esa imagen, que aún ahora sigue vigente en algunos estudios sobre el ‘mundo andino’, de estar ante un tiempo detenido, ‘congelado.’” José Guillermo Nugent, El laberinto de la choledad, Serie Panel 1 (Lima: Fundación Friedrich Ebert, 1992), 20. See, especially, Fuenzalida’s critique of the national myth in “Poder, raza y etnia en el Perú contemporáneo,” 15–23. For the essentialist category of lo andino in anthropology, see de la Cadena, “De utopías y contrahegemonías.” 71. See, especially, Méndez, The Plebeian Republic. 72. Teófilo Castillo first mentions the painting as “El haravicú, ó sea el indio historiador” (“Interiores limeños,” 1933). 73. “The poetry of Inca amautas or philosophers and harauicus, or poets,” Royal Commentaries of the Incas, book 2, chap. 27, 126. On the haravicus, see also book six, chap. 9. 74. In 1876, for example, Abelardo M. Gamarra was baptized as “el último harabicu” in Gorriti’s literary salon. See Gorriti, Veladas literarias de Lima, 1876–1877, 452–479. 75. Unanue, “Idea general de los monumentos del antiguo Perú,” 207. 76. [René] Enrique Tabouelle, “Algo sobre el estudio de la historia peruana,” Revista de Lima 1, no. 6 (December 15, 1859): 276–277. 77. Tabouelle, 278–280. 78. Though the subject has yet to be studied. For orality, music, and folklore in Colombia, see Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in NineteenthCentury Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 79. “Su género literario es oral. Cuando escribe, está hablando. . . . A Ricardo Palma no se le lee, se le oye.” Emilio Romero, “El cuento hace treinta años,” in Ricardo Palma, Tradiciones, 5 vols., ed. Raúl Porras Barrenechea, with illustrations by Apu-rimak, Raúl Vizcarra, and Carlos Quíspez Asín (Lima: Editorial Cultura Antártica S.A., 1951), 5:iii. 80. The painting seems to have been exhibited for the first time in 1937. In 1923, when it was in the Prado family collection (along with other paintings that Javier Prado had bought from Laso’s widow), the painter José G. Otero described it as a little-known painting; see “En el taller de Laso, una visita emocionante: Dibujos y óleos,” Variedades, no. 792 (May 5, 1923): 1101. 81. R. Vegas García claims that the painting was presented at the 1863 Paris Salon. [R.V.G.], “Centenario de Lasso,” Variedades 19, no. 792 (May 1923): 1093–1098. Emilio

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Notes to Pages 100–101 Gutiérrez de Quintanilla seems to be the first to mention the painting’s rejection from the salon but gives no date in “Opinión sobre Lazo y algunas de sus obras,” El Comercio (Lima), April 12, 1917. He draws a comparison between the reasons for the rejection of Laso’s painting and those that justified the rejection of Gustave Courbet’s Return from the Conference at the 1863 Paris Salon. Vegas’s assertion may derive from a misreading of this text. 82. Information provided by Rosanna Kuon, who restored and analyzed the painting in 1997. 83. Castillo, “Interiores limeños,” 1931–1932. Castillo wrote: “Es su célebre Entierro del mal cura, que a la par que mi Manchay-puito (pintado en Italia hace 28 años y sin pretender comparar la calidad de una obra con otra) tuvo su rato de bulla en Lima por lo irreligioso del tema.” Castillo’s ambiguous phrasing seems to suggest that, like his own work, Laso’s painting shocked the public of Lima. There is no indication, however, that the painting was exhibited in Laso’s lifetime. 84. Fernando Villegas Torres, “Las pinturas de Teófilo Castillo y las Tradiciones de Ricardo Palma,” in Confluencias e intercambios: La literatura comparada y el Perú hoy, ed. Biagio d’Angelo (Lima: Universidad Sedes Sapientiae, 2006), 93–110. 85. E. W. Middendorf translated the term as “la tenebrosa sepultura” when he recorded “Manchay-puytu” as an “elegy.” See “Elegien, Manchai puitu,” in Dramatische und Lyrische Dichtungen der Keshua-Sprache (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1891), 257–258. Yet as Nicole Fourtané explains, Middendorf seems to rely largely on Palma’s version; see “La légende du ‘Manchay-Puito,’ creuset de traditions complexes,” América: Cahiers du CRICCAL 19 (1997): 205–221. According to a version recorded by Lara, Manchay-Puito means “cantarillo del miedo.” See Leyendas quechuas: Antología, ed. Jesús Lara (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Librería Juventud, 1960), 136. César Itier states that in Cuzco Quechua, the word refers to rhomboid figures in textiles (personal conversation, 2020). 86. As I explore further below, Castillo was probably inspired by Juana Manuela Gorriti’s story “La quena.” Both Castillo and Palma may have also drawn from a piece by Chilean writer Manuel Concha, “Origen de la quena,” El Correo del Perú (Lima) 6, no. 48 (November 26, 1876): 364–365. 87. D’Harcourt and D’Harcourt recorded early twentieth-century accounts of the puytu being played by inserting the quena into a jar with two holes on the sides and blowing on the flute while passing the hand over the holes (La música de los incas, 58– 59). Luis E. Valcárcel also describes the instrument as it was played in Cuzco, repeating the fanciful notion that it had been prohibited because its depressing sounds induced those who heard it to suicide. See Memorias, ed. José Matos Mar, José Deustua C., and José Luis Rénique (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1981), 63. This apparently indigenist instrument seems to have disappeared by the mid-twentieth century. Arturo Jiménez Borja mentions its rarity, illustrates an example from Moya, and points out that water was added to the bottom of the puytu. See “Instrumentos musicales peruanos,” Revista del Museo Nacional 19–20 (1950–1951): 68–69. I have identified, among others, a painting by Antonio Rodríguez del Valle titled Quena en cántaro dated to 1925, known through a postcard edited by Ulises Ch. in Lima, as well as a number of photographs of indigenist musicians with puytus at the Fototeca Andina in Cuzco. 88. “En esta obra él ha querido castigar al clero malo de nuestras provincias andinas, a quien se acusa de explotar demasiado a los indígenas y cuya moralidad a veces, parece, deja que desear.” See Castillo, “Interiores limeños,” 1931–1932. Though there are more than seven figures among the demons at the left of the painting, Castillo

Notes to Pages 101–102 claims they represent the seven cardinal sins; and although there are only two angels, he claims that there are three, representing the “three theological virtues.” 89. Majluf, “Francisco Laso, escritor y político,” 34. Though offering no justification, Juan Manuel Peña reverses Castillo’s anti-clerical interpretation in “El arte en el Perú a través de un museo,” El Comercio (Lima), January 27, 1929, 22–23. 90. According to Merlin D. Compton, it was written in 1876 and published for the first time in the fourth volume of his Tradiciones in 1877; see “Las Tradiciones Peruanas de Ricardo Palma: Bibliografía y lista cronológica tentativas,” Fénix 28–29 (1983): 99–129. Palma’s fame has allowed his version of the story to survive, while others have been forgotten. 91. It was apparently published for the first time as “La quena (Leyenda peruana)” as a serial in El Comercio (Lima), January 29, 30, 31; and February 1, 3, 4, 1851. It later appeared in ten parts as “Sección literaria. La quena. Leyenda peruana por Da. Juana M. Gorriti,” La Prensa, between October 13, 1858, and December 4, 1858. It was included in Gorriti, Sueños y realidades: Obras completas de la señora doña Juana Manuela Gorriti, ed. Vicente G. Quesada (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Mayo de C. Casavalle, 1865), 1:3–67. In his biographical note to this edition, José María Torres Caicedo mentions that the novel first circulated in 1845, yet we have identified no edition for that date. Sofía Pachas also associates the painting with Gorriti’s version but arrives at a different interpretation in “El entierro del mal cura o Manchay Puito de Francisco Laso: La representación del mal a partir de una leyenda de amor prohibido,” in Estética del mal: Conceptos y representaciones, ed. Erik Velásquez García, 33rd Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte, 2009 (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2013), 323–333. 92. The priest is also an Indian in the version published in 1960 by Jesús Lara, who mentions that this version compiles different accounts, but principally one recounted by the Bolivian politician Ismael Vásquez and the musician Eduardo Caba. See J. Lara, Leyendas quechuas, 11, 131–139. 93. For Latin America’s national romances, see Sommer, Foundational Fictions. 94. Gorriti, “La quena,” in Sueños y realidades, 1:60. 95. Gorriti, 1:56–57. 96. This is the case of “Issichay Puytu” and “Cuento de Malika y el Cura”; see Nicole Fourtané, “Tradition et création dans la littérature orale des Andes péruviennes: Le cas des ‘condenados,’” 3 vols. (PhD dissertation, Université de Tours, 1991), 1:358; 3:994–1001. The version that Fourtané consigns of “Malika y el Cura” is a translation from Quechua recorded by Max Uhle in Cuzco around 1904–1905. For the “Issichay Puytu,” first published in 1949, see also Anónimo quechua, Issicha Puytu: Drama quechua anónimo, bilingual Quechua and Spanish, ed. Jorge A. Lira, illustrations by Mariano Fuentes Lira (Lima: Editorial Milla Batres, 1974). 97. Flores Aráoz speculates that Laso picked up the legend during his trip to Puno in 1850. There is no evidence of this trip, nor any that he visited the Titicaca region on his trip to Cuzco in late 1851. See Flores Aráoz, Catálogo de la exposición Francisco Laso, no. 80. 98. Fourtané, “La légende du ‘Manchay-Puito,’ creuset de traditions complexes,” 217–220. See also Gonzalo Espino Relucé, “Manchay puytu y narrativas de la aldea letrada quechua (La tradición escrita, siglo XIX),” Letras, nos. 103–104 (2002), 249–262. 99. Miró Quesada cites a 1725 text describing the festivities for Louis I’s accession to the throne, which cites the lugubrious nature of the quena: “ciertas flautas a quien

