Itinerant Ideas. Race, Indigeneity and Cross-Border Intellectual Encounters in Latin America (1900-1950) 9783031019517, 9783031019524

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Itinerant Ideas Race, Indigeneity and Cross-Border Intellectual Encounters in Latin America (1900–1950) Joanna Crow

Itinerant Ideas

Joanna Crow

Itinerant Ideas Race, Indigeneity and Cross-Border Intellectual Encounters in Latin America (1900–1950)

Joanna Crow University of Bristol Bristol, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-01951-7    ISBN 978-3-031-01952-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01952-4 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Grahame Cornforth / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This is a book about conversations and networks. It is also born from multiple conversations and networks, and I want to express my gratitude to the many different people who are part of those networks and who have helped to make those conversations happen. I have been researching, writing up, and presenting papers about the material for this book since 2015, when I was lucky enough to spend some time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The trip was funded by the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN), and I was hosted by preeminent historian of Latin America, Florencia Mallon, who, together with Steve Stern, made me feel very welcome in Wisconsin, and introduced me to Peruvian scholars Víctor Vich and Virginia Zavala. As well as finding a wealth of material in the university’s library, and conversing with Florencia, Steve, Víctor, and Virginia, I was invited to give a talk as part of the Lunchtime Lecture Series organised by the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program (LACIS). I was greatly encouraged by the enthusiastic and thought-provoking questions that LACIS colleagues put to me that afternoon. Later in 2015 I shared my ideas for the project with staff and students at the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Research (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile). This conversation was set up by Dr Allison Ramay, who I have worked with for several years now, developing an exciting digital public history project on Mapuche political activists’ social networks, and who has read and provided feedback on several different parts of the book. I am enormously grateful to Allison for her unswerving friendship, banter, and support. Also in 2015, I organised a workshop on v

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“Chile and Peru” at the University of Bristol. I invited four esteemed UK-based historians of Latin America—Paulo Drinot at UCL, Patience Schell at Aberdeen, Natalia Sobrevilla at Kent, and David Wood at Sheffield—to present their own perspectives on the ongoing collaborations and hostilities between these two countries, and the ensuing discussion, which involved numerous colleagues and doctoral students at Bristol too, convinced me that there was more than enough, if not too much (!), for a new book on the subject. The conversations that began in Bristol in June 2015 have continued, and I want to thank Paulo Drinot for reviewing earlier drafts of two chapters of Itinerant Ideas, and Patience Schell for generously agreeing to read the full draft manuscript for me. Their incisive feedback was enormously helpful as I revised and prepared the final version of the book. Since 2015, I have presented my findings and deliberations on indigenous rights debates in early twentieth century Chile and Peru at several international conferences in the U.K. and the U.S., not least those organised by the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland; the Society of Latin American Studies; the American Historical Association; and the Latin American Studies Association. At these conferences, I have been fortunate enough to contemplate wide-ranging questions about race and indigeneity, and about the national and transnational contours of such questions, with so many inspirational scholars as fellow panellists or members of the audience: Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Marc Becker, Martín Bergel, Catherine Boyle, Andrea Cadelo, Michela Coletta, Catherine Davies, Geneviève Dorais, Nicola Foote, Iñigo García Bryce, Tori Holmes, Elizabeth Horan, Claire Lindsay, Nicola Miller, Erin O’Connor, and Mark Petersen. Beyond the conference sessions, Michela Coletta, Elizabeth Horan, and Nicola Miller have given up precious time to comment on different sections of this book, asking critical questions and suggesting new scholarly works for consultation, all of which has enabled me to push my arguments a little further. As well as advice, Elizabeth Horan has shared important archival sources related to Gabriela Mistral with me. Our Zoom conversations about Mistral and broader questions of circulation and travel during the first Covid-19 lockdown were one of the highlights of that challenging time. During lockdown I was also able to dialogue with experts in Chilean and Peruvian agrarian and economic history, Claudio Robles, Rory Miller, and Lewis Taylor, and they good-naturedly put me right on several issues.

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Beyond major international conferences, I have been given the opportunity to discuss my research and to meet new people working in related fields of enquiry through many smaller colloquia and seminar series: the Modern Languages Research Forum at the University of Aberdeen; the Oxford Latin American History Seminar; the Jornadas Historiográficas at the School of Arts and Human Sciences, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru; a one-day conference on “Histories of Race, Popular Culture and Identity in the Andes” at the Institute of Latin American Studies, London; a workshop on “Cultures of Anti-Racism” at the University of Manchester; a colloquium on “Becoming Latin American: Children, Education and Citizenship” at the University of Reading; a two-day conference at University College London on “Periodicals on the Periphery? Magazines and Print Cultures in Latin America”; and a conference on conferences, entitled “Conferencing the International: Spaces of Modern Internationalism” at the Royal Geographic Society, London. These conversations would not have happened without the initiative and hard work of individual academics: Patience Schell, Eduardo Posada-Carbó, Miguel Costa, Jesús Cosamalón, Elena McGrath, Catriona McAllister, Peter Wade, James Scorer, María Chiara D’Argenio, Claire Lindsay, Lauren Rea, Stephen Legg, Mike Hefferman, Benjamin Thorpe, and Jake Hodder. All of these events provided a critical space for me to think through different arguments of the book in dialogue with excellent scholars working in a variety of disciplines, from History, Literary Studies, and Cultural Studies to Anthropology and Geography. My home institution, the University of Bristol, has provided a stimulating and supportive environment for my research since I first joined in 2006. The Faculty of Arts has provided the necessary funding for numerous research trips to Latin America and for research assistance when I was not able to make the trips myself. I was also fortunate enough to get a University Research Fellowship, which was essential for writing the main part of this book. More important though than funding or research leave are the people that work at Bristol. I have benefitted enormously from being surrounded by so many warm, talented, and wise colleagues who have helped to keep me sane during insanely busy (and, more recently, Covid-impacted) semesters, and who have offered constructive and perceptive comments on different sections of the book manuscript from its embryonic days through to the last revisions: Ruth Bush, Rhiannon Daniels, Bethan Fisk, Ruth Glynn, James Hawkey, Ed King, Becky Kosick, Paul Merchant, Rachel Randall, Catherine O’Rawe and Paco Romero.

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I am also very grateful to two of our recently graduated PhD students from Chile, Andrés Baeza and Isidora Urrutia, for their many insights and questions along the way. A special acknowledgment goes to Matthew Brown who carefully read and rigorously commented on most chapters of the book, was a steady source of encouragement throughout, and helped spur me on to the final text. Finally, from Bristol, I want to thank Caroline Williams, sadly deceased in 2019. I learnt a great deal about so many things from Caroline, from intellectual debates about colonialism and race in Latin America, to teaching practice and the intricacies of university administration. She was always so generous with her time and support, and I miss her very much. Before starting this book, I was much more familiar with the archives and libraries of Chile than those of Peru. Staff at the main campus of the Pontifical Catholic University in Lima, the Riva-Agüero Institute, and the National Library of Peru have helped to remedy that. Giannina Miranda generously gave up her time to introduce me to the Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Lima, and Milagros Chavez González did some invaluable research for me on journals and newspapers when I was unable to travel to Peru. In the U.S., staff at the Library of Congress, the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, Austin, and at Penn State University Archives helped me to locate seemingly hidden sources and advised on permissions. In Chile, Alejandra Guerra accessed and copied some very useful periodical materials in the National Library. In the UK, I have benefitted greatly from the online research assistance provided by Rebecca Wilson and Emily Walmsley, and from the lively discussions we had together about the materials they found. I thank the anonymous Palgrave reviewers for their encouraging and helpful reports on the initial manuscript. I am also grateful to Megan Laddusaw who first approached me about publishing with Palgrave and was hugely enthusiastic about the book project from the offset, and to Meagan Simpson who was a great source of cheer and reassurance as I worked on the revisions during lockdown. Thanks too to Hemalatha Arumagam and Raghupathy Kalynaraman for helping to make the production process as smooth as possible. There are too many friends and family members to name here to be able to say thank you to everyone who helped to keep me level and steady whilst I was researching and writing this book, and/or who put up with me when I was not so level and steady! Hopefully, if you are reading this, you will know who you are. In particular, I am indebted to my parents,

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Ann and Bob Crow, who always believed in me, especially my mum who read earlier versions of the manuscript and made me believe I would finish it when I was not so certain. I am also especially grateful to my partner Alex, and our daughters Sofía and Elisa, who have made very happy memories of trips that we have gone on together to Chile and Peru, and who managed, for the most part, to refrain from asking when I would be done with the book, and from telling me off for talking about it too much. Itinerant Ideas is dedicated to Elisa who was not yet in the world when I wrote my first book. Writing a book is a collective, collaborative process. I could not have done it on my own, but any mistakes and shortcomings are my own.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Transnational Race-Making in Latin America—Chilean-Peruvian Conversations  1 Part I Indigeneity and Labour: Contested Class Struggles  29 2 Socialism,  Communism and Aprismo: Revolutionary Languages of Race 37 3 Indigeneity, Land and Property 69 4 Labour  Legislation: Vocal Challenges to Enduring Exclusions101 Part II Indigeneity and Cultural Heritage: Who and Where Are Civilised? 135 5 Weaving the Indigenous Past into the Present143 6 Machu  Picchu and Cuzco: Marketing Inca Peru for International Consumption167

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7 Museums  Actors, Folklore and Popular Art: Displaying and Performing Indigeneity189 Part III Indigeneity and Education: Interlocking Ideals of Salvation 215 8 E  xpanding the Estado Docente: Modernisation, Nationalism and U.S. Connections223 9 Periodical  Pathways through the Silence: Race and the “New School” Approach245 10 A  Persistent Pursuit of Schooling: Indigenous Led Education Projects269 11 Conferencing Indigenous Education297 12 Conclusion: Roots, Routes, Connections and Threads319 Appendices339 Selected Bibliography347 Index363

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Front cover of Amauta, September 1926 Chile, A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs Vol. IV No. 20, October 1927 Chile, A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs Vol. IV No. 21, November 1927 Chile, A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs Vol. IV No. 17, July 1927 Chile, A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs Vol. III No. 12, Jan-Feb 1927 Chile, A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs Vol. II No. 9, October 1926 Chile, A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs Vol. V, No. 26, April 1928 Ercilla, 9 May 1940 Information board in the Casa Concha Museum, Cuzco, 2019 (author’s own photograph) Exhibit 29 shown by Aureliano Oyarzún in Buenos Aires, 1910 Exhibit 31 shown by Oyarzún in Buenos Aires, 1910 Illustration of weaving pattern analysed by Looser in his 1927 article Front cover of En Viaje, No. 2, December 1933 Augusto Flores, Mocomoco, Bolivia, September 1938 Venancio and Jesús Chuquichampi, Sicuani, Peru, July 1938

39 119 119 120 120 121 121 132 144 150 151 154 181 207 207

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List of Figures

Fig. 8.1

Fig. 9.1 Fig. 11.1

“CHILE—Antofagasta. Soldiers of the Republic, mostly Indian boys from the mountains attending the barrack school where they are taught to read and write”. The Hispanic Society of America, Postcard Collection, ca. 1920. H-112. Courtesy of the Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin Boletín Titikaka Vol. II, No. XXXI, June 1929, p. 2 Manuel T. Calle Escajadillo, Ponencia Presentada al Primer Congreso Indigenista de Mexico, 1940. Courtesy of The Library of Congress, Washington

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Transnational Race-Making in Latin America—Chilean-Peruvian Conversations

Writing in July 1938, the Chilean poet, educator, and diplomat Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) informed her Argentine friend, the renowned publisher and literary critic Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979), that she was about to depart Chile by steamboat, traveling from Valparaíso to Lima.1 “I feel terror at what they tell me about Peru”, she said, “2000 political prisoners from the APRA party!”2 Recalling this trip a little over three years later, Mistral told Magda Portal (1900–1989) and Manuel Seoane (1900–1963)—Peruvian Apristas living in exile in Chile—that few of the limeño elite had made her feel welcome.3 Portal seemed to feel the same wariness about Chile as Mistral did about Peru. In September 1942, this poet and political activist wrote to Mistral to share the good news that her partner Serafín Delmar (1901–1980) had been released from prison and had recently joined her in Santiago with their daughter Gloria.4 However, life in Chile could be difficult. Portal lamented how “standoffish” some  In Elizabeth Horan and Doris Meyer (eds.), This America of Ours: The Letters of Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), pp. 80–81. 2  The American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) emerged in the mid-1920s as an anti-imperialist movement promoting the political and economic unity of Latin America. It became the Peruvian Aprista Party in 1930. 3  The letter, dated 2 December 1941, is accessible at www.bibliotecanacional.gob.cl. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 4  Portal to Mistral, 15 September 1942. Magda Portal Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. 1

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Crow, Itinerant Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01952-4_1

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Chilean intellectuals were with them. “We [Apristas] have never distinguished between nationalities”, she said, “because our political struggle strives for inter-Americanism and continental citizenship.” Somewhat despairingly, Portal added “But you know the cold, distant men and women of your homeland…” Such epistolary proclamations point to a well-known story of troubled encounters between Chileans and Peruvians that is usually traced to the military conflicts of the nineteenth century.5 However, we can also read another, very different story in the above correspondence. That Mistral and Portal were writing to each other is significant in itself. Their correspondence shows that they interacted regularly, openly, and affectionately: as indicated in the letter of September 1942, Portal was confident Mistral would understand her criticisms of Chilean intellectuals. Other letters show that Mistral offered financial help to Portal whilst she was exiled in Chile. The soon-to-be Nobel laureate also advised Portal about publishing her writings and finding paid employment and put her in touch with major up-and-coming politicians such as Eduardo Frei Montalva (1911–1982). Mistral, moreover, was one of many Latin American intellectuals to demonstrate the “continental citizenship” of which Portal spoke in her letter: Mistral had appealed to the Peruvian authorities on Delmar’s behalf whilst he was in prison. Such efforts, Portal said in her letter, helped to bring his long “martyrdom” to an end. Portal also told Mistral that her daughter Gloria had been fortunate enough to enrol in a university course for free in Santiago—Chile was “one of the few countries”, she said, “where [the government] makes it easy to study.” In her view, this was something to celebrate. Mistral was only in Peru for a short time in 1938. She complained about having no time to go to the museums or visit the bookstores.6 But her agenda was packed with cultural engagements with Peruvians. Portal too took an active role in political debates and social reform processes during her time in Chile. And, in both cases, such initiatives were warmly welcomed. On her arrival in Callao on 11 July 1938, Peru’s oldest newspaper El Comercio applauded Mistral’s “lack of affectation”. It noted how impressed the Chilean poetisa was with the maritime works underway in Callao, and it revelled in how she offered their journalists a cigarette as she  The War of the Confederation (1836–1839) and the War of the Pacific (1879–1883).  Letter to Ocampo, dated July–August 1938, in Horan and Meyer (eds.), This America of Ours, pp. 84–85. 5 6

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lit one for herself. There was no snobbery in her gesture, El Comercio assured its readers; quoting her directly, it said she smoked out of habit— something inherited from her mother.7 The same newspaper reported on a public lecture that Mistral gave on 22 July: the city’s Teatro Municipal was apparently filled with “ladies, diplomats, intellectuals and teachers” who greeted her “fascinating talk” with a “long, rapturous applause.”8 This testified to the “devotion and respect” the Chilean writer inspired among the educated public of Lima.9 In Chile, the Peruvian Portal found a staunch friend in the leader of the Socialist Party, Salvador Allende (1908–1973). She helped organise the First Congress of Democratic and Popular Parties of Indo-America, held in Santiago in October 1940.10 She also worked for the Chilean Ministry of Education, as a script writer for the newly created Radio Escuela Experimental, authoring at least twenty-­ five shows between 1943 and 1944.11 Itinerant Ideas tells many such stories of Chilean-Peruvian conversations and collaborations, developing an analysis that seeks to open up and deepen our understanding of how ideas travelled across national borders in early-twentieth-century Latin America. The focus of my study is ideas about race, specifically ideas about indigenous-ness or indigeneity. It was specifically “indigenous museums” that Mistral had wanted (and been unable) to see whilst visiting Lima, and in her letter to Portal and Seoane of December 1941, she said it was “only with the Indians” in Peru that she felt any “real affinity”. Perhaps more critically, Mistral’s lecture at Lima’s Teatro Municipal in 1938 centred on indigenous folklore in Chile. Asserting the value of “Araucanian” contributions to Chilean culture, she urged her audiences in Peru as in Chile to recognise the indigeneity that they “carried within”. The so-called “indigenous question” also permeated Portal’s interventions in Chilean political developments. Via the 7  El Comercio, 11 July 1938, reproduced in Héctor López Martínez (ed.), El Siglo XX en el Perú a través de ‘El Comercio’ (Lima: Edición de ‘El Comercio’, 1991). 8  ‘En el teatro municipal Gabriela Mistral disertó ayer sobre el folklore chileno’, El Comercio, 23 July 1938. I am enormously grateful to Elizabeth Horan for sharing this and other relevant newspaper articles with me. 9  ‘La segunda conferencia de Gabriela Mistral estuvo muy concurrido’, La Crónica, 23 July 1938. 10  Letter from Portal to Haya de la Torre, 20 June 1941. Magda Portal Papers. 11  Iñigo García-Bryce, ‘Transnational Activist: Madga Portal and the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), 1926–1950’, The Americas 70: 4 (2014), p.  698. The Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, has transcripts of these plays.

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congress of 1940 and her cultural production, Portal endeavoured to incorporate the Chilean left into the Aprista revolutionary vision that was “Indo-America”—a continent-wide economic and social renewal “based on an indigenous consciousness or subconsciousness”.12 The following pages explain why it is so important that we both recount and interrogate such cross-border conversations about indigeneity.

Race Beyond Nation Anthropologist Francesca Merlan describes indigeneity as a “contingent, interactive, and historical product”; “there is not just one concept out there”, she says, “but a range involving different histories and positions”.13 In the proclamations and activism of Mistral and Portal referenced above, we see how indigeneity was articulated both as a “criterial” identity category (linked to cultural practice and/or part of one’s inner self), and a “relational” rights-based discourse (a struggle for social justice in the context on ongoing internal colonialism) in early twentieth century Latin America.14 It was a racial label. It was also a racialised political project, or rather it was central to a political project that was verbalised in racial terms (“Indo-America”). Race is widely recognised as an idea that transcends national context, yet the framework of the nation-state dominates much of the Latin American and Latin Americanist scholarship on this social construct and its diverse meanings.15 There are several valid reasons for this, not least the 12  Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, ‘La cuestión del nombre,’ in ¿A dónde va Indoamérica? (Santiago de Chile: Editoriales Ercilla, 1935), p. 29. 13  Francesca Merlan, ‘Indigeneity: Global and Local’, Current Anthropology 50: 3 (2009), pp. 319–320. 14  Merlan makes the distinction between “criterial” and “relational” definitions of indigeneity in ibid., pp. 304–305. 15  See for example, Nancy P. Appelbaum, Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846–1948 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003); Julio Arias Venegas, Nación y diferencia en el siglo XIX colombiano. Orden nacional, racialismo y taxonomías poblacionales (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2005); Marisol de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000); Enrique Florescano Etnia, estado y nación. Ensayo sobre las identidades colectivas en México (México City: Aguilar, 1998); Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Peter Wade, Music, Race and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Barbara Weinstein, The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015).

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historical particularities of different nation-building projects across the continent, and the important implications of ideas about race (linked, for instance, to community, land ownership, heritage or literacy) for state policies. With a focus on whiteness, blackness, indigeneity or mestizaje, a vast array of in-depth country case studies have illustrated the highly flexible nature of race and racism in Latin America, emphasising how both “can be molded and remolded to fit changing historical circumstances”.16 In the first half of the twentieth century, for example, an emphasis on “cultural” differences along with the possibility of improvement through assimilation largely displaced the hitherto dominant scientific or biological racism of the late nineteenth century. And it is precisely this elasticity which helps to explain the staying power of race and racism. What the existing scholarship also reveals, though, is a history of anti-racism—of myriad political struggles undertaken at local and national level against the racial stereotypes justifying discrimination and exploitation.17 Crucially, such studies have cast the people that lived (and continue to live) discrimination and exploitation as central agents in these struggles. Itinerant Ideas builds on and expands previous scholarship on race, racism, and anti-racism in Latin America by telling a history of race-making— of the making of indigenous identities and indigenous rights discourses—that moves beyond the nation. It investigates the cross-border elaboration of the ideas that informed and fed into state policies towards indigenous peoples, and in doing so adds another layer of understanding to how these policies came about. Mapping out transnational conversations, it argues, reveals the underpinnings of what happens at a national level. In other words, Itinerant Ideas is not written “without nations” (my emphasis) “but simultaneously pays attention to what lives against, between and through them”.18

16  Laura Gotkowitz, Introduction to Histories of Race and Racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 8. 17  This is true of many of the studies referenced in footnote 14. In the case of Peru, Mallon spotlights the discursive strategies evident in letters sent by indigenous leaders to government authorities in the late nineteenth century, and de la Cadena analyses the politics of contestation on display in public statements of the Comité Pro-Derecho Indígena Tawantinsuyo (1919–1926). 18  Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History: Theory and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 2.

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In line with the broader “transnational turn” in historical scholarship,19 an increasing number of monographs have adopted a comparative approach to the study of race in Latin America,20 and several edited collections on Latin America are organised around different country case studies, which point to shared historical and contemporary trends across the region, as well as divergences.21 However, the comparative approach has some limitations in that it assumes that we can qualify exactly what it is that we are comparing.22 In the present case, how can we confidently establish what a Chilean or Peruvian discourse of race looks like, when each is multifaceted, entangled, and contested? And so, whilst Itinerant Ideas does draw out some parallels and differences between what was happening in the two countries over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, its main objective is to examine the routes and vehicles that brought Chilean and Peruvian activist-intellectuals together to talk about the so-called “indigenous question”. This approach is inspired by the work of political theorist Juliet Hooker and historian Karin Rosemblatt. Hooker (2017) reads the Argentine statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento alongside the African American abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, and the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos alongside U.S. pan-Africanist writer and political activist W.E.B. Du Bois, to “reveal the intellectual connections and political genealogies of racial thought within the Americas”.23 Her “account of 19  Transnational history gained momentum in the late 1980s and early 1990s. See Fiona Paisley and Pamela Scully, Writing Transnational History (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 1. 20  See Mara Loveman’s excellent work on national censuses, National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 21   For example, Nancy P.  Appelbaum, Anne S.  Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (eds.), Race & Nation in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Richard Graham, The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Gotkowitz (ed.), Histories of Race and Racism; and Peter Wade, Carlos López Beltrán, Eduardo Restrepo, and Ricardo Ventura Santos (eds.), Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014). See also Rebecca Earle, Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), and Edward Telles, Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race and Color in Latin America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 22  See Juliet Hooker, Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois and Vasconcelos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 11–13; and Micol Seigel, ‘Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn’, Radical History Review 91 (Winter 2005), pp. 62–90. 23  Hooker, Theorizing Race, p. 2.

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­ ialogically formed racial discourses and political projects that intersect d and bind” the two Americas helpfully counters the long scholarly tradition that positions them as opposites (i.e. the “one drop rule” of the U.S. versus the Latin American myth of “racial democracy”). A similarly intersecting and binding history is found in Karin Rosemblatt’s The Science and Politics of Race (2018), which explains how Mexican scholars and politicians interested in “racial minorities” visited and studied the U.S. and built on what they saw there when they elaborated reforms in their own country, and vice-versa how U.S. intellectuals and policy makers “drew on the ideas of Mexicans and about Mexico to understand” what was going on at home.24 In line with Hooker and Rosemblatt, I show that we gain a better understanding of Chilean and Peruvian ideas about indigeneity when we put them in dialogue with one another. For example, we get a sense that the focus of each state’s official national narrative on the “great civilisations” of the past, that is the Araucanians in Chile and the Inca in Peru, occurred at least partly because these civilisations were admired by the other state, and across the region. Hence, also, the importance of placing the two-way Chilean-Peruvian exchange within a broader continental frame. That broader frame exposes the hollow myths of national “exceptionalism”, particularly for Chile, which has often been conceived—both by Chileans and international observers—as a country that did not have an “indigenous problem” and where class conflict rather than race conflict dominated intellectual and political debates in the early twentieth century.25 What differentiates this book from the lines of analysis developed by Hooker and Rosemblatt is its focus on South-South transnational exchanges, rather than how “knowledge travelled from South to North as well as from North to South”.26 The transnationality of my approach also develops from the broader insights and priorities of the “new imperial history”, which emerged in the 1990s. By destabilising the colonised/coloniser and resistance/complicity binary, this body of scholarship questions what the centre or the peripheries of (the mainly British) empire might 24  Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), p. 7. 25  Patrick Barr-Melej, Reforming Chile: Cultural Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Frederick Pike, ‘Aspects of Class Relations in Chile, 1850–1960’, The Hispanic American Historical Review 43: 1 (1963), pp. 14–33. 26  Rosemblatt, The Science and Politics of Race, p. 7.

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mean, and for whom.27 Catherine Hall’s work, which foregrounds race as an idea mutually constituted in both the colonies and the metropole, has been especially influential in these discussions about empire.28 The “metropole” appears as but one of many significant reference points for the networks presented in Itinerant Ideas. The following chapters show how Chileans and Peruvians looked to Europe and the U.S., but how they also drew inspiration from the experiences of countries across Latin America, not least each other. As Su Lin Lewis and Stefanie Gänger have written, “much of the scholarship on early twentieth-century intellectual history in the non-Western world has been viewed through the [prism of the] metropole and colony,” even if it has sought to transcend overly simplistic binary understandings of that relationship.29 In their own work, Lewis and Gänger “widen the framework to consider the way in which intellectuals formed scholarly networks and gathered multiple influences to articulate new visions of community and society within a wider world of ideas.”30 Itinerant Ideas contributes to such efforts to “widen the framework” to try to gain a better understanding of the making and meaning of racial labels in Latin America. Through an intra-regional case study—a neglected approach particularly in the Latin American context—it provides fresh insights into the historical construction of dominant intellectual and political definitions of indigeneity: “Indians” as illiterate agriculturalists, as innately communitarian, as closely connected to nature, as irrational, as ignorant, as backward, as easily misled, as part of the past and therefore out of place in the modern world. It also expands our understanding of the multiple ways in which such racist stereotypes were challenged and subverted, not least by indigenous people themselves. Of course, indigenous activism is not and has never been uniform. Writing on contemporary Bolivia, Andrew Canessa comments that certain indigenous groups “are perceived, whether by themselves or by others, to 27  Kathleen Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 28  For example, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 29  Su Lin Lewis and Stefanie Gänger, ‘A World of Ideas: New Pathways in Global Intellectual History, c. 1880–1930’, Modern Intellectual History 10: 2 (2013), p. 347. 30  See Lewis’s special issue co-edited with Carolien Stolte, ‘Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Connections in the Early Cold War’, Journal of World History (2019). I return to Gänger’s work shortly, as it focuses precisely on Chile and Peru.

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have more legitimacy and power than other groups.”31 This is the case for Bolivia’s large highland populations of Quechua and Aymara speakers whose conceptual and legal status is markedly different to that of the smaller and more marginalised groups that occupy the eastern lowlands.32 It is a similar situation in contemporary Peru, where approximately 95% of the almost 6 million people who self-identify as indigenous are Quechua and Aymara (5,176,809 and 548,292 respectively). Historically, these peoples—especially the Quechua—have had much more say or been evoked much more frequently in indigenous rights debates than Amazonian groups such as the Ashaninka, although the latter have become increasingly visible in recent years in the context of violent conflicts with illegal loggers.33 Whilst the overall demographics are different, it is also a similar situation in Chile. In 2017, approximately 1.5 million people self-­identified as indigenous—9% of the national population, compared to 26% of the total population in Peru—and 80% of these were Mapuche.34 Chilean law recognises the existence of nine different indigenous groups in the country, including the Aymara and Quechua in the northern regions (territories annexed from Bolivia and Peru during the War of the Pacific), but the Mapuche dominate scholarly, parliamentary and media debates on indigenous-­state relations. Such dominance is mirrored in the transnational forums of the early twentieth century which I interrogate in this book. I have focused on the Mapuche in Chile (mainly of the Araucanía region and often referred to as Araucanians, a term invented by the Spanish conquistadors) and the Quechua and Aymara peoples in Peru (mainly of the Cuzco and Puno regions in the southern Andes, and descendants of the Inca or Inca-­ controlled peoples), because when intellectuals in these countries were talking about “los indios”, “los indígenas” or “comunidades indígenas” this was—for the most part—who they meant. Furthermore, it was Quechua, 31  Andrew Canessa, ‘Indigenous Conflict in Bolivia Explored through an African Lens: Towards a Comparative Analysis of Indigeneity’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 60: 2 (2018), p. 320. 32  As Canessa (2018), notes, highland and lowland indigenous peoples have rarely come together in their demands of or against the Bolivian state. The historic 800 km March for Territory and Dignity in 1990 was an important turning point in this regard, although tensions persist. 33  For the demographics of Peru, according to the census of 2017, see www.inei.gob.pe (‘Perú: Perfil Sociodemográfico, Informe Nacional’) and www.iwgia.org. 34  For the demographics of Chile, see www.ine.cl and www.iwgia.org.

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Aymara and Mapuche activist-intellectuals who most effectively forced their way onto the national political stage in Peru and Chile during this period. In a sense, then, my analysis ends up replicating state narratives about which indigenous peoples count, especially in the case of Chile, but it deconstructs such narratives and highlights some of the key evasions and silences, as well as when and how these were contested, not least through cross-border conversations. In broader terms, my emphasis on indigeneity precludes an in-depth interrogation of debates about blackness or whiteness, or representations of Asian populations in Latin America.35 However, I do pinpoint some moments when connections emerge between indigenous and other “races” in Chilean-Peruvian discussions, and I analyse how these help us to understand the concept of indigeneity in the early twentieth century as both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic, and as simultaneously related to cultural distinctiveness, territory, and political relations with the state.

35  A rich, flourishing literature exists on blackness in Latin America. On Peru, see Maribel Arrelucea Barrantes, Sobreviviendo a la esclavitud: Negociación y honor en la prácticas cotidianas de los africanos y afrodescendientes, Lima, 1750–1820 (Lima: IEP, 2018); Heidi Feldman, Black Rhythms of Peru: Reviving African Musical Heritage in the Black Pacific (Middletown, Conn. L Wesleyan University Press, 2006); Tanya Golash-Boza, Yo so negro (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011); Christine Hünefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima’s slaves, 1800–1854 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); José R.  Jouve Martín, The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014); Rachel Sarah O’Toole, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). There is less on Chile, but scholarly interest has grown in recent years. See, for example, Juan Eduardo Wolf, Styling Blackness in Chile: Music and Dance in African Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019). On Latin America more broadly see the pioneering work of George Reid Andrews, e.g. The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires 1888–1988 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 1988), Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1988 (Madison Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), and Afro-Latin America: Black Lives, 1600–2000 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016). For a fascinating discussion of whiteness in Chile, see Sarah Walsh, ‘The Chilean Exception: Racial Homogeneity, Mestizaje and Eugenic Nationalism’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 25: 1 (2019), pp. 105–125.

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Chile and Peru: An Illuminating Case Study of South-South Knowledge Exchange Most of the ample scholarship on relations between Chile and Peru springs from and draws attention to the wars fought in the nineteenth century— the War of the Confederation between 1836 and 1839, and the War of the Pacific between 1879 and 1883—and the ever-reverberating internal and external consequences of those wars.36 Victorious in the War of the Pacific, Chile annexed the Peruvian province of Tarapacá (and the Bolivian province of Atacama) and thus secured almost complete control of the world’s nitrate deposits. Disputes over these and maritime acquisitions, and the treaties that ratified them, continued throughout the twentieth century, and still claim much attention in the twenty-first century.37 One of the legacies of this conflict is that relations between Chile and Peru have been interpreted almost exclusively as antagonistic and hostile. Indeed, the backdrop against which the Chilean-Peruvian conversations under scrutiny in this book took place is full of episodes of aggression and enmity (for more details, see the timeline in the Appendix). Whilst acknowledging this history of conflict, several scholars have started to look beyond it. Particularly insightful are Josh Savala’s article on collaborations between port workers in Mollendo and Valparaíso in the 1910s and 1920s, and Stefanie Gänger’s long-durée study (1837–1911)

36  Heraclio Bonilla, ‘The War of the Pacific and the National and Colonial Problem in Peru’, Past & Present 81: 1 (1978), pp. 92–118; Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); William Sater, Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacific, 1879–1884 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); William Skuban, Lines in the Sand: Nationalism and Identity on the Peruvian-Chilean Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); Sergio Villalobos, Chile y Perú: La historia que nos una y nos separa (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 2002). 37  See ‘Peru-Chile border defined by UN court at The Hague’ posted on www.bbc.co.uk, 28 January 2014. As well as territory, Chile stole books from Peru, specifically from Lima’s Biblioteca Nacional. Thousands were returned in 2007. See ‘Chile returns looted Peru books’, posted on www.bbc.co.uk on 7 November 2007. Nicola Miller discusses the latter in Republics of Knowledge: Nations of the Future in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), p. 36.

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of antiquity collecting and archaeology in Chile and Peru.38 Itinerant Ideas extends these endeavours to critique the dominant historical (often nationalist and nationalistic) narratives, by probing connections between the experiences and representations of indigenous peoples in both countries during the first half of the twentieth century. (The image on the front cover—an Inca road through the Atacama Desert in Chile—speaks to  these connections). It thereby overturns long-standing assumptions that Chile—in contrast to Peru—failed to engage in early twentieth-century discussions about the so-called “indigenous question”. Such assumptions coincide with widespread accounts of Chilean anti-­ indigenous (and anti-black) racist attitudes and actions towards Peruvians. We find these in historical works on the War of Pacific. As Ericka Beckman puts it, “the Chilean state waged its expansionist war within the language and politics of the European ‘civilizing mission’, constantly affirming the (relative) whiteness, virility, discipline and morality of Chilean soldiers in opposition to their indigenous and mixed-race counterparts on the Peruvian and Bolivian side.”39 We find them in the detail of several studies of the twentieth century, such as Raymond Craib’s Cry of the Renegade, which calls attention to Chilean magazines’ racist depictions of Peruvians as childlike black terrorists, in the context of the waves of violence sweeping the frontier region and Chilean expulsions of Peruvians from that region in the late 1910s and early 1920s.40 We also find them in more recent press coverage and testimonies of Peruvian migrants living in Chile.41 Chilean racism against Peruvians is a well-known story, and it reappears directly and indirectly throughout the following chapters. However,  Stefanie Gänger, Relics of the Past: The Collecting and Study of Pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1937–1911 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Josh Savala, ‘Ports of Transnational Labor Organizing: Anarchism along the Peruvian-Chilean Littoral, 1916–1928’, Hispanic American Historical Review 99: 3 (2019), pp.  501–531. See also Daniel Parodi and Sergio González (eds.), Historias que nos unen: 21 relatos para la integración de Perú y Chile (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la PUCP, 2014); and Cristóbal Aljovín and Eduardo Caviares, Chile – Perú, Perú – Chile: 1820–1920. Desarrollo Políticos, Económicos y Culturales (Valparaíso: Universidad de Valparaíso, 2005). 39  Ericka Beckman, ‘The Creolization of Imperial Reason: Chilean State Racism in the War of the Pacific’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 18: 1 (2009), p. 75. 40  Raymond Craib, The Cry of the Renegade: Poetry and Politics in Interwar Chile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 42–43. 41  For example: Alexander Carnwath, ‘When not to paint the town red: teenagers’ graffiti sparks spat between Chile and Peru’, Independent, 19 February 2005; Silke Staab and Kristen Hill Maber, ‘The Dual Discourse about Peruvian Domestic Workers in Santiago de Chile: Class, Race and a Nationalist Project’, Latin American Politics and Society 48: 1 (2006), pp. 87–116. 38

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Itinerant Ideas also tells another story. It does so in two different ways. First, it scrutinises the exclusion of and discrimination against indigenous peoples as a history that Chile and Peru have in common. It illustrates the long-standing overlaps between Chilean and Peruvian discussions about race, not least the notion—discussed by Paulo Drinot—that “indigeneity [is] commensurable with backwardness”.42 Like Gänger’s Relics of the Past, my work emphasises “the interconnectedness and similarities between scholarly and political ideas in the two nation-states”; it demonstrates “shared concerns about race, nationality, and territoriality”.43 But it takes us further into the twentieth century, and is organised around three themes— labour, cultural heritage, and education—that both touch upon and transcend Gänger’s focus on archaeology and antiquarianism. Second, Itinerant Ideas documents an ongoing struggle for racial justice in both countries. It reveals many different instances when Chilean and Peruvian intellectuals came together to discuss how to build a more inclusive community, learning from the projects taking place in the other’s country. In more than a few cases, the Chileans and Peruvians engaged in such cross-­border discussions and projects were indigenous. A growing body of literature explores how indigenous social movements in contemporary Latin America are linked into transnational networks.44 My research shows that this is not a new phenomenon. It demonstrates that transnational indigenous organising was a visible and audible reality in the early twentieth century, and that it took many different forms: labour protest, conference attendance, teacher exchanges, missionary activity, art exhibitions, theatre groups, and more. The indigenous and non-indigenous intellectuals discussed in the following chapters often interacted with, worked for, or headed-up state institutions in Chile and Peru. Existing scholarship rightly highlights the divergent pathways that modern state building took in Chile and Peru. Florencia Mallon underscores Chile’s reputation as a “relatively stable and interventionist state” by the end of the 1930s—a state which led the process of “industrialisation and economic development behind tariff barriers 42  Paulo Drinot, ‘Website of Memory: The War of the Pacific (1879–1884) in the Global Age of YouTube’, Memory Studies 4: 4 (2011), pp. 370–385. 43  Gänger, Relics of the Past, p. 10. 44  Robert Andolina, Nina Laurie, and Sarah Radcliffe, Indigenous Development in the Andes: Culture, Power and Transnationalism (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009); Alison Brysk, From Tribal Village to Global Village: Indian Rights and International Relations in Latin America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Canessa, ‘Indigenous Conflict in Bolivia…’; Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998); Merlan, ‘Indigeneity: Global and Local’.

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and formulated social welfare policies aimed at including broader sectors of society of the population within an expanded ‘national economy’”. In consequence, the historiography on Chile has generally been willing, whether critical or supportive of the status-quo, to accept “the existence of a successful national project led by the state.” Regarding the Peruvian state, on the other hand, scholars have emphasised the “failure of efforts at national consolidation across spatial and ethnic lines, as well as the maintenance of an ‘open economy’”.45 Importantly, Mallon’s work also points to historical trends shared by the two countries. Both “experienced deep crises in the first three to four decades of the twentieth century.” They both had in common “the fact that rurally and oligarchically based social political orders were being challenged from below by a combination of newly emerging social groups, including urban workers, peasants, urban and/ or provincial middle classes.”46 In Peru, the exclusionary “Aristocratic Republic” (1895–1919) was followed by the populist-turned-authoritarian regime of Augusto Leguía (1919–1930), which succumbed to pressure for legislative reforms but barely or only very superficially implemented them. Leguía’s demise initiated “a long-term crisis of rule and direction”, which was not fully confronted until the reforming military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–1975). In Chile, the “Parliamentary Republic” (1891–1925)—with its selective political inclusion and intra-elite negotiation—“reached its limits with the populism of Arturo Alessandri, precipitating a decade-long crisis that ended with the election of Pedro Aguirre Cerda and the first Popular Front coalition government in 1938.”47 Despite the differences in the details and outcomes, in both countries and throughout early twentieth century Latin America, there was a shift from an oligarchic state to a modernising state.48 It was within this framework that the “indigenous question” and the ideology and movement known as indigenismo emerged.

45  Mallon, ‘Decoding the Parchments of the Latin American Nation-State; Peru, Mexico and Chile in Comparative Perspective’, in James Dunkerley (ed.), Studies of the Formation of the Nation State in Latin America (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2002), p. 15. 46  Ibid., p. 14. 47  Ibid. 48  Miller, drawing on Laurence Whitehead, in In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth Century Latin America (London: Verso, 1999), p. 3.

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Modernisation, Indigenismo, and the “Indigenous Question” in Latin America The conversations about the “indigenous question” studied in this book arose in the context of an intense process of modernisation: export-led economic growth, the building of new roads, the coming of aviation, mass rural-urban migration, the expansion of education (in both Chile and Peru, primary schooling was made obligatory for all children in 1920), government intervention in public health, state sponsorship of archaeological excavations and cultural tourism, and, in some countries, major agrarian reform programmes. This was a markedly uneven process. Radical inequalities forced political elites in Chile, Peru, and other countries in Latin America to acknowledge and grapple with various aspects of the “social question”, such as urban squalor, rural poverty, alcoholism and epidemics, as well as increased political mobilisation effected in the growth of trade unions, anarcho-syndicalism, and the creation of Socialist and Communist parties.49 The “indigenous question” intertwined with the “social question”. Starting in 1900 and ending in 1950, Itinerant Ideas sketches out the emergence, radicalisation, institutionalisation and the beginnings of the decline of indigenismo, a discourse and (cultural, intellectual and political) movement characterised broadly, in the words of Rebecca Earle, by “a concern with the well-being of contemporary indigenous people.”50 This concern was “often expressed as a desire to elevate the Indian from their lowly position so that they might enjoy the benefits available to other citizens.”51 In speaking of “bettering” and “improving” the Indian “race”, indigenistas presumed its inferiority even if they argued that such supposed inferiority was not biological or natural, but rather the result of centuries of abuse and exploitation. As commented by Peruvianist Jorge Coronado, proponents of indigenismo sought “to reshape Andean societies by the inclusion of vast swathes of the marginalised indigenous population” but refused to “relinquish [their] tutorial attitude toward those [they] sought to protect”.52  Mallon, ‘Decoding the Parchments…’, p. 14.  Earle, Return of the Native, p. 185. 51  Ibid. 52  Jorge Coronado, The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), p. 135. 49 50

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Most scholarly work on indigenismo has focused on the Andes and Mesoamerica, especially on Peru and Mexico, because it was only in those states that indigenismo became “the basis of a specific political movement or party,” or became an official part of state policy for any sustained amount of time.53 And yet, as Laura Gotkowitz makes clear, it “resonated powerfully” throughout Latin America, peaking “at different moments, in different nations” and taking “on diverse national and regional forms”.54 Chile rarely features in studies on indigenismo. To be sure, neither as a discourse or a movement was it as prominent in early twentieth-century Chile as it was in Peru or Mexico, but Chilean intellectuals and policy makers both in Chile and abroad were certainly talking about the “indigenous question”.55 Furthermore, as the following chapters will show, Chile played host to numerous international meetings which tackled this question. It thereby sought to frame as well as participate in the debate. By tracing connections between the debates taking place in Chile and Peru, Itinerant Ideas digs further into the complexity, diversity, and inconsistency of indigenismo. Specifically, it investigates how indigenista discourses connected with three different but interlinked areas of state policy in Chile and Peru: labour, cultural heritage, and education. All three were intimately bound up in the process of nation-building and nation-­ imagining, but the intellectual exchanges about policy were to some extent above the nation. These transnational exchanges, moreover, involved indigenous as well as indigenista protagonists, or rather, we see how indigenous people were involved in indigenista debates, and thus the distinction between the two—intimated by scholars such as Coronado and Earle—becomes blurred. In demonstrating how multiple, oft-competing languages of indigenous rights circulated simultaneously across national borders, this book encourages us to look for ways of thinking and formulating socio-political realities which do not neatly map onto strict ideological scenarios, such as left versus right, as sometimes happens in scholarship on the (Latin American) history of ideas. It can be helpful, for example, to see Mistral’s insistence (in her lecture tour of 1938) on the indigeneity “carried within”

 Gotkowitz, Introduction to Histories of Race and Racism, p. 19.  Ibid., p. 20 55  See Joanna Crow, The Mapuche in Modern Chile: A Cultural History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013). 53 54

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through a longer tradition of spiritualism and idealism in the region.56 Itinerant Ideas also makes evident that debates about indigenous rights did not always proceed in a linear fashion. In other words, the story it tells goes beyond teleological progress, and eschews the preoccupation with establishing definitive origins to the “big ideas” about indigeneity. Different chapters do map out certain changes or shifts in the experiences and representations of indigenous peoples over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, but these are multicausal, as well as reversible. In all, with its focus on circulation and travel, Itinerant Ideas calls attention to the multi-sited causes of historical change, which we see enacted and lived locally, nationally, and transnationally.

Transnational Intellectual Networks in Latin America The cast of the book is comprised mainly of intellectuals, whom I understand, following Nicola Miller, as “porteurs (carriers) of ideas […], not only as translators and expositors but also as opinion makers.”57 More than 170 Chilean and Peruvian intellectuals appear in the following pages. Some make only sporadic or brief appearances. Others feature more prominently, repeatedly, and comprehensively. Some of those in the latter camp, such as Mistral and Portal, will already be familiar to people well-read in Latin American intellectual and political history. Others are less well-­ known. The majority, but by no means all, of the cast are men.58 Around thirty self-identified as indigenous, and I pay particularly close attention to the way in which their knowledge and political propositions circulated. Many intellectuals used “their established […] authority to make a successful bid for national influence.”59 Others either did not bid for national influence or were unsuccessful in such bids; their impact was more localised, or more difficult to trace. All of them, though, contributed—directly or indirectly—to public debates about indigenous identity and indigenous rights in Chile and Peru. Itinerant Ideas is about their conversations with 56  I am very grateful to Michela Coletta for the illuminating discussions we had about this at the Latin American Studies Association conference in New York in May 2016. 57  Miller, Reinventing Modernity in Latin America: Intellectuals Imagine the Future (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 7. 58  There are just under twenty women. 59  Miller, In the Shadow of the State, p. 4.

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one another. In this sense, it is as much about relationships as it is about individuals. As Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have commented in their book on the power of social networks, the “key to understanding people is understanding the ties between them.”60 The protagonists of Itinerant Ideas emerged from the primary source materials that I have been investigating for this project. I was both keeping an eye out for the intellectual figures of whom I had already heard in the context of debates about indigenous peoples and, in the case of Chile, already studied.61 At the same time, when someone new and intriguing appeared, I followed them into other sources and organised periods of archival research around them. By selecting documents that might provide evidence of transnational conversations, I summoned forth the privileged people who were conspicuous public voices in early twentieth century Chile and Peru. I therefore ran the risk of replicating the scholarly attention already bestowed upon Latin America’s “great thinkers”: literary prize winners, government ministers, political leaders, and intrepid explorers. What I found, however, was that by tracing the broader web of ties of which these renowned figures were part, I could foreground more marginalised intellectuals and political activists, people about whom little has been written, especially in relation to the subject of race and indigeneity in Latin America. My focus is on dialogues between Chileans and Peruvians, but this is not exclusively the case, for I show that Chilean-Peruvian interactions reflect a broader continental, even global, conversation about indigeneity during the first half of the twentieth century. Thus, on top of the approximately 170 Chileans and Peruvians who appear in Itinerant Ideas, readers also meet some 80 other intellectuals from across the Americas and beyond. The recipient of the first letter cited in this introduction was the Argentine feminist Victoria Ocampo. The lecture that Mistral gave in Lima’s Teatro Municipal in July 1938 was a repetition of ones already given in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Santiago. Mistral is often claimed as “mother of the Chilean nation”, but she spent most of her adult life abroad. In 1922, she journeyed to Mexico to work with the then Secretary of Public Education, José Vasconcelos (1882–1959), and never returned to live in Chile. Between 1922 and 1957, she lived in Mexico, France, 60  Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (London: Harper Press, 2011), p. xi. 61  Crow, The Mapuche in Modern Chile.

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Spain, Portugal, Italy, Brazil, and the United States, and visited many other countries besides.62 In contrast to Mistral, Magda Portal’s travels— at least from the 1920s through to the mid-1940s—were largely the result of enforced exile. She was first expelled from Peru in 1927, during Augusto Leguía’s regime. On this occasion, she went to Cuba, then Mexico, and from there she embarked on a lecture tour of the Caribbean. After a period back in Peru in the early 1930s, she travelled to Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, where she ended up living for several years. Both Portal and Mistral lived transnational lives, meeting and talking to people from all around the world. If Mistral and Portal themselves travelled widely, so too did their ideas. Public lecture tours and international conferences were a critical medium for personal conversations and face-to-face interactions, but letters too were important vehicles for the dissemination of ideas, and more significant still—because of their potentially large readerships—were newspapers and magazines, and books. Both Mistral and Portal published widely in Chile and Peru, as well as in many other countries in Latin America, in the U.S. and in Europe. For example, Mistral’s well-known essay “El grito”, calling for continental fraternity based on a shared experience of indigenous-­Hispanic encounter (“el azteca-español, el quechua-español, el araucano-español”), did not take long to travel from the pages of the Costa Rican magazine Repertorio Americano, where it was originally published in 1922, to those of Inter-America in New York.63 (The editorial team of Repertorio Americano proudly highlighted its role in making sure this Chilean poet’s work was disseminated in the Global North.) And her most notably indigenista collection of poems, Tala—partly written whilst she was in Europe—was published by Ocampo’s Ediciones Sur in Buenos Aires the same year that she went to Peru.64 These details about Mistral’s publications point to the fact that the circulation of ideas is not a fortuitous occurrence—that literary and journalistic texts, which promote certain ideas and agendas, are not moved by an unspecified force, even though we sometimes talk about them as if they 62  Marjorie Agosín (ed.), Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003). 63  The essay was initially published in Vol. 4, Issue No. 4 of Repertorio Americano. The editorial team informed readers that it had been re-published in English in Inter-America in Vol. 5, No. 6. 64  Mistral, Tala (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Sur, 1938).

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were, especially when we refer to the “flow” of ideas.65 It was the editor of Repertorio Americano, Joaquín García Monge, who helped to get “El grito” printed in a U.S. magazine, and it was Ocampo who agreed that Ediciones Sur would publish Tala. Picking up on details like this, Itinerant Ideas explores the conditions of the movement of ideas about indigeneity in early twentieth century Latin America. It shows how important personal, as well as political, relationships are in this context; both Ocampo and García Monge were good friends of Mistral.66 The stories of Chilean-Peruvian dialogues that fill this book thus allow us a glimpse into an extensive transnational network that is relevant to historians studying race worldwide. These dialogues connect to events such as the First Universal Races Congress, held in London in 1911, and the First International Congress Against Imperialism and Colonialism, held in Brussels in 1927. Chilean and Peruvian intellectuals attended these congresses. They did not, for the main part, present formal papers, but they were there, listening to others and talking about their own countries’ experiences.67 And they participated in various committees associated with the League of Nations, established in 1920. Existing, very fruitful, analyses of these global institutions and sites of encounter often focus—as does existing work on race in the Americas—on the exchange of ideas between the Global North and the Global South.68 What I bring to the table is a South-South conversation about indigeneity and examine how this was shaped by and influenced global debates. 65  Stefanie Gänger, ‘Circulation: Reflections on Circularity, Entity, and Liquidity in the Language of Global History”, Journal of Global History, 12: 3 (2017), pp. 305–318. 66  On Mistral’s friendship with García Monge, see Mario Cespedes, Gabriela Mistral en el ‘Repertorio Americano’ (San José: Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica, 1978), p. 7. 67  Official attendees at the Universal Races Congress are recorded in G. Spiller (ed.), Papers on Inter-Racial Problems, Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress held at the University of London, July 26–29, 1911 (London: P.S. King & Son, 1911). Latin American representatives were there as “Honorary Secretaries” (for example, Alejandro Álvarez of Chile and Joaquín Capelo of Peru), “Honorary Vice-Presidents” (for example, Miguel Cruchaga of Chile), “Presidents of Parliaments”, “Rulers, Ministers of States, Governors and Ambassadors” (for example, Eduardo Lembcke of Peru), and members of the “Honorary General Committee”. Writing on Brussels, Vijay Prashad notes the presence of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, as well as José Vasconcelos. See The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007). 68  Daniel Laqua, ‘Transnational Intellectual Cooperation, the League of Nations and the Problem of Order’, Journal of Global History 6: 2 (2011), pp. 223–247; and Alan Macpherson and Yannick Wehrli (eds.), Beyond Geopolitics New Histories of Latin America at the League of Nations (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015).

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Itinerant Ideas aims to produce new insights into networks as conscious constructions, which involve many different actors, each with their own motives for engaging in conversation or collaborating on a given initiative. It also offers insights into, and stresses the importance of recognising, the failures to connect and refusals to collaborate, by tracing some of the pathways that were not taken as well as those that were. The detail of the multiple Chilean-Peruvian conversations and their ramifications shows that individuals and their life histories (i.e. where they are speaking from) matter. And because they often represented their respective governments abroad, or took on active roles in national government, the individual protagonists of Itinerant Ideas help to illustrate the “complex and multi-layered nature of state institutions and state power”.69 Put another way, Itinerant Ideas opens-up the possibilities for identifying individual agency in historical processes, hence my frequent reference to the intellectuals under scrutiny as protagonists. Yet, embedded as they are in far-reaching “social networks and influenced by others to whom [they] are tied, [they] necessarily lose some of [their] individuality.”70 Magda Portal, for example, capitalised on her connections with APRA leader Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre when she participated in the organising committee for the First Congress of Democratic and Popular Parties of Indo-America in Santiago in 1940. In many ways, she acted as a representative of APRA in Chile, and her social networks there were constructed in this context, which might explain the coldness she perceived on the part of some Chilean intellectuals. Portal’s Aprismo thus presented constraints as well as opportunities. The other important part of the story here, though, is that Portal could use the platform and authority that she gained from being part of the same congress in Santiago to speak back against Haya de la Torre, when, for example, he failed to commit to agrarian reform policies in the late 1940s.71 Portal was part of multiple networks, or part of multiple clusters within a network that transcended Aprismo. So, perhaps overall Portal—and the approximately 250 other intellectuals who appear in this book—are more accurately described as nodes with agency than protagonists. They helped to disseminate certain ideas, but exactly how successful they were and the precise contours of their ideas  Mallon, ‘Decoding the Parchments…’, p. 45.  Christakis and Fowler, Connected, p. 305. 71  Magda Portal, ¿Quienes traicionaron al pueblo? (Lima: Impresa Editora Salas e Hijos, 1950). 69 70

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were influenced by the bigger picture of which they were part, and some of the other individual components of that bigger picture with whom they interacted.72 Individual agency and context therefore go in hand in hand: individual agency should not be overlooked or squashed by context, such as the highly visible roles of institutional structures, but neither can we ignore the latter, which are in themselves made up of individuals and shaped by them. This last point leads to the broader issue of causation in history. The ten main chapters of Itinerant Ideas map out some key shifts in racialised thinking about indigenous peoples over the first half of the twentieth century. Did change occur because of these transnational intellectual networks? And did these shifts in ideas impact state policy, impacting the lives of indigenous people in turn? Direct influence or causation is notoriously hard to quantify. It may or may not be that one specific conversation (about education, for example) at one conference or in one journal article definitively sparked new ways of thinking (about Indianness and literacy, for example), and it is difficult to show that a new way of thinking unequivocally led to a concrete programme of social reform, never mind establish how far or how evenly that reform package was implemented. In fact, whilst highlighting important shifts, I also suggest that some of the conversations about indigeneity in twentieth-century Latin America went round in circles, meaning that we cannot trace a way of thinking to a definitive point of origin. My overriding argument, though, is that to fully understand state policies related to indigenous peoples—whether these were focused on land ownership, or conservation of archaeological remains, or the use of native languages in schools—we need to look at the transnational conversations taking place concurrently, because they shaped the range of political possibilities. I dig into the content and mechanisms of these larger conversations to help contextualise Chilean and Peruvian government reforms. While no one detail explains the larger whole, that larger whole cannot be appreciated without piecing together the details.

72  On the argument that much work still needs to be done if networks are to be properly understood not only as “sites and conduits of power” which are productive of new ideas, but also as embodied, social locales that relied on personal and political relationships, see Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck, and Jakob Vogel, ‘Introduction’, in Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), p. 13.

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Conference Circuits, Periodical Culture and Epistolary Exchanges Three principal vehicles of Chilean-Peruvian intellectual interactions feature in this book: cultural and political congresses; and print periodicals; and private correspondence. These constitute some of the most important spaces where ideas about race and indigeneity were generated in early twentieth-century Latin America—“spaces through which ideas move[d], [were] exchanged, and eventually change[d]”.73 Most of the congresses that appear in the following chapters were explicitly celebrated as continental, hemispheric, or international gatherings. For example: the First Conference of Communist Parties of Latin America (Buenos Aires, 1929); the First Congress of Democratic and Popular Parties of Indo-America (Santiago, 1940); the Pan-American Scientific Congress (e.g. Santiago, 1908–1909); the Inter-American Indigenista Congress (e.g. Patzcuaro, Mexico, 1940, and Cuzco, 1949); the International Congress of Americanists (e.g. Buenos Aires, 1910, Washington, 1915, Lima, 1939); and the First International Congress of Popular Arts (Prague, 1928). The early twentieth century saw a proliferation of these conferences; many of the above were the first of their kind. This coincided with the end of the First World War (1914–1918), and an eagerness to foster connections across and thereby promote peace between nations. Some new works in the field of geography have proclaimed conferences to be the origin of internationalism in the inter-war years.74 Most of this scholarship has focused on the Anglophone world (especially Africa and Asia) and Europe, and yet as Miguel Ozorio de Almeida of Brazil told the Second Meeting of National Commissions of Intellectual Cooperation in Paris in 1937, Latin Americans had long since been engaged in transnational intellectual exchange, indeed, they had begun “to do intellectual cooperation before everyone [else].”75 Itinerant Ideas is not just about the 73  Davide Rodogno, Shaloma Gauthier, and Francesca Piana, ‘What Does Transnational History Tell Us about a World with International Organizations? The Historians’ Point of View’, in Bob Reinalda (ed.), Routledge Handbook of International Organizations (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 97. 74  See Stephen Legg, Mike Heffernan, Jake Hodder, and Benjamin Thorpe (eds.), Placing Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2021). 75  In Juliette Dumont, ‘From intellectual cooperation to cultural diplomacy: The Brazilian and Chilean experiences (1918–1946)’, Does Academic Exchange Matter?, Vienna, 2011, p. 2. Available at https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr (last accessed 8 August 2021).

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conference circuit, but it features prominently. I thereby bring an under-­ studied and important story—the Latin American story—to a burgeoning scholarly debate on these international sites of encounter. The early twentieth century also witnessed a proliferation of print periodicals, as well as their enhanced circulation. Like congresses, the magazines and newspapers discussed in Itinerant Ideas were fundamentally transnational in outlook. The Lima-based Amauta, directed by Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930), and the Puno-based Boletín Titikaka, founded and edited by Gamaliel Churata (pseudonym for Arturo Peralta Miranda, 1897–1969), were adamant that the writings and visual art contained within were both created by and aimed at a large collective of people beyond the confines of Peruvian national boundaries. Even the indexes of journals that were titled as national or linked to a national institution, such as Peru’s Revista del Museo Nacional, reveal the overtly transnational scope of their content. In total, my analysis draws on approximately 50 different print periodicals. The majority are Chilean or Peruvian. Some are long-lasting daily national newspapers (for example, El Comercio of Lima and El Mercurio of Santiago). Others are monthly cultural and political journals and are more ephemeral: Amauta and the Boletín Titikaka were in production for just four years; others lasted for even shorter periods of time, such as Luis Nieto’s Cuadernos Korikancha in Cuzco, and numerous Mapuche periodicals published in Chile in the 1930s and 1940s. Some periodicals are directly linked to a specific political association such as Rumbos, the official mouthpiece of Chile’s National Association of Teachers. Others purport to be more universal, not least the mainstream national newspapers. In all, I underscore the wide variety of print periodicals in Chile and Peru talking about the “indigenous question”. Building on recent developments in periodical studies, I also draw attention to the internal heterogeneity of some of the magazines discussed, as well as—where pertinent—to their textuality and the “business end of operations”, to quote from Claire Lindsay’s excellent book on magazines and tourism in post-revolutionary Mexico.76 Beyond Chile and Peru, there are several Mexican periodicals are central to my analysis, not least those attached to the Inter-American Indigenista Institute in Mexico City: América Indígena and the Boletín 76  Claire Lindsay, Magazines, Tourism and Nation-Building in Latin America (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

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Indigenista. Many of the magazines I reference are based in the United States: government publications such as Labor Monthly Review, scholarly journals such as the Hispanic American Historical Review, and more popular publications such as National Geographic. And a small number are European, for example Madrid’s daily newspaper ABC and London’s long-running monthly science journal Nature. Interestingly, what we see printed in these venues, as well as in Chilean and Peruvian fora, is sometimes a reprint of a piece previously published elsewhere. Various print periodicals, moreover, dedicate whole pages or multiple-page sections to promoting other periodicals, and act as agents or distributors for them (this is particularly true of Amauta, Boletín Titikaka and Repertorio Americano but it is a widespread phenomenon in the 1920s and 1930s). And of course, the printing press responsible for a specific revista might also be responsible for publishing books, such as the largely Peruvian-run Editorial Ercilla in Santiago. Even when not directly connected to a book publisher, journals often publicised and sold-on books, again across national borders. Such minutiae are key to understanding how certain writers and certain ideas caught on and travelled through the region during the early twentieth century. Itinerant Ideas illustrates how periodicals and congresses intersected as conduits of ideas, not least because newspapers and magazines usually reported on what was being said at the congresses. It also draws extensively on private correspondence (found in published edited collections or accessed through personal archives available on-line or in libraries in Lima and Santiago). The letters helpfully reveal some of the intricacies regarding precisely how a magazine travelled (how Chile’s National Library acquired copies of Amauta in the late 1920s, for instance), or how attendance at a congress was organised, and with what personal ramifications. My source materials are thus not treated separately, but rather put into dialogue with one another. I also put them into dialogue with government reports, national parliamentary records, and legislative documents, to show how transnational intellectual debates connected with state policy making in early twentieth-century Latin America. Congresses, print periodicals, and letters do not simply reflect existing knowledge and ideas about indigenous people. They construct knowledge. They shape ideas. More critically, they represent a certain way of creating knowledge. There are other ways, other epistemologies, that I do not include in this book. It is important to acknowledge this, especially in the context of debates about indigeneity, because in many ways these sites

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of encounter represent elite (colonial or neo-colonial) spaces which marginalise the knowledge and ideas produced by indigenous peoples themselves—in the rural communities, for example, through oral histories passed from one generation to another. And yet, as noted above, the voices and views of indigenous people are certainly not absent from the written documentary evidence scrutinised in Itinerant Ideas. Few delegates at international congresses self-identified as indigenous. An important exception is the Mapuche leaders who participated in the Inter-American Indigenista Congresses in Mexico in 1940 and in Peru in 1949. In this case then, what I am analysing is mainly non-indigenous intellectuals and policy makers talking about indigenous peoples rather than with them. This is true, also, of most of letters that I examine, although some have indigenous authors. With print periodicals, the question of agency and voice is not so clear cut. Indigenous intellectuals and political activists were reading and making public reference to print periodicals in the early twentieth century. They were also publishing in them: from poetry and essays to news bulletins and campaign posters. Sometimes their voices appeared indirectly or in mediated form, through interviews or in reports on indigenous congresses and political meetings. The point throughout is to be aware of the absences and silences, and the indirect as well as direct interventions of indigenous peoples in transnational forums. These were stages on which multiple actors performed and debated the meaning of being indigenous in early twentieth century Latin America. Epistolary communications, published congressional proceedings, and print periodicals were part of and helped to replicate what cultural theorist Ángel Rama famously described as the “lettered city”.77 Rama asserts the power of literacy in the formation of Latin American societies, and the central role played by the urban sphere in deploying and reproducing that power. The literary historian Jean Franco explores what she sees as the decline and fall of this “lettered city” in the context of the cultural cold war in Latin America, and particularly in the context of civil war and military rule during the 1980s, when the written word becomes a key tool of the (culturally, politically, socially and racially) marginalised in their efforts to contest and undermine the authoritarian state.78 The “lettered city” remained hegemonic throughout the period that I am investigating but, as the following chapters will confirm, indigenous people made their  Ángel Rama, La ciudad letrada (Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1984).  Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002). 77 78

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presence felt and sought to decolonise written discourse in complex and creative ways.

Structure and Organisation Itinerant Ideas is divided up into three parts. Each focuses on a policy area linked to discourses of indigeneity in early twentieth century Chile and Peru: (1) labour, (2) cultural heritage, and (3) education. Each policy area relates to the “transnational” in a different way. Labour, for example, seems the most apposite of the three, in that worker activism and class struggle has overtly transcended national borders since at least the nineteenth century, just as the capitalist system that it seeks to change has always done. Education, on the other hand, is widely perceived as the nation-building institution par excellence.79 Existing Latin Americanist scholarship on the early independence era through to the present-day has already explored how teachers, textbooks, and school rituals, such as singing the national anthem, have sought to consolidate national identities across the region. And in the context of territorial disputes, of course, the nationalistic purpose of education becomes especially paramount. Writing on the frontier conflict between Chile and Peru, William Skuban illustrates how “the education of the youth” in the provinces of Arica and Tacna— particularly as the planned plebiscite of 1925–1926 approached—“became the ideological high ground in the struggle between the two central states”.80 Skuban’s point is an accurate and important one. But, as I will show, debates about education could also bring Chileans and Peruvians together, and challenge aggressively nationalistic discourses.81 The policy areas are distinct, then, but they also overlap. One of the aims of state-led education in early twentieth-century Latin America, for example, was to provide a productive and compliant labour force. And cultural heritage— the past made present, through the opening-up of archaeological remains, for instance, or the celebration of “traditional” folkloric practice—was central to the teaching of “historia patria” in schools and museums across the region.  Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).  William Skuban, Lines in the Sand: Nationalism and Identity on the Peruvian Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), p. 44. 81  Education was a highly transnational sphere long before this, with dedicated periodicals in Europe and the U.S. from the 1830s, and international congresses from mid nineteenth century. See Axel Körner, Nicola Miller and Adam Smith (eds.), America Imagined: Images of the United States in Europe and Latin America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 79 80

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The three separate parts have their own introductions. Each introduction spotlights a different vehicle of Peruvian-Chilean interactions (letters, conferences, and the publishing industry) as a way into the policy area under scrutiny. Part I on labour has three chapters. The first focuses on the revolutionary leftist project that was Indo-America, the second on land ownership, and the third on the struggle to include indigenous workers in labour legislation. Part II on cultural heritage is also comprised of three chapters which scrutinise indigenous weaving, archaeological sites, and museums, folklore, and art. Part III includes four chapters: on obligatory state education laws; the “New School” approach to teaching; indigenous leadership in education; and the resolutions of the Inter-American Indigenista Congresses on education. The ten chapters do not seek to map out everything that happened with racial stereotypes about and policies toward indigenous peoples in Chile and Peru between 1900 and 1950. Instead, they guide the reader through a mosaic of moments, a patchwork of pictures which, stitched together, create a whole whose significance cannot be fully appreciated close-up. That whole is a transnationally constructed political discursive field, within which the survival of indigenous people is simultaneously seen as antagonistic to the existence of the modern state and as central to its success. The concluding chapter of Itinerant Ideas reiterates how the two national experiences responded to and helped to shape each other, and how they both fitted into broader continental, hemispheric and global debates. It also underscores some of the lessons we can learn from the diverse racisms and anti-racisms of the past, particularly regarding how policy happens. Despite long-standing arguments about race as a social construction, racism is currently on the rise everywhere. This is a fundamentally transnational phenomenon, as we see with the growth of the Far Right across Europe and the Americas. By tracing and analysing the circuits of exchange through which ideas about indigeneity were reworked in early twentieth century Chile and Peru, Itinerant Ideas joins in scholarly efforts to dismantle racism. It exposes how racial hierarchies are not the “natural” order of things, but are built and maintained, and as such, can be unbuilt, destroyed. Hence the stories of racism and anti-racism that populate its pages. Both are significant. If large-scale co-operation as well as conflict is based on myths, then how people co-operate with or antagonise one another can be altered by changing the myths. In other words, by telling different stories.

PART I

Indigeneity and Labour: Contested Class Struggles

Introduction The first part of Itinerant Ideas addresses the well-established argument that the construction of racial stereotypes about indigenous peoples in Latin America has gone hand in hand with the exercise of political and economic power, and more specifically with the exploitation of labour and the expropriation of land.1 One of the most renowned intellectual figures to talk in these terms and to make such terms part of a widespread conversation in the early twentieth century was the Peruvian journalist, essayist and philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930)—“Latin America’s foremost Marxist thinker”, in the words of French-Brazilian sociologist Michael Löwy.2 Via books, conference papers and journal publications, Mariátegui urged his contemporaries to “give life to an Indo-American socialism reflecting our own reality and in our own language.”3 As he told it, that “reality” was a simple one: the peasantry in early twentieth-century Peru constituted the majority of the exploited masses and therefore had to form the basis of any revolutionary movement. Mariátegui also made the crucial point that the peasantry in Peru and the wider region was predominantly indigenous. He wrote of the “practical socialism” that he saw in contemporary indigenous rural life—a collectivist tradition that dated back to the pre-Columbian Inca past. To his mind, such a long-standing  Gotkowitz, Introduction to Histories of Race and Racism, p. 11.   ‘Mariategui’s Heroic Socialism—Interview with Michael Löwy’, December 2018. 3  ‘Aniversario y balance’, Amauta 3, (September 1928), p. 3. 1 2

Jacobin,

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collectivist tradition and natural solidarity would ensure the resonance of socialist ideas, and therefore the development of a powerful communist movement in Peru. Apart from the three years he spent in Europe in the early 1920s, Mariátegui did not travel very much.4 He had many health problems linked to a serious leg injury he suffered as a child and, as a result, spent most of his life in or around Lima.5 He only went once to the Peruvian sierra (Huancayo), and then not for more than a few weeks.6 In 1929, Mariátegui spoke of relocating to Buenos Aires. He had not been to Argentina before, or indeed to any other Latin American country. Why did he want to leave Peru at this point? “For the last five years I have faced a difficult struggle in Peru”, he explained in a letter dated 27 December 1929, but it had recently gotten much worse: the police had raided his home, taken all his papers, and placed him under house arrest. The recipient of this letter was Chilean novelist and popular chronicler Joaquín Edwards Bello (1887–1968).7 Mariátegui told Edwards Bello that he wanted to travel to Buenos Aires via Valparaíso and Santiago so he could “embrace [his] Chilean friends” and “get a brief glimpse of the country”. But he never made it to Chile or Argentina. He died on 16 April 1930 at the age of just thirty-five. So, Mariátegui did not travel around Latin America and hardly travelled within Peru. But his writings did travel. In a recent commemorative publication, the Aymara writer José Luis Ayala describes how Mariátegui’s avant-garde journal Amauta (1926–1930) circulated throughout Peru “due to the networks of agents that Mariátegui built up”. He tells the story, for example, of Vicente Mendoza Díaz and his brother Julio who were responsible for taking copies of Amauta and Mariátegui’s seminal Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928) from Lima to 4  Mariátegui travelled to Paris via New York in October 1919. As Nicola Miller tells us, the Parisian climate did not suit his fragile health, so he moved on to Rome within a couple of months. He stayed in Italy until June 1922. From there he travelled to Munich, Vienna, Berlin, Prague, and Budapest, before returning to Lima in March 1923. See Reinventing Modernity, pp. 150–152. 5  From 1924, when his right leg was amputated, Mariátegui was permanently in a wheelchair. 6  Alberto Flores Galindo, La agonía de Mariátegui: La polémica con la Komintern (Lima: DECSO, 1980), p. 41. 7  The letter is available via the digital archive of Chile’s National Library—http://www. bibliotecanacionaldigital.gob.cl.

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Huancané.8 Nicola Miller singles out Siete ensayos as a “canonical work” which has had a lasting influence not just in Peru but across the entire region.9 And Peruvian politician Sergio Tejada talks of this text finding “its way around the globe”.10 Circulation is not a given or incidental occurrence.11 Mariátegui himself played a central role in ensuring the dissemination of his writings as did many other individuals. Sometimes the people enabling the circulation of Mariátegui’s vision of Indo-American socialism were formal distributors, i.e. publishing houses that were paid to do the work. Sometimes they were colleagues and friends, such as Gamaliel Churata (director of Boletín Titikaka in Puno) or Joaquín García Monge (director of Repertorio Americano in San José, Costa Rica), who used their own magazines to promote his work (as he did for them through Amauta). Sometimes they were young students like the Mendoza Díaz brothers who carried his Siete ensayos and Amauta from the Peruvian capital to the rural hinterland in their bags. Mariátegui’s private correspondence further emphasises the significance of individual agency in the spread of ideas. His letters allow us to build up a picture of how individuals connected to one another and functioned as part of a broader network. When Mariátegui wrote to Edwards Bello about his impending trip to Chile in 1929, he told his friend: Concha Romero James told me the copy of 7 Ensayos de Interpretación de la Realidad Peruana that I dedicated to you never arrived. I am sending on another copy today. Let me know when you get this, and if you received the book by Eguren./ The bearer of this letter is the nicest person: Blanca del Prado, a young and admirable poet of the ‘Amauta’ group. She does not yet have intellectual connections beyond Peru. […]/ ‘Amauta’ is most fond of her. It holds you in great esteem too.

Mariátegui wanted to make sure Edwards Bello got a dedicated copy of his new book—an indication of how books could help to consolidate

8  See special issue of the Boletín Casa Museo José Carlos Mariátegui (No. 100, January– March 2019), entitled ‘100 Intelectuales saludan a Mariátegui’, p. 10. 9  Miller, Reinventing Modernity, p. 144. 10  In ‘100 Intelectuales saludan a Mariátegui’, p. 22. 11  Gänger, ‘Circulation’, p. 312.

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personal relationships, regardless of their thematic content.12 In other words, the fact of exchange was as important as what was being exchanged. Still, Edwards Bello was likely receptive to, or at least interested in, what Mariátegui had to say in Siete ensayos. He was a member of the Radical Party, socialised with leftist writers like Pablo Neruda, and was consistently critical of Chilean elites, for their lack of nationalism and indifference toward the plight of the working classes, and of the state’s propensity to violently suppress—rather than engage with the social problems highlighted by—labour protests.13 As well as sharing his own work, Mariátegui was keen to promote the writings of the Peruvian avant-garde poet José María Eguren (1874–1942).14 His presentation letter also spoke of the Arequipa-born writer Blanca del Prado (1903–1979). Mariátegui ensured a direct encounter between her and Edwards Bello, with praise for each of them via Amauta (it was “most fond” of her and held him “in great esteem”) intended as the glue to initiate a collaborative Chilean-Peruvian relationship.15 For Blanca del Prado, this represented a significant milestone; as Mariátegui commented, it would be her first foray into the transnational intellectual sphere. The last person to feature in Mariategui’s 1929 letter is the Mexican cultural diplomat Concha Romero James (1900–1987), who would soon 12  For an excellent account of the significance of books as objects of exchange see Patience Schell, The Sociable Sciences: Darwin and His Contemporaries in Chile (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 13  By 1929, Edwards Bello had already published El roto (1920), an implicitly political novel about “the Santiago lumpenproletariat” that was positively reviewed in Amauta. He had also published a collection of essays Nationalismo continental (1925), which was at least partly a response to and celebration of the anti-imperialism of Peruvian activist Víctor Raul Haya de la Torre. Edwards Bello was also a prolific journalist, and he used his newspaper columns to speak out against government-authorised atrocities such as the massacre of nitrate workers in Iquique in 1907. See Gerald Martin, ‘Literature, Music and the Visual Arts, 1870–1930’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.), A Cultural History of Latin America, p. 119, and Barr Melej, Reforming Chile, pp. 124–126. 14  The “book of Eguren” was likely Poesías, published by Mariátegui’s Editorial Minerva that same year. 15  Del Prado published poems in Amauta in 1929 and 1930. In Chile, she collaborated with the Revista de Educación and corresponded with Mariátegui about sending copies of Amauta and Siete ensayos to this magazine. Carlos Manuel Cox invited Edwards Bello to participate in Amauta in 1927 and it publicised his books El roto and Un chileno en Madrid. See Beverly Adams and Natalia Majluf, Redes de vanguardia: Amauta y América Latina, 1926–1930 (Lima: Asociación Museo de Arte de Lima, 2019), p. 291.

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take on the role of assistant chief of the Pan American Union’s Division of Intellectual Cooperation.16 It was she who informed Mariátegui that the first copy of Siete ensayos had not reached Edwards Bello—an indication that she was familiar with the epistolary and object exchanges of both intellectuals. And she seemed to take it upon herself to intervene when she became aware of blockages in the system. Exactly how important Romero James was to Mariátegui as a porteur of his ideas and writings, or at least how important she perceived herself (and her husband, Earle K. James) to be, comes across more clearly still in a letter that she wrote to the Peruvian Marxist philosopher in September 1928: I have not forgotten the wonderful time spent at your home when I was passing through Lima. It is one of the best memories I have of Peru’s beautiful capital. I need to ask a big favour of you. As you will remember, I told you my husband writes for various North American newspapers and magazines, such as The New York Times, Current History, [and] The Arts […]. He’s just sent me an urgent telegram […] as he’s been contracted by The New York Times to write a series of articles on Latin American authors […] If you could recommend any books, I would be hugely grateful. I would be even more grateful if you and your friends could send your own books, and he can help to disseminate and publicise them in the U.S. Such publicity is no small thing. In the case of La Vorágine, within a few weeks of my husband publishing his review in The Times, all copies in Bogotá had sold out…17

Romero James wrote this letter from Chile. It shows that she had been moving between Chile and Peru: she was in Peru just prior to going to Chile, and she wrote of going back there soon, via Bolivia and Argentina. This time she wanted to visit Cuzco and said she would shortly be asking Mariátegui for contact details of people there—“interesting people who are concerned about the Indian problem.” Her letter then finished with a post-note suggesting that Mariátegui “write something on the 16  Whilst working for the Pan American Union, Romero James set up one of the initial models of contemporary art information exchange with the newsletter Correo. She also prepared overviews of literature on and from Latin America, such as the Annotated Bibliography of Latin American Literature, published in 1939. See Claire Fox, Making Art Pan American: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 17  Letter dated 16 September 1928. Accessible through the Archivo José Carlos Mariátegui, at http://104.236.95.101/index.php/carta-de-concha-romero-james-1928-09-16.

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reestablishment of relations between Chile and Peru, for a Chilean newspaper or magazine.”18 “I think they would welcome a piece from you”, she said, “on this or any other issue.” She pressed home the importance of “re-start[ing] intellectual relations between these countries!!” and, in such a context, presented herself as a critical cross-border mediator: “If you’d like, I can help to open doors here for Peruvian writers, and I can also arrange for Chileans to send writings to you in Peru.” Another person who sought to “open doors” for Mariátegui in Chile was Peruvian political militant Julián Petrovick (pseudonym for Federico Bolaño). Whilst in exile in Santiago in 1930, Petrovick wrote to Mariátegui: I learnt all the details about what happened to you and other compañeros from Blanquita del Prado, and I’ve written to Argentina, Brazil and Central America about it. I anxiously await more news […] I think there will be a meeting later this year for all of us who fight for the revolutionary ideal. I have great hopes for this meeting. El Mercurio said that you might attend. The next issue of ‘Letras’ will publish your portrait, as part of a brief commentary piece by me. If you could send something to include too, that would be wonderful […] I want to make sure people here know who you are, and that they value your work.19

Blanca del Prado re-emerges here as an important emissary, passing on the news to Petrovick about Augusto Leguía’s repression of political dissidence in Peru. Petrovick spoke of mobilising his international connections across Latin America in defence of Mariátegui and other “comrades”. He also called attention to the visibility that he had through Chilean periodicals and how this could be used to promote Mariátegui’s work. His “commentary piece” on Mariátegui was to be published in the literary supplement of El Mercurio—meaning we have a notoriously right-wing newspaper encouraging Chilean readers to acquaint themselves with and value the work of a Peruvian Marxist thinker. In 1930, Petrovick aligned himself with the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), which opposed the socialist vision of Indo-America promoted by Mariátegui. And yet the letter makes it clear that this Aprista would be writing about Mariátegui’s work in very positive terms. Possibly, he sought to re-present 18  That re-establishment of relations was made formal through the signing of the Treaty of Lima in 1929. 19  Letter dated 7 February 1930. Accessible through the Archivo José Carlos Mariátegui at http://archivo.mariategui.org/index.php/carta-de-julian-petrovick-7-2-1930.

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Mariátegui’s thinking to make it coincide with APRA’s agenda. More likely, Petrovick perceived important connections between the two, and deemed Mariátegui’s contributions to be worthy of dissemination despite the disagreements between Apristas and Communists. If the latter is an accurate summary, this is a good illustration of how debates about “the revolutionary ideal” taking place in Chile were able to cut across the party-­ political lines dividing the left in Peru. Through these three letters we detect the depth and breadth of the transnational networks Mariátegui was involved in, and of the importance of the exchange of objects—in this case, mainly books and periodicals. We also begin to appreciate how Mariátegui’s relationships were created and sustained by the act of letter writing. What makes Mariátegui particularly relevant to the first part of this book, exploring the link between race-­ making and the organisation of labour, is the fact that he interacted with Chilean intellectuals of different political affiliations, and, through them, ensured that his writings on the “indigenous problem” reached readers in Chile. Chile was also home to many Peruvian exiles through the 1930s who engaged with and interrogated Mariátegui’s vision for socialist revolution in Latin America. The first chapter of Part I begins by mapping out the formative years of the main political parties who claimed to speak for labour in early twentieth century Chile and Peru—the Communist and Socialist Parties in Chile, and the Socialist-turned-Communist Party and APRA in Peru— and highlights how they interacted with and were impacted by one another. It then investigates the heated discussions about the “Problem of Race” that took place at the First Conference of Communist Parties of Latin America (Buenos Aires, 1929), paying special attention to how Mariátegui brought Chile and Peru together in his defence of Indo-­ American Socialism. The third section of Chap. 2 traces the precarious alliances established between indigenous organisers and the Left in Chile and Peru during the 1920s and 1930s. The penultimate section zooms in on Peruvian Apristas living in Chile during the 1930s and 1940s, analysing how they impacted on the Chilean cultural and political scene and, vice versa, how the latter helped to shape Aprismo. Finally, Chap. 2 scrutinises the intellectual output of Riga-born Chilean Communist Alejandro Lipschutz (1883–1980), and how this related to Chilean national specificities as well as the institutionalisation of indigenismo at a hemispheric level during the 1940s. In all, Chap. 2 reveals “Indo-America” as a multi-­ authored narrative, in which both Chile and Peru played starring roles.

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Chapter 3 focuses on the question of land ownership. After exploring Chilean-Peruvian intellectual and artistic exchanges (via Mexico) about the urgency of agrarian reform in defence of indigenous communities in the 1920s and 1930s, this chapter shows how successive governments in both countries proceeded to reduce indigenous land tenure over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. It then explores the transnational aspects of the violent cyclical history of dispossession, indigenous rebellion (against dispossession), and state repression (of rebellion) from the 1910s through 1930s. Finally, it shows how indigenous intellectuals in both countries made it clear that their problems with landowners and the state was not just about the economic worth of land. The third chapter of Part I investigates Chilean-Peruvian conversations about indigenous labour that took place through the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the conferences it sponsored during the 1930s and 1940s. These conversations foregrounded the valuable contributions made to society by indigenous agricultural workers, whilst also denouncing the ways in which they had been neglected by evolving labour legislation. We also see how the urban indigenous worker became increasingly visible in cultural production and policy discussions. Building on these narratives, the penultimate part of Chap. 4 probes early-to mid-twentieth century debates about the relationship between indigenous art and industry, whilst the final section delves into the racialised dimensions of one specific aspect of labour legislation: public health. Here we glimpse how indigenous peoples were sometimes recast as the solution to—rather than the root of—national problems. All three chapters together press home my broader argument that the connections between race and the organisation (or control) of labour in Latin America are more fully understood when studied beyond, as well as within, the confines of each nation-state.

CHAPTER 2

Socialism, Communism and Aprismo: Revolutionary Languages of Race

The consanguinity of the Indian movement with world revolutionary currents is too evident to need documentation. I have said already that I reached an understanding and appreciation of the Indian through socialism. —José Carlos Mariátegui, 1928

In Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928), José Carlos Mariátegui described becoming aware of “the Indian” through socialism. For this Marxist philosopher, the fundamental problem facing Peru in the early twentieth century was not a racial one; it was social and economic. But race had “its role in the problem and in the means to address it.”1 In other words, indigenous people suffered racial discrimination and indigenous political mobilisation was key to revolutionary change, but theirs was essentially a class struggle related to land ownership; resolve the land problem and the “Indian problem” is resolved. In 1928, Mariátegui created what was to become the Communist Party of Peru. The Peruvian Aprista Party (PAP), born from the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) in 1930, also features prominently in this chapter. Both the Communists and the Apristas presented themselves as champions of the labouring classes in Peru, and in this context claimed

1

 Cited in de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos, p. 128.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Crow, Itinerant Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01952-4_2

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leadership and ownership of indigenous struggles for justice. They made the “exploited Indian” of the present central to their revolutionary rhetoric, but also drew strength from the grandiose imperial past of the Inca which depended on collectivist traditions and thus provided part of a blueprint for a radical utopian future. The best illustration of Mariátegui’s indigenista discourse was the avant-garde magazine he created in 1926 and edited until his death in 1930. Its title was Amauta—a Quechua word meaning “wise one” or “teacher”, visualised by the Peruvian painter and muralist José Sabogal (1888-1956) on successive front covers (see Fig. 2.1 below). For its part, APRA named some of its cells (in the early underground days) after Inca emperors and composed songs that included Quechua battle cries.2 Ample studies exist on the indigenista dimensions of the programs of the Communist and Aprista parties in Peru. These probe the connections between indigenismo and their plans for revolution, as well as the limitations, superficiality, and sometimes hypocrisy of their indigenista declarations.3 The Communist Party of Chile, founded in 1922, spoke much less about the “indigenous question” than its counterpart in Peru.4 Early-­ twentieth century Chile had no equivalent of Mariátegui. It had no journals like Amauta. Indeed, scholars tend to concur that indigenismo was largely absent or irrelevant across the Chilean political spectrum during this period, when congressmen and intellectuals—as in Peru—vigorously debated what to do about the (problems faced and threat posed by the) 2  Eric Helleiner and Antulio Rosales, ‘Toward Global IPE: The Overlooked Significance of the Haya-Mariátegui Debate’, International Studies Review 19 (2017), p. 675 3  For example, Thomas Davies, ‘The Indigenismo of the Peruvian Aprista Party: A Reinterpretation’, The Hispanic American Historical Review 51: 4 (1971), pp.  626-645; Flores Galindo, La agonía de Mariátegui,; Jaymie Patricia Heilman, ‘We will no longer be servile: Aprismo in 1930s Ayacucho’, Journal of Latin American Studies 38: 3 (2006), pp. 491-518; Gerardo Leibner, El mito del socialismo indígena en Mariátegui (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1999); José Tamayo Herrera, Historia del indigenismo cuzqueño, siglos xvi-xx (Cuzco: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1980). 4  Whilst certainly not ignoring earlier periods, work on the left and indigenous politics in Chile tends to centre on the second half of the twentieth century, especially the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende. See, for example, Florencia Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906–2001 (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) and Augusto Samaniego Mesías and Carlos Ruiz Rodríguez, Mentalidades y políticas wingka: Pueblo mapuche entre ‘golpe’ y ‘golpe’ (de Ibáñez a Pinochet) (Madrid: CSIS, 2007).