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Notes to Pages 102–104 llaman ‘quenaquenas’, cuya música tiene más de lúgubre que de apacible.” Miró Quesada Sosa, Historia y leyenda de Mariano Melgar, 169–170. 100. D’Harcourt and D’Harcourt, La música de los incas, 56. 101. “.  .  . su origen es el más tétrico, y su memoria la más dolorosa” (Sicramio, “Rasgo remitido por la Sociedad Poética,” 285). 102. “Mas, no. Le arrancaré siquiera / un hueso / Y lo tendré en mi seno tal si / fuera ella misma / Se convertirá en quena entre mis / manos / Y llorará mis propias lágrimas . . .” Lara, Leyendas quechuas, 137–139. 103. The pertinent pages of the manuscript are reproduced (but not transcribed) in the article by Néstor Puertas Castro, “La leyenda trágica y doliente del cura de Yanaquihua en tres estancias,” Cultura Peruana 42, no. 103 (January 1957): n.p. No information is provided regarding the manuscript’s location or its author’s biography, though mention is made that it was written during Deglane’s stay in Arequipa around 1848. Deglane was listed as a doctor in the police intendancy of Arequipa in 1849. See “Avisos,” El Republicano (Arequipa), February 3, 1849, 12; August 8, 1849, 4. He died in Lima in 1885. See “Crónica: Ha fallecido . . .,” El Comercio (Lima), December 16, 1885. 104. For the broader construction of the notion of folk creations, see Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 3–5. 105. Itier, “Quechua y cultura en el Cuzco del siglo XVIII.” I thank César Itier for his guidance on this subject. In 1874 Manuel de Mendiburu stated: En el territorio de la costa raras serán las personas que conozcan la quichua y bien poco, o mejor dicho, para nada es necesario. Al otro lado de la cordillera todos hablan quichua y el uso de esta lengua tiene de hecho un positivo fomento, porque las familias más o menos notables y cuantos tienen ideas del castellano tratan con sus domésticos, y en general con obreros, agricultores y proletarios en quichua y no en español por costumbre y para hacerse entender mejor.

See “Sobre el quichua,” El Correo del Perú (Lima) 4, no. 28 (December 31, 1874): xxix. 106. As Clements Markham noted in the 1850s (Markham in Peru). Cited in Adrian J. Pearce, “Reindigenization and Native Languages in Peru’s Long Nineteenth Century (1795–1940),” in History and Language in the Andes, ed. Paul Heggarty and Adrian Pearce (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 151. See also, in the same volume, Alan Durston, “Quechua Political Literature in Early Republican Peru (1810–1876),” 166. 107. For a useful survey of Creole perspectives on indigenous languages in this period, see Yvinec, “‘Los peruanos conocidos antes con el nombre de indios,’” 88–103. For later debates, see Gonzalo Espino Relucé, Imágenes de la inclusión andina: Literatura peruana del XIX (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1999). See also Tord, El indio en los ensayistas peruanos, 1848–1948, 38–39. 108. Mendiburu, “Sobre el quichua,” xxix. 109. See César Itier’s illuminating study on nineteenth-century reinterpretations of Ollantay, “Ollantay, Antonio Valdéz y la rebelión de Thupa Amaru,” Histórica 30, no. 1 (2006): 74–78. For a broader discussion on such transformations, see Gänger, Relics of the Past, 78–80. 110. See Frank Salomon, “The Historical Development of Andean Ethnology,” Mountain Research and Development 5, no. 1 (February 1985): 79–98. 111. Clorinda Matto de Turner, “La quena,” in Tradiciones cuzqueñas: Leyendas, biografías y hojas sueltas (Cuzco: Universidad Nacional del Cuzco, 1954), 228–230; Germán

Notes to Pages 104–107 Leguía y Martínez, El Manchay-Puito (Infierno aterrador): Leyenda dramática en tres actos, original en verso (Lima: Imprenta de “El Lucero,” 1908). I have been unable to locate Dora Mayer’s version, apparently published as La leyenda de la quena (Callao, 1928). Significantly, according to Puertas Castro, it recorded a version told by Gabriela Unanue, descendant of Hipólito Unanue. See Puertas Castro, “La leyenda trágica y doliente,” n.p. 112. See the important exploration of hegemonic uses of vernacular poetry in Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity, 162. Fourtané also notes the way in which a literary tradition is constructed through the legend of the Manchay-Puito in “La légende du ‘Manchay-Puito,’ creuset de traditions complexes,” 220–221. 113. Besides these examples, see also an archaeologist’s accounts regarding the reluctance of Indian informers in Gänger, Relics of the Past, 137–143. Gänger also cites early colonial precedents. 114. D. F. D. P. D. L. M. L. [Francisco de Paula de la Mata Linares y Vasquez de Avila], “Carta remitida a la Sociedad, que publica con algunas Notas,” Mercurio Peruano, no. 344 (April 20, 1794): 257. 115. Orlove, “Putting Race in its Place,” 317, 328; Majluf, “Traces of an Absent Landscape.” For Alcides d’Orbigny’s comments on the impenetrable physiognomy of the Indian, see the citation in Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 80. 116. El tesoro de los incas was apparently first published in La República 1, nos. 5–6, 8, 10, 14–15 (December 20, 1863–February 21, 1864): 39–40, 46–47, 62–63, 79–80, 111– 112, 119–120. In 1865 it was included in Gorriti, Sueños y realidades, 2:87–137. Studies on Gorriti seek to differentiate her writings through identification of a female voice. See, for example, Lucía Guerra Cunningham, “Visión marginal de la historia en la narrativa de Juana Manuela Gorriti,” Ideologies and Literature 2, no. 2 (1987): 59–76; Denegri, El abanico y la cigarrera, 138–139. The stories discussed here, however, reveal rather a confluence with male hegemonic ideologies. 117. See, for example, Amédée François Frézier, A Voyage to the South Sea, and Along the Coasts of Chili and Peru, in the Years 1712, 1713, and 1714 (London: Jonah Bowyer, 1717), 269. 118. Modesto Basadre, “Botijlaca,” included in a compilation of his writings titled, appropriately enough, Riquezas peruanas: Colección de artículos descriptivos escritos para “La Tribuna” (Lima: Imprenta de “La Tribuna,” 1884), 91–112. Palma wrote a number of tradiciones on the theme, including “Los Tesoros de Catalina Huanca” (1876– 1877), “Un tesoro y una superstición” (1879), and “Buscadores de tesoros.” The legend by Matto de Turner is “Ccata-Hueqque (Origen tradicional del nombre de la cueva),” in Tradiciones cuzqueñas, 131–133. The persistence of the theme can be seen in Ventura García Calderón’s “La espantable magnificencia,” in Instantes del Perú, Biblioteca de Grandes Autores Americanos, 1st series (Paris: Garnier Hms., 1941), 59–67. 119. This story, heard by Markham from Modesto Basadre, was confirmed later in his travels by another informant, Josefa Astete de Bennet, the descendant of Pumacahua’s ally Domingo Luis Astete y Angulo. Markham, Markham in Peru, 89. Significantly, Rivero and Tschudi include a long footnote relating to these narratives of treasure in Antigüedades peruanas, 1:310–313. See also Markham, Markham in Peru, 10–11; Tschudi, Travels in Peru, 242–244. 120. See Tschudi, 244. 121. For an early notice on what could be called treasure mining, see “Avisos: Noticia interesante,” El Comercio (Lima), March 21, 1844, [4]. On the “Huaca del inca” and