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Fig. 2.1  Front cover of Amauta, September 1926

working classes.5 Chapter 2 shows that discussions about the confluence of the “indigenous question” and class struggle were neither absent nor irrelevant in Chile, and, moreover, that Peruvians were aware of and commented on such discussions. Previous literature has underscored the transnational dimensions of leftist political activism in both Chile and Peru, as well as the transnational dimensions of (state) repression of such

5  Barr-Melej, Reforming Chile; Pike, ‘Aspects of Class Relations’; Jorge Larraín, Identity and Modernity in Latin America (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

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activism.6 In fact, most recent scholarship on APRA adopts an explicitly transnational approach.7 Occasionally, historians have pinpointed specific connections between Chilean and Peruvian labour organisers.8 However, these cross-border exchanges and their ramifications are rarely central to the analysis, and when they are, as in Josh Savala’s excellent work, race-­ making (or unmaking) is not the focus.9 It is here. This chapter explores how the leftist political parties that claimed for speak for labour in early twentieth century Chile and Peru brought “the Indian” into their narratives of class revolution and highlights certain moments when these appeared to be co-authored by Chileans and Peruvians together. After mapping out the institutional development of the Socialist, Communist and Aprista parties in the 1920s, it centres in on the First Conference of Communist Parties of Latin America (Buenos Aires, 1929) which enabled a spirited debate about indigenous rights to self-determination. There were no Chileans present at the conference but the report by the Peruvian delegation wrote Chile into a transnational history of Inca primitive communism that lived on in the present. The main protagonists in these first two sections of Chap. 2 are Mariátegui and leader of APRA Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (1895-1979), but they are joined by other important leftist politicians such as Eudocio Ravines 6  On Chile, see Olga Ulianova, ‘Revelando un mito: Emisarios de la Internacional Comunista en Chile’, Historia 41: 1 (2008), p. 99-164; and Heraldo Muñoz, ‘La politica internacional del Partido Socialista y las relaciones exteriores de Chile’, in Eduardo Ortiz (ed.), Temas socialistas (Santiago: VECTOR, 1983). On Peru, see Steven J. Hirsch, ‘Peruvian Anarcho-Syndicalism: Adapting Transnational Influences and Forging Counter-Hegemonic Practices’, in Hirsch and van de Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 7  See Geneviève Dorais, ‘Coming of Age in Exile: Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and the Genesis of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, 1923-1931’, Hispanic American Historical Review 97: 4 (2017), pp.  651-679; García-Bryce, ‘Transnational Activist…’; Ricardo Melgar Bao, Redes i imaginario de exilio en México y América Latina (Mexico City: CIALC, 2018); Martin Bergel, La desmesura revolucionaria: cultura y política en los orígenes del APRA (Lima: La Siniestra Ensayos, 2019) 8  Several of the Comintern representatives in Chile that Ulianova discusses were Peruvian. Craib touches upon collaborations between Chilean and Peruvian labour activists in his book Cry of the Renegade. Paulo Drinot refers to a 1931 ‘Plan for Revolutionary Emulation between the sister parties of Chile and Peru’. He also notes that Apristas’ denunciations of Communism frequently incorporated Chile. See ‘Creole Anti-Communism: Labor, the Peruvian Communist Party, and APRA, 1930-1934’, Hispanic American Historical Review 92: 4 (2012), p. 719 and p. 725. 9  Savala, ‘Ports of Transnational Labor Organizing’.

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(1897-1979) and Hugo Pesce (1900-1969) from Peru, and Carlos Contreras Labarca (1899-1982) from Chile. The third section, which brings renowned indigenous activists such as Quechua linguist Francisco Chuqiwanka Ayulo (1877-1957) and Mapuche leader Manuel Aburto Panguilef (1887-1952) into the story, points to significant overlaps between indigenous political strategising (vis-à-vis the left) in Chile and Peru, concentrating mainly on the 1920s and 1930s. I then move on to the experience of Peruvian Aprista exiles living in Chile during the 1930s and 1940s, namely Luis Alberto Sánchez (1900-1994) and Magda Portal. I underscore their endeavours not only to incorporate Chile into a continent-wide quest for social and racial justice (meaning this quest could be shaped by Chile), but also to understand what was going on in Peru from Chile and reflect on its significance in conversation with Chileans. The final section of the chapter draws attention to the Latvian-Chilean scientist Alejandro Lipschutz (1883-1980), who brought biology and anthropology together to advance an innovative, widely circulated, argument—picked up in Peru—about indigenous identity and social mobility. The transnational approach allows us to interrogate further the radical potential of leftist indigenismo to destabilise colonial racial divisions. It also reveals the shortcomings of such a movement, particularly when indigenous people were conceived as passive victims, deeply rooted in the cultural traditions of the past, rather than politically aware subjects capable of adapting to and questioning the logic of globalised capitalism.

Distinct yet Interwoven Histories of Party-Political Mobilisation Chilean socialism had its roots in the nineteenth century but did not become institutionalised until the early twentieth century. This happened in 1912 with the foundation of the Socialist Workers Party (POS) by Elías Lafferte (1886-1961) and Luis Emilio Recabarren (1876-1924). In 1922, the POS became the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh), which was closely tied to the Soviet Union and the Communist International (Comintern)— an organisation established by Lenin in 1919 with the proclaimed objective of promoting world revolution.10 In line with mid-1930s directives 10  Sergio Grez Toso, Historia del comunismo en Chile: La era de Recabarren (1912-1924) (Santiago: Ediciones LOM, 2011).

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from Moscow, about forging alliances with other political parties to combat fascism, the Communist Party of Chile participated in the Popular Front governments led by the Radical Party leaders Pedro Aguirre Cerda (1938-1941) and Juan Antonio Ríos (1942-1946).11 The Socialist Party of Chile, officially created in 1933, also participated in Aguirre Cerda’s administration.12 Existing historiography suggests that Peruvian Communist, Eudocio Ravines, who was in Chile between 1935 and 1936 and between 1938 and 1940, played an important role in this shift towards coalition politics.13 Olga Ulianova describes Ravines as an “emissary” of the Comintern, even though he was often reprimanded for refusing to follow orders from Moscow. Indeed, she notes that some political leaders, such as Gabriel González Videla (president from 1946 to 1952), claimed him as “the true father” of the Chilean Popular Front.14 Unlike Chile, there was no socialist tradition in early twentieth century Peru.15 The country did, however, see the growth of important anarchist and syndicalist oriented labour movements during the 1900s and 1910s, as part of a broader global history of increasing social unrest.16 Mariátegui became involved with these movements and by 1918, Nicola Miller tells us, openly identified himself as a socialist—“helping to found a Committee of Socialist Propaganda and Organisation, and rapidly moving toward the radical end of the spectrum between reformism and revolution.”17 It was he who established the Socialist Party of Peru (PSP) in 1928 and served as its first leader. After Mariátegui’s premature death in 1930, Eudocio Ravines—the same Ravines who later became involved in political developments in Chile—assumed the leadership of the party and, following a bitter internecine dispute, renamed it the Communist Party of Peru 11  Report of the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International (London: Modern Books, 1935); Chapter 5 of Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (London: MacMillan, 1996), pp. 120-143; and ‘Dice Contreras Labarca: Reafirmamos nuestro apoyo al Gobierno de Aguirre C.’, Ercilla, 27 December 1939, p. 6. 12  Paul Drake, ‘The Chilean Socialist Party and Coalition Politics, 1932-1946’, The Hispanic American Historical Review 53: 4 (1973), pp. 619-643. 13  For example, Ulianova, ‘Revelando un mito…’ 14  Ibid. Ravines similarly casts himself as the mastermind behind the Chilean Popular Front in The Yenan Way (New York: Scribner’s, 1951). 15  Miller, Reinventing Modernity, p. 153. 16  Helleiner and Rosales, ‘Toward Global IPE’, p. 669. 17  Miller, Reinventing Modernity, p. 154. For a slightly different account of Mariátegui’s incipient socialism, see Flores Galindo, La agonía de Mariátegui, pp. 73-74.

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(PCP).18 Unlike their counterpart in Chile, the PCP did not have the opportunity to take part in a coalition government. During the early years and much beyond, it either functioned in opposition to the government in power or was officially banned. As commented by Paulo Drinot, “most card-carrying Communists spent the best part of the 1930s in jail.”19 The reality of repression in early twentieth-century Peru helps to explain why its Communist Party largely failed to capture labour and thus was “small, weak and electorally insignificant”.20 But Drinot asserts that this was not the only reason. It was also because of the PCP’s political strategy (for example, trying to control rather than work with trade unions), and because it came up against a powerful nationalist, populist, and (what was to become) anti-communist rival: APRA. Before he founded the Socialist Party, Mariátegui was an APRA sympathiser. APRA’s first “cell” was created in Paris in 1926.21 For the first few years, APRA functioned as an international movement with sections or cells, comprised of Peruvian activists exiled during the government of Augusto Leguía (1919-1930), who promoted the APRA agenda in various Latin American countries as well as in Europe. That agenda was encapsulated in five main points: anti-imperialism; nationalisation of land and industry; continental unity; internationalisation of the Panama Canal; and solidarity with all oppressed peoples of the world. It was institutionalised as a national political force with the creation of the Peruvian Aprista Party (PAP) in September 1930, which went on to become the country’s “most important political party for most of the twentieth century.”22 APRA’s leader, Haya de la Torre, was strongly influenced by Marxism. He travelled to Russia in 1924 and attended the Fifth Congress of the Communist Party whilst there. He spoke of the need to draw universal lessons from the Russian experience, but—like Mariátegui—he sought to adjust these to Latin American realities. Many of Haya’s early public declarations on the “indigenous question” likewise coincided with the views of Mariátegui. In 1925, for example, Haya proclaimed that it was impossible “to achieve rehabilitation, renovation, or justice [in Peru] without 18  Kathleen Weaver, Peruvian Rebel: The World of Magda Portal, with a Selection of her Poems (University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2010) p. 97. 19  Drinot, ‘Creole Anti-Communism’, p. 708. 20  Ibid., p. 703. 21  Iñigo García Bryce, Haya de la Torre and the Pursuit of Power in Twentieth-Century Peru and Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), p. 28. 22  Miller, Reinventing Modernity, p. 145.

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facing the economic problem of our Indian, the great base of our exploited class, who is the worker, the soldier, the producer, and the backbone of the nation.” Any legitimate “revolutionary action”, he said, had “to orient itself toward [the Indian problem of Peru] with seriousness and energy”.23 Despite their shared ideas Mariátegui and Haya parted ways within a couple of years of APRA’s launch. In 1927, Haya attended the First International Congress against Imperialism and Colonialism in Brussels. According to Iñigo García Bryce, this conference marked a “turning point in Haya’s relationship with international communism.”24 He became increasingly critical of Comintern for itself acting as an imperialist force. Tailoring his Marxism to Latin American realities, Haya eventually discarded the idea of proletarian revolution and began to defend a cross-class alliance between peasants, industrial workers, and the middle classes as the best means of challenging ruling oligarchies. Mariátegui did not endorse the (constantly changing) Stalinist doctrine of the Comintern; he promoted a distinctly Indo-American Socialism but, in contrast to APRA, he prioritised class conflict and proletarian revolution right up until his death. The fall out between Mariátegui and Haya reached a head in 1928. This was when Haya proposed to transform APRA into a national party and when Mariátegui founded the Peruvian Socialist Party. Their dispute is well-documented and scrutinised elsewhere.25 For the purposes of this chapter, I emphasise two key points about it. First, that race featured prominently. Mariátegui criticised Haya for believing that imperialism could be stopped by a nationalist movement led by the bourgeoisie, on the basis that the Peruvian (and Latin American) bourgeoisie was fundamentally racist: “The feudal or bourgeois elements in our countries feel the same contempt for Indians, as well as for Blacks and mulattos, as do the white imperialists.” “The solidarity of racisms and prejudice joins class solidarity”, he argued, “in making the national bourgeoisies the docile instruments of Yankee or British imperialism.”26 The second and more important point is that Chilean periodicals followed these polemics, albeit somewhat belatedly, printing the views of both Chilean and Peruvian 23  Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, Por la emancipación de América Latina. Artículos, mensajes, discursos (Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer, Editor, 1927), p. 124. 24  García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre, p. 31. 25  For example, Adam Anderle, Los movimientos políticos en el Perú (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1985); Julio Cotler, Democracia e integración nacional (Lima: IEP, 1980); Flores Galindo, La agonía de Mariátegui; and Helleiner and Rosales, ‘Toward Global IPE’. 26  Cited in Helleiner and Rosales, ‘Toward Global IPE’, p. 682.

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intellectuals. For example, the Santiago-based magazine Índice, founded and directed by the Venezuelan writer Mariano Picon Salas (1901-1965), published several pieces on the Haya-Mariátegui dispute during its short existence (1930-1932), as did the journal Babel, which came out several years later (1939-1951).27 And it was largely in the context of this dispute that exiled Apristas in Chile were so keen for Mariátegui to visit the country on his way to Buenos Aires in 1930. They wanted to confer with him about their divided movement. Looking back years later, Magda Portal wrote: “If Mariátegui had arrived, if he’d been able to meet with us, it is possible he would have united us, and created a new atmosphere, with new political perspectives […] and the course of Peru’s history might have been different.”28 Chile thus emerges as an important intellectual and political terrain through which the trajectory of Peruvian leftist parties was decided, even if this came down to what did not happen there—a missed encounter, a conversation averted due to the death of one of the key players.

Race and Anti-Imperialism at the Margins of the Communist International The First (and last) Conference of Communist Parties of Latin America was held in Buenos Aires in June 1929. This meeting—organised by the Italian-Argentine leader of the Comintern’s South American Secretariat, Victorio Codovilla (1894-1970)—lasted twelve days and was attended by “38 Communist Party representatives from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.”29 Delegates of the Comintern, 27  E.g. Marcos Chamudes, ‘Carta del Perú. Mariátegui y Haya de la Torre’, Indice 1: 5 (August 1930), p.  3 and ‘Más en torno de Mariátegui y Haya de la Torre’, Indice 1: 9 (December 1930), p. 6; Magda Portal, ‘Haya de la Torre y José Carlos Mariátegui’, Indice 1: 6 (September 1930), p. 12; and Julian Petrovick, ‘Carta del Peru’, Indice 1: 9 (December 1930), pp. 7-8. For a useful overview of the long-term reception of Mariátegui in Chile, see Patricio Gutiérrez Donoso, ‘La recepción del pensamiento de José Carlos Mariátegui en Chile’, Analecta Revista de Humanidades 4 (2010), pp. 35-50. 28  Cited in Weaver, Peruvian Rebel, p. 96. 29   ‘Apertura de la Conferencia’ in South American Secretariat of the Communist International, El Movimiento Revolucionario Latino Americano: Versiones de la Primera Conferencia Comunista Latino Americana (Buenos Aires: La Correspondencia Sudamericana, 1929).

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the Comintern’s youth organisation, the Communist Party of France, and of the United States also participated. Chilean communists were unable to attend in any official capacity due to the “worsening of the white terror” under the government of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (1927-31).30 In the opening ceremony, organisers paid tribute to the “three hundred heroic companions from the [Chilean] Communist Party and the Chilean Workers Federation” who had been “arrested and tortured”, as part of a continent-wide “reaction against the proletariat”.31 Not only was this the first meeting of Latin American Communist Parties held under the auspices of the Comintern. It was—as Hugo Pesce, who went by the alias “Saco”, proudly proclaimed when he addressed delegates on 8 June—“the first time that an International Congress of Communist Parties has focused their attention in such a broad and specific manner on the racial problem in Latin America.”32 Saco was one of four Peruvian delegates to travel to Buenos Aires and it was he who presented the preliminary report on this problem. As Saco told it, “El problema de las razas en América Latina” drew together “contributions from comrades of all the delegations”, but historian Marc Becker—building on the important work of Alberto Flores Galindo—attributes the “lengthy treatise” (it was the second longest paper of the conference) to Mariátegui, who was unable to attend the conference due to illness.33 According to Becker, Codovilla—pressured to put the race question on the agenda by the Swiss member of Comintern’s Executive Commission, Jules Humbert Droz—had instructed Mariátegui to prepare a document analysing “the possibility of forming an Indian Republic in South America”.34 This was at a time when many communists around the world were defending “the rights of self-determination for national minorities,

 Ibid.  Ibid. 32  ‘El problema de las razas en América Latina’, in ibid., p. 263. 33  Marc Becker, ‘Mariátegui, the Comintern, and the Indigenous Question in Latin America’, Science & Society 70: 4 (October 2006), pp.  450-479. Amauta published an abbreviated version of this paper a month after the congress, and it was included in the multivolume Obras Completas de José Carlos Mariátegui (1969). Carlos Arroyo Reyes describes “El problema de las razas en América Latina” as a “Peruvian report” and claims that Saco wrote it using Mariátegui’s “basic outline”. See Nuestros años diez: La Asociación ProIndígena, el levantamiento de Rumi Maqui y el incaismo modernista (Libros en Red, 2007). 34  Becker, ‘Mariátegui, the Comintern and the Indigenous Question…’, p. 450. 30 31

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including the right to secede from oppressive state structures.”35 “The Problem of Race in Latin America” was scheduled as the fifth of ten items on the agenda in Buenos Aires and it provoked an extensive and heated debate, in which 12 other delegates (from Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Peru, the United States and Venezuela) intervened. The proposal to create an Indian Republic centred on the Andean region, where Aymara and Quechua speakers represented the greater part of the population, and where the Inca empire had flourished before the arrival of the Spanish. Despite not sending delegates to Buenos Aires, Chile featured prominently in the discussion of the contemporary relevance of Tawantinsuyo. As Saco told delegates, the “‘Inca’ Indians still occupy a vast territory that extends across several different states” including (northern) Chile, as well as Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, and (northern) Argentina.36 Early-twentieth-century Chile was not home to as many indigenous people as Bolivia or Peru, where they made up 60-70% of the total population, but they nevertheless represented “an important group” in the country, he said. Centring on the present-day needs of this trans-­ border collective, Saco explained that the livelihoods of indigenous people “in Peru, Ecuador and Chile, and part of Bolivia” were “tied to agriculture and cattle breeding”, meaning their demands were “fundamentally about land.”37 His report then denounced bourgeois intellectuals who consistently denigrated the Indian “to the point of negating the truth of the most salient aspects of his historical process” (i.e. the reality of “primitive communism among the Inca Indians”) and who “feigned ignorance about the existence of thousands of communities in Peru, Bolivia [and] Chile”.38 The “collectivist spirit” of indigenous people—the basis of the future triumph of socialist revolution—was embodied in their communal ownership of land, he asserted, as well as in their form of social organisation, called the ayllu. (As told by Saco, this distinguished indigenous people from black Latin Americans, who “imported by the colonisers, have no

35  Ibid., p. 461. This was linked to Bolshevik policy in the Soviet Union and the idea that ethnicity was the basis of nation-building. 36  ‘El problema de las razas en América Latina’, in South American Secretariat of the Communist International, El Movimiento Revolucionario Latino Americano, p. 268. 37  Ibid. 38  Ibid., p. 274.

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such attachment to the land, or, really, any traditions of their own”).39 Especially valued was the indigenous “secular custom of minka” whereby if an individual could not do by himself the work that needed doing neighbours would help him complete the task, and he would later repay this help in kind or offer a gift. This was a tradition that “lived on in the territories of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Chile.”40 Mariátegui, via Saco, thus wove Chile into a narrative of indigenous cultural, political, and territorial autonomy, connecting the past and the present. Whilst indigenous communities’ ongoing autonomous social organisation was an important part of Mariategui’s narrative, the report dedicated more time to re-telling the history of exploitation that indigenous people had suffered since European colonisation. Notably, this was a history that they shared with Afro-descendants in Latin America. Both were exploited as agricultural labourers and mine workers, Saco stated, and elites justified such exploitation by asserting these peoples’ racial inferiority—an idea that was “too [widely] discredited to merit the honour of [further] refutation here”.41 The white race’s economic and political power depended on the notion that the indigenous and black proletariat were the proletariat because they were racially inferior. Thus, the race problem was presented as a class problem. Quoting from “a comrade from Brazil”, Saco asserted that “only a government of workers and peasants of all the races” would lead to true emancipation of the continent’s indigenous and black population.42 In other words, to create an independent Indian Republic, thereby dividing rather uniting the proletariat, was not the best way forward. Many Communist Party delegates, such as “Braceras” of Cuba, agreed with the main thrust of Saco’s (Mariátegui’s) report.43 “Peters” of the Youth Communist International, “Martínez” of Venezuela, “Suárez” of Mexico, and “Muñoz” of Argentina saw things differently, however. They asserted that the “indigenous problem” was just as much about cultural and territorial autonomy as land ownership and urged their peers to support indigenous demands for self-determination.44 In the end, no one “won” the debate. Instead, one of the central Comintern representatives closed discussions by reiterating what an important milestone it was to  Ibid., p. 270.  Ibid., p. 278. 41  Ibid., p. 266. 42  Ibid., p. 267. 43  Ibid., pp. 292-294. 44  Ibid., p. 301. 39 40

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finally be talking about the “problem of race” which was complex and intersectional. We do not know what Chilean Communist Party militants would have said on the issue if they had been in Buenos Aires, but we do know that they were talking about indigenous self-determination at least two years before this conference. In February 1927, Carlos Contreras Labarca (1889-1982)—a lawyer and congressional representative for Pisagua and Tarapacá (1926-1930)—informed the Chamber of Deputies on a recent Communist Party Congress and its resolutions regarding the “Problems of the Aborigines”. As summarised by Contreras, the PCCh planned to “fight for the recognition of the right of aboriginal tribes to maintain ownership of the lands that they had inhabited for centuries” and for the “recognition of the same tribes’ right to full autonomy.”45 Chile was therefore not just part of the “problem of race” in Latin America, it was also part of continental conversations about how to resolve this problem.

The Communist Party and Indigenous Politics in Chile and Peru Not once did any delegate at the First Conference of Communist Parties of Latin America directly reference the views of indigenous people. And yet Mariátegui corresponded with several prominent indigenous activist-­ intellectuals in Peru, such as Francisco Chuqiwanka Ayulo, and regularly published news on their campaigns and protests in Amauta. On 6 February 1927, for example, Chuqiwanka wrote to Mariátegui to say that he had just received the fifth issue of Amauta, read it “avidly”, and come across a piece on himself, which included a letter that he had sent to the law courts in Puno the previous August. Chuqiwanka had little hope of obtaining the justice for which he was fighting but stressed how grateful he was for the “kind lines” that Mariátegui had dedicated to him, and the fact that his journal publicised the letter.46 Chuqiwanka wrote again in April 1927, celebrating “the great work” of Amauta. “[W]hat would become of Peru”, he exclaimed, “without Amauta?”—a journal of such “strongly felt and proudly expressed ideals” that it had become a “a beaming light in the darkness” (likely an allusion to Augusto Leguía’s dictatorship). 45  Cámara de Diputados, Sesiones extraordinarias (sesión 86a, debating Indigenous Lands Division Law), 2 February 1927. 46  The letter is available through the Archivo Histórico Joséá Carlos Mariátegui at http:// archivo.mariategui.org/index.php/carta-de-francisco-chuqiwanqa-ayulo-6-2-1927.

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Ricardo Melgar Bao has drawn attention to many other indigenous political organisers who collaborated with Mariátegui: Mariano Larico Yujra, Carlos Qana, Ricardo Santos, Julián Ayar Quispe, Juan Perez, Mariano Paco, Hipolito Salazar, Manuel Camacho Alqa, and Ezequiel Urviola.47 He claims all of these were familiar with and inspired by Mariátegui’s writings. He cites Camacho Alqa, for example, once saying “[I feel like] he wrote Siete ensayos especially for me.” Melgar Bao also makes it clear, though, that indigenous adhesion to communism went beyond Mariátegui and beyond Peru. As early as 1921, a group of indigenous leaders from Peru, Bolivia and northern Argentina wrote to the Argentine Communist Rodolfo Ghioldi (1897-1985)—who was due to attend the forthcoming Third Comintern Congress in Moscow—to express their desire to be part of this global organisation.48 In 1924, the Peruvian Regional Indigenous Workers Federation (FIORP, created in December 1923) issued a manifesto pledging to “raise high our banner of Communism” and insisting “the Indian” was communist “por derecho”, “por costumbre”, and “por tradición.” It was published, amongst other places, in the Communist newspaper of Mexico City, El Machete.49And in 1926, founder of FIORP, Hipolito Salazar, submitted a report to the South American Secretariat of Comintern in Buenos Aires affirming that in “Cuzco and Puno alone there are more than 200 indigenous federations and all of them sympathise with communism.”50 This was two years before the Socialist Party was formally established in Peru. When the Communist Party was competing in the 1931 presidential election in Peru its candidate was Eduardo Quispe Quispe.51 As Marisol de la Cadena has noted, the PCP repeatedly emphasised the indigenous identity of its candidate during the electoral campaign and spoke at length of the “exploited Indians”, especially in Cuzco. She quotes one of the party’s fliers of the time: “Let us appeal to our soldier brothers who are workers and Indians like us: Do not fire against the ayllus, but instead help them to recover their lands!”52 And she indicates that it was two-way 47  Ricardo Melgar Bao, ‘José Carlos Mariátegui y los indígenas: Más allá de la mirada, diálogo y traducción’, Boletín de Antropología Americana 31 (July 1995—December 1997), pp. 131-141. 48  Ibid., p. 135. 49  Ibid., p. 136. 50  La Correspondencia Sudamericana, Año 1: 15, 15 November 1926. Cited in ibid., p. 138. 51  Basadre, 1964, cited in de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos, p. 129. 52  In ibid., p. 129.

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conversation, with indigenous leaders, such as Mariano Turpo of the Sindicato de Campesinos de Lauramarca, adopting class vocabulary and activities as an important part of their struggle for indigenous rights. Existing literature also points, however, to there being some major limitations and obstacles to collaboration between the PCP and indigenous leaders. Mariano Larico Yujra once said that the Communists chose an indigenous candidate in 1931 “just to ruffle feathers”. As Drinot rightly points out, this “can be read as either a challenge to the prevailing racialised order or a racist act in itself.”53 According to María Elena Oliva, under Ravines (who took over from Mariátegui) the Communist Party abandoned its pro-indigenous rhetoric, focusing almost exclusively on revolution as a class struggle.54 Moreover, as numerous historians such as Drinot have noted, state repression in the 1930s forced the PCP underground and it largely disbanded.55 In other words, there was not much of a PCP with which to collaborate during this period. The political scenario in early-twentieth century Chile was quite different to Peru. Ibáñez’s “white terror” in the late 1920s and González Videla’s “Ley Maldita” of 1948 apart, this was a country where the Communist Party played a major role on the national political stage, with representatives in congress throughout the period who were able to publicly challenge the government or to participate directly in government. The story of the relationship between indigenous political activists and the Chilean Communist Party, however, had some important similarities to that which unfolded in Peru, veering as it did between alliance and mismatch. In June 1934, campesinos in Lonquimay rebelled against the southern frontier region’s most powerful landowning families and demanded their rights to land on the Ranquil estate. It was “Chile’s largest and most violent rural uprising” and yet, as Thomas Miller Klubock comments, “strikingly little has been written” on it.56 Reporting back to the meeting of the  Drinot, ‘Creole Anti-Communism’, p. 708.  María Elena Oliva, La negritud, el indianismo y sus intelectuales (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 2014), p. 52. 55  Drinot, ‘Creole Anti-Communism’, p. 707. 56  Campesinos managed to take control of a significant area of land but after ten days were overpowered by the military police. Hundreds fled across the Andes. Many of those who did not were taken prisoner, becoming “Chile’s first detenidos-desaparecidos”. Thomas Miller Klubock, La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 91-92. 53 54

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South American Secretariat of the Communist International in 1935, Contreras Labarca described the PCCh as the driving force behind the uprising in Lonquimay. “From early 1934”, he said, “the Party Leadership focused its attention on Lonquimay, in order to prevent the eviction of campesinos from their lands, and to call for […] solidarity between all the campesinos and indigenous people of this region.”57 Klubock too notes the participation of the PCCh, but he allocates them a secondary, auxiliary role, as supporters of “the Sindicato Agrícola Lonquimay which led the uprising”.58 Either way, for Olga Ulianova, Ranquil marked a shift in the Chilean Communist Party’s policy.59 To her mind, it was from this point on that the PCCh started pushing for the return of indigenous ancestral lands—as well as the right of peasants more generally to own the land that they farmed—and calling for the establishment of an Araucanian Republic. As commented by Andre Menard and Jorge Pavez, Ulianova elides the fact that proclamations of independence had already been issued by indigenous peoples themselves.60 Manuel Aburto Panguilef, leader of the Araucanian Federation, famously proposed the creation of an autonomous Indigenous Republic at the 11th Araucanian Congress, which took place in December 1931  in Raguintuleufu. This congress brought together thousands of Mapuche from across southern Chile and was widely reported in the local and national press.61 In his speech to the congress, Aburto Panguilef weaved his campaign for indigenous autonomy into a broader narrative of class struggle: the “aspirations of the race”, he asserted, were achievable “only with an affective alliance between indigenous peoples and the campesinos and workers.”62 And, as recorded in the published minutes of the congress, delegates agreed that “the problems related to the land and education of the race” were social problems that also affected “the national proletariat.” Mapuche activists reaffirmed this sense of class allegiance at the 16th Araucanian Congress, held in Pitrufquen, Villarrica, in December 57  Proceedings of meeting of the South American Secretariat of the Comintern, 25 March 1935, cited in Olga Ulianova, ‘El levantamiento campesino de Lonquimay y la Internacional Comunista’, Estudios Públicos 89 (2003), p. 195. 58  Klubock, La Frontera, p. 90. 59  Ulianova, ‘El levantamiento campesino…’ 60  Menard and Pavez, ‘Documentos de la Federación Araucana’, p. 54. 61  As with all preceding congresses, Aburto Panguilef invited journalists to attend and sent communiqués to local newspapers stressing how important the event was. 62  In Menard and Pavez, ‘Documentos de la Federación Araucana’, p. 102.

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1936, when they resolved to send “warm greetings, by telegraph, to the Congreso de Unidad Sindical” that was taking place concurrently in Santiago. Aburto Panguilef wished this congress great success and prayed “for the joining together of all the workers of the Republic”.63 Such proclamations led Catholic Church leaders in southern Chile— namely Felix de Augusta (1860-1935) and Guido Beck de Ramberga (1885-1958)—to brandish Aburto Panguilef as “anti-Christian and anti-­ Chilean”.64 As early as the mid-1920s, El Diario Austral of Temuco was denouncing him as a “caudillo of Communism” and a “Mapuche soviet”.65 Aburto Panguilef was not the only target. In December 1926, Antonio Chihuailaf—leader of the Araucanian Union, which worked closely with Ramberga—publicly accused Arturo Huenchullán (1901-1978), then president of the Caupolicán Society, of inciting rebellion among his people.66 Via El Diario Austral, he issued Huenchullán with a stark warning: in Russia “teachers like you, who began the […] revolution” were the “first to be guillotined by the ignorant and hungry masses.” In 1932, Armando Bergue—a landowner from southern Chile—used the same newspaper to lash out at another Mapuche educator and activist César Colima.67 In this case, the target was deemed a communist subversive for attending the 11th Araucanian Congress presided over by Aburto Panguilef; he was subversive by association. All three Mapuche leaders, for various obvious reasons, rejected the label of communist. Huenchullán’s response to Chihuailaf’s accusations was categorical: “I detest those [Communist] doctrines.”68 In his rejoinder, Colima refused to mention the term communist.69 Instead, he put the spotlight back on Bergue, explaining to readers of El Diario Austral that of course a landowner who benefitted from the exploitation of Mapuche campesinos would malign any attempt to defend their rights. Finally, Aburto Panguilef— whilst allying himself with the workers of Chile from as early as the  Ibid.  Foerster and Montecino, Contiendas, líderes y organizaciones mapuches, p. 87. 65  El Diario Austral, 8 July 1926. 66   Antonio Chihuailaf, ‘Ecos de una asamblea araucana’, El Diario Austral, 15 December 1926. 67  Armando Bergue, ‘La república araucana’, El Diario Austral, 5 January 1932. 68  Arturo Huenchullán, ‘Carta al director. Respuesta a Antonio Chihuailaf’, El Diario Austral, 17 December 1926. 69  César Colima, ‘Carta al Diario Austral. Respuesta a A.  Bergue’, El Diario Austral, 6 January 1932. 63 64

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mid-1910s—consistently stressed his allegiance to Chilean state authorities.70 By the late 1930s, moreover, his personal diaries included numerous diatribes against communism, and he supported none other than Ibáñez in the elections of 1938.71 In this way, the leader of the Araucanian Federation evaded rigid categorisation on the left-right political spectrum. This is not to say he was not committed to a political cause—he was, it is just that his political cause was the defence of Mapuche rights (to cultural, political, and territorial autonomy), and his allegiances shifted depending on which party, or which political figure, seemed to be the most useful ally. The desire to work together with the left, but not be absorbed by it, was reinforced in a statement issued by Segundo Painemal to his “Fellow Mapuche and fellow workers” in 1935: “As Indians our hearts reach out to yours today […]. We do so as a result of both our traditions and the pain that afflicts us every day.”72 The pain was collective, but the traditions (the place from where they suffered that pain and therefore its implications) were unique to the Mapuche. There were Mapuche activists, such as Martin Painemal, who formally joined the Communist Party in early twentieth century Chile, just as Chuqiwanka seemed to in Peru.73 However, in both countries, large scale indigenous participation in leftist party politics only really became a reality in the 1960s. By this point, paradoxically, the regional term “Indo-America” had been largely discarded (and superseded by Latin America) in the prevailing script of revolution.

Writing Chile into Aprista Narratives of Indo-America As outlined by Geneviève Dorais, “Indo-America” was “first envisioned and theorised” by APRA in the 1920s as a quest for social justice which “emphasised the indigenous roots of Latin America”.74 According to 70  He made a pact with the League of Workers’ Societies whilst on tour with his Araucanian Theatre Company in Valparaíso in 1916. 71  Manuel Aburto Panguilef, Diary entry of 9 August 1938, pp. 26–27. Centro de Estudios y Documentación Liwen, Temuco. I would like to thank Pedro Mariman for sharing Aburto Panguilef’s diaries of the 1930s with me. 72   ‘Hermanos mapuches y hermanos obreros’, Juventud Araucana, 27 December 1935, p. 3. 73  See http://joseportugalcatacora.blogspot.com/2013/06/francisco-chukiwanka-ayulo. html 74  Geneviève Dorais, ‘Indo-America and the Politics of Exile: APRA, 1918-1945’, PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin Madison, 2014.

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Frederick Pike, Peruvians were unable to “export” APRA to Chile because of the organisation’s “apparent stress on the Indian”.75 To the contrary, Paul Drake asserts that APRA had “an enormous impact” in Chile.76 But he reaffirms the racialised national distinctions by describing Chile as a country that was “unsuited to put such an emphasis on the Indian”. It was APRA’s “populist blend of socialism and nationalism” that caught on in Chile, he said, not its indigenista rhetoric. More recent work shifts the focus a little by hinting at Chile’s impact on APRA as well as APRA’s influence in Chile. As noted by García Bryce, 1930s Santiago “became a hub in the Aprista transnational networks and an important locus for the dissemination of APRA propaganda.”77 And yet, whilst several scholars have begun to dig into Aprismo in Argentina and Mexico, the “Chilean scenario […] remains to be studied.”78 This section focuses on the experiences of three key Aprista figures— Haya de la Torre, Luis Alberto Sánchez, and Magda Portal—and their interventions in the “Chilean scenario.” It analyses the different mechanisms through which Haya, Sánchez and Portal attempted to bring Chile into their emancipatory narratives of “Indo-America”. Taking up Juliet Hooker’s suggestion that to “map a thinker’s ideas, we need to think more broadly about the sites where those ideas have been formulated”, it envisages Chile as one of the intellectual and political terrains from which Aprista Indo-Americanism was propagated and in which it developed and shifted.79 The limitations of APRA’s indigenista proposals are already welldocumented.80 Arguably, such limitations can be explained, at least in part, by the fact that Chile—famed for ignoring the “indigenous question” at an official level—was (temporarily) home to so many prominent Aprista intellectuals. Haya de la Torre liked to cast himself as original author of “Indo-­ America” and on one occasion he deftly did so through the Chilean diplomat-­poet Gabriela Mistral. In a short retrospective piece, recounting a visit to Mistral’s home in California in 1948, he claimed she had said to 75  Frederick Pike, ‘Church and State in Peru and Chile since 1840: A Study in Contrasts’, American Historical Review 73: 1 (1967), p. 49. 76  Paul Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 1932-1952 (University of Illinois Press, 1978), p. 140. 77  García Bryce, ‘Transnational Activist’, p. 692 78  Ibid., p. 697. 79  Hooker, Theorizing Race in the Americas, p. 17. 80  E.g., Davies, ‘The Indigenismo of the Peruvian Aprista Party’.

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him quite out of the blue: “You know, one of the best things you ever invented was that term—Indoamérica.”81 The Peruvian politician quite literally put words in her mouth, and in doing so sought to validate this cultural and political project of continental unity, as well as monopolise its meaning. Mistral, he said, was always insisting on the indigenous (Inca and Quechua) blood that ran through her veins, and he had felt compelled to correct her: to explain that Indo-America was not just about the Indian, but also—due to its colonial history—“the Iberian, the Negro, and the mestizo”. In Haya’s re-telling of this 1948 encounter, Mistral listened to him and agreed. Haya first met Mistral in Santiago in May 1922. He stopped off in Chile on his way back to Peru from Buenos Aires, and one of his public acts (as President of the Peruvian Student Federation) included laying a wreath on the tombs of Chileans students and workers who had died in recent protests.82 Such actions, García-Bryce informs us, “came into conflict with nationalist feelings”.83 That is, a certain kind of nationalist feeling—the xenophobic elite-led nationalism that, to Haya’s mind, was becoming increasingly prominent and dangerous in the 1920s. The soon-­ to-­be APRA leader contested such nationalism through his writings as well as symbolic gestures. In “Letter to a Chilean soldier” published whilst in exile in London in 1925, he wrote: “Who do you defend with your weapons? Your leaders, the government tell you: the fatherland. But I ask you: who makes up the fatherland? You would respond: the fatherland is made up of the people of course! I ask you now: do you really defend the people? Do you truly defend the majority of your compatriots—the poor, the workers, the peasants, and the indigenous?” Haya tried to invoke the possibility of a continental nationalism in the context of class struggle and growing resentment against U.S. imperialism in the region. Crucially, Haya’s piece of 1925 also narrated Chile as part of an indigenous Latin America, for “los indígenas” were part of the “majority” of the soldier’s “compatriots”.84

81  Guely Villanueva (ed.), Haya por Haya: Apuntes para sus memorias (Lima: Editorial del Congreso de la República, 2009) p. 416. 82  Gonzalez and Parodi (eds.), Historias que nos unen, pp. 215-216 83  García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre, p. 20. 84  The text, with some interesting comments from Chileans and Peruvians reading it in the 2010s, is available at https://cavb.blogspot.com/2009/12/una-hermosa-carta-de-v-r-hayade-la.html

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Haya’s visit to Chile in 1922 was a brief one. He frequently spoke of Chile and Chilean-Peruvian relations, but he never spent much time there. In contrast, many of his Aprista compañeros spent several years exiled in Chile. As early as 1931, Chilean teacher Víctor Troncoso wrote to Portal saying “El Aprismo is far better known here than you would imagine. There are even some congressmen who think this is the best way forward for our country.”85 Portal herself was part of the reason Chilean politicians knew about the APRA agenda, as she had been there—promoting that agenda—in 1930. At that point, Portal was one of a couple of scores of Peruvian Aprista exiles living in Chile. They had a Santiago-based committee which had its own headed paper and operated from an office on Moneda street in downtown Santiago.86 According to the Puno-based avant-garde magazine Boletín Titikaka, they also had their own pamphlet entitled Indo-América which—although only published intermittently— “valiantly defended the APRA agenda” and explained the details of this agenda to readers in Chile.87 They had even seen a sister Aprista party established in 1931 in the form of Nueva Acción Pública (NAP)—led by Eugenio Matte Hurtado (1895-1934)—which would go on to become part of the Socialist Party of Chile in 1933.88 When Matte Hurtado explained NAP’s programme in the Chilean Senate in January 1933, he used the term Indo-America four times, and a publishing house called Indoamérica was set up in Santiago the same year.89 By 1935, Chilean newspapers reported on the existence of more than 300 Apristas living in Chile.90 One of them was the lawyer and writer Luis Alberto Sánchez. Sánchez had first visited Chile in 1930, as part of a bridge-building exercise between the two countries in the aftermath of the Lima Treaty (or Tacna-Arica compromise) signed in 1929. As told by Sánchez, one of the first initiatives “to accelerate this re-encounter” focused on “strengthening the exchange of books and people”.91 In his role as sub-director of the National Library in Lima, he oversaw the  Letter dated 1st May 1931. Magda Portal Papers, Benson Collection, University of Texas, Austin. 86  Letter from Carlos Alberto Eyzaguirre to Magda Portal, dated 4 April 1936.  Magda Portal Papers, Benson Collection, University of Texas, Austin. 87  ‘Nuestros canjes’, Boletín Titikaka, II: XXV, December 1928, p. 2. 88  Fabio Moraga, ‘¿Un partido indoamericanista en Chile?: La Nueva Accion Publica y el Partido Aprista Peruano’, Historia XXXIII: 2 (2009), pp. 109-156. 89  Hernández Toledo, ‘Apristas en Chile’, p. 82. 90  Moraga, ‘Un partido indoamericanista…’, p. 115. 91  Sánchez, Visto y vivido en Chile, p. 31. 85

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establishment of a section dedicated to Chilean books, and shortly afterwards Armando Donoso (1887-1946) invited him to give a series of talks at the Universidad de Chile.92 Sánchez stayed in Chile for just two weeks on this occasion. In 1934, he was deported there and stayed until 1943. The Peruvian academic was not allowed to teach in Chile, but he had plenty of other opportunities to disseminate his and his party’s views. Ercilla publishing house was created in Santiago the same year that Sánchez arrived. He was appointed director of the enterprise, and—in his own words—managed to turn it into a kind of “oasis” for exiled Peruvian Apristas.93 Its magazine of the same name, Ercilla, made sure readers in Chile could follow developments in Peru from a markedly Aprista standpoint.94 Chile’s Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda underscored the significance of such developments when later urging Sánchez to write about his time in Chile. As Sánchez relays it in Visto y vivido en Chile, Neruda told him: “you Peruvians have no idea how much influence you had on Chilean culture and politics. Through Ercilla, through periodicals, you did so much. There is no one better than you to tell this story. Your book will enable us, as Chileans, to understand ourselves better.”95 In some ways, the writings Sánchez authored whilst in Chile helped to perpetuate notions of Chilean racial exceptionalism. In an essay published in the state sponsored Revista de Educación in 1936, for example, he listed eight countries in Latin America where “lo indígena” constituted a “fundamental problem” and Chile was not one of them.96 Such imagery was reinforced in a letter he wrote to Mistral on 25 September 1942: “I will soon be leaving Chile. I’ll go straight to Bolivia, to receive nourishment from [nutrirme de] my Indians.” Sánchez plainly felt starved of Indian-­ ness in his host country. He also seemed comfortable talking with Mistral in such a paternalistic manner, as if he owned the “Indians” of Bolivia. In

 Ibid.  Ibid., p. 57. 94  For example, on the elections of 1936: ‘Trae la guerra civil en Perú la actitud de Benavides’, Ercilla, 19 October 1936; ‘El triunfo de los apristas peruanos es la victoria de los mejores amigos que tiene Chile en ese país hermano’, Ercilla, 2 November 1936, p.7; ‘Las prisiones, deportaciones y protestas crean un clima revolucionario en el Perú’, Ercilla, 9 November 1936, p. 3. 95  Sánchez, Visto y vivido en Chile, p. 21. 96  Luis Alberto Sánchez, ‘El indígena’, Revista de Educación 59 (February 1935). 92 93

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this way, we see the shortcomings of Aprista indigenismo revealed in and through conversations with Chileans. In other writings, however, such as Historia general de América, Sánchez made Chile central to a continental nationalism that was firmly rooted in a pre-Columbian past.97 And in Vida y pasión de la cultura en América he censured “Chilean shame” about the country’s “indigenous reality”.98 At least, this was one of the points that Mistral picked up on from the book and fully endorsed.99 Represented thus, Sánchez was helping Chileans to “understand [themselves] better” long before Neruda pressed him to write Visto y vivido en Chile. More significantly, Sánchez used the space he had in Chile to present his own vision of indigenista debates in Peru and to clarify APRA’s standing on indigenous cultures. In his above-cited article in Revista de Educación, for example, he lashed out at the Communist Party for inciting “the great indigenous masses to form indigenous Republics” and insisted that even Mariátegui declared Peru to be a mestizo as opposed to purely indigenous country. In “A New Interpretation of the History of America”, published in the U.S. in 1943, he transformed Indo-America from the “New World” into the “Oldest World”. “Indo-Americans”, he said, had begun to take “pride in their old stock”, due to the discovery of new archaeological riches.100 They had also become increasingly aware of “the general state of impoverishment and humiliation of the social race that history was vindicating” and of U.S. imperialism in the region. Sánchez posited APRA as representative of this “most authentic revisionist movement of our history”.101 To counter APRA’s critics, he insisted that the Indo-American project was not “an attempt to ‘regress’ to political and social forms of the pre-colonial period” or to “unleash a racial war”. The point, instead, was to think about how economic and racial factors interconnected and to counter the “precarious, despised and inferior existence” to which indigenous people had been condemned.102 Similarly to Haya in his supposed correction of Mistral in 1948, Sánchez insisted that Aprista  Luis Alberto Sánchez, Historia general de América (Santiago: Ercilla, 1942).  Luis Alberto Sánchez, Vida y pasión de la cultura en América (Santiago: Ercilla, 1936). 99  Mistral to Sánchez, letter dated 4 May 1936. Luis Alberto Sánchez Papers, Pennsylvania State University Library. 100  Luis Alberto Sánchez, ‘A New Interpretation of the History of America’, Hispanic American Historical Review 23: 3 (1943), p. 443. 101  Ibid., p. 444. 102  Ibid., p. 446. 97 98

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indoamericanismo sought not only “the revindication of the Indian” but rather the “effective integration of all the demographic components of this part of the globe” (my emphasis). That “part of the globe” was Central and South America. APRA’s effort to push for continental solidarity left the “autochthonous, aboriginal or indigenous element” in the U.S. and Canada on their own, on the basis that it “has not had the same strength, extension or hybridism as in this other part of the hemisphere” (a suggestion, surely, of Northern inferiority), but it did include Chile, and he was presenting the project from Chile. Like Sánchez, Aprista poet Magda Portal spent several years living in exile in Chile in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It was her second stay in the country. During this time, she joined the Chilean Socialist Party and developed close links with prominent figures such as Salvador Allende,103 which can be understood as part of Portal’s efforts to expand and deepen APRA’s Latin American presence.104 One under-explored illustration of such presence was the First Congress of Democratic and Popular Parties of Indo-America (FCDPPIA) held in Santiago in October 1940. In a letter to Haya dated 20 June 1941, Portal described this congress as an “Aprista initiative”—“brought to fruition by Apristas” (she was part of the organising committee)—and complained of how “little importance” the Peruvian Aprista Party in Lima had attributed to the event. This must be due to a “lack of concrete information”, she said, before restating its significance: just prior to writing, the Chilean Socialist Party had approved the resolutions of the FCDPPIA and signed up to a plan for continental unity. “Never has the opportunity for Indo-American concord been more favourable,” she said. If Portal were expecting an apology or some gratitude from Haya, she did not get it. In his reply, he criticised Aprista exiles’ ignorance of political developments: “When on earth will you stop putting up with the mistakes, lies, and plotting and scheming of the Chilean socialists?” It is not clear exactly what mistakes, lies, plotting and scheming Haya was talking about here, but the altercation seems to mark a key moment in the deterioration of relations between Portal and Haya— another illustration of how the Chilean scenario impacted on struggles within APRA and, by extension, politics in Peru. The few sources available do not indicate whether indigenous rights were discussed at the First Congress of Democratic and Popular Parties of  Weaver, Peruvian Rebel, p. 135.  García Bryce, ‘Transnational Activist’, p. 699.