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Notes to Pages 107–111 similar enterprises, see Gänger, Relics of the Past, 152–153. The narrative of culpability is present in Tschudi’s account of “mercenary Peruvian mestizos and creoles in search of hidden treasures.” See Tschudi, Travels in Peru, 227. 122. Gorriti, “La quena,” in Sueños y realidades, 1:33. 123. Laso, “Croquis sobre el carácter peruano,” 306–307. 124. Gorriti, El tesoro de los incas, 90. See also Paz Soldán and Paz Soldán, Geografía del Perú, 1:31. 125. Unanue, Los ideólogos, 250. Unanue cites a 1568 account by Pedro de Osma, who recounts how, when he sought information on the bezoar stone, “por más preguntas que hacían a los indios sobre esta materia, se resistían y no querían descubrirles sus secretos, por el encono que les tenían. . . . Pero habiéndoselos revelado un indiecito de 10 a 12 años, al instante sus paisanos lo quisieron degollar. Protegiólo Osma, y descuidándose en custodiarlo con el recreo de la caza, se lo robaron y lo sacrificaron.” 126. Unanue, “Apuntes sobre las ruinas del valle de Santa [1824],” in Los Ideólogos, 434. Originally published in Nuevo día del Perú. 127. A striking example is the satirical newspaper El Duende (1830), directed by José Domingo González de Matos, written in the form of an imaginary dialogue between the editor and the Inca. 128. The lithograph appeared in El Ateneo americano, periódico quincenario con láminas: Literatura, ciencias, artes y oficios, no. 2, November 20, 1847. The newspaper was directed by Rivero and Nicolás de Piérola. According to Pablo Patrón, five issues appeared, accompanied by six lithographs, three of which were “los primeros incas con sus coyas, según la narración de Garcilaso”; see “Galería de retratos de los gobernadores y virreyes del Perú,” La Integridad (Lima), February 25, 1893. 129. Buntinx identifies the crack as the fracture of the conquest to be repaired, or as a communication to be recovered between the ancient Indians and modern Creoles. See “Del ‘Habitante de las Cordilleras’ al ‘Indio Alfarero,’” 29–30. 130. On ventriloquism and the Creole appropriation of indigenous voices, see Guerrero, “The Construction of a Ventriloquist’s Image.” 131. On how modern scientific discourses temporally situated the indigenous population, see Gänger, Relics of the Past. For Mexico, see Miruna Achim, From Idols to Antiquity: Forging the National Museum of Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), especially 252–253. 132. See, for example, the Pilgrims of Sainte-Odile (1867, Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar) by the French painter Gustave Brion (1824–1877). See also The Storyteller, attributed to the German painter Ernst Fischer (1815–1874), in Sotheby’s, New York, Important 19th Century European Paintings, sale catalogue no. 4714M, October 19, 1981, no. 271A. See Richard R. Brettell and Caroline B. Brettell, Painters and Peasants in the Nineteenth Century (Geneva: Skira, 1983). 133. Valleyres, “Exposition des beaux-arts: Souvenirs d’un spiritualiste,” L’Illustration, Journal Universel 26, no. 670 (December 25, 1855): 442. 134. Unidentified engraver, “École de Bade et Nassau: Halte des bohémiens, tableau par M. L. Knaus,” L’Illustration, Journal Universel 26, no. 670 (December 25, 1855): 428. 135. Lehmann’s painting (oil on canvas, 78.7 × 99 cm) was at auction in the sale of Orientalist Art: 19th Century European Art, Christie’s, New York, October 25, 2006, sale 1717, lot 230. Catalogue consulted online. 136. For a history of the structure of these dichotomies, see Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity. For the transnational equivalence of exoticisms, see Renata R. Maut-

Notes to Pages 112–122 ner Wasserman, Exotic Nations: Literature and Cultural Identity in the United States and Brazil, 1830–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 137. Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth- Century Art and Society, Icon Editions (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 33–59. 138. Wolfgang Kemp, “Death at Work: A Case Study on Constitutive Blanks in Nineteenth- Century Painting,” trans. Raymond Meyer, Representations 10 (Spring 1985): 116, 107. 139. José Dionisio Anchorena, Gramática quechua o del idioma del imperio de los incas (Lima: Imprenta del Estado, 1874). 140. This reading is indebted to Wolfgang Kemp’s account of reception theory’s application to painting in “The Work of Art and Its Beholder: The Methodology of the Aesthetic of Reception,” in The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 189. 141. The photographs were first identified in 1968 by Francisco Stastny, then director of the Museo de Arte de Lima. They had entered the collection with the Prado Family Bequest in 1960. See “Viejas fotografías descubiertas lo comprueban: El famoso pintor Francisco Laso no se representó en ‘La Pascana,’” El Comercio (Lima), June 22, 1968. In 1984 one of the images in the sequence was identified in the Museo Nacional de Historia (now Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú). See Merli Costa C., “Francisco Laso y el nuevo invento de la fotografía,” Lienzo 7 (May 1987): 161–165. 142. Francisco Laso, Ignacio Merino, Biblioteca Hombres del Perú 33 (Lima: Hernán Alva Orlandini, 1966), 159. 143. Lavalle y Arias de Saavedra’s early reference to these paintings is ambiguous but also suggests a date in the second half of the 1850s. After speaking of Laso’s Justice and The Concert, which he dates to ca. 1855–1856, he writes: “A la misma época corresponden, dos cuadros representando campamentos de indios en la cordillera, de los cuales creemos que uno está en poder del doctor don Mariano Álvarez, y otro en el de su viuda” (“Francisco Laso,” 1126). 144. “Lima: Esposición [sic] de pinturas,” El Comercio (Lima), September 18, 1861. 145. The relative chronology suggested here contradicts that which has traditionally been assigned to these paintings. Flores Aráoz, who is followed by later authors, dates Pascana in the Cordillera to 1851, Indian Encampment to 1859, and Haravicu to 1868. 146. As does another preparatory sketch for Indian Encampment (n.d., pencil on paper, 17.5 × 15.5 cm) in a private collection in Lima. 147. Preparatory Study for the “Indian Encampment” (n.d., pencil on paper, 27.4 × 43.5 cm), private collection, Lima. 148. Griselda Pollock, Millet (London: Oresko, 1977), 46–47. See also Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois, 96–98. 149. The group of three figures appears in an undated preparatory drawing, possibly a study for Indian Encampment, pencil on paper, 28.5 × 30.5 cm, Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.0-992. The lack of independent drawings or sketches for the Pascana in the Cordillera also confirms that the painting developed out of Indian Encampment. 150. The most evident exception would be Édouard Manet’s paintings of the 1860s. See especially Fried, Manet’s Modernism.

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Notes to Pages 123–128 151. Laso, “Croquis sobre el carácter peruano,” 307. 152. “Lima: Esposición [sic] de pinturas,” El Comercio (Lima), September 18, 1861. 153. Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

Chapter 3: Picturing Race 1. For a detailed account of these polemics, see Majluf and Wuffarden, Sabogal, 94–101. 2. César Moro, “A propósito de la pintura en el Perú,” El Uso de la Palabra 1 (December 1939): 3. 3. César Francisco Macera, “José Sabogal, maestro pintor,” Turismo 15, no. 161 (March 1941): [8–9]. Though they respected Laso, indigenist painters rarely acknowledged him openly. Sabogal owned a self-portrait drawing of Laso, and Julia Codesido had a framed reproduction of his portrait that could still be seen hanging in her home some years ago. Significantly, Sabogal’s drawing originally belonged to Teófilo Castillo, a leading promoter of the idea of a national art in the 1910s. It was acquired by Manuel Cisneros Sánchez and gifted to the Museo de Arte de Lima (2.0–412). See José Flores Aráoz, Catálogo de la exposición Francisco Laso, cat. no. 3. 4. For a summary of that crucial debate, see Isabel Rith-Magni, “El ancestralismo en la obra de Szyszlo,” in Szyszlo, ed. Luis Eduardo Wuffarden and Ricardo Kusunoki (Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 2011), 72–99. 5. See Tomás G. Escajadillo’s account of indigenism framed through the arguments of realism in Narrativa indigenista peruana (Lima: Amaru, 1994); and Kristal’s discussion of indigenist claims to realism in The Andes Viewed from the City, 7, 217–220. 6. Majluf, “Pintura, historia y verdad: ‘Los funerales de Atahualpa’ de Luis Montero,” in Majluf, Luis Montero: “Los funerales de Atahualpa,” 54–86. See also Lauer, Andes imaginarios, 50–53. 7. Lauer falls into the same trap he denounces when, in the same text, he argues that the indigenists failed because they were unable to “feel” the Indian, not “por resistencia a mirarlo, sino por real imposibilidad de verlo.” See “La pintura indigenista peruana: Una visión desde los años 90,” Márgenes 6, nos. 10–11 (October 1993): 104, 106. 8. Poole, “An Excess of Description,” 163. Nicholas Mirzoeff describes racism as a process “in which a ‘nothing’ is made visible by something that does not exist”; see “The Shadow and the Substance: Race, Photography, and the Index,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Center of Photography, Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 111. 9. Listed as “Un indio de los Andes con un huaco en la mano” in “Crónica,” El Comercio (Lima), December 10, 1884, 2. 10. In the catalogue of Lima’s 1877 national exhibition it was listed as “El famoso Indio alfarero de Laso.” See Catálogo general de la exposición municipal inaugurada el 28 de julio de 1877 (Lima: Imprenta de “El Nacional,” 1877), 11: no. 68. In 1892 it was titled “Un habitante de las punas” in Exposición Nacional: Objetos exhibidos en las secciones de bellas artes, minería e industrial (Lima: Imprenta de “El Comercio,” 1893), 11: no. 104. On the significance of the change of title, see also Buntinx, “Del ‘Habitante de las Cordilleras’ al ‘Indio Alfarero’: Variaciones sobre un tema de Francisco Laso,” 9. 11. The engraving by A. Marc appeared in L’Illustration, Journal Universel 26, no. 670 (December 25, 1855): 428. This engraving was also reproduced in El Correo de Ultramar,

Notes to Pages 129–134 arte literaria ilustrada 15, 7, no. 159 (1856): 44. Another version, apparently by the same engraver, appeared in Magasin Pittoresque 24 (March 1856): 101. 12. Emilio Gutiérrez de Quintanilla, “Los cuadros de Laso,” La Prensa, January 8, 1922, 8. 13. Juan Manuel Peña, “El arte en el Perú a través de un museo,” El Comercio (Lima), January 27, 1929, 22. 14. José Antonio de Lavalle y García, “La extraordinaria personalidad de Francisco Laso,” Expresión, Revista Peruana 1, no. 1 (1938): 22. 15. José Flores Aráoz, “La exposición de pintura de Francisco Laso,” 11. An anonymous writer agreed: “En ‘La Pascana’, aceptamos la crítica que asegura que los indios tienen más bien un aspecto moruno sin dar la sensación de peruanismo que lo marcan en forma precisa las llamas que se ven en la lejanía.” See “La exposición de la obra magnífica de Laso,” La Crónica, December 15, 1937, 3. 16. Carlos Raygada, “La pintura de Laso,” El Comercio, December 12, 1937, iv. 17. J. A. [Juan Acha], “Exposición conmemorativa de F. Laso: En el primer centenario de su muerte,” El Comercio, August 1, 1969. 18. Eduardo Calvo, “Francisco Laso, el pintor de Santa Rosa de Lima,” El Comercio, May 10, 1978, 2. 19. Buntinx writes: “aunque ataviados a la manera indígena, los retratados son visiblemente blancos o mestizos—empezando por el propio artista” (“Del ‘Habitante de las Cordilleras’ al ‘Indio Alfarero,’” 70). 20. Buntinx, 11, 14, 25–26, 37, 71, 73. 21. Oliart, “Poniendo a cada quién en su lugar,” 286. 22. W. J. T. Mitchell, Seeing Through Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 13. 23. See, especially, “The Fact of Blackness,” in Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967), chap. 5. 24. Stuart Hall, “The After-Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?,” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (London and Seattle: Institute of Contemporary Art, Institute of International Visual Arts, and Bay Press, 1996), 20. 25. Linda Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Charles W. Mills, “Materializing Race,” in Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, ed. Emily S. Lee (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 19–41. 26. Fuentes, Lima, or, Sketches of the Capital of Peru. The copy of Fuentes’s Lima bearing this inscription is in the Rare Books Section, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin. A copy of the carte-de-visite photograph on which this engraving is based is found in an album in the collection of Roberto Fantozzi, Lima. 27. Joanne Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial Kingdom of Granada (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 4–7. 28. Peter Wade, “‘Race,’ Nature and Culture,” Man, n.s., 28, no. 1 (March 1993): 21. 29. Mitchell, Seeing Through Race, 13. 30. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, revisions and historical introduction by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, translation and philosophical introduction by Jonathan Webber (London: Routledge, 2004), 92, 136. 31. Sartre, 18–20, 57. 32. For a recent study of racialized viewing, see Alia Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of

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Notes to Pages 135–141 Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing,” in Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, ed. Emily S. Lee (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 133–172. 33. Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 183–187. On Cuzco indigenisms, see, especially, de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos, chap. 3. 34. A response in the interview he gave Macera, “José Sabogal, maestro pintor,” [8–9]. 35. Hans-Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, introduction by Paul de Man, Theory and History of Literature 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 36. For an extensive history of Tinajeros and his relation to Montero’s painting, see Majluf, “Pintura, historia y verdad: ‘Los funerales de Atahualpa’ de Luis Montero,” 68– 77. Ramón Mujica has proposed that Tinajeros may have been the model for the Inhabitant of the Cordilleras. This is unlikely given that Laso could only have met Tinajeros later, either upon his return from Paris, perhaps during Laso’s stays in Arequipa in the late 1850s, or when Tinajeros became known in Lima in the early 1860s. See Mujica, “De alfarero civilizador a artesano insurgente,” 656n11. 37. On Ricardo Villaalba’s typological photographs, see Lisa Trever’s “Criminal Lines, Indian Colours, and the Creation of a Black Legend: The Photographs of ‘Los Bandidos de la Halancha,’ Bolivia,” History of Photography 40, no. 4 (November 2016): 369–387. 38. Unlike most of Villaalba’s photographs of indigenous subjects, the images reproduced here were not created in the carte-de-visite format but printed from large glass plates. The same images reappear in carte-de-visite format in the collection of the Peabody Museum. 39. Allan Sekula’s “The Body and the Archive” (October 39 [Winter 1986]: 3–64), remains the most important meditation on the instrumental role of photography. For an exploration of photographic types in the Andean region, see Poole’s Vision, Race, and Modernity, chap. 5. 40. “. . . ce fils de pauvres habitants d’un des villages les plus misérables du Pérou, nous fit comprendre que la race à laquelle il appartenait avait dû aimer et cultiver les arts avec profit, avant que la conquête n’eût fait peser sur leur esprit quatre siècles de misère et d’esclavage.” Émile Soldi, Les arts méconnus: Les nouveaux musées du Trocadéro, 2nd ed. (Paris: Ernest Leroux, Éditeur, 1881): 337–339, 341. On the abduction of the child and the presentation of the sculpture in 1878, see Lamarre and Wiener, L’Amérique centrale et méridionale et l’Exposition de 1878, 200. For Soldi, see Williams, “Art and Artifact at the Trocadéro: Ars Americana and the Primitivist Revolution,” 152– 157. 41. Majluf, “Pintura, historia y verdad,” 74. 42. Ephraim George Squier, Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1877), 184. 43. The use of archaeological human remains to achieve the “true type” has had a long life, even into the present. See Hernán Ponce Sánchez, “Seudo-arte inkaico,” Chaski 1, no. 1 (January-February 1940): 25–26. The image of a Taíno Indian in the logo of the Cuban Indigenist Institute was similarly based on the study of ancient crania. See Oswaldo Morales Patiño, “El emblema del Instituto Indigenista Cubano: Simbología,” América Indígena 7, no. 2 (April 1947): 172–175. 44. Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 103.

Notes to Pages 142–151 45. See, for example, Manuel Valle, “El rostro auténtico del hombre andino,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 58 (fourth quarter, 1941): 271–272. 46. Harry Tschopik Jr., “On the Identification of the Indian in Peru,” in Acculturation in the Americas, ed. Sol Tax, Readings of Selected Papers of the 29th International Congress of Americanists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 266. 47. Chambers, “Little Middle Ground,” 41–42. For a review of the state of the research on the identification of colonial Mestizos, see the introduction to Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo. 48. See Katzew, Casta Painting, 45, 60. 49. Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne and Thierry Saignes, “Dos confundidas identidades: Mestizos y criollos en el siglo XVII,” in 500 años de mestizaje en los Andes, ed. Hiroyasu Tomoeda and Luis Millones (Lima: Seminario Interdisciplinario de Estudios Andinos; Osaka: Museo Etnológico Nacional de Japón, 1992): 31. 50. Christian Metz, “The Perceived and the Named,” Studies in Visual Communication 6, no. 3 (Fall 1980): 59. 51. Katzew stresses the role of conventions in pictorial representations in Casta Painting, 204. 52. H. Willis Baxley, What I Saw on the West Coast of South and North America, and at the Hawaiian Islands (New York: Appleton and Company, 1865), 111. 53. This interpretation of the tapada complements Poole’s argument that the veil separated women from the dark-skinned classes from which elites sought to distance themselves; see Vision, Race, and Modernity, 92–97. 54. Cornejo Polar explains José de la Riva-Agüero’s paradigmatic image of Garcilaso as one that “clearly distinguishes Spaniards from Indians and aristocracy from commoners and, consequently, builds its great synthesis upon the unbridgeable abyss between them.” See Cornejo Polar, Writing in the Air, 71. 55. In his discussion of early colonial images, Estenssoro stresses the way in which the Mestizo is conceived as a composite figure, as a monster or a chimera; see “Los colores de la plebe: Razón y mestizaje en el Perú colonial,” 73. 56. Majluf and Wuffarden, Sabogal, 116. 57. See the entries for “Idéal,” in C.-H. Watelet and P.-C. Lévesque, Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture et gravure (1792), 5 vols. (Geneva: Minkoff Reprints, 1972), 3:84–96. 58. Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” October 19 (Winter 1981): 9–10, 28. 59. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 362. 60. Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 274. 61. “Artista por la raza i para ella” wrote the painter Manuel Domingo Pantigoso in Martín Chambi’s autograph book. José Z. Portugal referred to him as an “artista de profundo sentido indio” in his own dedication, dated March 13, 1934, in the autograph book. Archivo Fotográfico Martín Chambi, Cuzco. See Natalia Majluf, “Martín Chambi, fotografía e indigenismo,” in Chambi, ed. Natalia Majluf and Edward Ranney (Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 2016), 308. 62. José Uriel García, “Martín Chambi, artista neoindígena,” Excelsior (Lima) 14, nos. 185–186 (August-December 1948): 17. 63. Mitchell, Seeing Through Race, 13–14. 64. On the mystery of an indecipherable Andean culture in José de la Riva Agüero and Luis E. Valcárcel, see López Lenci, El Cusco, paqarina moderna, 71, 76, 268–269. On