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Indo-America. The issue did come up though—albeit in rather abstract form—earlier that same year during the visit of a Mexican labour delegation. In April 1940, Ercilla dedicated several pages to this visit and declared it a great success. Just before the Mexican delegation left the country, the Socialist Party of Chile gave them a bust of “an Indian of Temuco”.105 It was made by Yanko Brayovitch, a sculptor from Montenegro, and it was based on Antonio Peñalef, a “legitimate Araucanian”, who made a living selling ponchos to a “vast clientele of foreigners and tourists”. Ercilla thus cast Peñalef as an enigmatic mixture of tradition (with a stereotypical indigenous appearance and an ancient craft) and modernity (capable of being a successful entrepreneur and demonstrating an openness to the outside world). Paid $25 per day by Brayovitch to pose as a model, he became a racialised souvenir of Chile—captured in art before his culture disappeared—that the Mexican delegation could take home with them. With such a parting gift, moreover, the Socialist Party, which scholars have tended to see as indifferent to indigenista debates,106 seemed to present itself as both defender and owner of this indigenous Chile; it was theirs to give away and publicise abroad. Soon after the FCDPPIA, Portal found employment with the Ministry of Education, writing programs for Radio Escuela Experimental.107 One of these—produced in collaboration with the founder and director of Radio Escuela Experimental, María Teresa Femenias—focused on the indigenous leader Túpac Amaru II (1738-1781), and his uprising against Spanish colonial rule in the Cuzco region in the early 1780s.108 This radio drama was aired in July 1944, a day before Peruvians celebrated their Independence from Spain. The action begins with the abused and exploited “Indian labourers” who “drown-out their pain with the music of their quenas”. In the mines of Pataz, they are beaten almost to death for falling ill (with malaria) and failing to fulfil their work quotas. “Indian, you animal, get up!”, yells the foreman, “lazy shirker, you want to eat and yet you don’t want to work!” Against this backdrop Túpac Amaru appears, inspiring respect and veneration among his people. They dream of the restitution of what is rightfully theirs: “One day soon, we will again be owners of our 105  ‘El P. Socialista le regalará un busto a los mexicanos: sirve de modelo indio de Temuco’, Ercilla, 10 April 1940. 106  E.g. Samaniego and Ruiz Rodríguez, Mentalidades y politicas Wingka, p. 375. 107  García-Bryce, ‘Transnational Activist’, p. 698. 108  Ibid. The full title was “Homenaje a Perú, Túpac Amaru”. I am very grateful to Iñigo García-Bryce for sharing this document with me.

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lands, of our country!”, they cry. After consulting with “some Indian chiefs” who support a rebellion, Túpac Amaru confidently proclaims that, with weapons, his people will not be beaten. The uprising begins and listeners are told that the Spanish King becomes “desperate” as news of its success travels “from one end to the other of the revived empire”: the Inca, “by the will of God”, had become “King of Peru, Santa Fe, Quito, Chile, Buenos Aires, [the whole] continent.” The revival of Tawantinsuyo does not last long, though. Túpac Amaru is betrayed and he, his wife and children are captured. The radio drama ends with the well-known story of their brutal deaths in Cuzco’s main square. The narrator then wraps up by addressing the indigenous leader directly: “It was not yet your time to triumph … Others will come and they will have better luck … The destiny of the New World is already written … and you are one of its glorious forerunners…” Portal’s drama was short and simple, as was its message: Túpac Amaru’s rebellion was justified and widely supported; he ultimately failed and the immediate repercussions were horrific, but he sowed the seeds for continent-wide independence. Through this radio show, the Peruvian poet made sure that Chilean school children had access to inspirational histories of anti-colonial resistance led by indigenous people. She also wrote Chile into that story, by making it part of the historic Inca empire (as Communist Party delegates had done in Buenos Aires in 1929), whilst herself taking part in Chile’s present-day story of social reform under the Popular Front governments.

Exporting Hopes of Indo-American Resurrection from Chile Another enthusiast for radio as a means of promoting leftist indigenista narratives in 1940s Chile was the Riga-born endocrinologist Alejandro Lipschutz (1883-1980). Lipschutz arrived in Chile in 1926 and was hired by the University of Concepción. He was still working there in 1930 when it hosted a commemorative conference in honour of the recently deceased Mariátegui.109 Scholars of Chilean indigenismo such as Bernardo Berdichewsky and Henry John Stegeman claim that Lipschutz was greatly

109  Eugenio Orrego Vicuña (ed.), Mariátegui: Conferencia dictada en las Universidades de Chile y de Concepción (Santiago: Mastil, 1930).

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influenced by Mariátegui.110 I have found no direct references to the Peruvian Marxist in Lipschutz’s work, but we do know that by the mid-­1930s Lipschutz had widened his research interests to include anthropology and developed a particular interest in Mapuche communities in southern Chile. He wrote widely on the socioeconomic dimensions of the discrimination suffered by indigenous peoples, became close friends with renowned leftist indigenista figures in Chile such as Pablo Neruda, and joined the Chilean Communist Party in 1945.111 As shown below, Lipschutz made Chile a central part of a leftist script of Indo-American resurrection, connected his lived experiences of Chile to that of Peru and other Latin American countries, and became a prominent transnational authority on the “indigenous question.” Lipschutz’s first book-length study on the subject was entitled Indoamericanismo y raza india, published in 1937, after being delivered as a lecture at the University of Chile that same year.112 Lipschutz followed this up with public talks in Lima, Bogotá, Caracas, and Mexico City. His overriding argument was remarkably similar to that proposed by Mariátegui in the 1920s: “The Indian ‘race’ is a social construct, and thus [when we talk of] Indo-Americanism [we mean] the vindication of the economic and cultural rights of certain social groups, in opposition to other social groups who have more economic and political power.”113 Incorporating the works of Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) and Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), as well as reports by the British Commonwealth Office, Lipschutz went on to refute notions of biological inferiority.114 For Lipschutz, the Aztec, Maya and Inca peoples offered ample proof that the “human races” of the Americas “were equally as capable of cultural development as the man of Asia and Europe.”115 He did not include the Mapuche as a “great civilisation” but made them part of his larger 110  Berdichewksy, Alejandro Lipschutz: Su visión indigenista y anthopológica (Santiago: Ediciones UCSH, 2004); Henry John Stegeman, To Plow a Lonely Furrow. Indigenismo and Mapuche Politics in Chile, 1920-1960 (PhD Dissertation, Syracuse University, 2018). 111  Hernán Soto, ‘Neruda y Lipschutz: Amigos en la raíz americana’, Mensaje 40, No. 399 (1991), pp. 175-178. 112  See prologue to Indoamericanismo y raza india (Santiago: Editorial Nascimento, 1937), p. 7. 113  Ibid., pp. 17-18. 114  Ibid., pp. 35-44. 115  Ibid., p. 45.

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continental narrative of erroneous racial prejudice: “Who among us has not heard [the allegations of laziness] about present-day Araucanians, Aymaras of Quechuas?”116 He also included the Mapuche in his vision of mestizaje as a “levelling force”, by citing the story of a friend, who headed­up the Office of Indigenous Resettlement in southern Chile. Apparently, this friend found himself one day reflecting that the many indigenous people in his office, dressed in suits, speaking “the language of Cervantes” and complaining about barbaric drunken Indians, were not so very different to himself.117 The “real Indian” of Chile had not disappeared, just as the Inca peoples of Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia had not disappeared; they had simply adapted their ways in the context of the (limited) opportunities that modern life offered them.118 Lipschutz used this and other stories to affirm the possibility of indigenous redemption, or “Indo-American Resurrection” as the final section of Indoamericanismo was titled, and this was both picked up and applauded by Mapuche organiser Domingo Curaqueo in 1940. Writing in Heraldo Araucano, Curaqueo (an urban, suit-wearing, and Spanish speaking Mapuche) described Lipschutz as a “man of science” who, in contrast to many of his peers, sought to investigate and capture “the reality on the ground.” As recounted by Curaqueo, Lipschutz’s book “narrates and laments the misfortune of the Indian, squarely blames the government for such misfortune and affirms that the Araucanian can flourish, just like any other race, as long as he is given the kind of education that fuels progress.”119 Lipschutz published an extended version of this book, El Indoamericanismo y el problema racial en las Américas, in 1944.120 Two indigenista friends and colleagues from Mexico and the U.S. with whom Lipschutz corresponded regularly—the anthropologist and archaeologist Manuel Gamio (1883-1960) the Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier (1884-1968)—contributed to the making of the new monograph, mainly by sharing photographs.121 They also helped to make sure it was  Ibid., p. 35  Ibid., p. 29. 118  Ibid., p. 50. 119  Domingo Curaqueo, ‘Aversión e Injusticia’, Heraldo Araucano, No. 1 (September 1940), pp. 1-2. 120  Alejandro Lipschutz, El Indoamericanismo y el problema racial en las Américas (Santiago: Editorial Nascimento, 1944). 121  Stegeman, To Plow a Lonely Furrow, pp. 186-187. 116 117

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well-publicised. It would have been through Collier or Gamio that a summarised version of the book’s argument was printed in Boletín Indigenista, the bilingual journal of the Inter-American Indigenista Institute in Mexico City, created following the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress of 1940.122 Several Anglophone scientific journals also saluted Lipschutz’s work. In The Americas the Swiss-Argentine anthropologist Alfred Metraux (1902-1963) celebrated the efforts of El Indoamericanismo to demonstrate the “senselessness of current judgments about racial hierarchies”.123 And in the weekly journal Nature, which pitched the text as “a plea for an Indo-American resurrection”, Alfred Radcliffe Brown (1881-1955) praised Lipschutz’s deft dismissal of “the degeneration that is popularly supposed to result from racial miscegenation” and commended him for discussing “the African Negro” as well as indigenous peoples.124 El Indoamericanismo received glowing reviews closer to home too.125 Peru was part of that positive reception. Prominent intellectuals there incorporated Lipschutz’s work as an authoritative reference point to defend Peruvian indigenous peoples against allegations of biological inferiority. In an essay of the early 1950s, for example, Luis Alberto Sánchez used Lipschutz’s book to prove that “the Peruvian Indian […] has no psychological faults which render him weaker than other races,”126 and to insist on the “creative capacity” of the Indian—“his tenacity, diligence, and ability to embrace syncretism”.127 He also drew on Lipschutz’s work to ridicule scientific racism’s obsession with brain size.128 The same year that El indoamericanismo was published, Lipschutz broadcast a talk on Chilean radio entitled “Las razas aborígenes de la América y la reforma social”. This was essentially a synopsis of the book, as with the piece in Boletín Indigenista, and an explanation of what he 122  ‘Aboriginal Races of America and Social Reform’, Boletin Indigenista 4: 4 (1944), pp. 274-285. 123  ‘El Indoamericanismo y el problema Racial en las Américas by Alejandro Lipschutz’, The Americas, Vol. 4, No. 2 (October 1947), p. 265. 124  ‘El Indoamericanismo y el Problema Racial en las Américas’, Nature 156 (1945), p.158 125   See, for example, Revista de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia 2 (1945), pp. 447-449. 126  ‘Panorama Cultural de Perú’ (1951), in Luis Alberto Sánchez (ed.), La Vida del Siglo (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1988), p. 87. 127  Ibid. 128  Ibid., p. 88.

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referred to as his “Indo-American optimism.” It was aired on 31 October 1944, a couple of months after Portal’s radio drama on Tupac Amaru. Lipschutz may well, as Stegeman argues, have struggled to directly influence the Popular Front governments of the late 1930s and early 1940s, but they allowed him a space to publicise his views on race and social reform. In fact, they provided this space, for his lengthy radio report was sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, and it was published by the Chilean Institute for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union.129 Lipschutz’s argument that the indigenous peoples of Latin America had a bright future if governments intervened on their behalf was based partly on the reforms enacted in the United States under President Roosevelt. Unlike Sánchez, who seemed to exclude the U.S. from Indo-­ America as a cross-border project of social and racial justice, Lipschutz made it central. According to his narrative, the Indian Office, led by Collier, had made great strides by prohibiting the sale of indigenous lands and offering financial and technical assistance to indigenous communities. Equally important were the education initiatives related to indigenous languages and arts that had enabled native Americans to demonstrate their “cultural potential”. The “Great Social Reform” in Latin America would thus take two paths: the redistribution of land to those who worked it and absolute respect for autochthonous cultural values. It was going to be a bigger struggle in Latin America than in the United States—not least because of the “dominance of agrarian feudalism”—but Lipschutz believed it could be achieved through leftist revolution.

Conclusions Lipschutz’s writings scrutinised the intersections between class and race. Such intersections constituted a key point of the discussion led by Mariátegui and “Saco” at the First Conference of Communist Parties of Latin America. This is just one of many examples of how Chilean and Peruvian leftist party-political debates on the “indigenous question” overlapped and cross-fertilised over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. By digging into the conversations that took place between Chilean and Peruvian activists promoting Indo-American revolution, this chapter has further revealed both the constraints and innovations of such a 129  Discursos por la victoria y la paz (Santiago: Ediciones del Instituto Chileno de Relaciones Culturales con la Unión Soviética, 1945).

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discourse. Communist Party delegates in Buenos Aires in the late 1920s and Lipschutz in the 1930s and 1940s vigorously refuted notions of biological inferiority, but the former seemed to corroborate the idea that indigenous people were socially backward by proclaiming it their job to mobilise these disenfranchised masses. We see such thinking in the third section of the chapter too, where imaginaries of indigenous people oscillated between strategic allies and pawns of leftist party-political struggle. Throughout all sections, we see how indigeneity was equated with subalternity: to be indigenous was to be an impoverished, degraded, abused worker. For some intellectuals on the left, an indigenous person who was not impoverished, degraded, and abused, stopped being indigenous and became mestizo. For Lipschutz, mestizaje was a “levelling force”, but not one that implied erasure of indigeneity, even as cultural practices changed and modernised. Thus, dynamic conceptions of indigeneity circulated alongside fixed ones. Most of the leftist parties discussed here—the Peruvian Socialist Party which became the Peruvian Communist Party, APRA, and the Chilean Communist Party—made the land question a central component of their political programs. They all spoke energetically about the urgent need to break up the large estates and redistribute the land to those who worked it. Mariátegui, Haya de la Torre and Lipschutz cast this as one the most important pathways to solving the “indigenous question” in Latin America. Indigenous activists too spoke loudly and consistently about the lands that had been stolen from them. Neither in Chile or Peru, though, did the Left—whether speaking back to those in power or speaking from within the corridors of power—manage to make the restitution of indigenous lands a reality during the first half of the twentieth century. This is story I interrogate in Chap. 3.

CHAPTER 3

Indigeneity, Land and Property

The problem of the Indian is rooted in. the land tenure system of our economy. —José Carlos Mariátegui, 1928

For Mariátegui, Peru’s contemporary “Indian problem” was fundamentally socio-economic in nature. As discussed in Chap. 2, this Marxist philosopher asserted that it was more appropriate to talk of the “agrarian problem” than the “Indian problem”, because most indigenous people were campesinos and their problems could thus only be addressed effectively at the level of land tenure relations. The origin of the “problem” was thus perceived to lay not with the Indians themselves, but rather with the ongoing reality of “feudalism”, whereby estate owners kept up their “absolute exploitation and domination of the indigenous masses”.1 In José Carlos Mariátegui’s Unfinished Revolution (2013), Melissa Moore commented that “Republican regimes [in Peru] were just as, if not more hostile than the Crown toward the Indian community, with many mestizos, as well as creoles seeking to better themselves at the expense of their native citizens.” Drawing on the works of Alberto Flores Galindo and Nelson Manrique, she points to a history of systematic “state-led attacks on native

1  ‘El problema de las razas  en  América Latina’,  in El movimiento revolucionario latinoamericano, p. 287.

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lands and organisational structures.”2 These attacks started in the early nineteenth century, and despite government proclamations to the contrary, continued through to the early twentieth century and far beyond.3 Mariátegui’s report on “The Race Problem in Latin America”, delivered by Pesce in Buenos Aires in 1929, asserted that it was this structural violence and enforced servitude that led to “the ignorance, backwardness and poverty of indigenous people”—a statement that both reinforced discriminatory stereotypes (by describing indigenous people as ignorant and backward) and challenged them (by attributing such a state of affairs to colonial class relations, rather than innate biological factors).4 In line with social critic Manuel González Prada (1844–1918), Mariátegui used the term gamonal to refer to Peru’s large land holders and gamonalismo to refer to the socioeconomic system that they represented (the phenomenon of local or regional political bossism). Focusing for the most part on Andean Peru, he claimed that indigenous peoples’ struggle was primarily against the gamonales, and this was essentially and invariably a struggle to defend community lands. The history of indigenous land ownership in Chile was quite different to that in Andean Peru, especially for the Mapuche in the southern region of Araucanía. In contrast to the Inca, the Mapuche were renowned for  Melissa Moore, José Carlos Mariátegui’s Unfinished Revolution: Politics, Poetics, and Change in 1920s Peru (Lanham, Maryland: Bucknell University Press, 2013), fn. 42 on p. 48. 3  Simón Bolívar passed a decree abolishing indigenous communities as legal entities in Peru in 1824. This failed in two regards. First, the law was not effectively implemented due to indigenous resistance, and indigenous communities continued to exist in practice. Second, the aim was to create a class of small property owners, but this is not what happened; instead, land was increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The process intensified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the development of the coast led to more demand for agricultural produce from the highlands. It’s also important to note that the dynamics of land ownership varied across the country, between the highlands and the coast, for example, and between these and the Amazonian lowlands. Even in the highlands the situation of indigenous communities varied from region to region. Nonetheless, it is still true to say that from the early nineteenth century onwards, the Peruvian state sought to reduce indigenous land tenure and power. See Héctor Omar Noejovich, ‘La desvinculación y la desamortización de la propiedad en América: una visión del caso peruano a través de su legislación (siglo XIX)’, Investigaciones Y Ensayos 60 (2014), pp. 293–312; Ponciano del Pino, En nombre del gobierno. El Perú y Uchuraccay: un siglo de política campesina (Lima: La Siniestra Ensayos, 2017); and Mark Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial Nationmaking in Andean Peru (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997). 4  ‘El problema de las razas en América Latina’, in El movimiento revolucionario latinoamericano, p. 287. 2

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successfully repelling the Spanish conquistadors (from the Bio Bio River southwards), and for obliging the colonial state to acknowledge the political and territorial autonomy of Araucanía through a series of treaties, beginning with the Treaty of Quilín in 1641.5 During the early republican period, the Chilean state continued this official recognition of Mapuche independence, with the Treaty of Yumbel in 1823 and the Treaty of Tapihue in 1825.6 State policy shifted in the 1850s, however, and in 1862 Chilean military forces began their occupation campaign, taking control of Angol, and working their way south in stages, until they concluded the euphemistically named “pacification” of Araucanía with the conquest of Villarrica in 1883. Once the state had colonised Mapuche territory, it proceeded with a policy of resettlement or “radicación” (1883–1929), which entailed granting approximately 3000 “títulos de merced” to Mapuche communities, covering some 525,000 hectares. This meant the Mapuche lost almost 95% of their ancestral lands.7 And the land that was allocated by legal deeds was far from protected: large agricultural producers frequently encroached upon indigenous communal holdings, and—despite the existence of institutions such as the Indian Protectorate—law courts (if the case got that far) usually found in favour of the former. Thus, as we move from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, the hacienda system that had long been the reality of northern and central Chile became the reality of Araucanía too.8 As Florencia Mallon has shown us in her study of the Nicolás Aílio community, land was central to the political struggles of the Mapuche throughout the twentieth century. She emphasises that whilst Mapuche political strategies to protect their lands or reclaim usurped 5  Jimena Pichinao Huenchuleo, ‘Los parlamentos hispano-Mapuche como scenario de negociación simbólico-político durante la colonia’, in Hector Nahuelpan Moreno et  al., Historia, colonialismo y resistencia desde el país Mapuche (Temuco: Ediciones Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, 2017), pp. 25–44. It is worth emphasising that this history of government treaties was only relevant to the Mapuche in Araucanía, not in central Chile or Chiloé. 6  Pablo Mariman, ‘La República y los Mapuche: 1819–1828’, in ibid., pp. 65–90; Joanna Crow, ‘Troubled Negotiations: The Mapuche and the Chilean State (1818–1839)’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 36: 3 (July 2017), pp. 285–298. 7  Nahuelpan, ‘Formación colonial del Estado y desposesión en Ngulumapu’, in Nahuelpan et al., Historia, colonialismo y resistencia, pp. 123–156. 8  For an interesting analysis of Chilean rural economic development during this period see Claudio Robles, ‘Frontier Capitalism: Agrarian Expansion in Southern Chile, c. 1890–1930’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 39: 4 (2019), pp. 238–254; ‘Agrarian Capitalism and Rural Labour: The Hacienda System in Central Chile, 1870–1920’, Journal of Latin American Studies 41 (2009), pp. 493–526.

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lands varied over time, the position of the state remained static—state policies consistently worked to reduce Mapuche land tenure.9 This is the starting point for Chap. 3. The historical process of colonisation lived by indigenous communities in Chile and Peru was very different (or at least Mapuche history in Araucanía was distinctive to that of the Quechua and Aymara, who lived in northern Chile as well as in Peru and Bolivia), but the outcome—in the early twentieth century—was in many ways the same: state expropriation of indigenous lands; hacendados’ theft of indigenous lands; increasing pauperisation of indigenous communities; and ensuing mass rural-urban migration. Mariátegui, Haya de la Torre, Sánchez, Mistral and Aburto Panguilef—all of whom featured in Chap. 2—reappear in this chapter’s analysis of debates about land in Chile and Peru between the 1910s and the 1950s. We also meet the Peruvian novelists Ciro Alegría (1909–1967) and José María Arguedas (1911–1969), the Chilean writer Reinaldo Lomboy (1910–1974), and Mexican indigenista Moisés Sáenz (1888–1941). The latter’s compatriot David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) engages in conversation with Chilean artists such as Laureano Guevara (1889–1968). Equally, if not more prominent, are Mapuche activist-intellectuals, Manuel Manquilef (1889–1950), Venancio Coñuepán (1905–1968), César Colima, Carlos Huayquiñir, and Alberto Melillán, and Quechua-speaking archaeologist Julio Tello (1880–1947).10 The first section of Chap. 3 develops one of the points to emerge from Chap. 2: that leftist intellectuals in early twentieth century Chile and Peru regularly spoke out in defence of indigenous communal land ownership. They spoke across the territorial borders that separated their countries, engaging in a continent-wide campaign for land reform inspired by post-­ revolutionary Mexico. The second and third sections show, however, that such efforts largely failed to impact upon state policies in Chile and Peru, or that if legislation was passed in defence of indigenous communities this was rarely put into practice, due to the enduring power of the landowning elite. Section four probes the cyclical story of indigenous dispossession and marginalisation, which led to rebellion, which, in turn, was met with brutal repression. It draws out, moreover, the fundamentally transnational  Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood, pp. 234–236.  I haven’t been able to find precise biographical data for Colima, Huayquiñir, or Melillán, despite their frequent interventions in public debates in Chile via congresses and print periodicals. Manquilef and Coñuepan are more conspicuous in the official records because of their status as congressmen. 9

10

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dimensions of the backdrop, action, and telling of this story. The final section spotlights the discourses of autochthony and historical continuity promoted by indigenous activist-intellectuals in Chile and Peru as (an albeit unsuccessful) strategy for defending their lands. In all, we see how— from both the perspective of the colonisers and the colonised—land was conceived in economic, cultural, political, and territorial terms.

Conversing about Land Reform in and Via Mexico Over the course of the early-to-mid twentieth century, many intellectuals in Chile and Peru attempted to influence the state’s position in favour of indigenous campesinos’ land rights. In Peru, indigenous and indigenista intellectuals from the Cuzco and Puno regions published university theses defending indigenous communal land ownership from the 1900s onwards.11 In Chile, anthropologists like Lipschutz did the same through through books, journal articles and radio talks (see Chap. 2), and historians made public official documents proving the existence of community property titles in the southern regions, thereby demonstrating that the ongoing dispossession of indigenous lands had been, and still was, against the law.12 Defending indigenous community lands was not necessarily the same as promoting agrarian reform, but many activist-intellectuals blamed the poverty of indigenous communities on latifundismo or, in the case of Peru, gamonalismo. Both APRA and the Communist Party of Peru spoke of the need to abolish large land holdings, as did the Communist Party in Chile. In this section, I show how intellectuals who pushed for the redistribution of land in Chile and Peru drew on the experience of post-­ revolutionary Mexico, in diverging and sometimes contrary ways. Mexico—and Mexicans—moreover, acted as a direct conduit between Chileans and Peruvians who were in favour of land reform. The Mexican Constitution of 1917 enshrined indigenous people’s right to own land collectively. In an article on “The Peculiarities of Mexican History”, Alan Knight summarises both the achievements and failings of the country’s post-revolutionary land reforms: “In the 1920s and 1930s 11  For example, Francisco Chuqiwanka Ayulo, ‘La propiedad indígena’ (1908), and Felix Cosio, La propiedad colectiva del ayllu (1915). Revista Universitaria published the latter over four separate issues in 1919 and 1920, starting with Volume VIII, No. 27, in March 1919 (pp. 27–40). 12  Ricardo Donoso and Fanor Velasco, Historia de la Constitución de la Propiedad Austral (Santiago: Imprenta Cervantes, 1928).

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the agrarian reform was innovative, destabilising, contested, sometimes radical and by no means controlled from above.”13 At this point, it “seemed to promise a new collectivist agriculture, which implicitly challenged the sanctity of private property and the logic of private capital accumulation.” This changed after 1940 when agrarian policy “still responded to popular demands” but became a “more thoroughly ‘top-down’ and bureaucratic process”. Furthermore, landowners who might well “bridle at the threat of reform” were “aware that it did not challenge the prevailing socio-­ economic system.” In sum, agrarian reform in Mexico betrayed its early radical potential and aligned itself with capitalist modernisation. Gabriela Mistral was in Mexico during the early 1920s when Alvaro Obregón (1920–1924) endeavoured to implement the redistribution of land promised by the 1917 Constitution. Writing from there in 1923 for the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio, she declared: “Mexico has won me over with its social reforms […] Here something is being done for the Indian […] In my view, the Mexican agrarian question is the greatest and most momentous thing seen in our race today.”14 She urged Chile to emulate Mexico. APRA leader (or soon-to-be APRA leader) Haya de la Torre was in exile in Mexico at the same time as Mistral and stayed at her house in San Ángel. As told by Luis Alberto Sánchez, it was here that agrarian reform “entered into the ideological rhetoric of Haya” as well.15 In 1928, El Mercurio published another article by Mistral pressing for land reform in Chile.16 Again, she called up the example of Mexico but this time in a slightly different way: “It was six years ago that I sent my first article to Chile on agrarian reform in Mexico [and] since then I have declared, whenever I could, my abhorrence of our rural feudalism.” Chilean campesinos, she said, would find out sooner or later—“through films and illustrated magazines”—what was going on in countries like Switzerland and Germany, where land was much more evenly parcelled out. They would also find out about Mexico, where (with the “empellón” 13  Alan Knight, ‘The Peculiarities of Mexican History: Mexico Compared to Latin America, 1821–1992’, Journal of Latin American Studies 24: 1 (1992), p. 130. 14  Mistral, ‘El presidente Obregón y la situación de México’, in  Jaime Quezada (ed.), Bendita mi lengua sea: Diario  íntimo de Gabriela Mistral, 1905–1956  (Santiago: Planeta, 2002), p. 93. 15  Cited in Richard Salisbury, ‘The Middle American Exile of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre’, The Americas 40: 1 (1983), p.4. 16  ‘Agrarismo en Chile’, written from Avignon, France, in August 1928, published in El Mercurio 23 September 1928, p. 4.

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that was Emiliano Zapata) the redistribution of land was accompanied by “looting, burning and murder”. Mexican agrarian reform “resulted from an uprising” meaning it “fears and trembles at each new uprising”, and with the death of Obregón, she said, its future looked particularly uncertain. What Mistral wanted to see in Chile was “agrarian reform without bloodshed”: “it is about time an American country legislated [for change] without […] the heated urgency of rebellion”. Drawing on the Mexican experience, Mistral thus issued both a call for action and a warning. She insisted that landowners in Chile “should respond more favourably to the new agrarian laws that were being put before Congress” (they could lose so much more if the campesinos finally decided enough was enough), and for the campesinos, there was “nothing more beneficial than the redistribution of land without revolution” (for they could work their newly acquired lands in peace).17 In 1940, the Peruvian-run Chilean magazine Ercilla published at least two celebratory pieces on agrarian reform in Mexico under Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940).18 Indirectly validating Mistral’s fears, it noted that Obregón’s 1923 law, enabling the redistribution of 4 million hectares to 16,000 families, had been suspended after three years due to “the tenacious resistance of the latifundistas and old-timer bureaucrats”. As reported here, Cárdenas had revived the post-revolutionary state’s social agenda and made it possible for any Mexican to occupy and cultivate plots of land (up to 25 irrigated hectares) which were not in use, and to apply for credit and technical assistance to help farm it productively. The basic premise, Ercilla readers were told, was that the farm worker was “now motivated to toil the land” because it was “theirs.” The focus (“el trabajador”) was not so much the collective as the individual (man), and the aim was to “get as much as possible out of the land”. Land was considered an economic resource above all else; it was for “he who cultivates it.” One particularly well-known Peruvian Aprista to work for Ercilla during the late 1930s and early 1940s was Ciro Alegría. He was living in exile in Chile at this point and published several novels there. The central storyline of one of them, El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941), is the struggle of an indigenous community in the northern Peruvian Andes, Rumi, to defend its lands and its members’ independence from the intrusions of a greedy  All the citations in this paragraph are from “Agrarismo en Chile”.  ‘Tierra libre para todo mexicano es el lema del gobierno de Cárdenas’, and ‘Cualquier mexicano tiene derecho a pedir para si la tierra ociosa’, Ercilla (January 1940), p. 10. 17 18

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and violent estate owner. From the very first pages, Lewis Taylor asserts, “Alegría is at pains to enlist the reader’s sympathy” on the side of Rumi.19 Through private correspondence and the occasional face-to-face meeting, Alegría established a long-lasting friendship with Mistral, and they conversed frequently of indigenous peoples’ relationship with the land. In one letter, dated 12 October 1947, which spoke at length about the “ancient race of the continent”, Alegría suggested that if Mistral wanted more reading on “the case of the Peruvian Indian” she should try Mariátegui, Hildebrando Castro Pozo (specifically his Nuestra comunidad indígena), and Moisés Sáenz.20 All three of these figures wrote passionately in defence of indigenous communal landholdings. I have already cited from Mariátegui’s works. Alegría’s second suggestion, Peruvian sociologist and politician, Castro Pozo, was a member of the Tawantinsuyo Pro-Indigenous Rights Committee. His writings presented the ayllu as central to the agrarian economy of Peru: “the Indian is the célula constitutiva of this collective body, and as such is the most valuable contributor to our economic output, to the political and economic organization of our production, and [thus] to the political, social and economic organization of the Republic.”21 Alegría’s last recommendation, Sáenz was a Mexican writer, educator, politician and diplomat, who had served as sub-secretary of education in the late 1920s, and was later posted as ambassador to Peru. In 1933 Saénz published Sobre el indio peruano y su incorporación al medio nacional, which argued that only land reform could maintain indigenous people in a way of life that corresponded to their nature. It also asserted that land reform was critical if the government wanted to reduce internal migration.22 This was to be the official position of the Inter-American Indigenista Institute (III), when it came into being at the first Inter-American Indigenista Congress, held in Pátzcuaro, Mexico, in April 1940. Sáenz organised the preparations for this congress from Peru and was named as

19  Lewis Taylor, ‘Literature as History: Ciro Alegría’s View of Rural Society in the Northern Peruvian Andes’, Ibero-amerikanisches Archiv 10: 3 (1984), p. 351. 20  This letter is accessible through the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile at http://www.bibliotecanacionaldigital.gob.cl/bnd/623/w3-article-143932.html 21  Hildebrando Castro Pozo, Nuestra comunidad indígena (Lima: Editorial El Lucero, 1924), p. iv. 22  Moisés Sáenz, Sobre el indio peruano y su incorporación al medio nacional (Mexico City: SEP, 1933)

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first director of the III. Such a potentially game-changing role was short lived, however, for he died in October 1941. Sáenz was greatly admired by David Alfaro Siqueiros, one of the founders of the renowned school of Mexican muralism.23 Together with other artists in the pay of the post-revolutionary state, Siqueiros made agrarian reform and the defence of indigenous community lands a key part of the celebratory narrative painted onto public buildings during the 1920s and 1930s.24 Siqueiros and Xavier Guerrero (1896–1974) recreated this story in Chile in the early 1940s. Their canvass was the Escuela de México, a school built in Chillán after the earthquake in 1939 with funds from the Cárdenas administration. This act of solidarity, organised by Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda (1904–1973)—who was posted in Mexico at the time—included painting the history of the “sister republics” of Mexico and Chile onto the walls of the school.25 Siqueiros and Guerrero were helped in their endeavour by Chilean artists Laureano Guevara, Gregorio de la Fuente (1910–1999), and Camilo Mori (1896–1973). Through “Muerte al invasor” and “De Mexico a Chile”, they refabricated and publicised a transnational imaginary of indigenous people, including sixteenth century Mapuche warrior Lautaro, as intimately connected to the land— land that was rightfully theirs, and which they had defended with their lives against various waves of colonial “invaders”.26 This was by no means an entirely new artistic narrative for Chile. Guevara had worked on the Chilean Pavilion at the Ibero-American Exposition in Seville in 1929. Alongside Arturo Gordon, he decorated the pavilion with a “vision of indigenous Chile, of the real people of the country: miners, fishermen, indigenous farmers, weavers, going about their daily tasks, in their geographic landscape.”27 For at least a decade then, we detect multiple connections between Chilean and Mexican proclamations  Siqueiros created a portrait lithograph of Sáenz in 1931.  Desmond Rochfort, ‘The Sickle, the Serpent, and the Soil: History, Revolution, Nationhood, and Modernity in the Murals of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros’, in Alexander Dawson and Mary Kay Vaughan (eds.), The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 43–57. 25  Siqueiros’s mural (the main mural) was entitled “Muerte al invasor”. Guerrero created a smaller series of murals, entitled “De México a Chile”. 26  The mural also featured President Cárdenas, and deceased leader of the Chilean workers’ movement, Luis Emilio Recabarren. 27  Pedro Emilio Zamorano Perez and Claudio Cortes Lopez, ‘Muralismo en Chile’, Universum 2: 22 (2007). 23 24

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about indigenous lands and labour. Peru and Peruvians feature prominently in the larger collective picture being drawn here: the Peruvian-run Ercilla promoted Cárdenas’ land reforms in Chile; Alegría recommended Peruvian and Mexican intellectual works on the ayllu to Mistral; and press coverage of the Ibero-American Exposition in Seville paired Chile up with Peru, as a country which had just recently begun to recognise the cultural and economic value of its indigenous population (see Part II). Despite the widespread visibility of these transnational conversations about indigenous land rights, however, little was achieved in either Chile or Peru during the first half of the twentieth century.

Land Reform in Early Twentieth Century Peru: A History of Empty Promises On 18 January 1920, the government of Augusto Leguía (1919–1930)— influenced by developments beyond Peru, not least by what was happening in post-revolutionary Mexico—promulgated a new constitution.28 According to Article 58 of that constitution, the Peruvian nation now “recognise[d] the legal existence of indigenous communities”.29 This represented an important shift in official policy but the details as to how such constitutional recognition would work in practice relied on additional laws being passed, and on these the text remained vague: it merely stated “[further] legislation will determine their rights.” Moreover, as Mallon and others have noted, “this was done in the context of a new protectionist and paternalistic policy towards indigenous peoples in general.”30 Article 58’s other sentence (there were two in total) read: “The State will protect the indigenous race and enact special laws to promote its development and culture in harmony with its needs.” To this end, it created a Department of Indian Affairs within the Ministry of Development, through which individual communities could request legal validation from the state, “thus establishing a direct and ‘special’ relationship between indigenous

28  Wyndham Bewes, ‘The New Constitution of Peru (January 18, 1920)’, Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law 2: 3 (1920), pp. 266–269. 29  The full constitutional document is available at http://www.leyes.congreso.gob.pe/ Documentos/constituciones_ordenado/CONSTIT_1920/Cons1920_TEXTO.pdf 30  Mallon, in José Moya, Oxford Handbook, p. 294. See also Paulo Drinot, Introduction to La Nueva Patria: Economía, sociedad y cultura en el Perú, 1919–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), pp. 1–34.

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peoples and the state.”31 In other words, rather than granting communities autonomy, Leguía’s government made them more dependent on the state, with promises of land redistribution and protection from abusive and corrupt gamonales that rarely came to fruition. The regime did expropriate some individual estates; Sáenz reported on such initiatives in his study of 1933, noting the purchase of a total of 133,793 hectares between 1926 and 1927.32 Overall, though, indigenous landholdings decreased under Leguía.33 Despite their political differences, the short tumultuous government of Luis Sánchez Cerro (1931–1933) followed Leguía’s lead on agrarian reform by calling “for the organisation and registration of Indian community lands, the restoration of lands usurped in the past and the distribution of plots to landless Indians,” but failing to implement any concrete measures in this sphere.34 Perhaps Sánchez Cerro felt compelled to speak in favour of land reform, because his main opponent in the elections of 1931 was APRA leader Haya de la Torre, who had made the issue an important part of his own campaign. In June 1931 Haya wrote: “The state ought to abolish latifundismo gradually, protecting and giving a technical impulse to the comunidades, educating the Indian and securing Peru’s rich production for the benefit of all.”35 The party’s “Plan of Immediate Action” included proposals to “pass legislation to conserve and to modernise the comunidad”.36 To “modernise” meant creating “a class of Indian yeoman farmers.”37 To “conserve” meant securing “for the Indian the position he held during the Inca Empire”.38 Thus, the indigenous past and present came together, with a view to constructing a better future for Peru. However, as with the governments of Leguía and Sánchez Cerro that it opposed, APRA’s pledges largely came to nothing. To be sure, effective implementation was impossible when operating from a position of opposition or indeed prohibition and persecution (like their rivals in the PCP, nationally renowned Aprista activists spent much of  Ibid.  Sáenz, Sobre el indio peruano. 33  Thomas Davies, ‘Indian Integration in Peru, 1820–1948: An Overview’, The Americas 30: 2 (1973), pp. 184–208. 34  Davies, ‘The Indigenismo of the Peruvian Aprista Party’, p. 651. 35  In ibid., p. 629. 36  Reported in El Perú, 3 July 1931. 37  Davies, ‘The Indigenismo of the Peruvian Aprista Party’, p. 630. 38  La Cronica of Lima, 23 August 1933, cited in ibid. 31 32

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the 1930s in hiding in Peru or in exile abroad). Thomas Davies’s point, though, that APRA’s stance on land was notably vague, and remained so through the 1930s and into the 1940s, is a valid one, for when they were finally “in government” during the presidency of José Bustamante y Rivero (1945–1948), Haya and his fellow Apristas failed to make any substantive headway with land reform. In the words of Davies, “they treated each land dispute and each Indian comunidad as a separate, isolated case” rather than trying to overhaul the system. In the case of Santa Ursula, the “only hacienda expropriated for the benefit of its Indian tenants”, it was two years before Apristas lent their support to the congressional bill that made this possible. As Davies tells it, there “were many expropriation bills introduced in both houses, but the Apristas supported few and seem to have aided efforts to kill others.”39 It was for this reason that activist-­intellectuals who slowly moved away from Haya in the 1940s, such as Magda Portal (see Chap. 2), asserted that APRA betrayed land reform and indigenous people.40 In an interesting twist of events a few years later, Portal’s friend Mistral tried to rescue Haya’s reputation as a champion of indigenous land rights. This was in a letter of 1951 sent to the president of the International Court of Justice, Cuban lawyer Antonio Sánchez de Bustamante (1865–1951).41 The aim of Mistral’s letter was to stress the moderate nature of the APRA leader’s politics when he was threatened with life imprisonment in Peru. The Chilean poet recovered what she remembered of her conversations with Haya in Mexico in the early 1920s, describing his “social programme for Peru, particularly for indigenous people” as significant but “de gran moderación” compared to the agrarian reforms underway in Mexico at the time. Haya was not a threat to the system, she insisted. He remained committed to the “indigenous campesino question”, but his proposals were more “considered” than  those of the “agraristas” of Cuba and “the Catholic Falangists of Chile”. The Chilean poet and diplomat then fed this into a broader narrative of indigenous suffering. She evoked the “tragic scenes” that she said she had witnessed on “indigenous reservations in so many countries”—a reality that she had  Ibid. 639.  Portal, ¿Quiénes traicionaron al pueblo? 41  The letter (available at http://www.bibliotecanacionaldigital.gob.cl/bnd/635/w3-article-151463.html) does not have a date but was written from Rapallo, Italy, and we know Mistral was there in early 1951. 39 40

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supposedly recounted to the Pope several years previously, securing his promise to get “rural priests to pay more attention to this serious problem.” Mistral’s letter to the ICJ constituted a plea to keep land reform on the agenda and to refrain from thinking about it as a radical leftist endeavour; she used Haya to do this despite himself having said little of any substance on the issue for many years. By the 1950s, agrarian reform was no closer to becoming a reality for Peru’s indigenous campesinos than it had been in the 1920s. As Michael Albertus comments, “with a military that largely protected the wealth and power of the pre-existing landowning elite, democratic governments proved incapable of implementing even mild land reform until Fernando Belaúnde was elected president in 1963.”42 The story is a remarkably similar one for twentieth-century Chile. Despite the Communist Party making the redistribution of land a major part of its political programme, and despite the hope that something might be achieved under the Popular Front government of Pedro Aguirre Cerda (1938–1941), “mild land reform” only became a reality under Jorge Alessandri (1958–1964), and then it was very mild.43

Land Reform in Early Twentieth Century Chile: More Empty Promises In contrast to the 1920 Constitution in Peru, the Chilean Constitution of 1925 made no reference to indigenous communities. Some Chilean land legislation did, though—namely the resettlement laws brought in after the state occupation of Araucanía. Between 1883 and 1929, Mapuche communities in this region were allocated or dispossessed of lands according to these laws. The radicación process was, as Mapuche leaders consistently and publicly lamented, majorly flawed, not least because the decisions 42  Michael Albertus, ‘Explaining Patterns of Redistribution under Autocracy: The Case of Peru’s Revolution from Above’, Latin American Research Review 50: 2 (2015), p. 112. See also Pablo Macera, Agricultura en el Perú, s. XX (Lima: Universidad Nacional de San Marcos, 1977). 43  Indeed, Alessandri’s government did little more than buy a few estates from public institutions. See Brian Loveman, Struggle in the Countryside: Politics and Rural Labor in Chile, 1919–1973 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 235–239. Frei-Montalva’s government (1964–1970) introduced a more substantive reform, allowing for the expropriation (with compensation) of estates over 80 basic irrigated hectares. Allende’s UP government (1970–73) then made this a reality, without compensation.

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taken by the Indian Courts as to who was to be settled where were very slow in coming and because lands were rapidly being sold off to (nonindigenous) private interests in the meantime.44 Nonetheless, it was this legislation and the land titles (“títulos de merced”) allocated as a result of it that Mapuche activists often turned to during their struggles against estate owners and logging companies during the twentieth century. In this too we note a marked contrast with Peru, where it was land titles granted by or purchased from the Spanish crown that indigenous community leaders regularly invoked to defend their collective property.45 Where the experiences of Andean Peru and southern Chile overlapped was in Mapuche activists’ citations of the historical treaties with the Spanish crown that recognised their territorial autonomy; in both cases, colonial documents served as subversive documents to defend indigenous rights against the republican state and the private interests it represented. Chilean republican legislation on indigenous lands referred only to Mapuche lands, and not all Mapuche lands at that. The Talca-born economic historian Álvaro Jara Hankte (1923–1998) called attention to this limitation in his report on Legislación Indigenista de Chile, published by the Instituto Indigenista Interamericano in Mexico City in 1956. After thanking his “good friend Professor Alejandro Lipschutz” for his valuable input, Jara noted that Chilean indigenista laws related exclusively to “one specific region of national territory, [the region] situated to the south of the Bío Bío River”.46 The northern regions, annexed from Bolivia and Peru during the War of the Pacific, were excluded; the state had never passed any special laws defending the rights of the “sizeable groups of Quichuas, Aymaras, Atacameños and Changos” who lived there. This was also true, he said, for the “few indigenous people living in the provinces of Atacama and Coquimbo”.47 As we will see throughout this book, such legal invisibilisation and silencing was often replicated in broader intellectual and political debates. Developments regarding Mapuche lands in Araucanía during the early twentieth century seemed to move in the opposite direction to what was happening (even if only at a discursive level) in Peru. Whilst Leguía’s new 44  ‘El comicio indígena de ayer. Cerca de 30,000 indios sin radicar. Piden se suspenden los remates de tierras’, El Diario Austral, 16 October 1916. 45  Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided, p. 112–113. 46  Alvaro Jara, Legislación Indigenista de Chile (Mexico City: III, 1956), p. 13. 47  Ibid., p. 21.

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constitution of 1920 recognised indigenous communities as corporate units, thereby shifting the emphasis from private to collective land ownership, the Ibáñez regime in Chile (1927–1931) passed new legislation to enable the (previously prohibited) division and sale of Mapuche community lands, thereby shifting the emphasis from collective to private ownership. On 29 August 1927, Chile’s National Congress approved Indigenous Lands Division Law 4169. As summarised by Mallon, one of the law’s “most important provisions [was] that any single member of a Mapuche community could request the division of its lands”.48 It was a Mapuche political organiser, Manuel Manquilef (1887–1950), who brought this bill to congress, and was consequently deemed by many other Mapuche to be a “traitor to the race.”49 For Manquilef—whose thinking was in line with Peruvian intellectuals such as Victor Andrés Belaunde (1883–1966) but started from quite a different perspective—it was only through their legal recognition as independent property owners that the Mapuche would be able to achieve equality with Chileans.50 As Mallon rightly notes, we need to understand Manquilef’s strategy here in the context of previous declarations by him. She cites from his 1915 essay, ¡Las  Tierras de Arauco!: “stripped of their property, [the indigenous people] today are poor, miserable victims of the government and society in which they live”.51 He continued: “The Government of Chile violated treaties, promises. It blatantly ignored the Constitution when it declared war on Arauco in the most despicable and sinister way ever seen.” And then came the settlement laws (1883–1929) which forced all Mapuche to “live as a community”, treating them as minors, prohibiting them from selling their lands even if they wanted to. Moreover, Mallon explains that “before division could take place the legal boundaries of the land granted needed to be confirmed according to the original […] title issued by the Chilean government”.52 And in Congress Manquilef repeatedly asserted that these “títulos de merced” were not, as the wording suggested, a compassionate, generous gift from the state; rather, they served as recognition of Mapuche ancestral rights.53 Through the detail he  Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood, p. 4.  See Menard and Pavez, ‘Documentos de la Federación’ (p.  76) on the Araucanian Congress of 1926. 50  On Belaunde, see de la Cadena, ‘Silent Racism and Intellectual Superiority in Peru’. 51  Manquilef, Las Tierras de Arauco! (Temuco: Imprenta Modernista, 1915), p. 8. 52  Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood, p. 4. 53  Cámara de Diputados, Sesiones ordinarias (sesión 105a), 7 February 1929, p. 5782. 48 49

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provided in the congressional debates (the coordinates of individual property titles, not least those of his own family), Manquilef was documenting—for the official record—a previously independent Mapuche territory. One Communist Party deputy, Carlos Contreras Labarca, spoke out against land division in the 1927 congressional debates. In his view, the sub-division of the communities would mean “the Indians” succumbing to “an individualistic, fratricidal and completely injurious struggle”. “[T]he Araucanians would become weaker and weaker every day”, he warned. For that reason, he described the proposed law as “an unsparing guillotine”; indigenous people must rise up, he said, “to defend their endangered rights, and join with the workers of the cities and the countryside, [in] a formidable struggle against the estate owners and land usurpers.” At the point where Contreras pledged that the Communist Party would always be there, “devotedly defending” the Mapuche, Manquilef interrupted. He asserted that such a strategy served only to “make the Indians […] subservient to the workers,” but his intervention was largely ignored by the PCCh deputy who merely reaffirmed his “friendly appeal” to make the “unity of workers, campesinos and Araucanians” a “magnificent reality”.54 The left lost this parliamentary dispute. The division of indigenous Mapuche communities was signed into law in 1928, dovetailing with Ibáñez’s Southern Property Law, which in turn coincided with major infrastructural development in Araucanía and government efforts to position the southern regions as a touristic attraction. Mapuche organisers who actively opposed the initiative of the modernising dictator (similar to Leguía in so many ways), were branded communists, and in some cases arrested.55 As put forward in the new property law, the problem of landownership in the south was to be resolved through a process of negotiation between estate owners and impoverished settlers, with a view to making “the first cede a small proportion of their land to the second, in return for the definitive recognition of la gran propiedad.”56 Contrary to Manquilef’s proposition, the Mapuche lost their “derecho anterior” to

 In Samaniego and Ruiz Rodríguez, Mentalidades y políticas wingka, p. 161.  Menard and Pavez, ‘Documentos de la Federación Araucana’, p. 52. 56  Ibid., p. 60. 54 55

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lands, but could access the benefits of the Southern Property Law as “national settlers”.57 Over the next three years, the Indigenous Land Division Law 4169 was modified several times. In May 1931, for instance, a new decree law (266) was passed, stipulating that one third of the community had to request the division for it to go ahead. The law acknowledged that the initial legislation ran counter to the desires of the majority of “los comuneros” but stressed that “indigenous people [must] abide by the same legal system as the rest of the country” because this was the “only way to incorporate them fully into civilisation”.58 The law also committed to ensuring that “the lands they occupy benefit from credit schemes”, which would enable them to be “[properly] worked and cultivated”. Beyond a general sense that deputies disagreed as to whether the ability to sell one’s land was an important freedom to which indigenous people were entitled or a guaranteed pathway to dispossession and ruin, four important points emerge from the congressional debates of the late 1920s and early 1930s. First, we detect the creation of an official mirage through which the colonists or settlers became the rightful owners of land because they, as “outsiders” [extraños], were working the land and making it productive.59 The contrast with the “lazy native” was taken as a given. Second, there was a notable transnational dimension to this mirage. The rights of settlers had, one Mr. Duran insisted, been recognised by “legislatures the world over”. Congressional deputies repeatedly turned to the U.S., Canada, Argentina, and Uruguay as economic success stories for Chile to emulate. A Mr. Alvarez asserted that in these countries “se legisla con sabiduría” because lands were cleared, and roads and railways built before bringing in new settlers. Chile, he said, really needed to catch up in this regard. Third, Manquilef repeatedly lamented that the new Indigenous Court created in Temuco had failed to “rule on any subdivision [of indigenous communities]”.60 In other words, the possibility of dividing Mapuche communal property existed on paper, but the law had not yet—even a couple of years after its promulgation—been put into practice. Fourth, Manquilef revealed the farce that was Chile’s modernity when he spoke of 57  ‘Los indígenas pueden obtener mayor extensión haciéndose colonos nacionales’, El Diario Austral, 11 May 1928. 58  The full text for this law is available through Chile’s Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional. See https://www.bcn.cl/leychile/navegar?i=5251 59  Cámara de Diputados, Sesiones ordinarias (sesión 105a), 7 February 1929. 60  Cámara de Diputados, Sesiones ordinarias (sesión 102a), 5 February 1929, p. 5666.

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people in the south dying of hunger; they were starving because their land had been stolen from them, and the supposedly modern, democratic state was doing nothing to solve this problem.61 The PCCh which had opposed Manquilef’s land division law and pledged to “fight for the recognition of the right of aboriginal tribes to maintain ownership of the lands that they had inhabited for centuries”,62 formed part of the Popular Front government that came into power in 1938. The illustrated weekly magazine Zig-Zag once claimed that the leader of this government represented “the Chile of the poncho, the dark-­ skinned [and] the rural”.63 Certainly, Aguirre Cerda had the support of many Mapuche organisations. Writing in Frente Araucano in 1939, Alberto Melillán commended the Popular Front for being “willing to tackle [the land question] head on”. The National Indigenous Congress held in Temuco in April that year had presented a report to the “Supreme Government”, outlining demands for state-demarcated and protected lands, and Mellilán and his peers were hopeful that the government would “resolve the problem favourably.”64 Aguirre Cerda appeared to respond to such demands and hopes when it set up a Commission on Indigenous Issues in 1941. This official entity, composed of government figures and Mapuche representatives, proposed three resolutions to the land question: that communal lands not be divided, that lands usurped in the context of and since the “leyes de radicación” (1883–1929) be returned, and that all sales contracts postdating the laws of 1927 and 1931 be nullified.65 However, these proposals were eventually rejected by Aguirre Cerda, and never revisited by the government of Juan Antonio Ríos.66 As commented 61  During the previously cited session of 7 February 1929, congressman Ríos exclaimed “Where is the honourable gentleman talking about? Nobody dies of hunger in Chile!”. Manquilef—backed up by Melivilu— reasserted “As I said, right here in Chile!”. For Ríos, land usurpations were the exception to the rule, for Melivilu and Manquilef, they were the norm. 62  Cámara de Diputados, Sesiones extraordinarias (sesión 86a), 2 February 1927. Cited in Samaniego et al., p. 155. 63  Cited in Barr-Melej, ‘Cowboys and Constructions’, p. 54. 64  Alberto Melillán, ‘Colonización a base de nuestra raza indígena’, Frente Araucano 1: 1 (July 1939), p.  3. Reproduced in Claudio Alvarado and Enrique Antileo (eds.), Diarios Mapuche 1935–1966: Escrituras y pensamientos bajo el colonialismo chilenos del siglo XX (Temuco: Ediciones Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, 2019), pp. 98–99. 65  The “Actas” of the commission were published in El Diario Austral, 14 October 1941, p. 8. 66  Crow, The Mapuche in Modern Chile, p. 90.

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by Mallon, the countryside—and especially the Mapuche inhabitants of that countryside—were very much left out of the Popular Front’s new “compromise state”.67 Mapuche intellectuals were outspoken in their dismay at such failures. In the November–December 1941 issue of Heraldo Araucano, Carlos Huayquiñir and Alberto Melillán wrote: “On the eve of the presidential elections, the most genuine son of democracy—who was soon to win power—told us that all the aspirations of the original owners of these lands, would be satisfied […] in accordance with humanitarian law.”68 However, “the years have gone by […] and time and time again we have raised our voices respectfully, asking that the Public Authorities pay attention to our petitions, but these have encountered only disdainful silence, hence our disillusion.” Huayquiñir and Melillán mainly complained that existing laws were not applied. They asked that a special court be set up in Osorno to ensure “strict compliance with the law”. And yet they also asked that all sale and rental agreements related to indigenous lands be suspended until a new law could be passed to truly protect communal land ownership. Finally, Huayquiñir and Melillán asked that the Ministry of Land and Colonisation employ an indigenous representative, and that indigenous people be relieved from paying property taxes. The penultimate request does not seem to have been heeded until 1952, but when it was, it happened at the highest level: in his second term of government, Ibáñez appointed Venancio Coñuepán, leader of the Araucanian Corporation (also known as the Indigenista Movement of Chile), as Minister of Land and Colonisation. The final demand seemed to be taken on board more promptly. In 1942, the Mexico City-based Boletin Indigenista reported that the then Minister of Land and Colonisation was to propose a bill to the Chilean National Congress exempting Indians from the payment of property taxes.69 In all, then, the record of Chile’s Popular Front government was not entirely one of broken promises, but reforms were piecemeal, and on the agrarian question it gave in to

 Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood, p. 3.  Carlos Huayquiñir and Alberto Melillán, Heraldo Araucano 2 (Nov-Dec. 1941), p. 4. Reproduced in Alvarado and Antileo (eds.), Diarios Mapuche, pp. 150–151. 69  ‘Chile: Indian Exemption from Property Taxes’, Boletín Indigenista 2: 2 (1942), p. 12. According to Rolf Foerster and Sonia Montecino, Mapuche organisations had been demanding exemption since the 1920s. See Organizaciones, líderes y contiendas mapuches, 1900–1970 (Santiago: CEM, 1988), pp. 36–39. 67 68

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pressure from landowning elites and their powerful guild associations such as the Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura (SNA).70

A Transnational Portrait of Dispossession, Rebellion and Repression Despite their close connections to the economic and political elites, and their frequent labelling of indigenous people as lazy and degenerate, it was not uncommon, in either Peru or Chile, for mainstream newspapers to denounce the ongoing dispossession of indigenous lands, and especially the violent nature of this process.71 In September 1915, for example, El Comercio of Cuzco—founded in 1876 by limeño Felix Evaristo Castro, who promoted the “whitening” of Peru through European immigration—reported that five “Indians” from the town of Acomayo had arrived at their offices with “horrible cuts” on their heads and faces after clashing with provincial authorities. The newspaper verified the first-hand accounts of the Indians, who “had heroically defended themselves from their cowardly aggressors”, and it specified the authorities who were prepared to commit murder in order to seize community land: “The blood of these poor wretches spilled in defence of their rights and the cadaver of that creature killed by the ambition of the Rondocán governor demonstrate the state of demoralization and anarchy in which the province of Acomayo finds itself”.72 The Pro-Indigenous Association (API, 1909–1916)—founded by Pedro Zulen, a philosopher and librarian of Chinese descent; his wife Dora Mayer de Zulen (1868–1959), who had migrated to Peru from Germany as a child; and Joaquín Capelo (1852–1928)—consistently decried the widespread dispossession of indigenous lands.73 Its magazine El Deber Pro-Indígena made sure news of the theft and violence circulated throughout Peru. It also liaised with The Times and the Anti- Slavery and Aborigine

70  Thomas Wright, Landowners and Reform in Chile: The Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura, 1919–1940 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982; Jean Carrière, Landowners and Politics in Chile: A Study of the ‘Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura’, 1932–1970 (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1981). 71  On Cuzco see Willie Hiatt, ‘Indians in the Lobby: Newspapers and the Limits of Andean Cosmopolitanism, 1896–1930’, The Americas 68: 3 (2012), pp. 377–403. 72  El Comercio of Cuzco, 15 September 1915, p. 2. Cited in ibid., p. 394. 73  Miller, Reinventing Modernity, p. 149.

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Protection Society in England to publicise these injustices beyond Peru.74 Building on the example of the API, this section maps out the transnational telling of—as well as back drop to—the violent history of (indigenous) dispossession, (indigenous) rebellion, and (state) repression shared by Chile and Peru. In early 1930s Chile, Mapuche activist César Colima used the Temuco based newspaper El Diario Austral to remind readers of the tragic events that had taken place in Forrahue in 1912: “a marauding landowner called Atanasio Burgos, murderer of so many tenant farmers, massacred—with the support of the police—more than 50 Araucanians, whose bodies were then burnt with paraffin and buried in a mass grave.”75 “Neither women, nor children, nor the elderly escaped the bullets”, he continued, and “the few that survived were forced to leave their mapus.” Forrahue was just one example of a very long history: “The Araucanian race has always been exploited, and is still to this day, victim of so many cruelties, crimes and provocations.” When Colima and Coñuepán addressed the First Inter-­ American Indigenista Congress in Mexico in 1940 (a story I come back to in more detail in Chap. 4), they did not mention this violence directly, but they made Mapuche dispossession—the “thousands of hectares usurped by the whites”—central to their report.76 In a sense, they translated the Mapuche experience into the indigenista language of the congress. And their national chronicle was incorporated into a larger continental narrative through the Acta Final of the Congress: the first point agreed by delegates in Mexico was that the “concentration of lands” constituted the major problem faced by indigenous people across the Americas, and that there was an urgent need for governments to “correct any abuse” in this regard.77 In both Chile and Peru, indigenous community leaders petitioned the government and the law courts to resolve their land problems. When this achieved nothing, they sometimes took up arms. Thomas Klubock Miller insists that the Ranquil uprising of 1934 (see Chap. 2) is best understood as part of a broader picture of social unrest: “during the first decades of the twentieth century throughout southern Chile—from Llanquihue and 74  Pedro Zulen to Mr. Travers, letter dated 1st March 1911. Archivo Pedro Zulen. Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. 75  César Colima, ‘Carta al Diario Austral’, Diario Austral, 6 February 1932. 76  Venancio Coñuepán and Cesar Colima, ‘El problema indígena de Chile’, 1940. I would like to thank Jorge Iván Vergara for sharing this document with me. 77  ‘Restitución de tierras’, Acta final del primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano, p. 7.

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Valdivia to Cautin, Malleco, Bio Bio and Arauco farther north—rural labourers, squatters, and settlers contested the authority of landowners […] and asserted their rights to land on estates.”78 According to historian José Tamayo Herrera, over 40 indigenous uprisings took place in the Puno region of Peru alone between 1901 and 1946, with 15 of these occurring between 1920 and 1922.79 Speaking via Hugo Pesce to the First Conference of Communist Parties of Latin America in Buenos Aires in 1929, Mariátegui claimed that 98% of the indigenous rebellions that had taken place in Peru were motivated by the land problem.80 “When people speak about the Indian’s attitude towards his exploiters”, he said, “they give the general impression of a reviled, depressed Indian that is incapable of fighting back” but, to his mind, the “long history of indigenous riots and uprisings” refuted such an imaginary. “In many cases”, indigenous protests were a defensive response “to the violence of a particular authority or landowner”. Others, though, could not be explained as a “local mutiny” and the authorities needed to bring in “considerable military force” to suppress them: “Thousands of rebel Indians”, Mariátegui asserted, “have sowed terror among the gamonales of more than one province.” Mariátegui spotlighted one uprising of 1915–1916  in Azángaro as especially significant: “that led by [an ex] army official Teodomiro Gutiérrez, an Andean mestizo, with a high percentage of indigenous blood, who went by the [Quechua] name of Rumi Maqui.” As presented in Buenos Aires—a story Mariátegui had already told in Lima’s El Tiempo more than a decade earlier—Gutiérrez had been sent to Puno in 1913 by President Guillermo Billinghurst (1912–1914) to investigate a recent massacre of campesinos in Azángaro.81 This meant “establishing close contact with many indigenous people” and “when Billinghurst was overthrown”—and the report on the massacre consigned to the bureaucratic archives—Gutiérrez “concluded that any chance of legal retribution had disappeared” and “se lanzó a la revuelta”.82 78  Klubock Miller, La Frontera, p. 91. On Ranquil, see also Florencia Mallon, ‘Victims into Emblems: Images of the Ránquil Massacre in Chilean National Narratives, 1934–2004’, Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, 8:1 (Spring 2011), pp. 29–55. 79  Tamayo Herrera, José, Historia del indigenismo cuzqueño, siglos xvi-xx (Cuzco: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1980) 80  ‘El problema de las razas...’, in El movimiento revolucionario latinoamericano, p. 285. 81  El Tiempo, Lima, Año II, No. 288, 25 April 1917, p. 1. 82  ‘El problema de las razas’, in El movimiento revolucionario latinoamericano, p. 285.

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One part of the story Mariátegui did not mention either in El Tiempo or in Buenos Aires, but which some sources on Gutiérrez have at least mentioned in brief, was that which took place in Chile. According to Carlos Arroyo Reyes, Gutiérrez was forced into exile in Chile in February 1914.83 This happened in the context of the military uprising which ousted Billinghurst from power. Billinghurst too went into exile in Chile, where he died shortly thereafter. Gutiérrez stayed six months in the northern city of Iquique and the central port city of Valparaíso. Reportedly, this gave him time (in cities where the labour movement was particularly visible and vocal) to reflect on what had happened in Azángaro, and when he returned to Peru he did so with a plan for armed rebellion. The uprising led by Gutiérrez in Azángaro in 1915–1916 was followed by numerous others, not least those of La Mar and Huancané in 1923, which were reported as far afield as Mexico City by El Machete, the mouthpiece of the Mexican Communist Party.84 As narrated by El Machete, the indigenous campesinos of La Mar and Huancané were legitimately protesting about the ongoing theft of their lands and about new laws that sought to eliminate the ayllu. At the end of the piece, readers were told that these protests had been silenced by “relentless rounds of shrapnel”.85 The brutal repression of campesino political mobilisation in Chile inspired the award-winning novel Ranquil: Novela de la Tierra (1941) by Reinaldo Lomboy.86 Lomboy was well known in national and international journalistic circles—working for the editorial boards of the magazines Ecran and Zig-Zag, as well as for the British Embassy in Santiago and Reuters News Agency—and his novel was likened, by fellow Chilean writer Fernando Santiván (1886–1973), to the classic Peruvian indigenista text El mundo es ancho y ajeno by Alegría, published in Chile the same year.87 When people read the title Ranquil, they immediately think “tierra indígena”, wrote Santiván. Lomboy’s novel was “compact, solidly and harmoniously constructed, with one simple storyline”. Alegría’s, by contrast, interweaved “various stories, seemingly large digressions, which then come together like a river joining the sea.” Both  Carlos Arroyo Reyes, Nuestros años diez, p. 116.  ‘Regalo de Leguía’, Machete, March 1924, p. 2. 85  Ibid. 86  The novel was published by Editorial Orbe in Santiago and won the Premio Atenea (Universidad de Concepción) in 1942. 87  Fernando Santiván, ‘Reseña de Libro. Ranquil: Novela de la tierra’, 1945. Available through the Archivo del Escritor at www.bibliotecanacionaldigital.gob.cl 83 84

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though had the same intent: “to defend the land claims of the dispossessed campesinos.” In Ranquil, Lomboy told the story of peasant farmers who were evicted from their lands by the forces of law and order—a “legal” eviction, carried out “in a brutal, pitiless and inhumane manner”. Many of them died of hunger, Santiván recapped, because they lost their crops and their cattle. They were “hunted down like animals” and their homes set on fire. This was why they rebelled. In Peru, newspapers criticised such violent repression, but also communicated and thus helped to spread fears about indigenous activism. In 1922—at the peak of unrest in the southern Andean region—one Cuzco newspaper informed readers: “[The Indians] attempt to divide Peru into races; they want to establish the Tawantinsuyu, the commune, and bring chaos to Peru. The very stability of the government is in danger […] there are more than three million Indians, and if they are going to assume a bellicose attitude, it is going to be very hard to stop them.”88 As de la Cadena has noted, the uprisings were depicted as “irrational” and “primitive”; their leaders as ferocious, bloodthirsty cannibals. Such imagery vindicated the violent repression. Some Liberal indigenistas claimed that indigenous rebellions were brought about by external agitators—a deft way of denying the importance of the national social problems underpinning the rebellions. They presented indigenous people as innately harmless in their supposed primitivity, but capable of violence if provoked, be it by corrupt hacendados or the organised left.89 As El Heraldo of Arequipa reported in April 1920, “A serious threat exists that could produce an uprising of Indian communities, instigated by outside elements to establish communism…”90 In 1927 in Chile soon-to-be president Carlos Ibáñez declared that the left was “destroying the virtues of the race” (meaning the Chilean race).91 “The moment has come”, he said—a moment of political crisis, when as Minister of War, he was responsible for widespread deportations of leftist activists, and for forcing the resignation of President Emiliano Figueroa Larraín—“to break definitively with the red ties of Moscow.” Later, Arturo Alessandri Palma’s government (1932–1938) sent Chile’s equivalent of  Cited by de la Cadena in Indigenous Mestizos, p. 89.  Ibid, p. 111. 90  El Heraldo, 7 April 1920, cited in Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca, p. 173. 91  ‘Declaración del Ministro de Guerra, del 8 de febrero de 1927’, La Nación, 9 February 1927. 88 89

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the FBI to investigate the “alarming” events in in the south (i.e. Ranquil) and to find the “professional agitators” who were encouraging campesinos to revolt.92 And yet the fact that one of the people arrested and sent into internal exile under Ibáñez was Aburto Panguilef indicates that Chilean government officials saw Mapuche people as very capable of instigating subversion themselves.93 Unsurprisingly, Aburto denied such charges (see Chap. 2). Taking his lead, delegates at the Araucanian Congress of 1928 agreed that subversive action was not the way forward. Instead, they urged “the Supreme Government to give every head of family 80 hectares of land, and 20 extra hectares for each son”, thereby deftly shifting the responsibility back to the government, and refocusing discussions on the lack of land.94 At the Araucanian Congress the following year, Aburto Panguilef stuck to the same discursive strategy, this time publicising what was happening across the Andes in Argentina. In particular, he lauded the President of the neighbouring republic for buying 160,000 hectares of land to give to Quechua indigenous communities. Why could the Chilean government not do the same, he asked. Aburto Panguilef denied the label of “natural” or manipulated rebel, indeed, he denied rebellion full stop, but also made it clear that Mapuche people were active agents in this historical moment of social unrest, and fully conscious of governments policy developments not only in Chile but also abroad. Interestingly, Communist Party leaders themselves sometimes propagated the same image of the innate, politically naïve indigenous rebel. In Buenos Aires in 1929, Mariátegui spoke of indigenous land claims as “deep rooted and instinctive”, asserting that it was the task of national communist parties to “give a coordinated, systematic, defined character” to such demands.95 Social realist novelists writing in defence of community land claims were similarly prone to this way of thinking. According to Santiván, Lomboy’s Ranquil depicted an uprising that was “impulsive, disorganised, illogical, and destined to fail.” This reviewer cast the indigenous campesino protagonists as the driving force of events but described them as “anonymous heroes, whose primitive and naïve ignorance [was] heart-breaking”. Writing to Mistral from Chile, a few years before Lomboy  Klubock, La Frontera, p. 108.  Menard and Pavez, ‘Documentos de la Federación Araucana’, p. 52. 94  Ibid. 95  ‘El problema de las razas’, in El movimiento revolucionario latinoamericano, p. 289. 92 93

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published this novel, Peruvian literary critic, Luis Alberto Sánchez, described the “constant rebellion” that he perceived in the “indio chileno”. This was not just “a response to the terrible conditions in which he finds himself”, Sánchez said; it was also explained by his “warrior attitude, which stands out as part of his idiosyncratic character.”96 Indigenista intellectuals like Sánchez might have justified indigenous protest in Chile in the 1930s (as he and his peers had done in Peru in the 1920s), but by making rebellion about racial characteristics, they side-lined indigenous political strategising. They also ended up endorsing landowners’ and governing authorities’ efforts to characterise any sort of indigenous activism as a “rebellion”, precisely the narrative that Aburto Panguilef sought to counter. From all this, we can appreciate the very cyclical nature of dispossession, rebellion, and repression in early twentieth century Chile and Peru. The material also reveals the many ways in which indigenous and non-­ indigenous intellectuals’ discussions about this reality traversed national boundaries: through literary works, newspapers, congresses, letters, and political organisers themselves. As noted earlier in this chapter, their widespread protest had little impact on government policy in either Chile or Peru. Significantly, the economic and political elites that conspired to prevent any significant land reform in favour of indigenous communities were as prone to engaging in cross-border solidarity as the activists they sought to repress. In the detail of the existing historiography, we find numerous instances of business and financial collaborations between Chilean and Peruvian elites—collaborations and ties that date back to the early independence period, indeed to colonial times.97 Perhaps most relevant to story being told here is that outlined by Mallon in her pathbreaking work Peasant and Nation (1987). She shows us how in the 1880s, some  Letter dated 4th June 1936. This is accessible at www.bibliotecanacionaldigital.gob.cl   On the lucrative coastwise exchange of Peruvian sugar for Chilean wheat in the early 1800s, for example, see Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, The Caudillo of the Andes: Andrés de Santa Cruz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 82. On cross-border corruption and money lending in the late 1800s see Alfonso Quiroz, Corrupt Circles: A History of Unbound Graft in Peru (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008), p. 168. On connections between merchant houses in the early twentieth century see Rory Miller, ‘The British commercial houses in Peru and Chile between the two world wars: success and failure’, Estudios de Economía 42: 2 (2015), pp.  93–119. On negotiations over the incipient cocaine trade, see Paul Gootenberg, ‘Secret Ingredientes: The Politics of Coca in U.S.Peruvian Relations, 1915–1965’, Journal of Latin American Studies 36 (2004), p. 254. 96 97

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Peruvian estate owners in the territory occupied by the invading Chilean army collaborated with that army because they feared that the campesino soldiers taking up arms to fight against Chile threatened the centuries old social order and elite privilege in the highlands.98 Put another way, even during the War of the Pacific there were Peruvian hacendados who perceived indigenous mobilisation and autonomy as a greater threat to their economic interests than Chile, which explains why they pressed for peace at any cost.99

Discourses of Autochthony and Historical Continuity The key word in the sentence above is “economic”. When delegates at the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress in 1940 focused on the land question and began to map out a continental pathway to agrarian reform, their main aim was to improve the economic well-being of indigenous peoples.100 Indigenous activists themselves often articulated their land claims in socioeconomic terms. When protesting the settlement laws in the 1910s, for example, Mapuche farmers stressed that the land had been successfully “cultivated with their labour”; it was them who had “sown and worked” the land and made the southern regions “the basket of Chile” (they there by negated the colonial trope of the lazy ignorant Indian and reiterated the trope of “working” the land as having rights to it).101 And elite opposition to the restitution of indigenous lands was certainly expressed in socioeconomic terms; hacendados in both Chile and

98  Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and ‘Comas and the War of the Pacific’, in Orin Starn et al. (eds.), The Peru Reader: History, Politics, Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 181–198. 99  Lorenzo Koliman, a Mapuche who fought for Chile in the war against Peru, told of how Chilean army officials requested that he speak with the “Peruvian Indians” that they came across during their campaigns, and how he could not understand a word they said. Implicit here is that Chilean authorities saw indigenous people as one uniform whole, or at least believed they all spoke the same language—they were all “other”. Elites in both countries were ignorant of indigenous realities and related to each other more closely than to indigenous people. See Tomás Guevara and Manuel Manquilef, Historias de familias, siglo XIX (Santiago and Temuco: CoLibris and Liwen, 2002) p. 45. 100  ‘Restitución de tierras’, Acta final del primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano, p. 7. 101  See La Época, 6 February 1914, and El Diario Austral, 26 January 1917.

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Peru wanted to secure control of indigenous lands to make money.102 At the same time, however, estate-owners also spoke of national security, about avoiding the break-up of the republican state, and preventing a “race-war” (as a way to justify the repression of indigenous rebellions in defence of community lands). And indigenous activists did sometimes talk of the community as a cultural, political, and territorial unit. They did sometimes talk of autonomy and independence. What is more, they promoted alternative epistemologies and ways of thinking about the land. This final section of Chap. 3 spotlights the discourses of historical continuity disseminated by indigenous intellectuals in Chile and Peru. That is, the notion that the land was theirs not just because they worked it, but because it had been theirs “since time immemorial” and was therefore an ancestral or natural right. On 16 October 1916, El Diario Austral reported on a large public gathering of Mapuche leaders who demanded the state suspend the sale of indigenous lands until the resettlement process (initiated in 1883 and ongoing in 1916) had been completed. One leader who spoke at the meeting was Aburto Panguilef: “in times past, our ancestors used to meet together, [basking] in the warmth of the spring sunshine, and on more than one occasion they met together in this very place, to talk freely about how to defend our beloved land from invasion by the arrogant Spanish or the reckless pacifying [Chilean] forces”.103 Fifteen years later, Aburto Panguilef proposed the establishment of an autonomous indigenous republic in Araucanía, based precisely on this long history of the collective defence of Mapuche ancestral lands. Most denunciations of Aburto Panguilef—by church officials and landowning elites—were not about the separatist nature of his campaign, but rather his alleged communism. There were some exceptions, however, such as Father Sebastian Englert’s article in Anthropos in 1938.104 As told by here, this “caudillo” from Loncoche repeatedly impressed upon his “fellow countrymen” that they “had the right to rule themselves, and to have their own judges and governors.” The priest described the idea that “indigenous people should form an independent State within the Chilean nation” as ridiculously 102  On Jose Bunster in Chile, see See Pedro Cayuqueo, Historia secreta mapuche (Santiago: Catalonia, 2017), pp. 322–327; Miguel Escalona and Jonathan Barton, ‘A “landscapes of power” framework for historical political ecology: The production of cultural hegemony in Araucanía- Wallmapu’, Area (of the RGS), 52: 2 (2020), pp. 445–454. 103  ‘El comicio indígena de ayer…’, op. cit. 104  ‘Un aspecto psicológico de la Raza Araucana’, Anthropos, vol. 33, 1938, p. 951.

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“immature” but asserted that Aburto was “far from lacking in supporters, who ignorantly and naively see in him the [possibility of the] political redemption of the race.” And “if there have been many instances where indigenous people have resisted obeying the law—for example, by refusing to […] inscribe their children in the civil Registers”, he said, “this is because they still believe ‘we are Mapuche’.” Many other Mapuche activists across the political spectrum spoke similarly to Aburto of “times past”. In a 1941 issue of Heraldo Araucano, Carlos Huayquiñir referred to the Mapuche as the “ancient owners of this country” and the “ancient possessors of [all] these lands”.105 Significantly, he was talking not from or about southern Chile but from and about Santiago. He was asserting Mapuche historical ownership of land in the capital city prior to Spanish conquest, for his precise demand was for a plot in the General Cemetery in Santiago so that Mapuche residents could be buried together according to ancient custom. As congressman in the late 1940s, Venancio Coñuepán endeavoured to force home the point more forcefully still: “We [the Indians] are fully aware … that wherever we find ourselves, we are living and walking on lands that have always been ours”.106 In the same session, this Mapuche deputy referred to U.S. legislators of the nineteenth century (Chief Justice John Marshall in 1832) and their claims that the Cherokee people retained “their original native rights as the indisputable owners of the lands, since time immemorial”. He contrasted this with Chilean legislation, and a recent court ruling in favour of a wealthy hacendado which had led to the eviction of Mapuche families from their ancestral lands. As demonstrated by Coñuepán, Mapuche activists were not only conscious of and consistently publicising their historical rights to land in Chile, including in parts of Chilean territory where indigenous land ownership had long been erased from official history; they were also aware of what was happening in the Global North (like Aburto Panguilef was aware of what was going on in Argentina) and how this could be harnessed to put pressure on the Chilean government. Just as he accommodated the Mapuche experience to the continental script of indigenismo, agreed upon in Pátzcuaro, Mexico, Coñuepán adapted both the latter and historical cases of land disputes in the U.S. to try to sway political debates in Chile.  Heraldo Araucano, No. 2, 1941, p. 8.  Cámara de Diputados, Sesiones extraordinarias, 25 November 1947. I write about this in The Mapuche in Modern Chile, p. 104. 105 106

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Indigenous Peruvian archaeologist Julio Tello was equally familiar with conversations going on in the Global North. Like Coñuepán, Tello spent time in the United States. As a Masters’ student at Harvard University, he was there for longer than Coñuepán, who visited after the 1940 Indigenista Congress in Pátzcuaro. Tello studied at Harvard in the early 1910s, and from there travelled to many cities in Europe, including London, where he attended the International Congress of Americanists in 1912. Back in Peru, in the 1920s, he was appointed director of the newly established Museum of Peruvian Anthropology. At the inauguration ceremony in 1924, the “father of Peruvian archaeology” spoke not just of indigenous peoples’ awareness of their ancestral land rights, but of their obligation to have and indeed propagate such an awareness: “We are bound by duty to know the history of the soil which holds the sacred ashes of our forebears, the territory they defended with their blood, which they worked with their sweat and utilised to benefit themselves and posterity”.107 “Our genealogical tree”, Tello said, “has profound roots”; “in times past”, the roots “extracted from this land the sap which nourished a race of giants.” Its “stalk was severed by European conquest, but new and vigorous shoots of the gigantic trunk of nationality” had begun to appear, and they would grow “nourished by indigenous vitality” and the “new ideas from the century in which we are living”. This Quechua-speaking scholar did not defend indigenous land rights in the same manner or context as Coñuepán—he spoke within and to Peruvian academic circles rather than national government—but he developed a similar narrative of historical continuity which, literally, rooted indigeneity in the land. Moving the focus to twenty-first-century Peru and quoting a Quechua-­ speaking teacher, Marisol de la Cadena asserts that the ayllu “is not where we are from, it is who we are.”108 The Peruvian ethnologist and novelist José María Arguedas perceived and celebrated this indigenous understanding of the ayllu in his literary work of the 1940s.109 For her part, Mistral wrote that “the Indian [fought] for his land”—in the early twentieth century, as he had for four hundred years—“with a clear understanding that the land is everything to him.”110 The repeated narration of such a close  Speech of 13 December 1924 republished in El Comercio, 14 December 1924.  Marisol de la Cadena, ‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond ‘Politics”, Cultural Anthropology 25:2 (2010), p. 354. 109  For example, Yawar fiesta (Lima: Compañía de Impresiones y Publicidad, 1941). 110  See ‘Agrarismo en Chile’ (1928) and ‘La música araucana’ (1932). 107 108

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and powerful connection with the land was, in some ways, too much and too threatening for political elites in Peru and Chile. As de la Cadena says, “to be recognised as legitimate adversaries, indigenous leaders have had to speak in modern terms”.111 Hence, Manquilef campaigning for individual family property titles in 1920s Chile, Tello attempting to make Peru’s “indigenous roots” part of a new unifying narrative of mestizaje, and numerous indigenous activists in both countries asserting the community’s ability to make the land productive and thereby contribute to national economic progress.

Conclusions This chapter has shown that the struggle in defence of indigenous lands crossed nation-state boundaries, through activists themselves, and through the intellectual conversations taking place via magazines, congresses, and art. It has also shown how indigenous activism could be simultaneously visiblised and denied. News of indigenous rebellions circulated widely in both Chile and Peru, and indigenous voices sometimes appeared in the press articles covering this news. In some cases, as with Colima in Chile in 1932, indigenous people authored the newspaper articles denouncing the violent expropriation of their lands. However, the dominant notion of indigenous people as “instinctive” or “naïve” rebels meant that the political strategising behind the rebellions often went ignored. In response, some indigenous activists tried to make sure the focus of the problem was on the government and what it was not doing, rather than what they and their organisations or communities were doing. In this sense, they exposed the hypocrisy of the state and governments’ inability or unwillingness to do anything to counter the power of the hacendados. Whether for or against the protection of indigenous lands, intellectuals and policy makers often presented land as an economic commodity, and the “Indian question” as part of a broader class question. Yet in the stories of indigenous protest in defence of their lands and in the repression of this protest, we see that land was conceived as an economic resource and as something more: indigenous historical continuity, memories of autonomy, territorial identity, and political power. The focus on land as an economic commodity was perpetuated by the Inter-American Indigenista Congress of 1940: the restitution of indigenous lands would help to resolve the  de la Cadena, ‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics’, p. 349.

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“Indian problem” because with lands indigenous peoples could make a living and contribute through their labour to national progress and modernisation. In the next and last chapter of Part I, I return to this congress in more depth, as well as other conversations, to explore debates about and emerging legislation on indigenous labour, especially indigenous rural labour. Here, as in Chap. 3, we see the tensions inherent in and exclusionary repercussions of the equation made between indigeneity and the rural world.

CHAPTER 4

Labour Legislation: Vocal Challenges to Enduring Exclusions

When announcing his presidential candidacy for the third time in Peru in 1924, Augusto Leguía proclaimed: “The Indian is … the farmer who cultivates the land with rare skill; the producer of almost all our riches; the indefatigable worker in the deadly labors of the mines […]/ The Indian thus is everything […] and, in exchange, we treat him like a serf … This cannot continue.”1 Such a reality did continue, however, at least according to the newspaper El Perú, founded by Aprista activist and poet Nazario Chávez Aliaga (1891–1978). One of its front-page articles in 1928 asserted: “There are few people in Peru who, either directly or indirectly, do not live off the Indians.”2 Reformist indigenista legislation meant little in this context; as narrated by El Perú, it would take “a bloody revolution to alter this state of affairs.” It was not simply a case of Leguía failing to transform discourse into practice. Official discourse itself was contradictory. In the quotation above, the “Indian” was included in the sphere of labour, and yet—as Paulo Drinot highlights in The Allure of Labor—the new constitution enacted by the Leguía administration in 1920 established a strict distinction between Indians and workers by dividing

 Cited in Skuban, Lines in the Sand, p. 203.  ‘Indigenistas e indigentes’, El Perú, 28 October 1928, cited in Lewis Taylor, ‘The Origins of APRA in Cajamarca, 1928–1935’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 19: 4 (2000), p. 441. 1 2

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the Ministry of Development into two different sections: the “Sección de Trabajo” and the “Sección de Asuntos Indígenas”.3 In her recent book The Science and Politics of Race, Karin Rosemblatt indirectly puts Chile and Peru in the same basket in terms of state governments’ neglect of rural labour: “Mexico’s earliest social and labor legislation targeted rural areas”, she argues, “in contrast to the rest of Latin America and the United States, where the reforms of the 1920s through 1940s largely overlooked agricultural workers and small-scale farmers.”4 As presented by Rosemblatt, Mexico was the exception to the general rule; Chile and Peru were part of it. In an earlier monograph on Chile during the 1930s and 1940s, Rosemblatt argues that “Popular Front leaders and their supporters in the labor movement […] defined ‘work’ in ways that subordinated women but also laborers who performed supposedly unproductive and retrograde work, especially campesinos”.5 Florencia Mallon’s Courage Tastes of Blood concurs. As told here, Chile’s “compromise state”—which allowed for the legal electoral participation of reformist and leftist parties, so long as they did not pose too radical a challenge to the status quo—privileged industrial workers and popular urban sectors over the countryside.6 One of the key moments that Rosemblatt interrogates in her book is the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress, which took place in Pátzcuaro, Mexico, in 1940. In his address to the congress, President Lázaro Cárdenas spoke of the necessity of an economic modernisation that incorporated and benefitted indigenous people. As Rosemblatt notes, Cárdenas equated Indians with the global class category of proletarian.7 In contrast, in Peru, as Drinot has shown—focusing on the 1910s through to the 1930s—“labor was defined typically in terms that excluded indigenous from the sphere of labor, for the simple reason that if labor [i.e. industrial work] was commensurable with progress, and indigeneity was commensurable with backwardness, it followed that labor was incommensurable with indigeneity.”8 In other words, “Indians” could become workers, but if

 Drinot, The Allure of Labor, pp. 63–64.  Rosemblatt, The Science and Politics of Race, p. 18. 5  Karin A.  Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p. 50. 6  Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood, p. 3. 7  Rosemblatt, Science and Politics of Race, p. 135. 8  Drinot, The Allure of Labor, p. 13. 3 4

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they did, they ceased being Indians (due to labour’s supposedly “civilising” effect on them). In what follows I expand the work of these scholars by picking up on the Chilean-Peruvian conversations about indigenous labour that took place through the International Labour Organisation and the congresses that it sponsored in Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s. I present Chile and Peru as important contributors to a hemispheric dialogue. Indeed, I show how both Chilean and Peruvian state officials countered Mexico’s claimed position as hemispheric leader in labour legislation. I suggest that representatives of both countries sought to shape a continental debate—by attending and hosting international congresses, publishing influential studies, and pushing for new legislation—rather than seeing themselves as merely shaped by it. The first section of Chap. 4 focuses on the state-sponsored transnational conversations of the 1930s and 1940s, wherein Chilean and Peruvian intellectuals and government officials acknowledged the valuable contributions made to society by the (resilient, dedicated) indigenous worker, whilst also denouncing the ways in which he (and sometimes she) had been neglected by the state. The second and third sections show how agricultural work was classified as labour and, perhaps more significantly, how the urban indigenous worker was made visible in cultural production and policy discussions, that is, as a worker, and as distinctively indigenous. Building on these narratives of the rural and urban “trabajador indígena” (a more capacious term than “obrero”),9 the fourth section probes early­to mid-twentieth century debates about the relationship between indigenous art and industry, which served to refute the notion that indigenous work did not count as productive labour. The final section delves into the racialised dimensions of one specific aspect of labor legislation: public health. Government officials and scholars in early twentieth-century Latin America commonly referred to indigenous people as innately or culturally dirty and unhygienic. In this context, indigenous people were blamed for the spread of epidemics. Others 9  In The Allure of Labor, Drinot astutely deconstructs the distinction between “obrero” and “trabajador”, which the English term “worker” cannot adequately convey. His research shows that official use of the term “trabajador” in Peru extended to indigenous people, whilst “obrero” did not. Hence legislation on the Seguro Social Obrero Obligatorio (1936), not Seguro Social del Trabjador (my emphasis), and indigenous workers being excluded from this. What this chapter of Itinerant Ideas reveals is how labour could be understood as extending beyond the sphere of the “obrero”.