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Notes to Pages 152–156 the complexity of anthropological definitions and models, see Enrique Mayer, “Mestizo e indio: El contexto social de las relaciones interétnicas,” in Fuenzalida, El indio y el poder, 88–152. See also Gonzalo Portocarrero’s openly mystifying take on the term: “La popularización del término andino corresponde a la revalorización de esa presencia indecible que no sabe bien lo que es, pero que se llama lo ‘andino.’” See Portocarrero, “La dominación total,” in Racismo y mestizaje (Lima: SUR, Casa de Estudios del Socialismo, 1993), 31.

Epilogue 1. Juana Noriega is also said to have posed for the figure of Ecuador in Laso’s American Unity, Biblioteca Nacional, Lima. 2. “Crónica de la capital: Tres frailes,” El Comercio (Lima), October 15, 1859. 3. Lavalle names Osma and Calmet, identifying the third as a model known as “le père éternel.” See Lavalle, “Francisco Laso,” 1127. Emilio Gutiérrez de Quintanilla identifies the third figure as José de Goyeneche in “Opinión sobre Lazo y algunas de sus obras.” 4. “Mi cumpleaños,” La Revista de Lima 6, no. 2 (July 15, 1862): 68–75. Reprinted in Laso, Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú, 175–180. In a disclaimer, Laso attributed authorship to a friend, yet the autobiographical references and the fact that it was signed a few days after his birthday suggest that he is the author. 5. “Tiempos pasados,” La Revista de Lima 4, no. 2 (July 15, 1861): 49–59; no. 5 (September 1, 1861): 185–204; no. 8 (October 15, 1861): 324–337. Reprinted in Laso, Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú, 147–174. 6. “. . . representa á un niño que, en compañía de una chola y una zamba, juegan a la baraja; tres tipos enteramente distintos que el señor Lazo ha sabido demarcar diestramente.” “Crónica de la capital: Cuadros de pintura,” El Comercio (Lima), April 15, 1859. 7. “Esposicion [sic] de pinturas,” El Comercio (Lima), August 15, 1860. This review was the first to refer to the title of the painting as The Three Races. 8. “Después de la ‘Santa Rosa’ puede decirse que Lazo ya no pintó más; pues sus trabajos se limitaron a uno que otro boceto humorístico, y a tal cual retrato de familia o de un amigo muy íntimo. Merecen especial mención entre los primeros, un cuadrito que intituló ‘Igualdad ante la ley’ y que representa a un niño de raza blanca esmeradamente vestido, jugando a los naipes con una sucia negrilla y una haraposa indiecita, que obsequió a su amigo el doctor Mariano Álvarez.” José Antonio de Lavalle and Arias de Saavedra, “Francisco Laso,” 1127. 9. Carlos Raygada described it as “una composición en que por única vez adviértese una leve sonrisa juguetona en medio de toda la producción tan severa y meditativa de Laso. . . . El cuadro es, sin duda gracioso pero intrascendente.” “La pintura de Laso,” El Comercio (Lima), December 12, 1937, iv. 10. Oil on canvas, 46 × 37.5 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, V 2.0–466. 11. On Orientalist evocations in relation to the tapada, see Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 90, 97, 104–105. For a regional perspective on Orientalism, see Roberto Amigo, “Beduinos en la pampa: Apuntes sobre la imagen del gaucho y el orientalismo de los pintores franceses,” Historia y Sociedad 13 (November 2007): 25–43. 12. On Creole discourses on the estrado, see Altschul, Politics of Temporalization, 58–

Notes to Pages 157–161 68, 132–133. In Aguinaldo, Laso pejoratively referred to “el lenguaje adulón o mieloso de un estrado.” 13. Velázquez Castro, La mirada de los gallinazos, chap. 4; Majluf, “Francisco Laso, escritor y político,” 31. 14. Lavalle y Arias de Saavedra, “Francisco Laso,” 1127. 15. Mario Montalbetti, “Ante un cuadro de Laso,” in Cualquier hombre es una isla: Ensayos y pretextos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2014), 120–121. Montalbetti identifies the game as the tresillo and undertakes a Lacanian reading of the painting drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s distinction between laws and rules. It is interesting to note that the rules of the game were designated as “laws” in contemporary manuals, such as Leyes penales del tresillo de voltereta (Madrid: Librería Julián Viana Razola, 1830). I thank Roberto Amigo for his suggestion and comments regarding the tresillo and nineteenth-century card games. 16. Montalbetti, “Ante un cuadro de Laso,” 130–131. 17. Sebastián Lorente defined the cholito as “el indio esclavizado casi al salir de la cuna.” See Pensamientos sobre el Perú (1855), preliminary study by Alberto Tauro, Comentarios del Perú 8 (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1967), 29. 18. “El poder total a escala doméstica” (Flores Galindo, Buscando un inca, 235). The author published advertisements for escaped servants. 19. As Prefect of Moquegua, Juan Antonio Pezet notified regional authorities, denouncing the abduction of children for personal service and prohibiting mule drivers from transporting children. See “Robo de niños,” El Comercio (Lima), October 20, 1850. For Gorriti’s classic narrative of a cholita’s abduction, “Si haces mal no esperes bien” (1861), see Denegri’s El abanico y la cigarrera, 142–144. 20. On laws limiting the liberties of domestic servants, see Carlos Aguirre, “Patrones, esclavos y sirvientes domésticos en Lima (1800–1860),” in Familia y vida privada en la historia de Iberoamérica, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru and Cecilia Rabell Romero (Mexico City: Colegio de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales de la UNAM, 1996), 401, 418. 21. Laso, Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú, 27. Yvinec notes that Aguinaldo probably inspired Juan Vicente Camacho’s “¡No era ella!,” a story in La Revista de Lima, where Gorriti’s “Si haces mal no esperes bien” also appeared; see “‘Los peruanos conocidos antes con el nombre de indios,’” 395–396. For this early literature on the indigenous population, see Kristal, The Andes Viewed from the City. 22. Gonzalo Portocarrero, “Castigo sin culpa; culpa sin castigo,” in Portocarrero, Racismo y mestizaje, 90. 23. Laso, Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú, 28. 24. Kusunoki Rodríguez, Ignacio Merino, pintor de historia, 60. 25. Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Phaidon, 1971), 83–86, 92–95. 26. Flores Aráoz, Catálogo de la exposición Francisco Laso, cat. no. 4. 27. Flores Aráoz, for example, identified two figures in Laso’s Haravicu as selfportraits. See Catálogo de la exposición Francisco Laso, cat. no. 59. For self-portraits in Laso’s Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro and Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, see Buntinx, “Del ‘Habitante de las Cordilleras’ al ‘Indio Alfarero,’” 49. 28. The painting was acquired from Álvarez’s descendants by the Museo de Arte de Lima in 1998. 29. Laso’s paintings were also staged as tableaux vivants among literary and theat-

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Notes to Pages 161–164 rical amateurs in the early years of the twentieth century. Enactments of Laso’s paintings (including one of The Three Races) are described in “La Cabaña,” in the pamphlet Programa: Homenaje a la Sociedad “Entre Nous” con motivo de la celebración de sus bodas de plata institucionales (Lima), January 25, 1938. This rare pamphlet is preserved in the Carlos Raygada Archive, Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. 30. Majluf, “The Creation of the Image of the Indian in 19th-Century Peru,” 1:240–256. 31. Laso, “La paleta y los colores,” 231. 32. Laso, 231. 33. José Antonio de Lavalle y Arias de Saavedra and Felipe Pardo, Proyecto de constitución política escrito por el Sr. D. Felipe Pardo y presentado a la Convención Nacional (. . .) con algunas explicaciones y comentarios por José A. de Lavalle, 2nd ed. (Lima: Tipografía de Aurelio Alfaro, 1859), 36. 34. Méndez, “Incas Sí, Indios No,” 206–216. Countering Peruvian racism, Laso significantly singled out the example of Peru’s de facto democracy, the rise to the presidency of the “Indian” Andrés de Santa Cruz (“La paleta y los colores,” 234). 35. Lavalle y Arias de Saavedra, “Francisco Laso,” 1127. 36. Laso, “La paleta y los colores,” 235. 37. Laso, 235. 38. Yvinec, “‘Los peruanos conocidos antes con el nombre de indios,’” 18.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival Sources Archivo Arzobispal, Lima Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Lima Archivo General de la Nación, Lima Archivo Histórico-Militar, Centro de Estudios Histórico-Militares, Lima Archivo Histórico Municipal, Lima Biblioteca Nacional, Lima Juan Manuel Ugarte Eléspuru Archives, Lima