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emphasised the primacy of economic forces, attributing illness to the social conditions in which indigenous peoples lived. Moving beyond these two positions, Chap. 4 examines the evolving transnational view that indigenous people were not the cause of health problems but rather the possible answer; their knowledge, some argued, could be harnessed to improve the public health of the nation. Participants in the conversations under scrutiny here include Peruvian lawyer Edgardo Rebagliati (1895–1958) and Chilean lawyer Moisés Poblete Troncoso (1892–1972). Leading member of the Chilean Socialist Party and Minister of Health (1939–1942), Salvador Allende, appears too, as does Mexican politician Vicente Lombardo Toledano (1894–1968), and a variety of Peruvian governments officials, including Gerardo Bedoya Saez (1904–1974) and José Ángel Escalante (1883–1865). Peruvian medical historians and scientists, such as Hermilio Valdizán (1885–1929) and Carlos Gutiérrez Noriega (1905–1950), make their voices heard in Chile, as does the Puno-born doctor, Manuel Nuñez Butrón (1900–1952). Returning from Chap. 3 are Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas and Mapuche political organisers César Colima and Venancio Coñuepán. Their interventions in the Chilean public sphere are supplemented by those of Emilio Huenuhueque, Felipe Inalaf and other emerging indigenous rights activists.

Celebrating Statist Social Action on the International Conference Circuit In January 1936, Santiago de Chile hosted the First Labour Conference of the American States.10 In general, its panel discussions prioritised the urban sphere. This was not exclusively the case, however. Delegates recommended, for example, that the ILO carry out a study on the cost of living in American countries, “bearing in mind that separate studies should be devoted to town workers, the various categories of agricultural workers, and, where these exist in a particular country, the various ethnic groups whose organisation in respect of social economics is relatively underdeveloped” (Resolution 9). And they suggested “that the Governing Body of the International Labour Office should consider and study the following questions which are of special importance for the American countries”  The full list of the resolutions agreed at the conference (2–14 January 1936) are available  in English at http://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1936/36B09_20_engl_resolutions.pdf. 10

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(Resolution 23). The seventh of these questions revolved around “creating special bodies for the protection of indigenous workers in American countries, with a view to improving their conditions of life and labour, with the permanent collaboration of representatives of the more working-­ class bodies.” Social welfare provision for workers—a key theme of the 1936 international labour conference in Santiago de Chile—had featured prominently in Peru’s new Political Constitution of 1933. This was a national development and can be attributed in part to the president of the time, Óscar Benavides, who sought to fend off the left’s proposals for radical change by introducing moderate social assistance projects as well as by persecuting its leaders, but this shift also chimed with broader global conversations and was taken forward through such conversations. One year after the constitutional reforms of 1933, Benavides asked Franz Schrüfer and Edgardo Rebagliati to put together a draft social security law.11 As highlighted by Drinot, Rebagliati was very familiar with the social security legislation enacted and implemented outside Peru. In 1932, he founded a journal entitled Revista de Seguros, which—between 1933 and 1934— published reports on the social security systems of many different countries around the world including France, Australia, Spain, and Chile. And in 1935, he travelled to Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile to study their social security laws. Rebagliati was particularly impressed by the Chilean system, “a true continental model” which had been established in 1924 and covered approximately 800,000 industrial workers and miners by the mid-1930s.12 APRA critics of Rebagliati’s Social Security Law (presented to the Peruvian Congress in November 1935) described the wording as “slavishly copied from the Chilean law”, implying, perhaps, that it was not sufficiently rooted in the Peruvian national context, or that it had been drawn up too quickly, or that it was not radical enough (or all three).13 Drinot, however, argues that Chile’s legislation of 1924 was not applied consistently until 1935–1936, so Rebagliati could not have carried out an in-depth study of the Chilean system in practice. He concludes that ­Rebagliati’s Social Security Law “was influenced not just by the Chilean  An adapted version was promulgated in 1936 as the “Ley de Seguro Social Obligatorio”.  Cited in Drinot, Allure of Labor, pp. 199–200. 13  Perhaps precisely to counter such criticisms, official literature promoting Seguro Social in Peru stressed its distinctly national heritage, and—in line with indigenista discourses— dated social assistance and protection for the weak and vulnerable back to the “Peruvian Inca Empire”. Ibid., p. 213. 11 12

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model, or other Latin American models, but also by the broader transnational ‘social politics’ shaping social insurance systems in the North Atlantic economy.”14 Rebagliati presented the Peruvian Social Security Law—which, like Chile’s, prioritised industrial labour—to conference delegates in Santiago in January 1936. As narrated by a recent government publication, it was Rebagliati’s paper that prompted Chilean representative of the ILO, Moisés Poblete Troncoso, to carry out a study of living conditions in Peru that same year.15 I will return shortly to this study, which was undertaken right away, published in 1938, and widely circulated in the Americas and beyond. For now—and before delving into conference debates of the early 1940s—I cite it to reiterate how closely intertwined social security developments (e.g. the creation of mandatory social insurance funds, the setting of minimum wages, and the recognition of rights to legal unionisation and strikes) in Chile and Peru were at this point, a reality not lost on the United States. Indeed, in some ways the United States, as a “good neighbour”, sought to encourage such cross-border reverberations as part of a bigger bid to prevent the spread of communism. On 21 June 1941, Hubert Herring of the U.S. Committee on Cultural Relations with Latin America penned a letter to Aprista poet Magda Portal, exiled in Chile at the time, informing her that “During July and August, a dozen of us are making the rounds of South America in order to check up on our ignorance. We will be in Santiago … and we hope to have the opportunity of meeting people who can tell us something about current social developments, education, politics, international relations. May I count on your help? We are particularly anxious to see something of living conditions, of the work of the various social security agencies, and so on. I am [also] writing Dr Allende, asking his help.”16 Herring was aware of Portal’s presence in Chile, and clearly deemed her to be an authority on the situation there. He also alluded to the relationship struck up between Portal and the Chilean Minister of Health (he seemed to think it important to tell Portal that he hoped to speak to her ally Allende, as if that would help secure her collaboration), and noted that Vienna-based psychologist Doctor Lotte de Elkeles was tasked with “completing  Ibid., p. 200.  Breve historia de la Caja Nacional de Seguro Social, p.  17. Available at http://www. essalud.gob.pe/downloads/archivo_central/BREVE_HISTORIA_CNSS.pdf. 16  This letter can be found in the Magda Portal Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin. 14 15

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arrangements for [Herring’s] program”. In sum, this conversation about living conditions and social protection mechanisms was a fundamentally hemispheric and trans-Atlantic one with an Austrian responsible for the agenda of a U.S. diplomat, who sought out the expertise of a Chilean and a Peruvian known to have worked together. The following year, author of Peru’s Seguro Social Obligatorio, Rebagliati,  attended the First Inter-American Conference on Social Security held in Santiago de Chile (10–16 September 1942)  as official delegate of the Peruvian government along with the lawyer Jorge Ramírez Otárola and congressional deputy Juan Luna.17 Unsurprisingly, hundreds of Chilean officials attended, not least Salvador Allende as ex Minister of Health and vice-president of the Chilean Caja de Seguro Obligatorio (created in 1938, to provide social security, disability and health care insurance to blue-collar workers).18 Another prominent figure present was Ignacio García Tellez, the Mexican Minister of Labour and Social Welfare, who thanked the “sister republic” of Chile for her hospitality and kicked off the discussions by stressing how important it was to resolve the problem of social security in Latin America. The continent’s abundance of natural resources, he lamented, had incited greed, and placed a huge burden particularly on indigenous and mestizo workers, “who receive meagre wages, suffer an exhausting day’s work, live in a constant state of malnutrition, [and] lack adequate clothes, schools and housing” all of which had led to “the progressive weakening of the race.”19 When the Peruvian delegation intervened in the discussion it was to assert that one of their country’s most serious problems was “the large-­ landed estates”, as Mariátegui had previously and repeatedly insisted, and to underscore “the great problem of the huge mass of indigenous people” which afflicted Peru and “other countries like ours”. Critically, this large proportion of the country (5 million out of a total of 7 million) was not “duly contemplated in or supported by” social welfare provision. As reported by Luna, Peruvians considered “this mass [of people] a great resource for our economy” and a reason to “hope for growth in the near future”. “Peru had followed with great interest the developments 17  The full conference proceedings (10–16 September 1942) are available at http://biblioteca.ciess.org/adiss/r53/actas_de_la_1_conferencia_interamericana_de_seguridad_social. 18  For a more detailed analysis of the Chilean CSO, see Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises, especially pp. 132–135. 19  Actas de la Primera Conferencia Interamericana de Seguridad Social, Realizada del 10 al 16 de septiembre de 1942 (Santiago: CIEDESS, 1992), p. 38.

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occurring in other countries”, he asserted; in particular, it had “both studied and applied the social security laws tried out in Chile”. The Peruvian government had “put this legislation into action, learning from some errors that [the Chilean] experience demonstrated.”20 In this context, Luna then lauded the achievements of Peru’s “indigenous culturalisation brigades”, which were teaching rural communities about civic culture, economics, health care and hygiene in indigenous languages.21 He thus presented Chile as an inspiration to Peru, but also made it clear that there was room for improvement, and that Peru had important lessons to pass on regarding community outreach, just as it had done in the 1930s with the creation of state-funded “restaurantes populares”, which Chileans had copied.22 In this sense, the inspiration was mutual. Especially passionate in his interventions was Ramírez Otárola, who used the conference stage to make Peru’s indigenous reality central to a larger continental story: “The true man of América is not the mestizo; it is not the immigrant from other continents; the true man of América is the indigenous, the aborigine, who has over the course of centuries been forced off his land and excluded from the economy; it is him that most merits and needs the full range of social security benefits.”23 As he put it to delegates in Santiago in 1942, an “American Congress on Social Security will never resolve the problem of social security on this continent if it forgets—in this very first conference—that American man, the legitimate, autochthonous aborigine.” “In order to avoid making such a grave mistake”, Ramírez claimed to have brought with him “to this congress some ideas, some studies on how we can face up to the problem of extending social security provision to the aboriginal population.” Following these and other interventions, Chilean delegate, Manuel de Viado, acknowledged the difficulties of implementing a comprehensive  Ibid., p. 70.  For more detail on the culturalisation brigades see Tamayo Herrera, Historia social e indigenismo en el altiplano, and Carmen Montero (ed.), La escuela rural: Variaciones sobre un tema (Lima: FAO-PEEC, 1990). 22  The Peruvian government published a 50-page illustrated booklet on Los restaurantes populares del Perú: Contribución al estudio del problema de la alimentación popular in Santiago in 1936. See Drinot, The Allure of Labor, pp. 180–181; and ‘Food, Race and Working-Class Identity: Restaurantes Populares and Populism in 1930s Peru’, The Americas 62: 2 (2005), pp. 245–270. 23  Actas de la Primera Conferencia Interamericana de Seguridad Social, p. 90. All the citations in this paragraph are from the same page. 20 21

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social security system and made it clear that conditions varied greatly between different countries “depending on their ethnic and geographic characteristics, the economic system in which they are rooted, how culturally developed the population is, and their national public health standards.”24 Such difficulties, Viado assured delegates, could be overcome, but he warned people not to ask too much of social security provision, for it could not, “in itself, resolve all the complex economic, biological and social problems of any given collective.” He then ran through what delegates had learnt from the positive experiences of the member states represented in Santiago: for example, Mexico’s community credit scheme and agrarian reform; the legislation protecting children’s rights in Costa Rica and Uruguay; the economic strength of Argentina and the United States; Peru’s public health policies and, together with Bolivia, “the interesting aspects of its indigenous peoples’ lives”.25 To this great communal effort, Viado asserted that Chile contributed its “successes and failures of 18 years of social security provision to all workers without distinctions of any kind.” And yet he highlighted the continuing (specific) problems faced by Chile’s campesino population because of low wages and the power of  the “régimen de latifundios”; in this regard, Chile suffered the same problems of inequality as the rest of Latin America. Viado’s Chile was apparently race-blind. The Peruvian delegate Ramírez Otárola likewise seemed to exclude Chile from the continent’s “problem of nationality”, for the countries which he listed as having large indigenous populations and where the “lack of adequate social security [was] simply tragic” were Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, some parts of Central America, and “possibly Mexico”.26 At the same time, however, he cited and promoted “the distinguished Chilean executive of the International Labour Organisation Moisés Poblete” as the author of the most impacting research into the “real extent of this problem” and how best “to apply Social Security to indigenous labour.” It was Poblete, Ramírez said, who had done the utmost “to defend the vital strength of this important part of American nationalities.”27 Moisés Poblete Troncoso was a Chilean lawyer who worked at the International Labour Office (ILO) in Geneva. He helped to organise the  Ibid., p. 97.  Ibid., p. 98. 26  Ibid., p. 90. 27  Ibid. 24 25

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First Labour Conference of American Member States of the ILO in Santiago in 1936, and it was in this context that the ILO asked him to carry out a study of the living and working conditions of indigenous peoples in Peru. He did this in collaboration with two Peruvians—the cuzqueño politician and journalist José Ángel Escalante, and the soon-tobe Minister of Labour, Gerardo Bedoya Sáez—and published his findings, which largely reproduced indigenista narratives about indigenous backwardness and the need for moral uplift through work, in 1938.28 That same year, he attended the VIII International Conference of American States in Lima, as did the Mexican Vicente Lombardo Toledano, who was president of the recently created Latin American Workers Confederation (CTAL). According to Juan Carlos Yáñez Andrade, Poblete Troncoso took advantage of this encounter to give Lombardo Toledano a copy of his book, and this opened the eyes of the Mexican labour leader to the specific problems faced by indigenous workers in Peru: the land issue; the lack of written contracts; the servitude of the “yanaconazgo” system; being forced to work in the mining and petroleum industries.29 It was at this OAS event in Lima in 1938 that government representatives agreed to establish a conference dedicated entirely to indigenous issues. I am not suggesting that it was because Poblete gifted his book to Lombardo that the Inter-American Indigenista Congress came about. The initiative was already in motion. Instead, I reassert that Poblete is a good illustration how entangled national and transnational discussions were during this period, and that it is difficult to fully understand one without the other. The First Inter-American Indigenista Congress, when it took place in Mexico in 1940, made clear the connection between race and class. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, President Cárdenas called for a programme of economic modernisation that incorporated and benefitted indigenous people, as workers with a distinct history and culture, and therefore different needs. Toledano was an official delegate of Mexico at this congress and was a close adviser of the Mexican president. The Peruvians Escalante and Bedoya Sáez, who had helped Troncoso with his  Moisés Poblete Troncoso, Condiciones de vida y trabajo de la población indígena del Perú (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1938). The book was also published in Santiago de Chile by Editorial Universitaria. 29  Juan Carlos Yañez Andrade, ‘La Organización Internacional del Trabajo y el problema social indígena: La encuesta en Peru de 1936’, Secuencia 98 (2017), pp. 130–157. See also Patricio Herrera, ‘La Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina y la implementación de su proyecto sindical continental (1938–1941)’, Transhumante 2 (2013), pp. 136–164. 28

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1936 study of Peru, also went to Mexico, also as official representatives of their government. Troncoso himself did not go to the indigenista congress, but his book on Peru was reviewed in América Indígena, one of the two official mouthpieces of the Inter-American Indigenista Institute, and deemed to be almost entirely “compatible with the conclusions reached” by delegates in Patzcuaro.30 The reviewer was U.S. anthropologist Emil Sady, who acclaimed Troncoso’s work as “a significant contribution to Indianist thought and action throughout America” and already in use “by the International Labor Office as a basis for detailed questionnaires describing conditions of Indian life in a number of countries.”31 Six years after Pátzcuaro, the then director of the ILO, Harold Butler, reported that most deliberations about the “indigenous problem” in Latin America had—until this indigenista congress—focused primarily on its cultural, ethnological, or linguistic dimensions. The conference in Mexico, he asserted, paved the way for the Confederation of Latin American Workers (led by Toledano) and Inter-American Labour Conferences to “approve concrete declarations on the Indian as a worker.”32

Protecting and Enabling Indigenous Agricultural Workers Rural labourers in Chile and Peru remained excluded from social security provisions throughout the 1940s, but we do see some “declarations on the Indian as a worker”, and specifically as an agricultural worker, materialise into national legislation. One example was Peru’s new sharecropping law, passed in February 1947. Thomas Davies explains the reality for sharecroppers (tenant farmers or yanaconas) until this point: he was “given a piece of land by the owner [and] told what crops to plant”. He “had to sell his produce to the landowner at a predetermined price, usually well below the current market price. His share of the crop was also  América Indígena II: 1 (January 1942), pp. 94–96.  Ibid., p. 96. 32  Cited in Herrera, ‘La Confederación de Trabajadores…’, p. 153. For a useful take on how such developments played out in Bolivia, especially during the presidency of Gualberto Villaroel (1943–1946) when the Comité Indigenal Boliviano was a driving force of change, see Rossana Barragán Romano, ‘La geografía diferencial de los derechos: Entre la regulación del trabajo forzado en los países coloniales y la disasociación entre trabajadores y indígenas en los Andes (1920–1954)’, available at https://www.relatsargentina.com/documentos/ RED_OIT_AL/RED.Barragan.pdf. 30 31

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predetermined” and if the crop failed, the yanacona took responsibility for all the costs incurred. On top of this, he was often forced to work for free on the hacienda, without a written contract. The sharecropper was, in short, “the victim of severe exploitation.” As told by Davies, “indigenistas in Peru had [for decades] demanded reforms in the system, or its outright abolition.” In 1945, following the election of Bustamante and congressional interventions by Aprista deputies, their efforts finally bore fruit: a newly formed Agricultural Committee proposed a twenty-four-article bill, which, amongst other things, made detailed written contracts obligatory, outlawed free labour, stipulated compensation for crop failures, and created a special Bureau of Inspection of Yanaconaje within the Ministry of Justice and Labour. This was what was signed into law in 1947.33 To be sure, the existence of new legislation did not necessarily translate into improved lives for Peru’s indigenous rural population, but it represents a shift in official language in terms of recognising their agricultural work as labour. Other reforms that Apristas had been pushing for since the early 1930s focused on making indigenous rural labour more dynamic and productive, and therefore more valuable to the nation. The party’s 1931 “Plan of Immediate Action”, for example, spoke of promoting small indigenous industries and crafts, introducing agrarian cooperatives to help indigenous farmers, creating an agricultural credit bank, and providing technical training.34 President Sánchez Cerro (1931–1933) mirrored such aims in his own public proclamations of the time.35 As with the sharecropping law— which had been on the table since 1933, but not passed until 1947—state investment in indigenous labour was slow in coming, but by 1942 the Peruvian delegation at the Inter-American Conference on Social Security in Santiago was proudly claiming that industrial credit schemes had been extended to rural farmers.36 Similar demands for credit schemes and technical support were being made by Mapuche organisations in Chile from at least the 1920s. One of the resolutions of the Araucanian Congress of December 1928, for instance, was to “Ask the Supreme Government for economic assistance to help increase crop production and cattle raising via a special section of  Davies, ‘The Indigenismo of the Peruvian Aprista Party’, pp. 639–640.  Ibid., pp. 629–630. 35  Ibid., p. 631. 36  Actas de la Primera Conferencia Interamericana de Seguridad Social, p. 94. 33 34

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the Agricultural Credit Fund”37 This was not to endorse the image of the backward indigenous farmer, but rather to say that the Mapuche were deserving of the same state support that settler farmers in the frontier region received. By the looks of things, little was achieved in this area, for in the late 1930s Mapuche activists, such as Emilio Huenuhueque, were still complaining about the drastic lack of credit schemes for indigenous farmers: “The poor Mapuche, who have never been given access to the same credit schemes as foreigners, work sin capital ni medios agrícolas”, he fumed in El Periódico Araucano in 1937.38 He asked specifically for help with seeds and tools, so that the Mapuche farmer “could make a better living from the land” and insisted that a Central Indigenous Fund was the best way forward. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s monthly magazine Agricultural Economics Literature, 1938 saw some advances in this regard. One issue recounted that a Chilean government decree of 17 October 1938 had authorised the semi-autonomous Agricultural Credit Fund to loan up to 30 million paper pesos to small farmers.39 Then in August 1939, Aguirre Cerda’s Popular Front administration passed a law authorising the establishment of Small Farmers’ Cooperatives, which involved Mapuche people directly, both as beneficiaries and state officials overseeing the scheme. In March 1940, for example, Temuco’s El Diario Austral reported that Alfredo Catrileo was touring the southern regions as a representative of the State Department of Cooperatives to let people know about the law and offer advice about how to set up cooperatives.40 As with the Agricultural Credit Fund, U.S. journals publicised and celebrated this initiative.41 When delegates met for the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress in Mexico they recommended all governments in the region set up agricultural credit schemes for indigenous communities (resolution XXXII).  The congress was held between 24 and 28 December 1928.  Emilio Huenuhueque, ‘Sobre ventas de tierras indígenas’, El Periódico Araucano 1: 8 (July-August 1937), pp. 1–4. Reproduced in Alvarado and Antileo (eds.), Diarios Mapuche, pp. 71–72. 39  ‘Agricultural Credit—Chile’, Agricultural Economics Literature 13: 1 (January 1939), p. 49. 40  ‘Realiza jira dando a conocer Ley de Cooperativas Agrícolas’, Diario Austral, 16 March 1940, p. 7. 41  ‘Development of Cooperatives in Latin America’, Monthly Labour Review 52: 4 (1941), pp.  810–816; ‘Cooperative Associations of Small Farmers in Chile’, Bulletin of the Pan American Union 74 (1941), pp. 413–414. 37 38

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They also resolved that member states should promote and provide technical support for collective farming initiatives (XXXIII). Two of the three representatives that the Chilean government sent to Pátzcuaro were Mapuche political leaders: Venancio Coñuepán and César Colima. Their report on “The Indigenous Problem of Chile”, stressed the need not only for the state to increase Mapuche community land titles and return “ancestral lands usurped by the whites” (see Chap. 3), but also for it to provide financial support and technical assistance, with a view to promoting collective agricultural production.42 These Mapuche spokespeople aligned themselves with legislators in Mexico and endorsed the continental road map for indigenista reform signed by congress delegates. More significant still, Coñuepán insisted on the importance of this road map when he was back in Chile and serving (from 1945) as diputado for the department of Temuco, Lautaro, Imperial, Pitrufquén and Villarrica in the National Congress. Addressing his fellow congressmen on 25 November 1947, he demanded the creation of an organisation that would provide indigenous farmers with credit and technical training.43 As with the Araucanian Congress in 1928 and Huenuhueque’s press article in 1937, this was not to endorse the stereotype of the backward, ignorant “Indian”. To the contrary, Coñuepán spoke often and passionately about indigenous people’s superior knowledge of the land. However, he insisted on their desire to acquire new knowledge and to make their lands more productive. And when he was made Director of the newly created Department of Indigenous Affairs in 1953 one of his main achievements was to secure increased credit loans from the State Bank for indigenous communities (55 million pesos in 1954, and 100 million pesos in 1956).44

Recognising Indigenous Urban Labour By the time indigenista delegates convened in Pátzcuaro in 1940, mass rural-urban migration was a reality across Latin America.45 As well as urging state investment in indigenous rural labour, the Acta Final of the congress encouraged member states to acknowledge this new reality and,  Coñuepán and Colima, ‘El problema indígena de Chile’, p. 5.  Cámara de Diputados, Sesiones extraordinarias, 25 November 1947. 44  Crow, The Mapuche in Modern Chile, pp. 104–107. 45  On Peru, see Henry Dietz, ‘Urban Squatter Settlements in Peru: A Case History and Analysis’, Journal of Inter-American Studies 11: 3 (1969), pp. 353–370; and on Chile, see Alvaro Bello, ‘Mapuche Migration, Identity and Community in Chile: From Utopia to Reality’, Indigenous Affairs 3–4 (2002), pp. 40–47. 42 43

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thus, at least momentarily, disrupted the equation so often made between indigeneity and rurality. More specifically, it recommended that governments “take into account the non-agricultural indigenous population who make a living from industry and other paid work” (Resolution XXXIV). Poblete Troncoso had stressed the importance of this sector in his 1936 study on Peru.46 It had also been recognised at the First Conference of Communist Parties of Latin America held in Argentina in 1929. One representative of the Communist International Youth who went by the alias of “Peters”, for example, asserted: “we need to study the ways in which indigenous people organise in places where we can [mobilise support] more easily, in the factories and in the towns and cities […] where many indigenous people work.”47 And Bolivian delegate Mendízabal spoke of the “Indian that has moved to the city to find employment in artisan workshops” and how he “changed his primitive clothing and customs, and can no longer return to his community [medio ambiente], that is to say, many elements or characteristics of his race now disgust him.”48 In this way, Mendízabal perpetuated the eugenic rhetoric of racial improvement and presented the city as a site of “de-Indianisation” (to quote from Marisol de la Cadena’s work), whilst Peters seemed to acknowledge that indigenous migrants to the urban sphere continued to organise along racial, as well as class, lines. This was certainly the case for Mapuche migrants in Chile’s capital city. In his memoirs published in 1983, political organiser Martín Painemal remembered arriving, at the age of 17, in the social and political turmoil that was mid-1920s Santiago and searching for work in a bakery. “There were many young Mapuche in Santiago at that time”, he said, which led to the creation of an increasing number of urban Mapuche organisations, such as the Galvarino Society.49 Felipe Inalaf was a member of the Galvarino Society. In an article of 1939, published in the mouthpiece of this society, El Frente Araucano, Inalaf drew attention to the rural poverty (the “lack of lands”) that forced Mapuche people to migrate to Santiago, where they found work in the “bakeries and homes of gente bien nacida”.50 In many cases they encountered “fair and honest employers”, he said, “who pay  Poblete Troncoso, Condiciones de vida y trabajo de la población indígena del Perú, p. 45.  ‘El problema de las razas...’, in El movimiento revolucionario latinoamericano, p. 300. 48  Ibid., p. 303. 49  Martin Painemal, and Rolf Foerster (ed.) Vida de un dirigente mapuche (Santiago: GIA, 1983), p.46. 50  Felipe Inalaf, ‘El araucano y la civilización’, Frente Araucano 1: 2 (September 1939), p. 1. Reproduced in Alvarado and Antileo, Diarios Mapuche, pp. 105–106. 46 47

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them the salary they legitimately deserve”, but there were also “unscrupulous bakery owners that deny them their basic rights”. Inalaf pinpointed certain cases where “the Araucanian—characterised as an uneducated peasant—is paid a miserable wage, excluded from Social Security benefits, denied annual holiday payments, and, even worse, suffers the kind of contempt, verbal attacks, and vulgar language that a cultured country should be repudiating.” As this activist-intellectual told it, urbanisation did not always solve the problems Mapuche migrants were fleeing; many Mapuche migrants simply exchanged exploitation by the rural landowner for exploitation by the urban industrialist. In this sense, the capital city did not live up to its promise of social progress and modernisation. In fact, Inalaf specifically noted the “uncultured manner” in which santiaguinos treated Mapuche people. More importantly, Inalaf reported that Mapuche workers in Santiago were denied the protection of labour legislation because they were classified as “uneducated peasants”.51 Cultural ideas about race thus fixed indigenous people’s status as rural workers even when they resided and laboured in the urban sphere. In Peru, urban indigeneity was made visible in literary circles by the self-identified cultural mestizo, José María Arguedas, who attended the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress in Mexico, and who published his highly acclaimed Yawar fiesta in 1941. Much of this novel is set in the small Andean village of Puquio, but it also narrates the experience of puquianos who migrated to Lima in the 1920s and 1930s: “sooner or later they came across their fellow countrymen [paisanos], or more likely someone from Ayacucho, or Coracora or Huancavelica. And they struck up a friendship right then and there, speaking of their communities, their women, their great fiestas, their homesickness. […] Someone would play the guitar. They would sing their favourite huaynos. Later they may even cry, remembering their villages, and declare themselves to be orphans in this huge city where they walked alone.”52 In this brief passage, we decipher two quite different (and notably male-dominated) stories of indigenous life in the city. We read of displacement, fragmentation, solitude, 51  Existing scholarship suggests that Mapuche workers in Santiago were not excluded from formal social security because they were Mapuche, but because they were household workers, or because their workplaces were small industrial establishments. For example, the labour provisions of 1924 did not apply to domestic servants or workplaces employing fewer than 10 labourers. See Martín Correa, Raúl Molina, and Nancy Yáñez, La Reforma Agraria y las tierras mapuches (Santiago: LOM, 2005). 52  Arguedas, Yawar fiesta, p. 59.

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sorrow, and loss. We also, though, get a strong sense of solidarity, collective organisation, and the reconstruction of Andean identities. Of course, Lima had always had an indigenous population. What Arguedas’s writings reflected on and contributed towards was the growing visibility of a migrant indigenous population in the Peruvian capital.

Indigenous Art as Industry Reporting on the preparations for the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress, El Comercio of Lima commended the fact that the “picturesque and legendary” town of Pátzcuaro had been chosen to host the event.53 It was only a few hours by automobile from Mexico City, and enormously popular with tourists because of its “magnificent climate”; its beauty, surrounded as it was by “immense orchards”; and its “Tarasco Indians” from whom visitors could buy the region’s “famous hand-painted bowls and cups”. It was, in sum, home to a living indigenous community whose handicraft industry was thriving. What better inspiration for delegates attending a conference focused on how to integrate indigenous peoples into national society? Article XIV of the Congress’s Acta Final resolved to establish an Inter-­ American Exposition of Popular Arts in Panama City. Purportedly in response to the desires of “Indian delegates of the native tribes”, the aim was to “display to the travellers of all countries examples of the artistic production of the Indians of America.” Delegates also recommended starting a campaign “to encourage the most extensive use of Indian arts and crafts products” and to “increase their consumption on the American markets”. National consumption was thriving, but more could be done— for example, “special treaties on duty exemption”—to encourage cross-­ border “acquisition by collectors, and purchase for souvenirs and gifts”. We can take away two key points from all of this. First, the continent-wide celebration of so called “traditional” indigenous arts and crafts. Second, an official recognition that this counted as productive labour: the main objective of promoting indigenous crafts, beyond cultural validation, was to “provide a greater income for the makers.”54

53  ‘Se ultiman los preparativos para el Congreso Indigenista Interamericano q’ se celebrará en Paztcuaro (sic.), México’, El Comercio, 13 April 1940, p. 13. 54  ‘Resolución XIV’, Acta final del primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano, pp. 11–12.

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A couple of years after Pátzcuaro, Peruvian government representative, Jorge Ramírez, took advantage of the international platform provided by the First Inter-American Conference of Social Security in Santiago (1942), to publicise what had been achieved in the realm of indigenous industry in his country. “As well as being good agricultural workers, indigenous people are true artists”, he announced; in particular, he praised Peru’s indigenous workers as “accomplished silversmiths”.55 He explained that “all over the Andes, they make out of silver, bracelets for the ladies, cutlery, dishes and much more besides”. Ramírez’s aim was to show that indigenous silversmiths were “adapting to modern necessities”; and to stress that this had only been possible because of the “extensive support” provided by the Peruvian state, which had helped to “substantially improve the economic conditions of indigenous people”. “These people do not have the resources to buy silver”, he clarified, “but they are willing to work, and they have a talent for it.” So, the Bank of Peru “purchased tonnes of silver” and gave it to indigenous silversmiths who could then “supply shops with their creative products”. This Peruvian official told a similar story of tradition and modernity coming together when he spoke of indigenous textile production. Peru’s “industrial credit schemes”, Ramírez reported, had “been extended to those regions […] where people produce carpets and rugs.”56 He made a direct connection between the past and the present, asserting that it was the “Incas [who] bequeathed us a rich textile industry”; Inca weavings were “the object of admiration the world over” and the contemporary “aboriginal race [had] continued with this tradition.” As with silverwork, “the production of these beautiful rugs […] requires the support of the State, because people do not have the funds to acquire the primary materials they need.” I return to the celebratory narratives surrounding indigenous weaving in Part II. Here, the key point to highlight is that, in Chile in 1942, conference delegates recast Peruvian indigenous artistic ­production as industrious labour, which was beneficial to national economic development, and thus necessitated state intervention.57 55  This and all other quotations in the paragraph are taken from Actas de la Primera Conferencia Interamericana de Seguridad Social, pp. 93–94. 56  Ibid., p. 94. 57  This official framing of indigenous cultural practice as a valuable national “industria” continues throughout the 1940s. See, for example, ‘Discurso del Contralmirante don José R. Alzamora, Presidente del Gabinete y Ministro de Justicia y Trabájo’, in Perú Indígena 1:1 (September 1948), p. 22.

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Shifting our focus from the conference circuit to print periodicals, we detect efforts to acknowledge the industrious labour of Chilean indigenous people too. Interestingly, we see this happening from as early as the mid-1920s in the New York based publication Chile: A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs. Below are six front covers of the magazine designed by Juan Oliver and published between 1926 and 1928. The October and Fig. 4.1  Chile, A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs Vol. IV No. 20, October 1927

Fig. 4.2  Chile, A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs Vol. IV No. 21, November 1927

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November 1927 issues (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2) present us with an image of a fundamentally industrial, modern, productive Chile. The modernising agent singled out by this magazine was often—unsurprisingly—the strong, virile, dexterous male worker (e.g. July 1927, Fig.  4.3). As represented here, it was men who were the driving force behind Chile’s industrial development. But we also see women labourers, cast in a notably Rivera-esque style, carrying their wears and selling Fig. 4.3  Chile, A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs Vol. IV No. 17, July 1927

Fig. 4.4  Chile, A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs Vol. III No. 12, Jan-Feb 1927

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agricultural produce in the urban sphere (e.g. January–February issue of 1927, Fig. 4.4). In fact, from 1926 to 1928, more women were pictured on the front cover of this magazine than men. More significantly, they were often visibly indigenous women. For example, the October 1926 and April 1928 issues (Figs. 4.5 and 4.6) feature indigenous Mapuche weavers (their indigeneity and femininity made clear through the distinctive hair

Fig. 4.5  Chile, A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs Vol. II No. 9, October 1926

Fig. 4.6  Chile, A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs Vol. V, No. 26, April 1928

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style, clothes, and jewellery) practicing their traditional techniques, framed in a starkly modernist aesthetic. In this Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs aimed at readers in the U.S., Mapuche women’s textile production was as representative of Chilean modernisation as the country’s new railroads and its male industrial labour force.

The Racial Politics of Dirt and Disease: Producing Clean, Healthy Workers Of course, to be productive, one had to be healthy. In recent years we have been treated to a rapidly evolving historiography on medicine and health care in Latin America, which highlights how entrenched racial prejudices were reflected in inequalities in health care, not least how indigenous people in rural areas were often excluded from access to medical facilities (as these tended to be concentrated in the major urban centres), and when they did receive medical care it was of notably low quality.58 Ten of the 72 resolutions agreed by delegates at the Pátzcuaro Indigenista Congress related to public health. These indicate the persistence of the early twentieth century eugenic idea of the “Indian” as a weak, sickly, degenerate race in need of salvation, combined with an emphasis on the poverty in which indigenous people lived (poverty imposed on them by the landowning classes), the state neglect which had exacerbated such inequality, and the need to provide better access to public health care. With better access to “modern” health care (and education, discussed in Part III), would come the redemption of the “Indian race”. What we also see, though, is a marked interest in traditional indigenous healing practices. This final section of Chap. 4 explores the ambiguities of such interest—the simultaneous recognition and appropriation of indigenous medical knowledge—as well as shows that in both Peru and Chile it predated the Pátzcuaro congress. My analysis points, moreover, to the continuing disputes over the comparative healthiness of the rural and urban environments, and spotlights two indigenous figures who acted as cultural intermediaries between these two worlds. Delegates in Pátzcuaro were keen to stress the connection between health problems and social inequality. They followed the line of thinking promoted by Cárdenas in his inaugural address, when he presented 58  A good example is Ann Zulawski, Unequal Cures: Public Health and Political Change in Bolivia, 1900–1950 (London and Durham; Duke University Press, 2006).

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“Indian emancipation” as “proletarian emancipation”—reduce poverty, change the environment in which he/she lives, and the “Indian” will be a healthier, more productive worker. For example, when discussing malaria (resolution XXIII), “the scourge of the indigenous population in vast regions of America”, delegates underscored the importance of preventative as well as curative medicine, and improving “people’s education, nutrition and habitat.”59 This chimed with what Chile’s Minister of Health, Salvador Allende, was saying at the time. His 1939 book La realidad médico-social chilena, which was hailed as an important accomplishment by the magazine Ercilla in January 1940, asserted that the main public health problems in Chile were: the urban conventillos (overcrowding, lack of basic facilities and hygiene), a lack of affordable food, ­insufficient consumption (and production) of milk, tuberculosis and syphilis, and alcoholism.60 These problems were blamed not on the people suffering them, but on the elites, and previous government administrations run by and for the elites. Allende made no explicit distinction between “races” in Chile. When he said the Popular Front government sought to “recover the physical vitality of the race” it was the Chilean race he was referring to, not the plural races that Cárdenas spoke of in Pátzcuaro. The socialist doctor did, however, note significant regional disparities: for example, that between 80–90% of the population in Arauco, Malleco and Cautín had no access to health and sanitation services, whilst in Valparaíso and Santiago it was 30%. Arauco, Malleco and Cautín were in historic Mapuche territory. Beyond an emphasis on the importance of social medicine, delegates in Pátzcuaro were keen to discuss “Indigenous Beliefs about Disease” (the title of resolution XIX). Distinguishing between “beliefs” and “knowledge”, delegates concluded that “medical practitioners and services working in indigenous areas should gather information on popular beliefs about diseases and their treatment”, and that these practitioners needed academic training (i.e. to be taught the relevant “anthropological, historical, and social knowledge”) to ensure they were able to process such information effectively.61 Resolution XXIV homed in on the creation of Schools of Rural Medicine, which were to provide this training, as well as share the  Acta final del primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano, p. 14.  ‘Alimentacion, vestuario y vivienda son factores determinantes en salud pública: Un importante estudio del Ministro de Salubridad’, Ercilla, 3 January 1940. 61  Acta final del primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano, p. 13. 59 60

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acquired knowledge with the public on a regular basis.62 Alongside these schools, delegates proposed the installation of “Medical Centres in Indigenous Areas” (Resolution XXVIII), which focused on preventing as much as curing disease.63 Taken together, these three resolutions indicate a willingness to listen to and learn from indigenous communities, as well as an effort to bring “Western” medical knowledge to indigenous communities. Such projects were already underway in Andean Peru, led by indigenous health practitioners such as Manuel Butrón Núñez. The Acta Final, however, narrates a state-led version of events, or at least seems to suggest that the state should be the driving force behind this kind of knowledge exchange. Perhaps most representative of the congress’s focus on knowledge exchange with indigenous communities was Resolution XXII on “Indigenous Medicinal Plants”. Here delegates concluded that “indigenous medicine should be the object of scientific research” and urged member states to set up national institutes for this purpose.64 To a certain extent, this represented a recognition and validation of indigenous cultural autonomy. The language, however, also reveals an attempt to extract medical knowledge from indigenous peoples in order to incorporate it into dominant “Western” medical knowledge, thereby establishing authority over it. Such interest at an inter-American institutional level was a new development, but intellectuals had long since been investigating indigenous healing practices, and especially indigenous knowledge and use of medicinal plants. In Peru, Italian Antonio Raimondi (1826–1890) attributed modern scientific value to traditional Andean medicinal knowledge and practices as early as the 1870s. Indigenous use of plants in the healing process was given substantive and positive coverage in his history of Peruvian medicine, published as a six-volume tome between 1874 and 1913. The crucial word here is history. It was largely pre-Columbian and colonial Inca medicine that researchers were interested in excavating. Hermilio Valdizán (1885–1929) built on and expanded Raimondi’s work, publishing two important books in the 1910s, and La medicina popular peruano in the early 1920s.65 Valdizán’s work in turn was developed by Carlos Enrique  Ibid., p. 14.  Ibid., p. 15. 64  Ibid., p. 14. 65  Hermilio Valdizán and Angel Maldonado, La medicina popular peruano (Lima: Imprenta Torres Aguirre, 1922). See also Hermilio Valdizan, ‘Acerca de los origenes de la medicina peruana’, Historia de la Medicina Peruana 1: 1 (1921), pp. 7–29. His first two books published in 1911 were: La Facultad de Medicina de Lima 1811–1911 and Nuestra Medicina Popular. 62 63

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Paz Soldan (1885–1972) and Juan B. Lastres (1902–1960), who in the 1930s and 1940s published several pieces on Inca medicinal knowledge in the Revista del Museo Nacional.66 The same magazine published some of José Marroquín’s work on “Aboriginal Medicine in Puno”.67 It is perhaps telling that this was a museum journal—a journal dedicated to excavating the national past—and yet there were some significant changes afoot even here, for Marroquín’s piece focused on contemporary rather than historical indigenous practices. So, indigenous medicinal knowledge and practice in Peru was a long-standing interest among intellectuals, which grew over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, moving from a focus on the past to the present, and became institutionalised at a continental level at the Indigenista Congress in Mexico in 1940. Not long before this congress, the Mexican historian and anthropologist Wigberto Jímenez Moreno (1909–1985) published a 140-page list of “Resources for an Ethnographic Bibliography of Latin America” in the Boletín Bibliográfico de Antropología Americana.68 Jímenez Moreno included the work of the above-cited Hermilio Valdizán.69 He also showed that scholarly interest in Inca medicine went beyond Peru, by citing works on this subject from Italy and Spain, among other countries.70 More pertinently, his list of resources incorporated the contributions of several scholars working on indigenous medicine in Chile, not least Martín Gusinde (1886–1969) and Ricardo Latcham (1869–1943).71 As with 66  For example, ‘Las causas de enfermedades nerviosas en el antiguo Peru’, Revista del Museo Nacional 6 (1937), pp. 25–42; ‘La medicina en la obra de Guamán Poma de Ayala’, 10: 1–2 (1941). In 1951 Lastres published his multivolume Historia de la medicina peruana. The first volume was dedicated to “La medicina incaica”. 67  Jose Marroquin, ‘Medicina aborigen puñena’, 13: 1 (1944), pp. 1–14. 68  Wigberto Jimenez Moreno, ‘Materiales para una bibliografía etnográfica de la America Latina’, Boletín Bibliográfico de Antropología Americana 1: 4 (October-December 1937), pp. 289–421. 69  Hermilio Valdizán, ‘Acerca de los orígenes de la medicina peruana’, Historia de la Medicina Peruana 1: 1 (1921), pp. 7–29. 70  For example, Guissepi Mazzini, ‘I medici e la medicina del Peru incaico’, Archeoin (Rome) XIII (1931), pp. 408–423; and Angel de Tuya G Solar, ‘La magia en la medicina peruana incaica’, Investigación y Progreso IX: 9 (1935), pp. 271–276. 71  Martin Gusinde, ‘Medicina i higiene de los antiguos araucanos’, Revista Médica de Chile 46 (1918), pp. 222–225; ‘Viruela y sifilis en los antiguos araucanos’, Revista Médica de Chile 46 (1918), pp.  310–312; ‘Plantas medicinales que los indios araucanos recomiendan’, Antropos 31 (1937), pp. 555–571; Ricardo Latcham, ‘Prácticas médicas propiamente tales entre los indios araucanos’, in Pedro Lautaro Ferrer (1869–1937), Historia General de la Medicina en Chile (Talca: Imprenta Talca, 1904), pp. 40–75.

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their Peruvian counterparts, both Gusinde and Latcham concentrated on the pre-Colombian and colonial periods. Moreover, they perpetuated the notion that superstition predominated in indigenous diagnosis and treatment of diseases and asserted that Mapuche traditional healers understood little about the internal causes of illness. But they stressed their excellent knowledge of medicinal plants, and the successful use of such plants for afflictions such as cuts and rashes. The work of Gusinde, Latcham and other Chilean scholars were published in international scientific journals,72 Chilean scholars presented papers on indigenous health practices at international congresses,73 and efforts were made to publicise the contributions they were making to the anthropological discipline at a continental level.74 We also see direct exchanges and collaborations between Chileans and Peruvians. Specifically, we see Peruvians working in Chile and reaching out to Chilean scholars to help them advance in their work. Sometimes that reaching out connected, ironically, with the history of military conflict between the two republics. For example, when Valdizán travelled to Santiago in 1909 and sought out José Toribio Medina and his renowned library (see Part II), he was looking for documents that had been taken from Peru during the War of the Pacific.75 Much later, in 1945, the Chilean Consul in Bahía Brazil, Juan Mujica de la Fuente, wrote a letter in reply to Lastres, who needed to consult some sources in Chile’s National Library. Mujica put Lastres in contact with the director, saying “I hope to hear that the staff of that rich documentary resource that is our National Archive have treated you well.”76 Some Peruvian researchers spent more substantive periods of time in Chile. Neuro-pharmacologist Carlos Gutiérrez Noriega, for instance, studied in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Chile between 1932 and 1935. He had previously been president of the Medical Students Society at the National University of San Marcos in 72  E.g. Alciabades Santa Cruz, ‘Las plantas mágicas mapuches’, Revista Chilena de Historia Natural 41 (1937), pp. 172–177. 73  E.g. Eulojio Robles Rodríguez, ‘Costumbres y creencias araucanos’, at the Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, Buenos Aires, 1910. Published by Imprenta Barcelona in Santiago in 1911. 74  See Gualterio (Walter) Looser, ‘Publicaciones chilenas sobre antropología, etnología, folklore, arqueología y lingüística’, Boletín Bibliográfico de Antropología Americano 3: 3 (1939), pp. 228–230. 75  Javier Mariátegui, ‘Hermilio Valdizán y la Facultad de Medicina de San Fernando’, Anales de la Facultad de Medicina 58: 3 (1997). 76  Letter dated 10 November 1945, available at www.bibliotecadigital.gob.cl.

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Lima, and a regular contributor to Mariátegui’s journal Amauta. When this university was temporarily closed in 1932, Gutiérrez Noriega moved to Chile, and continued his work on the consumption of coca leaves, particularly among (indigenous) people living at high altitudes in the Andes.77 He also investigated public health policy among Andean populations, thereby making Chile part of the Andean region when it was so often left out. Rebecca Earle’s study on elite representations of indigenous peoples in post-independence Latin America is titled The Return of the Native.78 What I have outlined in the pages above points specifically to a celebration of the rural “native”, which ran counter to official discourses that located and promoted the city as a central site of progress and modernisation. A proposed return to rural life went beyond medical circles. In a recent article on urban planning and public health in Santiago, Macarena Ibarra refers to the First Pan-American Congress of Architects in 1920, where one delegate claimed it was “more preferable to live under the trees as the primitive man, than in the filth-infected tenements”. Ibarra explains: “the conventillos—groups of unventilated rooms, usually overcrowded, situated along a narrow interior passage, and lacking basic hygienic services— appeared unhealthy and a real threat for the spread of diseases.”79 Usually, it was the rural world that was seen to epitomise the problems of poverty and underdevelopment. And, yet, in 1920 (and still in 1939, if we take Allende’s study into account) disease was more prolific in the “filth-­ infected tenements” of the big cities, and architects at international congresses were asserting that the “primitive man” lead a healthier life. Whilst not necessarily representative of the general biomedical establishment, we see at least some overlap between the above acclamation of a pristine rural world and Peruvian scholarly discussions about childbirth and maternity in the early twentieth century.80 A university thesis of 1908 77  Salomón Ayaya Pío and Juan Pablo Murillo Peña, ‘Gutiérrez Noriega y el debate en torno al consumo de las hojas de coca (1937–1952), Anales de la Facultad de Medicina 79: 2 (2018), pp. 162–174. 78  Earle, The Return of the Native. 79  Macarena Ibarra, ‘Hygiene and Public Health in Santiago’s Urban Agenda, 1892–1927’, Planning Perspectives 31: 2 (2016), p. 187. 80  For an interesting discussion of indigeneity and venereal disease, see Paulo Drinot, The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s–1950s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). On the dominant discourses related to family planning see Raúl Necochea López, A History of Family Planning in Twentieth-Century Peru (Chapel Hill: University of North, 2014).

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by Ricardo Moloche, for example, set up a direct opposition between women in the capital city and in the Andean region. He praised the strength and resilience of indigenous campesino women and the ease with which they reproduced children: “often, in the middle of the working day, they are interrupted by the pain of uterine contractions, and in a jiffy—no more than half an hour—they give birth, wash their new born child, wrap them in cloth, tie them to their back and continue with what they were doing as if nothing had happened.”81 To be sure, such praise often coincided with and, in fact, served to reinforce ideas about indigenous inferiority, in that to give birth easily, without pain or fuss, was to live like animals. In the 1940s, as infrastructure improved and more modern hospitals (with maternity wards) were being built in the country’s urban centres, doctors like Felix López Cornejo still lauded the “special disposition” of the “indigenous Andean woman”, particularly her “good pelvic condition which encourages a normal birth.”82 However, he stressed the dangers of trusting in nature, and lamented that rural areas continued “to present the same bleak picture as centuries ago.” The lack of medical assistance in the case of difficult births, he said, meant that women found themselves “alone with their misfortune”, often with tragic results.83 The story here was the harshness of rural life, the wrongful neglect of rural women who suffered if there were complications in childbirth, and a clear sense that they were living in the past. If López Cornejo presented the (harsh, neglected, backward) rural world in stark opposition to the city (with its modern health facilities), Manuel Núñez Butrón tried to bring them together. In 1978, the World Health Organization bestowed on this indigenous physician the epithet of “world pioneer in primary health care”. Butrón was born in Samán, Puno. During the 1920s, he studied medicine at the National University of San Marcos in Lima, and then at the University of Barcelona. According to Marcos Cueto, it was here that he “discovered” or “claimed” his indigenous identity, as a result of experiencing the racist attitudes of Spanish people (who, he felt, cast all Peruvians as indigenous and therefore inferior, regardless of whether they were from Lima, or Cuzco, or a small 81  La maternidad de Lima, 1908, cited in Jorge Lossio et al., ‘Por bien de la nación: discursos científicos en favor de la medicalización del parto en el Perú, 1900–1940’, Historias, Ciencias, Saude 25: 4 (2018), p. 949. 82  López Cornejo, 1940, cited in ibid., p. 953. 83  Ibid.

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village in Puno).84 On his return to Peru, Butrón sought an appointment as a doctor in his home region, where he despaired at the level of neglect he witnessed and how little he was able to achieve by himself: “the government pays a provincial physician to fight epidemics … but what can a man do … if his mission is to take care of thousands of inhabitants distributed hundreds of kilometres apart?”85 From Juliaca, Butrón travelled around the rural communities by horse and later by motorbike, concentrating his efforts on smallpox and epidemic typhus. He encouraged people to get vaccinated and gave classes on basic hygiene, and—from the offset in the early 1930s—began to recruit other people (Adventist missionaries, ex-­ soldiers, traditional healers) to help him. Butrón inaugurated his first brigade of rural sanitary workers—named Rijchary, meaning “awaken” in Quechua—in the community of Isla in 1933.86 State authorities provided modest financial support,87 and by 1937, there were 122 members in the Rijchary movement, covering 22 different locations, and during the first half of that year they carried out more than 10,000 vaccinations.88 Since the OMS recognised the significance of his rural public health campaign, a growing number of academic and journalistic works have been published on Butrón.89 Three important stories emerge from these. 84  Marcos Cueto, ‘Indigenismo and Rural Medicine in Peru: The Indian Sanitary Brigade and Manuel Nuñez Butrón’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 65: 1 (1991), pp. 22–41, p. 30. 85  Butrón, ‘Que es el Rijcharismo?’, Medicina Social 3 (1944), pp.  9–10, cited in ibid., p. 30. As Cueto tells us, the population census of 1940 found that there was only one health worker to every 24,000 people in Puno, whereas in Lima it was 1/350, and the country average was 1/2000. 86  Dan Hazen, ‘Meanings of Literacy in the Third World: The Concepts and Consequences of the Rijchary Reform Movement in Highland Peru’, Journal of Library History 16: 2 (1981), p. 408. 87  Marcos Cueto notes that the state covered the costs of an assistant, which enabled Butrón to pay four members of the brigade. See The Return of Epidemics, Health and Society in Peru during the 20th Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p. 60. 88  Cueto, ‘Indigenismo and Rural Medicine’, p. 36. 89  Marcos Cueto dominates the field. See the above-mentioned article and book, as well as Excelencia cientíca en la periferia: actividades cientificas y accion biomedical en el Peru, 1890–1950 (1989), and with Steven Palmer, Medicine and Public Health in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). See also Hugo Arroyo-Hernández, ‘Runa soncco: Manuel Núñez Butrón y su proyecto de educación sanitaria’, Historia de Salud Pública 30: 2 (2013); David Frisancho Pineda, ‘Manuel Núñez Butrón y el ‘Rijcharismo”, Acta Medica Peruana XVIII: 2 (May-August 2001); David Salinas Flores, ‘Manuel Núñez Butrón: Pionero de la Atención Primaria en el mundo’, Revista Medica de Chile 142 (2014), pp. 1612–1613; Gustavo Aliaga Rodríguez, ‘El Rijcharismo en el altplano peruano como una experiencia pionera de salud intercultural en America’, Revista Cubana de Salud Publica 41: 3 (2015), pp. 497–509.

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First, that his Rijchary movement exemplified a “collaboration between Western medicine and Indian culture”.90 Its sanitation programme was supported by indigenous communities of the Puno region: many of the ex-soldiers and traditional healers involved in the brigades self-identified as indigenous, as did Butrón, and whilst they encouraged people to get vaccinated against smallpox, for example, or to get regular haircuts, they also honoured many indigenous traditional practices. And its magazine, Runa soncco (1935–1948), claimed to be “of the Indians and for the Indians”. The second important agreed point in the existing literature is that Butrón’s work was both celebrated by government officials (as illustrative of the ability of indigenous people to create a clean social environment), and—particularly in the case of Runa soncco—deemed potentially dangerous (when it veered too far into the realms of social critique). The magazine condemned alcoholism and coca chewing, and thus, in some ways, reiterated common stereotypes of a degraded, weak “race”. However, the prime focus of its defamations were the local merchants, who promoted the consumption of alcohol and coca, and made money from such vices. It spoke of cleansing Andean Peru, but in a different way to many health officials in Lima: “If there are Indians … that have filth and lice on their bodies, there are not a few whites that have filth and lice in their spirit… to this kind of filth Peru owes much of its misfortune.”91 In line with indigenista thought from the 1920s, which blamed local whites and gamonales for the backwardness of the Indian, Runa soncco cast corruption and class exploitation as Peru’s biggest problem; this was the disease and infection that was ravaging the country. In some issues, though, it radicalised indigenista thinking by calling not just for less corruption or less exploitation, but the full-blown elimination of the landowning class.92 The third emergent narrative is that Butrón’s movement resonated far beyond Peru. Cueto comments that Butrón was a member of the Argentine Society for Hygiene and Social Medicine.93 Gustavo Aliaga Rodríguez asserts that his sanitation brigades were heralded as a great achievement in Chile and Mexico, as well as Argentina; indeed, enthusiastic praise for Rijcharismo, he says, was to be found as far afield as France.94 According  Cueto, ‘Indigenismo and Rural Medicine’, p. 41.  ‘Lapiz rojo’, Runa soncco 7 (1937), p. 18, cited in ibid., p. 38. 92  Ibid., p. 39. 93  Cueto, The Return of Epidemics, p. 66. 94  Aliaga Rodríguez, ‘El rijcharismo…’, p. 506. 90 91

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to David Salinas Flores, some of the articles published in Runa soncco were reproduced by the international news agency United Press.95 Hugo Arroyo-­Hernández claims that Runo soncco was especially well received by Argentine and Chilean readers.96 David Frisancho Pineda homes in briefly on the case of Chile, citing the doctor José García Tello: “I have travelled to ten countries … nobody has made such a profound impression upon me as Núñez Butrón, a stamp of honour for American medicine.”97 Such international recognition seemed to have little impact on Peruvian state policy, however. State officials let the sanitation brigades continue functioning in Puno during Butrón’s lifetime (despite dispatching him for a time to the Amazon region) but did not try to create similar projects elsewhere in the country; this was very much the initiative of one man, with the support of local contacts. Rather than community outreach programmes, the focus of the Peruvian state was on the construction of hospitals and investment in modern medical facilities, and in the mid twentieth century these were almost exclusively located in urban centres. One transnationally celebrated institution was the Hospital Obrero in Lima. Numerous Latin American dignitaries, including Allende, as Chile’s Minister of Public Health, attended the official inauguration of this hospital in late 1940 and Rebagliati gave a speech which explicitly—in the context of the Second World War—contrasted “the countries of America, in their tradition of accord” with “other countries [who] destroy each other”.98 In public health, he asserted, Chile, Peru and their continental neighbours emulated and competed with one another; as Rebagliati told it, the outcome was the improved protection of the well-being of the citizens of every state. In Chile, the story of Petronilla Trejo Millaqueo provides us—as Butrón’s does—with some compelling insights into the position of intercultural intermediaries. In contrast to Butrón, though, who took his university training from the city (Lima and Barcelona) to rural communities in Puno and prompted a dialogue between the two in that indigenous space, Trejo Millaqueo was a Mapuche woman who brought her knowledge of rural life and spiritual well-being to the city. In other words, the process of knowledge exchange operated in different directions. Trejo  Salinas Flores, ‘Manuel Núñez Butrón’, p. 1613.  Arroyo-Hernández, ‘Runa soncco’. 97  Frisancho Pineda, ‘Manuel Núñez Butrón’. 98  Cited in Drinot, The Allure of Labor, pp. 219–220. 95 96

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Fig. 4.7  Ercilla, 9 May 1940

Millaqueo sold her knowledge through the advertisement below (Fig. 4.7), which was published in almost every other issue of the magazine Ercilla over the course of 1939 and 1940. The advertisement for a very different kind of good health to that promoted by Butrón in his vaccination campaigns appeared alongside others for flower-scented soaps, cold and flu relief, beauty wax and indigestion remedies. Did readers want to know “how to improve [their] luck in business, lotteries, gambling, and work?” it asked. Did they want to know “how to resolve [their] moral and emotional problems?” “Write today to Petronilla Trejo Millaqueo at post-box 80 in Arauco”, the advertisement instructed, to receive a “FREE copy of the book El secreto de los toquis [The Secret of the War Leaders]”. This would be the answer to their problems. Trejo Millaqueo also advertised her services in the Chilean film magazine Ecran. In just one issue dated 5 September 1944, for example, she appeared five different times, publicising “artistic Zodiac rings made of gold and silver” (“beautiful jewellery crafted in Arauco for people all over

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the Americas”), free horoscope readings, and her ability to connect the “science of the past and the present.” What we have here then is a Mapuche healer—whether legitimate or not—successfully selling her wares and expertise through major periodicals in the capital city over several years. Clearly, Trejo Millaqueo’s knowledge—sold as secret knowledge inherited from the indomitable warriors of the past—was in demand, and given the target readership of these magazines, especially Ecran, which sought to connect Chile with the world of Hollywood, one presumes it was in demand among non-indigenous middle- or upper-class santiaguinos. With both Butrón and Trejo Millaqueo, we detect a growing recognition of the validity and usefulness of indigenous health practices, even if stereotypes of backwardness and primitiveness persisted.

Conclusions Chile and Peru passed their first Labour Codes in 1931 and 1936, respectively. Both excluded agricultural workers. This seemed to be on the basis that what the latter contributed to the nation was not productive labour. The success of such a discursive strategy is not surprising given the power of hacendados in the Chilean and Peruvian national congresses in the early twentieth century (Chap. 3). Most of the intellectuals cited in this chapter, however, debated and condemned such exclusion, and we do see— through the international congresses cited in the chapter—some important shifts in language over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, not least a recognition of the value of agricultural work, and the need to protect this sector and enable it to become more profitable. A large proportion of rural workers in Chile (especially northern and southern Chile) and Peru were indigenous. Chile was often categorised as a less indigenous country than Peru on the international conference circuit, but we also get a clear sense from the primary source material presented here that it played a key role in continental debates about indigenous labour, through the interventions of individual figures such as Moisés Poblete Troncoso and Venancio Coñuepán. With these two and their interlocutors, we see how an acknowledgement of rural indigenous labourers’ rights did not automatically mean a recognition of their (racial) equality, because there was still a focus on redeeming the “Indian” through his or her conversion into capable, industrious, profit-making workers. Linking all these different manifestations together is the notion of indigenous peoples as firmly rooted in the rural world. There were some

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major discrepancies as to how much mobility such roots allowed. For some intellectuals and policy makers, as Drinot says of 1910s–1930s Peru, to work in industry or to move to the city was to initiate a process of de-­ Indianisation. For others, as we saw through the complaints logged by Mapuche activist Felipe Inalaf in late 1930s Chile, class and race prejudice fixed the status of indigenous people as rural workers (“uneducated peasants”) even when they lived and worked outside the rural world. For others, still, indigenous people could inhabit the urban sphere and maintain their indigenous identity, becoming important cultural intermediaries. This was the role adopted by puneño health activist Manuel Butrón, who sought an education in the city but then took this back to rural indigenous communities, and Mapuche spiritual healer Petronilla Trejo who sold indigenous rural knowledge in the city, tapping into broader “Western” rethinking of health as more than biological or medical well-being. In Part II, I examine Chilean-Peruvian exchanges about indigenous cultural practices, such as weaving—which, as shown here, was increasingly celebrated as a modern money-making activity—and disputes over the pre-­Columbian past, and how this related to the twentieth-century present.

PART II

Indigeneity and Cultural Heritage: Who and Where Are Civilised?

A large part of the hatred that exists between Chileans and Peruvians is due to their native ancestry. In the Chilean there is a large percentage of Araucanian blood. In the Peruvian there is as much of the blood of the Quichuas. The Araucanians are the hereditary foes of the Quichuas. For centuries there was no peace between them. The Incas pushed their army of Quichuas as far south as possible, but they never could conquer the lands where the Araucanians roved. —Hiram Bingham, 1911

Introduction In his travel memoir cited above, Hiram Bingham took it as a given that Chileans and Peruvians hated one another.1 He asserted that this hatred was rooted in a long history of hostility, dating back to military conflicts between the Araucanians and the Inca in pre-Columbian times (depicted in Fig. 1 below). He thereby equated the Araucanians of old with modern-­ day Chile, and the Inca of old with modern-day Peru. Creole elites in both countries did the same thing during the early independence era. Peruvian revolutionaries claimed Tawantinsuyo and its celebrated history as an inspiring early chapter in their newly created national narrative. And Chilean insurgents found in the indomitable Araucanian warriors of the sixteenth century “an inexhaustible source of heroic imagery” for their own emerging national script.2 At this time, though, Chileans could also 1  Hiram Bingham, Across South America: An Account of a Journey from Buenos Aires to Lima by Way of Potosí, With Notes on Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru (New York and Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911), p. 357. 2  Earle, Return of the Native, p. 30.

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Fig. 1  Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala’s depiction (1615) of the Battle of Maule between Mapuche and Inca forces in the late fifteenth century

look to the Inca as a model for their future republic, and Peruvians could bask in the glorious feats of the Araucanians. In other words, the inheritance of these pre-conquest pasts was not entirely nationally bounded. By the early-twentieth century, after two wars between Chile and Peru, there was less room for flexibility. At least this is how the soon-­to-­be self-­ proclaimed “discoverer” of Machu Picchu told the story. Bingham explained contemporary Chilean-Peruvian rivalry as rooted in a biological reality: Chileans shared the same blood as Araucanians, and in Peruvian people’s veins ran Quichua or Inca blood.

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An incident at the First Pan-American Scientific Congress in Santiago, Chile, in 1908 was the apparent catalyst for these reflections.3 Bingham attended the lavish event as a delegate of the United States government and of Yale University, where he was working as a Lecturer in South American History, “a post that had been created especially for him” and “the first such post in any North American university.”4 In order to “qualify” to teach this subject, Bingham had travelled “across the Andes from Venezuela to Colombia”, following the route of “the great General Simón Bolívar”, and then written a report on the journey. The report made its way into the hands of Elihu Root, then U.S. Secretary of State, who was suitably impressed, and “very graciously gave [Bingham] the opportunity to see a lot more of South America” by appointing him delegate to the congress in Santiago.5 The incident transpired during the formal inauguration of the congress. As told by Bingham, the Peruvian delegate present at the ceremony received “one of the most enthusiastic and heartiest ovations of any”, but “took it in stolid silence, making no motion and giving no sign that he heard or understood what was going on.” The delegate and his colleagues “felt out of place” in Santiago; they felt “grievously wronged” by Chile’s continued occupation of Tacna and Arica, and, consequently, “accepted all the Chilean overtures with very bad grace, feeling that it would have been much more desirable to have had fewer fine words and more kind actions.” Bingham was sympathetic to the Chileans at the congress, who “were doing everything in their power to try and patch up the quarrel and let bygones be bygones”, but the Peruvians “held themselves somewhat aloof” throughout and “showed how little they enjoyed being the recipients of Chilean hospitality”.6 3  This was the fourth Latin American Scientific Congress, which began on 24 December 1907 and finished on 5 January 1908. The first regional meeting was held in Buenos Aires in 1898, the second in Montevideo in 1901, and the third in Rio de Janeiro in 1905. The Santiago congress became the First Pan-American Scientific Congress, by including the U.S. and other Latin American countries beyond the Southern Cone. See Manuel Bastias Saavedra and Camila Plaza Armijo, ‘From Control to Social Reform: the Latin American Social Question in the Latin American Scientific Congresses (1898–1908)’, Estudos Ibero-­ Americanos 42: 1 (2016), pp. 283–307. 4  Hugh Thomson, ‘Introduction’ to Hiram Bingham, The Lost City of the Incas [1952] (London: Phoenix, 2003), p. 4. 5  Bingham, Across South America, p. 111. 6  Ibid., p. 187.

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This was how a visitor from the U.S. recounted events retrospectively in 1911, shortly after Peru had severed diplomatic relations with Chile (for the second time in just over ten years), and in the context of escalating violence in the contested provinces of Tacna and Arica. In 1908–1909, when the Chilean and Peruvian governments were still officially talking to one another, Lima’s principal daily newspaper reported a rather different story to its readers. The Peruvian delegation at the congress was larger than that of any other country apart from Chile and Argentina.7 One of the Peruvian delegates was Enrique Oyanguren. It was he who attended the inauguration and received the ovation that Bingham recounted. According to El Comercio of 26 December 1908, the public in attendance, who were “almost in their entirety from the most distinguished families of Santiago”, “applauded energetically” when the president of the congress, Brazil’s Carlos Ribeyro Lisboa, handed over the lectern to Oyanguren (one delegate from each country was asked to say a few words). The applause reportedly lasted for more than five minutes, at which point the orchestra started to play the Peruvian national anthem, and the whole hall got to its feet. In the words of El Comercio, “never had Santiago seen such a spontaneous and delirious welcome given to a foreign country.”8 And the “delirious welcome” seemed to go down well. On 28 December, for example, this Peruvian newspaper reproduced a report from El Mercurio of Santiago which claimed the ovation was “especially significant” because it showed the Peruvian delegates that Chilean people felt “a great deal of compassion and consideration towards their homeland”, as well as a “fervent desire to build commercial and intellectual links” between the two countries.9 On 29 December, the Lima daily had more good news to tell its readers. The President of Chile, Pedro Montt, and his wife had invited Peruvian delegate Luis Miró Quesada to dinner in their residence.10 And on 24 December, the first day of the congress, it reported that the President of the Chamber of Deputies in Chile had invited the Peruvian delegates to an exclusive welcome event: a glass of champagne in the chamber’s dining 7  The total number of delegates to attend the congress was about 1900, with Chile having the most (1119 delegates); Argentina sending 377 delegates, Peru 63 and the United States 55. See Rodrigo Fernos, Science Still Born: The Rise and Impact of the Pan-American Scientific Congresses, 1898–1916 (Lincoln: iUniverse, 2003), p. 8. 8  ‘Telegramas: CHILE’, El Comercio, 26 December 1908, p. 1. 9  ‘Telegramas: CHILE’, El Comercio, 28 December 1908. 10  ‘Telegramas: CHILE’, El Comercio, 29 December 1908.

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room; the only other invitees were the Argentine delegates and Leo Rowe from the United States.11 Alongside details of the papers that the Peruvian delegates presented and of the commissions that they chaired, El Comercio—in contrast to the story published by Bingham a couple of years later—appeared to celebrate the special treatment (the “spontaneous and delirious” ovation; the exclusive governmental and presidential invitations) that Peruvins had received in Chile. It was not just while the congress was meeting that Chilean intellectual and political elites sought to build bridges, or that Peruvians responded warmly to such entreaties. We also see this in the planning for the congress. According to official correspondence found in the Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Lima, Valentín Letelier (1852–1919)— Rector of the University of Chile and President of the Organising Committee for the congress—wrote to the Peruvian Embassy in Santiago at least a year prior to December 1908 to let them know that preparations were underway, and to try to secure Peruvian participation.12 On 13 November 1907, the Peruvian representative replied praising what he saw as “the noble purpose of shared progress and sincere fraternity”, and promised to do all he could to make sure the congress was a successful one “with regard to my patria”.13 Each chapter in Part II takes the First Pan-American Scientific Congress, which brought together approximately two thousand delegates from across the hemisphere, as a starting point for its analysis of the many different ways in which Chilean and Peruvian intellectuals (often employed by and representing their governments) sought to re-work the indigenous past to suit present-day requirements. It interrogates how they endeavoured to create—and were constantly required to recreate—a “usable

 ‘Telegramas: CHILE’, El Comercio, 24 December 1908.  Letter from Peruvian Legation in Santiago to Valentín Letelier, dated 13 November 1907. 13  He would pass on the information to his government, he said, and try to formalise the attendance of delegates. Two weeks later A.  Rey de Castro wrote to Augusto Vicuña (Secretary of the Organising Committee) to confirm being “chosen as spokesperson for the sub-committee on Social Sciences” and to express his “sincere thanks” for such an invitation. Letters dated 13 November 1907 and 30 November 1907, Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Archivo Particular Augusto B.  Leguía, Correspondencia 566/10, Folios 25 and 27. 11 12

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past” for their nations.14 By exploring the ongoing collaborations and disputes between Chilean and Peruvian archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnologists and historians during the first half of the twentieth century, it shows that the process of constructing and exhibiting a “scientifically” proven national past, and of giving meaning to that past in the present, was highly dependent on and elaborated in response to each other, as well as internal political developments, and broader continental cultural and political concerns. Part II also enlarges our understanding of how dominant racialised discourses of the time equated indigeneity with the past (with untainted pre-Columbian tradition) as well as illustrates the ambiguities of such heritage discourses. These did not necessarily rule out recognition of indigenous people’s contemporary existence, or the valorisation of their living cultural practice in the present. Indeed, I show how sometimes such recognition and valorisation led to the elaboration of counter narratives which cast indigenous peoples as models of (an alternative) modernity. Chapter 5 shifts the focus from the military conflict that Bingham discussed in Across South America to one of the scholarly debates that caused some controversy at the First Pan-American Scientific Congress: the reach of Inca “civilising” influence in Chile. It interrogates how this panned out over the next few decades, concentrating on discussions about and representations of indigenous textile production. The lines of analysis draw out scholars’ and nation-states’ obsession with ascertaining origins (of objects, cultural practice, empires) and the accompanying anxiety to prove authenticity and legitimacy. They also point to the widespread use of “our” when intellectuals spoke of indigenous peoples. The intellectuals discussed in this chapter were almost exclusively non-indigenous. They did not claim direct or personal indigenous heritage, but rather—as Rebecca Earle discusses in Return of the Native—a metaphorical indigenous ancestry.15 Chapter 6 opens with Bingham’s “scientific discovery” of Machu Picchu. In Framing the Lost City, Amy Cox shows how this “abandoned archaeological site stands at the centre of Peru’s colonial past and its post-­ colonial future, speaking volumes about modernisation, development, 14  The term “usable past” is taken from Virginia Tuttle Clayton’s opening chapter to Drawing on America’s Past: Folk Art, Modernism and the Index of American Design (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), which in turn cites a 1918 article by U.S. literary critic Van Wyck Brooks. 15  Earle, Return of the Native, p. 132.

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race, indigeneity, long histories of scientific expeditions, photography, U.S.-Peruvian relations, tourism and national identity.”16 My argument here is that it also “speaks volumes” about Chilean-Peruvian relations, as well as about the rise to prominence of a pan Latin American nationalism during the early twentieth century. This chapter probes the multiple ­consequences of and responses to foreign interventions in the scientific study of Peru’s indigenous cultural heritage. It demonstrates, for example, how foreign involvement could be equated with recognition and prestige on the world stage, but equally how this could be perceived as a renewed form of colonialism. Chapter 6 then moves on to national legislation that pledged to protect pre-Columbian archaeological remains and reveals the international framework (namely congresses) within which this developed. The broader context for all this was the growing importance of national and international tourism in Latin America. The First South American Congress on Tourism was held in 1928. By this point, the construction of a tourism industry had become a state policy objective in both Chile and Peru.17 Such developments were consolidated in the 1930s: in Peru, with the creation of a Central Commission for Advertising and Tourism; and in Chile, with the establishment of an Institute of Hotel Training and the launch of full-colour travel magazines such as En Viaje.18 Chile and Peru competed with one another in their bids to attract foreign visitors, but they also collaborated at a governmental level, as we will see with the visit of indigenous Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi to Chile in 1936. At this time, an increasing number of people and organisations beyond Peru laid claim to or at least publicly identified with the glories of the Inca past.

16  Amy Cox, Framing a Lost City: Science, Photography, and the Making of Machu Picchu (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), p. 6. 17  In Peru, Leguía’s regime (1919–1930) was a major promoter of the tourism industry as part of a broader expansion of the state and capitalism. In 1920s Chile, the State Railway Company built grand hotels connected to railway branches in remote areas in the south, such as Villarrica. The government of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (1927–1931), created the Department of Tourism as a sub-section within the Ministry of Development. See Rodrigo Booth, ‘Turismo y representación del paisaje. La invención del sur de Chile en la mirada de la Guia del Veraneante’, Nuevo Mundo, Mundos Nuevos (2008). 18  The first was created in 1933. En Viaje was established in 1930. It was published by Chile’s State Railway Company and ran for 40 years (1933–1973).

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The seventh chapter (the last of Part II) begins by analysing museums as a window on to the institutionalisation of archaeology, anthropology and ethnology in Latin America. It draws out the connections between developments in Chile and Peru during the 1910s and returns to the role of the foreign scholar—in particular, that of German-born archaeologist Max Uhle. It then turns to artistic-folkloric projects, mainly during the 1930s and 1940s, which were driven by individuals rather than the state, and which underscore the fact that indigenismo was not just a project of elites. It maps out some of the different threads of argument emerging at this time about the meaning of popular art, and whether and how to include indigenous cultural production as art, as opposed to artefact. It brings Chileans and Peruvians into dialogue with one another through an exploration of the inter-American and Pan-American conversations about the exhibition of cultural heritage. Indigenous people feature more prominently in this chapter than in the previous two. They are more visible and vocal in the historical records on artistic-folkloric projects than they are in primary materials related to state-led museums and scholarly congresses, although they are certainly not absent from the latter. More critically, we see how indigenous people could use all these spaces to counter dominant racialised narratives about purity, tradition and knowledge production. The prominence of non-Peruvian/Chilean scholars, such as Bingham and Uhle, is a common feature of all three chapters. It was impossible to ignore their presence in the source material documenting Chilean and Peruvian efforts to create usable indigenous pasts, and that presence is therefore an important part of the story told in Part II. My analysis of the dialogue between these foreign scholars and local intellectuals aims to deepen our understanding of the complex relationship between the national and transnational spheres of archaeology, folklore and popular art, and tourism in early twentieth century Latin America. On many occasions, prominent figures of the Global North helped to build bridges between Chilean and Peruvian intellectuals and institutions. In other words, Chileans and Peruvians often came together through their efforts. Sometimes such bridge-building was unintentional, and sometimes, as we will see, Chileans and Peruvians ended up joining ranks against these (insider) outsiders and what they represented.

CHAPTER 5

Weaving the Indigenous Past into the Present

Visitors exploring Cuzco’s Casa Concha (or Machu Picchu) Museum in 2019 would likely have read that “For the Inca, textiles were the world’s most precious items, more valuable than gold and silver” (Fig. 5.1).1 In Lost City of the Incas (1952), Hiram Bingham highlighted the continuing and wide-reaching resonance of indigenous textile production in mid-­ twentieth century South America. He recounted how his team had “found the small stone whirl-bob of a spindle-wheel”, whilst excavating the Choquequirau archaeological site in 1909, which was “in size and shape like those made from wood and used today all over the Andes” (my emphasis).2 The practice was “more than five hundred years old” but lived on in the present: as Bingham told readers, “one rarely sees a woman tending sheep or walking along the high road who is not busily engaged in using this old-fashioned spindle.”3 Critically, Bingham’s narrative included Peru’s southern neighbour as part of this trans-Andean female-­dominated tradition: the spindle, he asserted, was used “by Indian women from Colombia to Chile.”4

 I visited this museum on 14 April 2019. The words quoted are part of a narrative accompanying various textile exhibits, including an encased woven tunic, dated 1450–1520. 2  Bingham, Lost City of the Incas, p. 127. 3  Ibid. 4  Ibid. 1

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Fig. 5.1  Information board in the Casa Concha Museum, Cuzco, 2019 (author’s own photograph)

Bingham had been impressed by Chile, especially by its capital city, when he attended the First Pan-American Scientific Congress in 1908–1909. He applauded Santiago for having “produced during the past generation more writers of ability than any other South American City.”5 Of these, he singled out José Toribio Medina (1852–1930) as a “genius of bibliography” who had become “famous all over the world”. Medina, he said, had “produced more scholarly works than any other man now living in South America, and more volumes of first-class bibliography than any in the Western hemisphere.”6 Bingham visited Medina’s house whilst in Santiago. As he recalled in Across South America, three large rooms were “lined floor to ceiling with his treasures”. These were not just Chilean treasures; one room was “devoted almost entirely to Mexican imprints”.7 Several delegates at the Scientific Congress cited Medina’s classic text Los aboríjenes de Chile (1882), because it broached a subject which— according to Ricardo Latcham—was vigorously debated in one of the

 Bingham, Across South America, p. 190.  Ibid. 7  Ibid. 5 6

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panel sessions.8 That subject was Inca influence in Chile.9 Stefanie Gänger describes Medina as a “Peruphile”, a scholar who was “fond of the history and archaeology associated with Peru”.10 He was also interested in tracing the “remnants” of indigenous peoples in Chile—“our aborigines” as he phrased it, claiming ownership of indigenous peoples but not identifying (himself or Chile) as indigenous—and in this influential book of 1882 he linked the two, by documenting the supposed “progress and contentment” that the Inca brought with them when they invaded northern Chile.11 In Medina’s version of history, the Inca had operated as bearers of civilisation and modernisation in Chile; this could be seen in local pottery and textiles. As he told it, however, their impact only reached as far as the Maule River. Like the Spanish, the Inca were unable to penetrate Mapuche (or, as most scholars said then, Araucanian) territory. According to Gänger, representatives of Peru in Santiago “unanimously defended the […] profound impact Incan invasion had exerted” on Chile, and asserted that this included Mapuche territory.12 She highlights the contributions by Pablo Patrón (1855–1910), who had represented Peru at previous scientific congresses and been much praised for his endeavours,13 and by Max Uhle (1856–1944), who attended the conference in Santiago

8  Session of 3 January 1909 organised by the “Natural and Anthropological Sciences” section. 9  Ricardo Latcham, ‘El comercio pre-hispánico en Chile’, cited in Gänger, Relics of the Past, p. 220. Latcham himself had already published an article on the subject: ‘¿Hasta dónde alcanzó el dominio efectivo de los Incas en Chile?’, Revista Chilena de Historia Natural 4 (1908), pp.  178–199. Latcham arrived in Chile in 1888, with a contract to work on the expansion of the railroad system in the south. Whilst living in Malleco, he learned to speak some Mapudungun, and decided he wanted to study Mapuche history and culture. By 1908, he was member of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the Society of Americanists of Paris, and the Scientific Society of Chile. In 1911, he also became a member of the Chilean Society of History and Geography. 10  Gänger, Relics of the Past, p. 218. 11  José Toribio Medina, Los aborijenes de Chile (Santiago: Imprenta Gutenberg, 1882). 12  Gänger, Relics of the Past, p. 220. 13  A letter from Montevideo, dated 2 April 1901, reported to the Peruvian Minister of Foreign Affairs on the Second Latin American Scientific Congress, and made special mention of Pablo Patrón for his “exceptionally superior qualities” and “vast knowledge”. Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Archivo Augusto Leguía, Correspondencia 496/13, Folio 15.

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in his capacity as the Director of Lima’s Museo Nacional.14 Uhle’s paper, “La esfera de influencia del país de los Incas”, outlined the vast reach of Inca influence throughout South America, including Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador as well as Chile.15 Patrón’s paper, more focused than Uhle’s, as indicated in its title “Influencia del dominio peruano en Chile”, re-wrote Inca imperial expansion into Araucanian territory as Peruvian dominance in Chile as he reworked a conflict between pre-Columbian civilisations into a dispute between modern nation-states. We can read this as a defiant response to the political reality of the time, when tense discussions were underway about Arica and Tacna, Peru’s southern-most provinces, annexed by the Chilean state in the early 1880s. International conference papers such as these, presented by scholars working for the Peruvian state, were part of a broader endeavour—together with the founding of government-­ funded national museums and the government-sponsored professionalisation of archaeology and anthropology—to regenerate the country in the aftermath of the disaster that was the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), or rather to regenerate a belief in the country, and pride in being Peruvian. By celebrating Inca expansionist endeavours as exemplary of their nation’s majestic past, and thus of its future potential, Peruvian elites sought to counter Chile’s contemporary claims to unsurpassed military glory. This chapter analyses some of the twists and turns that such scholarly discussions took from the early 1910s, when Gänger’s analysis concludes, through to the early 1950s. As well as the aforementioned Bingham, Medina, Latcham, Patrón and Uhle, it weaves together the interventions of Chilean physician and anthropologist Aureliano Oyarzún (1858–1947); Walter Looser (1898–1982), a Chilean botanist and engineer of Swiss parentage; Chilean educator, poet and diplomat, Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957); Chilean composer Pedro Humberto Allende (1885–1959); and Julio Tello (1880–1947), widely claimed to be Peru’s first indigenous 14  Uhle first excavated in Peru between 1895 and 1898, sponsored by Penn Museum in the U.S. He was then recruited by the University of California-Berkeley (1899) and asked to expand his excavations in Peru. He travelled there in 1903, and in 1905 was invited to become head of the archaeological section and first director of the Museo de Historia Nacional. By 1908, he was a well-known figure on the international conference circuit. See D.L.  Browman, ‘Max Uhle and the Museo de Historia Nacional-Lima’, Bulletin of the History of Archaeology, 9: 1 (1999), pp. 7–9. 15  Both papers appear in Carlos Porter, ed., Trabajos del Cuarto Congreso Científico (Santiago: Imprenta Barcelona, 1909).

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archaeologist. With a focus on textile production, the chapter shows that Chileans often endorsed narratives of Inca influence, but adapted them to suit their own (national) purposes. It also points to the increasingly frequent occasions where Chileans and Peruvians joined forces—through international congresses and expositions—to interrogate and celebrate together the greatness of ancient indigenous civilisations, as well as to underscore the notion that living indigenous people (who preserved this greatness) had the potential to make positive contributions to national and continental progress.

Nationalist Appropriations of a Shared Inca History In 1910, just a couple of years after Santiago hosted the First Pan-American Scientific Congress, many Chilean scholars travelled to Buenos Aires for the XVII International Congress of Americanists.16 The aim of this congress, from its beginnings in 1870s Paris, was to develop ethnographic, linguistic, and historical research on the Americas, with a special focus on the pre-Columbian era. “There was no obvious political or economic interest in our continent” (my emphasis), Peruvian anthropologist and historian Luis Eduardo Valcárcel recounted many years later, “but there was no lack of people who were genuinely interested in learning about and understanding American culture and history”, and “little by little, [scholars became preoccupied with] recording information about the life of the many different aboriginal peoples.”17 In Buenos Aires it was mainly the past—the remote past—that delegates scrutinised in their seminar discussions, but they also seemed interested in the contemporary lives of indigenous peoples unfolding outside the conference rooms. Charles Warren Currier’s report on the congress, published shortly afterwards in American Anthropologist, noted that Arthur Posnansky—Bolivian army officer and archaeologist—had organised an overland trip “from Buenos Aires to La Paz and Lake Titicaca, and thence to Lima” for the more adventurous or less-hurried of the delegates, or those who were travelling on to Mexico City for the second session of 16  Robert Lehmann-Nitsche (ed.), Actas del XVII Congreso Internacional de Americanistas: Sesión de Buenos Aires, 17–23 de mayo de 1910 (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Coni Hermanos, 1912). The First International Congress of Americanists was held in Nancy, France, in 1875. It was not held in the Americas until 1895 (Mexico City). The first session of the XVII congress took place in Buenos Aires, the second in Mexico City. 17  Valcárcel, Memorias, p. 309.

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the congress.18 The trip was free for delegates as the Argentine and Bolivian governments agreed to cover the costs of railroad transportation. Several signed up and showed willing, in Currier’s words, to suffer the “unavoidable discomforts” because the journey afforded great “opportunities for a personal acquaintance with the Indians of the Andean slopes, and the great plateau of Bolivia”.19 Aureliano Oyarzún travelled to Buenos Aires as an official delegate of the Chilean government and representative of the country’s National Education Association. He was also one of the vice-presidents on the Executive Committee for the congress and he gave a widely commented paper entitled “Contribución al estudio de la influencia de la civilización peruana sobre los aborígenes de Chile”.20 As with the title of Patrón’s presentation in Santiago, nation-states of the present seemingly superseded indigenous civilisations of the past. The subject also reflected contemporaneous political events. Oyarzún was writing at a time when Peru had just severed diplomatic relations with Chile, following the expulsion of Peruvian priests from Tacna and Arica (March 1910).21 Oyarzún began his paper by recapping the discussions that had taken place at the Scientific Congress in Santiago: first, doctor Otto Aichel’s refutation of the theory, “generally accepted until today”, that “it was the Incas who brought to Chile the civilisation that the conquistadors found when they discovered our country”. As told by Oyarzún, Aichel’s position was then supported by numerous other Chileans, claiming that “Peruvian influence had been minimal, or at least had not spread as far as scholars had generally thought.”22 This obviously ran counter to the arguments put forward by Uhle and Patrón. Celebrating the “new paths” that science had taken since then and presenting his own contribution as “more modern” than previous studies, 18  Charles Warren Currier, ‘Seventeenth International Congress of Americanists First Session—Buenos Aires’, American Anthropologist 12: 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1910), p. 599. 19  Ibid. 20  This was included in Lehmann-Nitsche (ed.), Actas del XVII Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, pp. 354–398. It was also published in pamphlet form by Editorial Universitaria in Santiago in 1910. The paper was followed by a panel discussion that included Salvador Debenedetti (Argentina), Rodolfo Lenz (Germany-Chile), Juan B. Ambrosetti (Argentina), Florentino Ameghino (Argentina), Robert Lehmann-Nitsche (Germany), Max Uhle (Germany), Hermann von Thering (Germany-Brazil) and Samuel Lafone Quevedo (Uruguay). 21  Skuban, Lines in the Sand, p. 56. 22  In Lehmann-Nitsche (ed.), Actas, p. 354.