Newspapers and Journals Unless otherwise indicated, all newspapers are published in Lima. Asterisks indicate that I have only had access to incomplete collections of those particular periodicals. The dates refer to the period covered by my research. El Amigo del Pueblo, nos. 1–73, 1840 El Ateneo Americano, 1847* El Comercio, 1839–1844, 1846, 1849–1856, 1858–1869 El Heraldo de Lima, 1854–1855* El Instructor Popular o Gabinete Curioso de Literatura y Ciencias Naturales, 1841 El Nacional, 1865–1869 El Peruano, 1849–1869 El Progreso, 1849–1850 El Republicano (Arequipa), 1849 El Semanario de Lima, 1848 El Sol del Cuzco, 1825–1827

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Bibliography La Bolsa (Arequipa), 1841–1842 La República, nos. 1–48, 1863–1864 La Revista, 1851* La Revista de Lima, 1859–1863 La Semana, 1851–1852 Mercurio Peruano, 1791–1795 Museo Erudito (Cuzco), 1837–1839 Nuevo Día del Perú (Trujillo), nos. 1–12, 1824

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics denote images. Acha, Juan, 129, 135 Afro-descendants, xi, 12–13, 75, 186n58. See also Black Aguinaldo (pamphlet), 9, 48–49, 52–53, 57, 60, 63, 153–160, 167 Aguirre, Carlos, 159 Alayza, Narciso, 49 Alcoff, Linda, 131 allegories: America and 21; conquest and, 20–21, 41; costumbrismo and, 29; culture and, 68; freedom and, 34; gender and, 73, 76; love and, 101; modern, 33, 161; naturalism and, 146–147; oppression and, 31; racial coexistence and, 129; realism and, 19, 33; redemption and, 80, 124; social commentary and, 52–53, 157, 161; symbols and, 78–79, 81 alterity, 4, 10, 12, 19, 21, 37, 111, 141 Althaus, Clemente, 8, 88 Álvarez, Mariano, 160 Álvarez Bravo, Lola, 125–126, 147 Amazon, 13, 66 American Unity, 152 Anchorena, José Dionisio, 114

Andes: alterity and, 19, 68; anthropology and, 151, 193n146; archaeology and, 151; colonialism and, 20–21, 178n7; cultural discourses and, 18, 66; geographical determinism and, 65, 67, 94, 134–135; imagination and, 114, 128; melancholy and, 84, 86, 93–96, 129, 196; progress and, 16, 122; race and, 22, 142–144; symbols and, 68, 175n48; travels of Laso in, 37–38 andino (category), 67–68, 147, 177n72, 193n146 Angrand, Léonce, 37, 182n28, 184n40 anthropology: 29, 95, 110–111, 151, 191n128, 193n146; physical, 127, 138–140 Antigüedades peruanas (Rivero and Tschudi), 36, 38–39, 40, 67, 108–110, Appadurai, Arjun, 68 archaeology: authority and, 110–111; cultural continuity and, 67; cultural sphere, 9; looting and, 106–107; monuments and, 35, 55; overview of, 35– 38; Quechua and, 104; stereotypes and, 105; typologies and, 141, 210n43

Index Areche, José Antonio de, 42, 162 Arequipa, 15, 138–139, 167, 204n103, 210n36 Argentina, 27, 28 assimilation, 8, 19, 73, 163 Atahualpa, 44, 88, 89, 106, 127, 136 Atlas geográfico del Perú (Paz Soldán), 10, 47 authenticity: culture and, 38, 80, 92–93, 111, 163; identity and, 64, 78; mestizaje and, 87; modernity and, 3; nation and, 1, 18, 30, 63, 64; pre-Columbian art and, 76, 80, 139; realism and, 151 Aymara, xi, 15, 138 Bajas, Pedro, 88 Barthes, Roland, 177n72 Basadre, Modesto, 106 Battle of Anaquito, 54 Bauman, Richard, 6, 85, 104 Bendix, Regina, 3 Benjamin, Walter, 78 Bilbao, Francisco, 49 Bilbao, Manuel, 187n77 Black (category), xi, 12, 26, 65, 71, 73, 155–156. See also Afro-descendants Blas, Camilo, 142 Bolívar, Simón, 165 Bolivia, 166 Borget, Auguste, 184n47 Bouysse-Cassagne, Thérèse, 143 Breton, Jules-Adolphe, 100 Briggs, Charles, 6, 85, 104 Bryce Echenique, Alfredo, 159 Buntinx, Gustavo, 50, 55, 67, 110, 129– 130, 188n85 Burial of the Priest, 18, 98–100, 102 Burke, Peter, 85 Cadalso, José, 102 Calmet, Torbio Alfonso, 152 Calvo, Eduardo, 129 Carbajal, Francisco de, 54–55, 188 casta paintings, 23, 25, 26, 143 Castelnau, Francis de, 36 Castilla, Ramón, 49 Castillo, Fermín del, 49

Castillo, Manuel, 89 Castillo, Teófilo, 100–101, 208n3 Castro-Klarén, Sara, 36 Catholicism, 101 caudillos, 15, 46, 54 Centeno, Ana María, 38–39 ceramics: allegories and, 41, 79, 146–147; alterity and, 37; authenticity and, 76, 80; collectors and, 184n40; conquest and, 41–42, 48, 53, 122; embodiment and, 139–140; iconography and, 39; idealism and, 44, 79; Pascana series and, 90–91, 122; portrait, 140, 142; pre-Columbian past and, 31, 36, 38, 67, 135–136, 139; puytu and, 100; semiotics and, 146–147; sketches/studies of, 142 Chambers, Sarah, 65 Chambi, Martín, 151 Chávez Aliaga, Nazario, 192n134 child abduction, 138, 159, 210n40, 213n19 cholitos, 158, 213n17 Cholo (category), 14, 65, 66 Christo, Maraliz, 88 citizenship, 16, 158–159, 162, 164, 171n17 Cobo, Bernabé, 84 Codesido, Julia, 208n3 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 79 colonialism: Andes and, 21, 178n7; costumbrismo and, 194n158; elites and, 15; ethnoracial concepts and, 11, 143; melancholy and, 87, 95; modernity and, 10; religious images and, 22; resistance to, 102; victimization and, 45 Columbus, Christopher, 62 The Concert, 152–154, 167 Conrad, Joseph, 82 Cornejo Polar, Antonio, 13, 175n48, 197n15, 211n54 Corpancho, Manuel Nicolás, 8, 33, 49, 52, 62, 82–83, 89, 190n112 Corpus Christi series, 21, 22 Cortés, Francisco Javier, 7, 165 costumbrismo: allegories and, 29; gender roles and, 73–76; Lima and, 65, 69,

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Index costumbrismo (continued) 71, 74–76; modernization and, 71; nationalism and, 63, 194n158; overview of, 12; painting and, 28, 157; racial typologies and, 26–28, 138, 141 Courbet, Gustave, 33, 100, 161 craniometry, 140–141, 191n128 Creole (category), xi, 12, 45, 60, 71, 144 criollismo, 12, 13, 69–71, 73 culture: authenticity and, 38, 80, 92–93, 111, 163; concept of, 3, 63, 193n150; costumbrismo and, 27, 63; genealogy and, 164; Indian and, 62–67; modernity and, 99; nation and, 2–3, 10, 13, 32–33, 60, 63–64, 68, 77–78; originality and, 3, 38, 68, 71, 83, 85, 92, 170; overview of, 2–6; race and, 4–6, 13, 26, 65, 68, 93 Cuzco, 15, 37, 106, 183n35 Daméry, Eugène, 155 Dean, Carolyn, 21 Deglane, Carlos César, 103, 204n103 De la Cadena, Marisol, 5, 17, 177n72 Delacroix, Eugène, 155, 157 Delaroche, Paul, 166 Del Campo, José Toribio, 86 Del Carpio, Miguel, 88–89 De los Ríos, Juana, 6, 165 De Man, Paul, 80 Drawing Academy, 7–8, 37, 165–166 Echenique, José Rufino, 49, 56 Ecuador, 49 Eléspuru y Laso, Juan Norberto, 160, 165 encomienda system, 55 Enlightenment, 22, 26, 85 Enríquez, Juan, 54 Errázuriz, Federico, 64 Espinosa, Juan, 49, 56–57 Estenssoro, Juan Carlos, 85–87, 198n26 estrado, 156 ethnicity, 4, 20, 27, 80, 129. See also ethnoracial categories; race ethnography, 104 ethnoracial categories: 171n19; costumbrismo and, 27–28; inequality and,

158; instability of, 19, 141–144, 147; love and, 101; modernity and, 105; perception and, 130–133, 141, 143– 144, 150; purity and, 65. See also specific categories exoticism, 3, 37, 68, 71, 112, 170n10, 206n136 Fanon, Frantz, 131 Favre, Henri, 1–2 femininity, 13, 73, 76, 175n48 Fierro, Francisco (Pancho), 75, 195n174; Tapada limeña (Lima Tapada Woman), 70. Flores Aráoz, José, 6, 90 Flores Galindo, Alberto, 158 Forment, Carlos A., 172n29 Fourtané, Nicole, 102 France, 33, 35 Fried, Michael, 123 frontier wars, 46 Fuentes, Manuel Atanasio, 131–132 Galerie Lebrun, 185n48 Gamarra, Agustín, 165, 166 Gänger, Stefanie, 67 García Calderón, Francisco, 8, 64, 84, 88–89, 92–95, 185n58, 199n44 García Calderón, Ventura, 82–83 Garreaud, Emilio, 47 gauchos, 12, 27 Gellner, Ernest, 3, 170n6 gender, 73–76, 144, 156. See also femininity; masculinity genre painting, 79, 157 Gleyre, Charles, 8, 166 Goldberg, David Theo, 4 González Prada, Manuel, 9 González Vigil, Francisco de Paula, 56 Gorriti, Juana Manuela, 8, 88, 99, 101– 103, 106–108 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe, 20 Gutiérrez de Quintanilla, Emilio, 129 Guyatt, Nicholas, 45 Hall, Stuart, 131 Haravicu, 89–90, 97–98, 111–119, 124,

Index 129, 200; preparatory photographs, 115–117 Henríquez, Manuela, 152, 167 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 63 Herrera, Bartolomé, 56, 60, 64 Hispanism, 56, 63, 71, 164 historical genre (painting), 33, 58, 119 history painting, 29, 79, 81, 88, 180n18 Hobsbawm, Eric, 170 homosexuality, 73 Huacho, 94, 95 Huancané uprising, 46 Huanta revolt, 46 Humboldt, Alexander von, 35, 67 immigration. See migration Incas: clothing and, 21, 42, 184n47; craniometry and, 191n128; Cuzco and, 183n35; gold and, 106; monuments and, 35, 37, 136; portraits of, 21–22; songs/poetry of, 84–90, 97 Inca Yupanqui, 109 Incaism, 56, 67, 87 Indian (category): abstraction and, 28– 29, 133, 146, 179n11; colonialism and, 30, 45; costumbrismo and, 26–28, 65; cultural discourses and, 1–6, 11, 13, 19, 29–30, 62–68; education and, 163; gender and, 2, 73–74, 76, 79, 175n48; genealogy and, 136, 141, 164; inscrutability and, 105–111; melancholy and, 18, 83–95, 97, 123, 196, 200; memory and, 122, 139; mental images and, 132; mourning and, 42, 107, 184n47; nobility and, 80; origins and, 68; overview of, xi, 12, 20–30; portraits and, 21–22, 137; purity and, 65, 66; relationality of, 143; victimization and, 18, 44–48, 84, 95, 139, 147, 163, 186n58. See also specific topics Indian Encampment, 90–91, 118–119, 122, 129; studies for, 118–121. See also Pascana series Indian Woman Spinning, 119–120, 183n30 indigenism: cultural, 171n15; culture and, 3–6, 68; Hispanism and, 164; op-

position to, 125–126; overview of, 1–3; progressive discourse and, 17; realism and, 135, 150–151; voice of the Indian and, 53. See also specific topics Inhabitant of the Cordilleras of Peru: abstraction and, 28; construction of, 135; dualism and, 62–63, 68–69, 92; gender and, 73; geography and, 67– 68; mestizaje and, 129–130, 144; overview of, 1, 2, 31–35; Paris Universal Exposition and, 31–32, 37–38, 48, 62– 63, 111, 167; public and, 48, 53; reproduction, 128; stereotypes and, 46–48; television and, xiii; temporality and, 80 Itier, César, 66, 86 Jauss, Hans-Robert, 135 Jiménez Borja, Arturo, 202n87 Justice, 33, 50, 52, 167 Kemp, Wolfgang, 113 Knaus, Ludwig, 111 Lagasca, Pedro, 54 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 111 La Paz, 6, 138 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 3, 44, 55–56 Laso, Benito, 6, 41, 45, 49, 87, 88, 165– 166, 168, 199n44 Laso, Francisco: anti-Hispanism and, 56, 63; archaeology and, 37–38; overview of, 1–2, 6–9, 165–168; portraits of, 4–5, 7, 61, 82–84, 89; travels of, 15, 37, 182n27, 166–168, 186n64. See also specific topics Laso, Juana Manuela, 160, 161, 165 Lastarria, José Victorino, 64, 69, 70 Lauer, Mirko, 20, 127, 171n15, 172n24 The Laundress, 74–75, 155, 161, 167, 195 Lavalle y Arias de Saavedra, José Antonio de, 8, 60, 61, 190n105, 207n143 Lavalle y García, José Antonio de, 129, 155, 157, 162 Leerssen, Joep, 63 Leguía y Martínez, Germán, 104 Lehmann, Rudolph W. A., 111

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Index Lima: centralization and, 15; corruption and, 154; cosmopolitanism of, 8; costumbrismo and, 65, 69, 71, 74–76; criollismo and, 69–71; gambling and, 157; gender roles in, 73–76, 144; melancholy and, 93; migration to, 6–7, 130; nation-building and, 9; tapadas and, 13, 73, 76, 194n156 Lohmann, Guillermo, 54 Longpérier, André, 36–37 Losada, Alejandro, 8 Louvre Museum, 35–36, 42, 52 Lozano, Cristóbal, 26 Malosetti, Laura, 46 Manchay-puytu, 100–104 Manco Capac, 41, 62, 108–109, 136 Manco II, 88 Manet, Édouard, 161 Marcoy, Paul, 199n39 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 13–14, 151, 164 Markham, Clements R., 84, 102, 103, 106 Markus, Gyorgy, 68, 193n150 Márquez, José Arnaldo, 8, 37 Martínez Compañón, Baltasar Jaime, 22–23, 25–26, 66, 143 masculinity, 2, 73, 175n48 Masías, Francisco, 135 Matto de Turner, Clorinda, 9, 104, 106 Mayer de Zulen, Dora, 104 Mazo, Manuel María del, 146 Melgar, Mariano, 87, 88, 89 Méndez, Cecilia, 67, 162, 179n11 Mendiburu, Manuel de, 104, 154, 204n105 Mercurio Peruano, 85, 86, 88, 96, 105, 199n41 Merino, Ignacio: artwork by, 39, 41, 62, 71, 72, 74, 160, 190n110; Jarana, 72; National Drawing Academy and, 7–8, 166; Paris Universal Exposition and, 32, 62; photographs of, 82–83 Mesa, Pío Benigno, 184n47 mestizaje, 14, 87, 129–130, 144–146, 198n26. See also miscegenation Mestizo (category): artisans, 192n135; clothing and, 144; instability and,

143, 145; overview of, xi, 12–14; representation and, 127, 129; utopia and, 188n85. See also mestizaje Metz, Christian, 143 Mexico, 28, 60 migration, 6–7, 10, 130, 176n59 Miller, William, 42 Millet, Jean-François, 33, 119, 161; Harvesters Resting (Ruth and Boaz), 121 Mills, Charles W., 131 Miró Quesada Sosa, Aurelio, 85, 197, 198n26, 203n99 miscegenation, 14, 25–26, 65, 143, 144, 162. See also mestizaje Mitchell, W. J. T., 131, 133, 150, 151 Moche, 31, 36, 38–42, 90, 140, 142 modernity: alterity and, 111; antinomies of, 6, 105, 111; authenticity and, 3; decadence and, 156; nostalgia and, 164; progress and, 99; symbols and, 34; universality and, 16, 111 modernization: 3, 16, 164; criollismo and, 71; indigenous population and, 98– 99 Montalbetti, Mario, 158 Montero, Luis, 29, 33–34, 68, 73, 76, 88, 127, 136–137; Funeral of Atahualpa, 29; Perú Libre (Free Peru), 34 monuments, 35, 37, 55, 67, 105, 108, 136 Monvoisin, Raymond Quinsac, 8, 180n18 Mörner, Magnus, 17 Moro, César, 125, 150 Morton, Samuel, 191n128 Mücke, Ulrich, 15, 172n30 Mujica Pinilla, Ramón, 192n135 Muller, Leopold, 40, 109–110 museums, 35–36, 42, 52, 55 Muslims, 69 nation: allegory and, 33–35, 81; authenticity and, 1, 63; clothing and, 67; culture and, 2–3, 10, 32–33, 60, 64; dualism and, 62, 179n11; embodiment and, 27, 29; gender and, 76; genealogy and, 164; geography and, 13, 64– 65, 93, 96–97, 106; heterogeneity and, 1, 162; language and, 104, 114; muse-

Index ums and, 36; purity and, 66. See also nationalism National Academy, 9, 38, 168 National Drawing Academy, 7–8, 37, 165–166 national exhibition, 62 national museum, 55 nationalism: authenticity and, 1; costumbrismo and, 63, 194n158; cultural, 13, 32, 63–64, 68, 77–78; ethnolinguistic, 170; victimization and, 45. See also nation National School of Fine Arts, 10, 125 nativism, 64, 170n10 New Laws, 55–56 Noboa, Ignacio, 37 Nochlin, Linda, 112 Nugent, José Guillermo, 95 Núñez de Vela, Blasco, 54 Oliart, Patricia, 14, 73 Ollantay, 104 Orientalism, 111–113, 156, 171n13 Orlove, Benjamin, 13, 18, 94, 177n71 Osma, Manuel de, 152 Ottsen, Hendrick, 21 Pachacamac, 110 Palma, Ricardo, 8, 54, 55, 60, 99–101, 103, 104, 188n87 Pardo, Manuel, 8, 49, 176n59, 190n105 Pardo y Aliaga, Felipe, 73, 162 Paris Universal Exposition: audiences of, 48; costumbrismo and, 27; floorplan, 32; Inhabitant of the Cordilleras and, 31– 32, 37–38, 48, 62–63, 111; Peruvian pavilion, 78; racial purity and, 138; regulations and, 180n4; tapadas and, 27, 77 Pascana in the Cordillera, 91. See also Pascana series Pascana series: 11, 84, 200n46; Haravicu, 89–90, 97–98, 111–119, 124, 129, 200; Indian Encampment, 90, 118–119, 122, 129; Pascana in the Cordillera, 90–91, 94, 119, 122–123, 129, 168. See also Indian Woman Spinning

Pasta, Carlos, 46 Pays, A. J. du, 44 Paz Soldán, Mariano Felipe, 47, 55, 64, 88–89, 93, 96, 199n44 Paz Soldán y Unanue, Pedro, 65 Peña, Juan Manuel, 129 Pérez, Isidro M., 88 Pérez Luna, Edgardo, 200 Pérez Vejo, Tomás, 61 Pérouse, Jean-François de la, 36 Peru: demographics of, 15; ethnoracial concepts and, 11; geography of, 13, 175n48; heterogeneity of, 129–130; inequality in, 159; social structure of, 154. See also specific topics Peruvian (term), 64 Pezet, Juan Antonio, 9, 168, 213n19 phenomenology, 131–134 philology, 66, 104, 110–111 photography, 138, 147, 150–151 Pizarro, Gonzalo, 11, 54–61, 69, 188n85. See also Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro Polack-Schneider, Eduardo, 136 Poole, Deborah: Andes and, 22, 67, 179n16; racial typologies and, 4, 19, 22, 127, 140–141, 179n16; tapadas and, 69, 73, 193n154, 211n53 Portocarrero, Gonzalo, 159, 212n64 Portrait of Gonzalo Pizarro, 11, 32, 54–63, 68–69, 167, 188n85, 189n102, 190n114 postcards, 136, 150, 202n87 Prado, Mariano Ignacio, 8, 9, 168, 183n32 Pratt, Mary Louise, 73 pre-Columbian art, 35–38, 184. See also ceramics Prescott, William Hickling, 54, 55, 187 Profit, Georges, 140 Prud’hon, Pierre-Paul, 50; Divine Vengeance and Justice Pursuing Crime, 51 Pumacahua, Mateo, 106 puytu, 100, 103, 202n87 Quatremère de Quincy, AntoineChrysostome, 81 Quechua: appropriation of, 86; clothing and, 66; geography and, 15; language,

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Index Quechua (continued) 66, 103–104, 114, 204n105; portraits of, 138, 151; yaraví and, 93, 100 quena, 89, 90, 100–103, 119, 202n87, 203–204 Quinet, Edgar, 63 race: biology and, 4, 26, 65, 134, 139– 141; categories and, 127, 129–135, 137–143, 146–147, 150, 163; culture and, 4–6, 13, 26, 65, 68, 93; diversity and, 161–162; purity and, 64–65, 70, 130, 138, 144, 162. See also ethnicity; ethnoracial categories racism, 17, 158–159, 162 Rappaport, Joanne, 132 Raygada, Carlos, 129, 135, 155 realism, 19, 33, 135, 147, 150, 151, 161 Recruitment, 52–53 revolution, 8, 9, 167 Riva-Agüero, José de la, 211n54 Rivero, Mariano Eduardo de, 36–40, 67, 79, 108–110, 183n28, 191n128 Robert, Léopold, 111 Rojas y Cañas, Ramón, 73 Romanticism: love and, 97, 101; melancholy and, 83–84, 89; nationalism and, 64; solitude and, 82, 153; symbols and, 79; temporality and, 80; tourism and, 151 Ruiz Cano, Francisco Antonio, 87 Sabogal, José, 13, 76–77, 125–126, 135, 145, 208n3; Garcilaso de la Vega, 145; Varayoc of Chinchero, 77 Said, Edward, 171n13 Saignes, Thierry, 143 Saint Rose of Lima, 11, 33, 152, 167 Salinas Cossío, Guillermo, 90 San Martín, José de, 67 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 133–134 School of Fine Arts, 10, 125 School of San Carlos, 35, 56–57, 166 Segura, Manuel Ascencio, 54, 189n102 Sicramio, 85–87, 93, 94, 102, 198 slavery, 44, 49, 55, 84, 158–159 Sociedad Amiga de los Indios, 56

Soldi, Émile, 138–139 Soult, Nicolas Jean de Dieu, 42 Sowing, 95–96 Spanish (language), 104 Squier, Ephraim George, 139, 141 Stastny, Francisco, 90 Study for a Flying Figure, 51 Study for Indian Encampment, 92, 119. See also Pascana series Szyszlo, Fernando de, 127 Tabouelle, René Enrique, 98–99 Tacna, 6, 184n47 tapadas: Laso and, 76; Lima and, 13, 69– 71, 73, 144, 194n156; Paris Universal Exposition and, 27, 77; Spain and, 69, 193n154; whiteness and, 69–70, 211n53 telluricism, 76, 94, 134 Terralla y Landa, Esteban de, 71 The Three Races, 11, 74, 129, 155–163, 167 Thurner, Mark, 16, 67 Tiahuanaco, 110 Tinajeros, Palemón, 136–137, 210n36 Torres Rubio, Diego de, 197n13 Torrico, Federico, 33, 63, 80 tribute, 16, 49, 66 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 16 Trujillo del Perú, 22–26, 143 Tschopik, Harry, Jr., 142 Tschudi, Johann Jakob von (Juan Diego de Tschudi), 36, 38–40, 67, 79, 106, 108–110, 191n128, 200n54 Tupa Amaro, Manuela, portrait of, 23 Túpac Amaru, 42, 86, 88, 98 Túpac Inca, Fray Calixto de San José, 87 Ugarte Eléspuru, Juan Manuel, 6, 118, 182n27 Ulloa, José Casimiro, 8, 33, 44, 49, 67 Unanue, Hipólito, 55, 93, 94, 96, 108– 109, 198n24, 199n35 Universal Exposition. See Paris Universal Exposition Uriel García, José, 14, 151 Uruguay, 28

Index Valcárcel, Luis E., 175n48, 202n87 Valdez y Palacios, José Manuel, 196n8 Varallanos, José, 14 Vega, Garcilaso de la, 54, 97, 109, 145– 146, 200n50, 211n54 Velázquez, Marcel, 157 Vernet, Horace, 112–113; The Parliamentary and the Medjeles, 113 Vicuña Mackenna, Benjamín, 55, 188n86 Vilar, Manuel, 35 Villaalba, Ricardo, 138–139, 150 Viracocha, 55 Vivanco, General, 9, 167 voting rights, 173n35, 176n59

Wade, Peter, 133, 171n19 War of the Pacific, 9, 10 White (category), xi, 8, 16, 69–70, 144, 163 Widdifield, Stacie, 2, 29 Wiener, Charles, 66, 138 Williez, Léon, 146 yaraví, 84–95, 98, 100, 103, 164, 197–200 Young, Edward, 87, 199n35 Young, Robert, 4–5 zambos, 163 Zavalza, Dexter, 71 Zurbarán, Francisco de, 42–43, 48

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