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Oyarzún largely sided with Uhle and Patrón. The overriding goal of his paper was to prove “the profound influence exerted in centuries past by the Peruvian people over our Araucanians”.23 He illustrated his talk with 32 exhibits of pottery, jewellery and weavings.24 To discuss ceramics, he used several exhibits from northern Chile and presented this region (without mentioning any specific peoples) as more developed and “civilised” than the Araucanians of southern Chile at the time of Spanish conquest. But when it came to textiles Oyarzún focused exclusively on the Araucanians; these were “the aborigines” that he was most interested in. By evidencing Peruvian influence over their weavings, he seemingly endorsed the Peruvian nationalist script. However, we can also see how he subverted and contested it: first, by suggesting that pre-Hispanic Peruvian artistic production was not (in all cases) original to Peru, coming instead or inspired by designs that came from California, Mexico and Central America; second, by arguing that Inca influence over the Araucanians was not a result of military conquest; and thirdly, by presenting the Araucanians as a contemporary culture that had outlived the Inca. The Inca, Oyarzún said, had only ruled in (northern) Chile for seventy-­ five years prior to Spanish conquest. This time frame was not sufficient to be able to impose one civilisation on another. But “influence” did not just occur through military occupation; trade was also an important factor, and this had likely been going on for a long time before formal conquest. The Araucanians, he reasserted, had—in contrast to indigenous people in the north—“never submitted to Inca government”, but they “took” the “Peruvian culture” that had come to northern Chile (through conquest or trade), and made this part of their own culture. Some of the adopted practices, Oyarzún said, were still thriving in the early twentieth century, as demonstrated “in the weavings and jewellery or our contemporary Mapuches”.25 Like Medina, he referred to the Mapuche as “our” (claiming Chilean ownership of, rather than directly identifying with them), but precisely by using the term Mapuche—interchangeably with the Spanish-­ invented term Araucanian—he at least partially acknowledged their autonomy. This was reinforced by his use of Mapudungun words such as “núcur  In ibid., p. 391.  Oyarzún’s method was one of comparison. He first showed an example of an Araucanian jug or plate, and then showed how similar this was to an Inca jug or plate. He did the same with the jewellery and textiles. 25  Oyarzún, ‘Contribución al estudio...’ in Lehmann-Nitsche (ed.), Actas, p. 361. 23 24

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Fig. 5.2  Exhibit 29 shown by Aureliano Oyarzún in Buenos Aires, 1910

macuñ” for the ponchos and “trarihue” for the waistbands that he showed to delegates in Buenos Aires (see Figs. 5.2 and 5.3). Oyarzún had acquired these objects in Temuco, and presented them as evidence that adopted customs, doctrines and artefacts could live on despite “the extinction of a race”. That race was presumably the Inca. They had died out, but their “ancient” textile art was still being practiced by the “Araucanians of today”.26 In line with Darwinian concepts of fitness, the living “Araucanians” were portrayed as superior to the extinct Inca. Oyarzún went on to praise the quality of the artwork, but also asserted that present-day Araucanians were ignorant about the origins of their weaving practice; they produced these impressive textiles but knew nothing of their underlying history, he said. Implicit was the point that scholars like himself and his peers at the Americanista Congress were thankfully producing and disseminating such knowledge. The Chilean anthropologist thus denied—at the same time as he acclaimed—Mapuche cultural agency.

26  Such a narrative was re-cast by Rita Reif as ‘Outlasting the Incas and Spaniards’ in The New York Times, 20 March 1994, p. 35.

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Fig. 5.3  Exhibit 31 shown by Oyarzún in Buenos Aires, 1910

Selling Ancient Indigenous Chile on a Modern Pan-American Stage In 1911, Max Uhle—one of the inspirations for Oyarzún’s work—left Peru and his post at the National Museum in Lima, and headed to Santiago, where he was contracted by the Chilean government. It was in this context that Uhle featured briefly in an intriguing piece on “Araucanian Textiles” published in 1927  in the New  York-based magazine Chile: A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs.27 This glossy, eye-catching periodical exemplified a broader government-sponsored effort to promote greater awareness of Central and South America in the U.S.28 The article heaped praise on and validated its argument through the “indefatigable investigations of the German savant, Dr. Max Uhle”, the results of which could be seen in the “Anthropological Section of the National Museum of Chile”. According to the details given in the magazine, this was where the author—Swiss-Chilean scientist Walter (in Chile, Gualterio) Looser—was 27  Walter Looser, ‘Araucanian Textiles’, Chile: A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs, Vol. III, No. 12 (Jan–Feb 1927), pp. 5–9. 28  In 1926 a Committee on Cultural Relations with Latin America was set up in the U.S., funded by the Rockerfeller family. See Jennifer McLerran, A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Art and Federal Policy, 1933–1943 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), p. 38.

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working at the time of the article.29 Looser started off by proclaiming that “one of the most marked characteristics” of the early twentieth century was “the interest shown in the peoples and cultures of remote ages.” “The modern world”, he asserted, “glances backward.” That modern world was living an “age of science” which embraced “complicated, wonderful machinery” and “chemical products that would make the ancient alchemist feel astounded,” but did not “know how to achieve the [most] simple, humble, spontaneous thing.” One of the products that purportedly demonstrated such simplicity, humility and spontaneity was “the Araucanian rugs and blankets, currently known in Chile as choapinos.”30 In this manner, the “Araucanians” were presented as low-skilled, pre-modern people; they belonged to a “remote” past Looser described the Mapuche (or, in his own words, Araucanians) as “incapable of assimilating a sudden rush of foreign ways” and lamented that “their present situation” was “one of utter decadence, with very few exceptions.” And yet his article in this U.S. magazine affirmed that their textile industry was thriving in the 1920s: “The taste for the handicrafts of our Indians and especially for the handwoven blankets is in full swing.”31 Their style of weaving, Looser explained, was “simple” but “ingenious”: they used no more than ten colours which were never blended together (“like all primitive peoples, they have the horror of shades”) and there was little diversity in their decorative designs, but “the deft combination of colours achieve[ed] pleasing results, thus explaining the present vogue of the choapinos.”32 He thus simultaneously imaged this people as simple and traditional, and adept at accommodating to and profiting from market forces.33 Looser also argued, in quite substantive detail, that the “origin of Araucanian Choapinos must be looked for in Old Peru”.34 Despite their 29  Looser was also an associate member of the Chilean Academy of Natural Sciences. See José Martínez, ‘Gualterio Looser Schallemberg. Un Naturalista Botánico (1898–1982)’, Revista Chilena de Historia Natural 56 (1983), pp. 91–95. 30  Looser, ‘Araucanian Textiles’, p. 5. 31  Ibid., p. 6. 32  Ibid., p. 9. On the dominant (global) language of this time which cast indigenous art as folk art, and therefore simplistic and primitive, as opposed to refined, complex, or important, see Elizabeth Manly de la Cruz, ‘Folk Art as Communal Culture and Art Proper’, Art Education 52: 4 (1999), pp. 23–35. 33  For an excellent study of the commodification of indigenous art production in the United States at a similar time, see McLerran, A New Deal for Native Art. 34  Looser, ‘Araucanian Textiles’, p. 7.

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supposed inability to assimilate foreign ways, their weaving techniques came from elsewhere. The author re-narrated the history of the Inca conquest of Chile (as far as the Maipu River, meaning they did not penetrate far into Araucanian territory in spite of the focus here on Araucanians), but asserted that the “influence of Inca civilisation in Chile came with the Spanish conquistadores”. In this way, Looser followed Oyarzún in challenging the Peruvian nationalist narrative, but he did so from a slightly different angle: for him, it was the subjugated Inca accompanying the Spanish colonising mission (presumably that led by Diego de Almagro)— rather than an unrivalled Inca empire—that brought “civilisation” to Chile.35 The overriding storyline, though, was that—regardless of how or when it happened—all the decorations and patterns used in Araucanian woollen blankets, rugs and ponchos (for example, the “concentric pattern of three chains of crosses”, the white decorative design on a black or dark colour, and “the geometric, conventional almost cubistic” style) could be found in “Inca art craft” (see Fig. 5.4); they were not original to the Mapuche.36 Paradoxically, there was no hint at a mixing of techniques in Looser’s account. Instead, he told readers about a seemingly straight forward transfer of an authentic, untouched practice from one culture to another.37 Complicating things further, Looser made links not only between “Arauco and Peru” but also between these regions and “Mexico and even further north”, thereby mapping out larger Pan-American connections (again as Oyarzún had done). In this sense, even though isolation and purity were possible starting points, traditional textile production was equated with entanglement—which we often conceive as a modern phenomenon.38 There is, moreover, an interesting hint of modernism in the reference to 35  As narrated by Kim MacQuarrie, Paullu, the brother of Manco Inca, “spent two years with [Diego de] Almagro in Chile. Without Paullu’s constant assistance, in fact, it is unlikely that Almagro and his men would ever have survived the long journey or returned to Peru” (The Last Days of the Incas, p. 287). 36  For contemporary scholarship which largely corroborates Inca influence on Mapuche weaving, although from a very different perspective, see Tom Dillehay and Francisco Rothhammer, ‘Quest for the Origins and Implications for Social Rights of the Mapuche in the Southern Cone of South America’, Latin American Antiquity 24: 2 (June 2013), pp. 149–163. See also Chile bajo el Imperio de los Inkas (Santiago: Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, 2010). 37  Looser added that Chilean people went “along recreating objects and images of Incaic origins without the least understanding of their meaning”. See ‘Araucanian Textiles’, p. 9. 38  See Gänger, ‘Circulation’, p. 307.

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Fig. 5.4  Illustration of weaving pattern analysed by Looser in his 1927 article

the “almost cubistic” Inca (and subsequently Mapuche) weaving motifs.39 For U.S. readers, then, the author momentarily and inadvertently challenged the dominant dichotomy of tradition versus modernity.

Representing Indigenous America in Prague At the same time as the Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs was trying to educate U.S. readers about the Inca-influenced weaving practices of the Mapuche, Gabriela Mistral wrote, from France, to her friend and director of the Costa-Rica based magazine Repertorio Americano, Joaquín García Monge, about an upcoming congress and exhibition organised by the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC).40 She saw this as “a good opportunity for our Indian peoples, above all Peru, Mexico and Central America, to show-case their fine arts and handcrafts, which […] 39  A parallel can be drawn here with Aztec geometric shapes influencing art deco design. For brief but useful references on this, see Mary Delaney and Karen Talia, ‘Colour, Texture and Pizzaz: Art Deco Fabrics’, Spirit of Progress 5: 4 (2004), pp. 16–17, and Richard Striner, ‘Art Deco: Polemics and Synthesis’, Winterthur Portfolio (1990), pp. 21–34. 40  This letter is dated 8 December, from Fontainebleu, France. No year is given, but it is likely 1926. This is ‘Carta 11’ in Madga Arce (ed.), Gabriela Mistral and Joaquín García Monge: Una correspondencia inedita (Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1989). Carta 9 is dated August 1926, and we know Mistral was in Fontainebleu in 1926. Mistral was head of the Institute’s Literature Division at the time. My thanks to Elizabeth Horan for clarifying the chronology of Mistral’s correspondence.

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are far superior to the facile and fraudulent cultural production of intellectuals”.41 For Mistral, indigenous art offered an antidote to the superficiality of academia. She celebrated indigenous art, but—possibly because this was a position that García Monge would take—also reduced it to an “other”, as if it could not be “intellectual”. And yet she referred to their fine arts, even though the central concern of the congress and exhibition was popular arts. In preparation for the congress, the IIIC was planning to set up national committees. Mistral asked García Monge to suggest members of a potential Costa Rican delegation: they needed to be people with knowledge of the “autochthonous arts”, ideally “specialists in textiles”. Mistral told García Monge that the exhibition had the potential to challenge the dominant racial discourses circulating in early-twentieth-century Europe and particularly France where the IIIC was based. In her own words: “There exists such stupid scorn and condescension towards us in France. The historical behaviour of this plethora of supposed specialists in American culture and history is so shameful. One senses such an ironic doubt about our racial values. If Mexico and Peru, with Central America, decided to put together a well-organised and high-quality display of their popular art, we could both surprise these gentlemen and—silently, splendidly—rectify their errors.”42 Mistral admitted knowing little about [the popular art of] Central America, which was why she sought García Monge’s advice; her knowledge was limited to the “Indian materials housed at the Museum of the Hispanic Society” in the U.S.43 In declaring her lack of familiarity with Central American popular art, Mistral underlined the vastness and diversity of Latin America. And yet, there was also a sense of shared cultural heritage here too, in that she identified as part of the greater American collective that would be best represented by Peru, Mexico and Central America. They were hers, as it were, to promote. Perhaps she felt they were more indigenous, or that their indigenous peoples were more “civilised”, meaning their art was better placed to combat European ignorance and prejudice.

 In Arce (ed.), Gabriela Mistral and Joaquín García Monge, p. 95.  Ibid. 43  She bemoaned the fact that Central America had given away so much of its “archivo de la raza” to New York, but she described the exhibition, which she visited in April 1924, as “marvellous”. 41 42

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The congress publicised by Mistral was most likely the First International Congress of Popular Arts, to be held in Prague, under the auspices of the League of Nations, between 7 and 14 October 1928.44 Preparations started in 1926, and approximately 250 papers were scheduled to be given on a wide range of topics, from folk music and woodwork, to ceramics and traditional culture. According to one contemporary, the aim was to “unveil the similarities between peoples [and] not only to present the original aspects of regions, but also, through deep investigations, to discover what the whole of humanity has in common.”45 It was a balancing act between the local or national and the universal. As narrated by Daniel Laqua, the Prague congress “sought to foster the international collaboration of scholars” and thereby “evoke an international community”, whilst simultaneously allowing intellectuals to “defend local customs” and to assert “their own country’s contributions to world culture”. Talking about Prague alongside three other events in Frankfurt, Liege and Antwerp, Laqua concludes that such “international congresses or exhibitions exemplified the idea that transnational spaces could be constructed on the back of nationhood”.46 In the case of Mistral, the “local customs” defended were not those of her native Chile but instead of other countries: Peru, Mexico, and Central America. It was their “contributions to world culture” that she aimed to assert, and thereby challenge European racialised presumptions about the backwardness of indigenous art. In many ways, though, Mistral was not challenging such presumptions at all. Indeed, it is possible to argue that she was strategically building on and thereby also helping to perpetuate the vogue for “primitive” art so prevalent among British, French and Spanish modernist intellectuals at this time.47 For Michael Bell, this was the central paradox of early twentieth century modernism: the fact that “the most sophisticated achievement 44  ‘The International Commission on Folk Arts and Folklore’, The Journal of American Folklore 61: 241 (July–September 1948), pp. 307–310; Annamaria Ducci, ‘Le musée de l’art populaire contre lo folklore. L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle à l’époque du Congrès de Prague’, Revue Germanique Internationale 21 (2015), pp. 133–148. 45  Cited in Bjarne Rogan, ‘Folk Art and Politics in Inter-War Europe: An Early Debate in Applied Anthropology’, Journal of Ethnographical Studies 45: 1 (2006), p. 8. 46  Daniel Laqua, ‘Exhibiting, Encountering and Studying Music in Inter-War Europe: Between National and International Community’, in Carlos Reijnen and Marleen Rensen, European Encounters: Intellectual Exchange and the Rethinking of Europe, 1914–1945 (Amsterdam: Rodolfi, 2014), pp. 207–224, p. 219. 47  See, for example, Ihor Junyk, Foreign Modernism: Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Style in Paris (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).

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of the present [was] a return to, or a new appreciation of, the archaic.”48 More significantly still, the records pertaining to the First International Congress of Popular Arts suggest that Mistral either failed in her quest to “silently and splendidly” surprise the “gentlemen” of Europe with the artistic accomplishments of indigenous Mexico, Peru and Central America, or that she did not make much effort to be involved after the initial planning phase.49 Of the long list of papers delivered in Prague, only three focused on Spanish America: one by Max Uhle on Ecuador, another on Ecuador and South America by a M. Veloz, and finally a piece on “Chilean Popular Music” by Humberto Allende.50 The latter opened with a laudatory description of indigenous cultural production in Chile. Following Oyarzún and Looser, it acknowledged Inca influence on Araucanian pottery and weaving, but argued that the music practised by this “virile and strong race” was completely original. Hence, despite Mistral prioritising Peru, Mexico, and Central America, it seems it was Chile (and Ecuador) which ended up representing pre-Columbian artistic practice in Prague, and despite the French interest in textiles, which Mistral had noted in her letter to García Monge, it was music that starred as the epitome of racial purity craved by European audiences. Such outcomes hint at incomplete networks, the breaking down of communication lines, or other interventions not on view through the fragmentary source materials discussed here.

Chile and Peru on Display in Seville A year after the International Congress of Popular Arts in Prague, Seville welcomed tens of thousands of visitors from around the world to its Ibero-­ American Exposition. Ten Latin American countries invested in the  Michael Bell, ‘The Metaphysics of Modernism’, in Michael Levenson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge and New  York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 20. 49  Mistral distanced herself from Chile after the election of Carlos Ibañez del Campo in May 1927. Many Chilean intellectuals did not want to be associated with his dictatorial government. 50  Congrès International des Arts Populaires: Prague, Du 7 au 13 Octobre 1928 (Paris: Institut International de Cooperation Intellectuelle, 1931). This publication comprised the rules of the congress, the reports, and a list of those registered and the titles of their papers. Another two-volume publication by Editions Ducharte included the actual papers given as well as illustrations of the art exhibited. Allende’s piece is included in the second volume. See Umberto Allende, ‘La musique populaire chilienne’, Art Populaire: Travaux artistiques et scientifiques du 1er congrès international des arts populaires, Tome II (Paris: Duchartre, 1931), pp. 118–123. 48

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construction of pavilions to display their exhibits during this sumptuous event which lasted for most of 1929 and 1930: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela.51 In his report for the Hispanic American Historical Review, Percy Martin (1879–1942) congratulated Chile—alongside Mexico, Peru and Colombia—for making an effort to show off “cultural aspects” as well as its “products and industries”.52 Many of these cultural aspects were demonstrably indigenous. The country’s three-story pavilion, designed by Juan Martínez Gutiérrez (1901–1976)—a Chilean architect of Spanish origin—included “motifs borrowed from the Araucanians” (they were quite literally incorporated into the foundations of the Chilean nation on display),53 and when visitors entered the “Sala de Historia”, they were “greeted by the opening verses of La Araucana”.54 It was an indigenous present as well as past that was on display, and textile production was key to such a narrative: as relayed by this U.S. professor, “One of the most impressive features of the Chilean exhibits was the elaborate and artistically arranged display of Araucanian arts and crafts. Rugs, blankets, silver work, and pottery were shown in almost lavish profusion.” To Martin’s mind, this was testimony to the fact that Chile, “like Peru and Mexico”, was “coming to a more adequate realisation of the artistic powers latent in the indigenous races.”55 That the Chilean Commission for the Ibero-American Exposition chose to showcase Araucanian rugs and blankets is perhaps not surprising given Looser’s previous publicity about this being the “sole artistic manifestation” of Chile’s indigenous “race”. More important though was the involvement of Aureliano Oyarzún and Ricardo Latcham, whom Looser had worked with at the National Museum in Santiago. They put the exhibit together, or at least made sure that indigenous arts and crafts were an important part of the exhibit, and they co-authored an Album de tejidos y alfarería araucana [Album of Araucanian Textiles and Pottery], which 51  Percy Alvin Martin, ‘The Ibero-American Exposition at Seville’, Hispanic American Historical Review 11: 3 (August 1931), pp. 373–386. Those countries that did not build their own pavilion, such as Ecuador and Bolivia, displayed their products in the “Commercial Galleries of the Americas”. For more information on Martin, see Madaline Nichols, ‘Percy Martin, 1879–1942’, Revista de Historia de América 14 (June 1942), pp. 98–101. 52  Martin, ‘The Ibero-American Exposition’, p. 377. 53  Ibid., p. 379. 54  Ibid., p. 380. 55  Ibid., p. 379.

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was available for visitors to purchase.56 Such a publication enabled the story of Araucanian cultural production to live on after the exposition finished. In Peru’s case, the exposition itself was to live on after the celebratory event: the archaeological display was “to be permanent” and “occupy the place of honor in the building to be utilised as a residence of Peruvian students carrying on research work in Seville.”57 The Peruvian pavilion was larger than that of Chile. Indeed, it was the largest of the ten Latin American pavilions. Designed by Spanish-Peruvian Manuel Piqueras Cotolí,58 it was—according to the Spanish daily newspaper ABC—“not picturesque, but monumental, with thick walls that evoke the colossal stones of the Inca fortress of Sacsayhuaman”.59 On entering the pavilion, visitors encountered an imposing statue of Atahualpa, and “three large halls on the ground floor were devoted to pre-Columbian Peru”.60 As narrated in Martin’s report, “Here were to be seen the chief treasures yielded by recent excavations made at Paracas by Sr. Julio Tello” which included “an elaborate and impressive collection of ceramics” and “a fine assortment of fragments of woollen and cotton cloth found in the tombs”. “The patterns of these textiles”, Martin expanded, “are of great richness and beauty and constitute an artistic treasure which the modern Peruvians are beginning to exploit.”61 Interestingly, this U.S. historian commented that, “a very fine quipus” apart, the exhibits of “ancient Peru” on display “were confined almost entirely to the pre-Incaic period”. Such emphasis was likely due to the involvement of Tello. It was the findings of his recent excavations that were on show in Seville, and he was keen—both at home and abroad—to flaunt Peru’s indigenous heritage as a highly diverse one, which dated back much further than the Inca civilisation revealed to the world by foreign scholars such as Hiram Bingham (a story explored in more detail in Chap. 6). No doubt the government of Augusto Leguía (1919–1930) could also see the potential benefits—in terms of national pride as well as  The book was published by Impresa Universo of Santiago in 1929.  Martin, ‘The Ibero-American Exposition’, p. 378. 58  Piqueras was born in the town Lucena, Spain, studied sculpture, and was invited to Peru to work as a teacher in Lima’s School of Fine Arts. He married and had children there. 59  ‘Una visita al magnífico y característico pabellón neoperuano’, ABC, Madrid, 16 June 1929, pp. 3–4. 60  Martin, ‘The Ibero-American Exposition’, p. 377. 61  Ibid. 56 57

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international tourism—of extending the remit of ancient Peruvian civilisations beyond the expertise of North American explorers. ABC noted this history of pre-Inca cultural diversity, but also stressed the importance of what came afterwards: first, a centralised imperial Inca state; then Spanish conquest, from which point “everything is Spanish” and “the Indian disappears”.62 But not totally, because, “through the influence of the environment, and the workforce—the Indian worker unintentionally deforms all that is Spanish—mestizaje is born, and the Spanish take advantage of the architectural aptitude of the Peruvian Indian.” This was the “neo-Peruvian-ness” of the pavilion that was celebrated in the title of ABC’s review—possibly a re-working of the Cuzco intellectual José Uriel García’s recent book El Nuevo Indio (1927). As told by ABC, the building—a “cross-breeding of Spanish and aboriginal styles”—and what was displayed within it represented a “new race”. Martin’s piece in the HAHR praised the Peruvian pavilion not just for its archaeological section, but also for its display “of products in the domains of agriculture, mining, and manufacturing”. Visitors were “especially impressed by the artistically arranged exhibit of stuffed vicuñas, alpacas, llamas, and guanacos with beautiful specimens of the textiles woven from the fleece of these animals.” Through weaving, indigenous Andean Peru was thus thrust back into the national narrative, which extended up to the present, given the “picturesque touch […] lent by the presence of a number of live llamas grazing on the grounds of the Peruvian building” (my emphasis). Similarly to its Peruvian counterpart, the Chilean pavilion’s exhibit displayed “the whole gamut of industries”, including the pastoral and agricultural, but—in contrast to Peru—“primacy was naturally accorded to nitrate and copper”.63 This could be perceived as a rather undiplomatic (indeed, aggressively chauvinistic) move, given that the country’s copper plants and nitrate mines were based mainly in the territory that Chile had annexed during the War of the Pacific, and the Seville Exposition opened only a few days after Chile and Peru had signed the Treaty of Lima, which had brought the dispute over the provinces of Arica and Tacna to an end, at least in international law.64 As recounted by Martin, the Chilean exhibit included an “illuminated model of one of the  ‘Una visita al magnífico...’, ABC, 16 June 1929.  Martin, ‘The Ibero-American Exposition’, p. 379. 64  This treaty, also known as the Tacna-Arica compromise, was signed on 3 June 1929, so less than two weeks before the opening of the exposition in Seville. It returned the province of Tacna to Peru, but Chile maintained sovereignty of Arica. 62 63

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largest of the ‘Oficinas Saliteras’, complete even to a network of miniature railways” and a “reproduction of the plant of the Chile Copper Company at Chuquicamata”—the home of “the most extensive copper deposits of the world.”65 This was how Chile excelled on the world stage. Its pavilion refrained from directly applauding the country’s military victories, but many would have been aware that the industrial development and material wealth flaunted therein had been enabled by war. And yet what emerges from the U.S. and Spanish commentaries cited above (not surprisingly, given that the U.S. was adjudicating the Arica-Tacna dispute) is, in the main, a narrative of fraternity between the countries of Latin America, and of connections between Chile and Peru, not least them realising in chorus the value of their indigenous cultural heritage.

Publicising and Validating Chilean Expertise in Mexico and Peru One of the intellectuals involved in Chile’s pavilion in Seville wrote a short essay in 1941 entitled “Popular Art and its Relationship with Indigenous Art” for the Bulletin of the Chilean Commission for Intellectual Cooperation, which was picked up and re-circulated in précised form in Mexico City the following year by the Boletín Indigenista.66 As told by Ricardo Latcham here, textile production in contemporary Chile had distinctively “Indian roots”: “The technique, the looms, the equipment […] are all similar to those employed long before the arrival of the Spaniards”. Latcham singled out the poncho as “truly pre-Hispanic”, a fact apparently proven by “recent excavations made in pre-Inca cemeteries”. And thus, continuing the thread of discussion initiated at the Scientific Congress in Santiago in 1908–1909, Latcham attributed weaving in Chile to a larger indigenous collective tradition led by Peru. He also corroborated the research and writings of his Peruvian colleague Julio Tello by emphasising Peru’s indigenous heritage as a highly diverse one which pre-dated (and therefore transcended) the Inca.67  Martin, ‘Ibero-American Exhibition’, p. 379.  ‘El arte popular y sus relaciones con el arte indígena’, BOLETIN, 5: 27 (1941); ‘Chile: Artes Manuales Indígenas’, Boletín Indigenista 2: 1 (1942), pp. 22–23. 67  At the Santiago conference of 1908–1909, Latcham gave a paper criticising the dominant historical narrative produced by the likes of Diego Barros Arana that stressed the cultural homogeneity of “pre-historic” Chile. See José Antonio González Pizarro, ‘Ricardo E. Latcham: Un cientifico social’, Alpha 38 (2014), pp. 67–88. 65 66

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Indigenous weaving in contemporary Chile had pre-Hispanic origins, but Latcham was keen to show that it had adapted over time, for example, supplanting llama wool with sheep wool. He was also keen to show that Chile’s indigenous people embraced and appropriated cultural practices from much further afield than (pre-Inca) Peru. Towards the end of the article, he drew attention to “a whole series of handicrafts of European origin, which were rapidly and fully assimilated by the Indians” to the point that, by the 1940s, these were sometimes considered “erroneously, as purely Indian products”. He thereby debunked notions of purity, at the same time as he legitimised the value of contemporary art through its connections with ancient custom. Latcham’s defence of Tello (and his insistence on the heterogeneity of indigenous cultures) in this piece was indirect; he did not name Tello, as he did in other publications,68 but made a similar argument to him. Latcham and Tello had met in person numerous times. They had both been at the First Pan-American Scientific Congress in Santiago in 1908–1909. Thirty years later, in 1939, they both participated in the XXVII International Congress of Americanists held in Lima. Tello was on the organising committee of this congress as Director of Peru’s Museum of Anthropology.69 Latcham was one of the vice-presidents of the congress.70 Both scholars gave papers as part of the same Saturday morning panel.71 Latcham’s paper discussed “Archaeological correlations between Chile and Peru”, whilst Tello spoke on “The Origin and Development of the Primitive Cultures of Peru”. They were joined by Uhle, who presented on “The Origins and Provenance of the Ancient American Civilisations”.72 This was a fundamentally transnational panel, both in terms of its participants and the content they covered. In his opening address to the congress, the Mayor of Lima, Eduardo Dibós Dammert (1898–1987) spoke of how proud his city was to host some of “the most famed and illustrious […] scholars on the planet”.73  E.g. Latcham, Ricardo, ‘El problema del indio’, Zig-Zag 21 July 1944, p. 38.  ‘En el Museo de Antropología: Recepción en honor de los miembros del Congreso de Americanistas’, El Comercio, Lima, 12 September 1939, p. 3. 70  Valcárcel, Memorias, p. 310. 71   This panel was part of the section dedicated to ‘American Archaeology and Pre-History’. 72  ‘Actividades del XXVII Congreso Internacional de Americanistas’, El Comercio, 15 September 1939. 73  Ibid. 68 69

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Seemingly imbued with a large dose of patriarchal and continental self-­ importance, he proclaimed: “The study of the American man—of the cultures that his genius has created over the centuries—and the revelation of his civilising mission will undoubtedly benefit the future trajectory of the countries of America.” As presented here, scholarly study of the past was rooted in the necessities of the present, i.e. to map out the best path towards a glorious future. In his memoirs, published almost fifty years later, Valcárcel looked back on Latcham’s paper as one of the highlights of the 1939 congress in Lima.74 He also wrote about the First International Congress of Peruvianists, which was organised by the National University of San Marcos in 1951 to commemorate its 400 years of existence. Valcárcel was Rector of San Marcos at the time, and had previously taught courses there on Inca History, the History of Peruvian Culture, and Ethnology. According to Valcárcel, Latcham was one of “the first-rate European and American dignitaries” to be invited to the congress; he was someone who had “a sincere interest in Peruvian studies”. His adopted Chilean nationality was no impediment to such accolades. In sum, not only did Latcham work on Peru, he worked closely with Peruvians, namely Tello, and helped to corroborate their research findings—together they constructed a cross-­ border history of indigenous diversity and dynamism.

Conclusions Rebecca Earle has claimed that Chilean elites at the end of the nineteenth century “wholly embraced their Spanish identity.”75 For evidence, she draws on the words of Peruvian lawyer Francisco García Calderon (1834–1905), who was briefly president of his country in 1881 and who was sent to Chile following Peru’s defeat in the War of the Pacific: “In Chile as in Peru, no one wants to be an Indian, mestizo or Araucanian, and everyone boasts of having illustrious, purely Spanish origins.”76 This desire for racial purity rooted in Europe was, as García Calderon told it, something that Chilean and Peruvian elites had in common in the nineteenth century.

 Valcárcel, Memorias, p. 311.  Earle, Return of the Native, p. 90. 76  Ibid. 74 75

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Chapter 5, which starts in Santiago in 1908–1909 and finishes in Lima in 1951, has shown how much things changed over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, and again in both Chile and Peru. In the context of the rise to prominence of the discourse and movement known as indigenismo, cultural and political elites in both countries began to speak in more positive terms about indigenous artistic practices, not least textile making, and they often laid claim to the authors or producers of this art form as part of their own ancestral lineage (“our Araucanians” and “our Inca”), although in a notably metaphorical rather than biological sense. The central aspect of indigenismo under interrogation here is the conviction that contemporary indigenous people preserved much of the greatness of the ancient civilisations in their racial essence, and that they consequently had the potential to make important contributions to the cultural and material well-being of the nation. Thus, they could be part of future national advancement, but not as active agents (in the case of Mapuche weavers, scholars seemed quite anxious as to where they got their ideas from) and precisely because they had not advanced themselves, maintaining as they did their customs of a bygone era. And yet many of the written works analysed in this chapter also highlighted indigenous peoples’ capacity for change and innovation, particularly Mapuche adaption of Inca or pre-Inca practices, and their willingness to cater to and make money from the emerging tourism industry. Moreover, discussions about textile production either implicitly or explicitly recognised indigenous peoples as civilisations—as opposed to depicting them as antithetical to civilisation, or in need of civilising (which is what we see emerge more clearly in Part III on education). It was all about finding a place for them in modern national society, based on their maintenance of ancient traditions. The other key point to emerge from the material presented in this chapter is that while indigenous weaving was often incorporated into official nationalist (and sometimes notably militaristic) narratives in Chile and Peru—pitting one country against the other, or making claims of superiority over the other—debates about its contemporary value could also bring the two countries together. Put another way, the greatness of ancient indigenous civilisations was often articulated in transnational terms, as a shared mythologisation of the past as well as a synchronised recognition of its benefits in the present. Such an encounter was performed on a notably international stage—in Santiago, Buenos Aires, New York, Prague, Seville,

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Mexico City and Lima—and was almost entirely choreographed by nonindigenous people. Julio Tello’s interventions aside, Chap. 5 tells the history of the objectification of indigenous people and the commodification of their cultural practices, such as weaving. Despite them designing and producing the textiles under scrutiny, indigenous people—and especially indigenous women, for weaving was construed as a female activity—were for the main part denied the status of political subjects. In the material investigated for Chap. 6, which focuses on archaeological heritage and tourism, indigenous voices are slightly more perceptible. They emerge more strongly still in Chap. 7 on museums and folklore. In both chapters though, the indigenous voices tend to be male voices.

CHAPTER 6

Machu Picchu and Cuzco: Marketing Inca Peru for International Consumption

Hiram Bingham first visited Peru in 1909. He was on his way back to the United States after attending the Pan-American Scientific Congress in Santiago de Chile. Whilst in Cuzco, he was invited to visit the ruins of Choquequirao by the then Prefect of Cuzco Juan José Nuñez Valdivia, and it was this expedition, as anthropologist Amy Cox tells us, that fostered the U.S. historian-cum-archaeologist’s desire to undertake further explorations.1 The Santiago congress can thus be read as the first part of a decisive, life-changing, and Peru-changing journey for Bingham. Participation in this congress was significant in another way too, because it legitimised his status as a scientist and this “won him support from industry and government, including free transport on the railroad and free entry at customs.”2 In a nutshell, it enabled him to gain access to the Peruvian countryside and the archaeological treasures found there. Bingham’s first official expedition to Machu Picchu in 1911 was organised under the auspices of Yale University. The subsequent expedition of 1912 was sponsored by Yale University together with the National  Cox, Framing a Lost City, p. 13.  Ibid. It was also in Santiago that William Holmes, a fellow delegate at the congress, drew Bingham’s attention to the “distinguished English archaeologist Mr. A.  P. Maudslay”. Holmes’ “hearty praise” for Maudslay’s efforts to clear “the jungle from some of the most important sites in the Maya country” caused Bingham “to undertake the discouraging task of chopping down the entire hardwood forest which stood on the city terraces and on top of some of the buildings at Machu Picchu.” See Bingham, Lost City of the Incas, p. 194. 1 2

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Geographic Society, and it was this society’s magazine that made worldfamous his photographs of Machu Picchu in a special expanded issue of 1913 entitled “In the Wonderland of Peru”.3 In the words of Cox, this marked the beginning of Machu Picchu’s “path to celebrity.”4 As Bingham himself made clear, however, the expeditions would not have been possible without “the full support” he received from the (first) government of Augusto Leguía and the Prefect of Cuzco, who “was instructed to aid us in every possible way”. Without the latter’s cooperation, Bingham wrote, “we should not have been able to secure the services of enough Indian workmen to clear the ruins.”5 Bingham’s explorations and excavations started off, then, as an international venture  that was endorsed at a national and local (governmental) level. This was partly because Leguía encouraged U.S. involvement in all areas of Peruvian society, “believing that the practical and ‘entrepreneurial’ spirit of the United States would benefit his country”,6 but mainly because Bingham brought attention and renown to the region of Cuzco, at a time when the government was keen to develop the country’s tourism industry, and of course at a time when indigenismo—described by Marisol de la Cadena as a “nationalist doctrine that anchored the Peruvian nation in its pre-Hispanic past, and most specifically in the Inca legacy”—was becoming increasingly prominent in Peru.7 Via National Geographic, Bingham crafted an internationally marketable vision of Peru, and the key selling point was its glorious Inca past embodied in the “Lost City”. This was promoted as a positive development by some important Peruvian periodicals. As the editor of the biweekly magazine Ilustración Peruana said to Bingham in 1913, after seeing National Geographic’s “Wonderland” issue, “I wish you a thousand congratulations on your work, and thanks, as a Peruvian, for your propaganda in favour of my patria.”8 This chapter analyses some of the intersections that emerged between the national and the international in the context of contested claims over Machu Picchu from the moment of its so-called “discovery” by Bingham in 1911 through to the early 1950s. Bingham, Valcárcel and Uhle from 3  Hiram Bingham, ‘In the Wonderland of Peru’, National Geographic, April 1913, pp. 387–573. 4  Cox, Framing a Lost City, p. 2. 5  Bingham, Lost City of the Incas, p. 188. 6  Cox, Framing a Lost City, p. 37. 7  de la Cadena, ‘Reconstructing Race’, p. 17. 8  Cited in Cox, Framing a Lost City, p. 105.

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Chap. 5 remain centre stage here, because they were important figures in the field of archaeology, the institutionalisation and professionalisation of which coincided with state efforts to develop tourism in Peru. They are joined by Philadelphia-born Alberto Giesecke (1883–1968), the indigenous Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi (1891–1973), leftist Cuzqueño writers José Uriel García (1894–1965) and Luis Nieto Miranda (1910–1997), and their Chilean comrade-in-literary-arms, Pablo Neruda (1904–1973). Building on Cox’s work, Chapter 6 probes two important ways that Machu Picchu and the Cuzco region brought Chileans and Peruvians together: senior government officials of Chile and Peru who perceived the benefits of cross-border collaboration for the development of their own national tourism industry; and Chilean and Peruvian leftist intellectuals who laid claim to Inca history as an inspiration for an anti-­ colonial, anti-imperial class struggle in the mid twentieth century. In this sense, Chileans and Peruvians became co-authors of a celebratory narrative of past Inca glory, because this could be used to secure shared economic and political goals in the present.

Using International Forums to (Try to) Protect National Treasures In his memoirs published in the early 1980s, Valcárcel looked back at the decades following Bingham’s initial expeditions and claimed that “each new archaeological discovery […] attracted universal attention.”9 By the late 1930s, this Cusqueño historian and anthropologist said, “museums of great importance on the world stage”, such as Brooklyn’s in New York and the Museum of Mankind in Paris, directed by Paul Rivet (1876–1958), “dedicated entire rooms to ancient Peruvian culture.” This was the result of “25 years of struggle” by himself and his peers “against the deplorable prejudice held against the Peruvian Indian”—a struggle supported by the findings of archaeological excavations. As recounted in a letter of 1934, Valcárcel had “received countless requests from England and the United States” for news of his excavations. In response, he had sent articles to the Illustrated London News and to the Bulletin of the Pan American Union, and his American-born friend and colleague Philip Ainsworth Means had

9

 Valcárcel, Memorias, p. 308.

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asked “for full reports on all [his] works” before he left for Paris that same year, as if he were planning to disseminate them once he got there.10 For Valcárcel, the 1937 World Exhibition in the French capital proved “that there had been a decisive shift in the cultural and historical valorisation of the Andean man. He was now definitively incorporated as one of the most surprising human testimonies of universal civilisation”.11 Never again would “Peruvian cultural elements […] be exhibited in lamentable confusion alongside those of primitive tribes”. As told by Valcárcel, such recognition of the country’s place in the history of “universal civilisation” was the reason that Lima was chosen to host the XXVII International Congress of Americanists in 1939—“the largest international event that the country had ever hosted”.12 He was thus not so much attempting to overthrow dominant discourses of civilisation versus barbarism, as trying to include Peru in the upper-echelons of such racial hierarchies. Not all responses to foreign-led archaeological expeditions were positive, however, particularly when it came to Bingham and his team’s efforts to box up and ship out to Yale the human remains and antiquities that they found whilst excavating Machu Picchu. This was considered by some as the looting of Peru’s ancient past. And, in this context, the international and national clashed. The focus of such discontent was the United States: in the words of the Peruvian historian and literary critic Emilio Gutiérrez de Quintanilla (1858–1935), speaking out in 1916, “the University of Yale travelled the Department of Cuzco [searching for] Peruvian antiquities, ignoring national sovereignty in the same fashion as those expeditions of Cortés and Pizarro [prowled] the states of Montezuma and Atahualpa.”13 The link between the U.S. expedition and Spanish conquest and colonialism could not have been made more emphatically. But Chile featured in the polemic too. At one point, for example, Bingham’s team was accused of shipping antiquities out of Peru via the city of Arica in northern Chile.14 Chile was thereby presented as an accomplice in the plundering and pillaging of Peru—and here the spectre of the Chilean occupying army

10  Letter from Valcárcel to Alberto Giesecke, dated 7 May 1934. Colección Giesecke, Archivo Histórico del Instituto Riva Agüero, AG-1553. 11  Valcárcel, Memorias, p. 304. 12  Ibid., p. 308. 13  Cited in Cox, Framing a Lost City, p. 159. The words in square brackets are my amendments to the author’s translation. 14  Ibid., p. 156.

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ransacking the country during the War of the Pacific (1879–1883) loomed large.15 Even before the first Yale expedition of 1911, archaeologists were voicing concerns about valuable antiquities being taken out of Peru. One such person was Max Uhle. He spoke on this issue at the XVII International Congress of Americanists which was held in Buenos Aires in 1910. After applauding the proposal put forward by one of the members of the hosting committee, Francisco Moreno, to establish a Latin American Association in Buenos Aires (i.e. to encourage Latin Americans’ study of Latin American history), Uhle denounced the regrettable situation of Peru. As reported in the published proceedings of the conference, the German archaeologist “lamented the fact that, year on year, innumerable boxes of valuable antiquities are taken out of the country, destined for European museums, where the dismembered material does not allow for productive scientific study of the cultures of this continent”. To counter this, he “pleaded the importance of studying ancient [American] civilisations in the lands where they flourished and promoted the idea of an international institute for the study of Peruvian civilisations.”16 In this way, Uhle argued against exporting antiquities to the “Old World” not in the name of nationalism or patriotism, but rather in the name of fruitful universal science. In 1911, Supreme Decree 2612 ruled that all archaeological sites in Peru were the property of the state, and therefore could not be excavated by any non-state (supported) actors.17 1911, of course, was the same year 15  See Julio Tello, ‘The Museum of Peruvian Anthropology’, in Richard L. Burger (ed.), The Life and Writings of Julio C. Tello: America’s First Indigenous Archaeologist (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), pp. 103–109, p. 104. In making the claim about Chilean looting, Tello drew on a statement by Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob von Tschudi (1818–1889). Tello’s text was first delivered as a speech at the inauguration ceremony of the Museum of Peruvian Anthropology on 13 December 1924. It was published in El Comercio the following day. 16  In Lehmann-Nitsche (ed.), Actas del XVII Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, p. 118 17  This was enacted on 19 August 1911. Peruvian legislation regulating archaeological finds existed from the early nineteenth century. When the Civil Code of 1852 directly addressed the issue, it gave ownership rights (for objects excavated) to the “discoverer”, unless the excavations were carried out on private land, in which case the landowner shared ownership rights. Decree 2612 therefore represents a significant shift in government policy. See Jack Batievsky and Jorge Velarde, ‘The Protection of Cultural Patrimony in Peru’, in Barbara Hoffman (ed.), Art and Cultural Heritage: Law, Policy and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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that Bingham undertook his first expedition to Machu Picchu, and it is likely that this legislation was a direct response to his so-called “discovery”. Interestingly, though, Bingham’s follow-up expedition of 1912 was—after extensive negotiations with Leguía’s government—explicitly exempted from the new regulations. This is what Gutiérrez de Quintanilla was protesting in 1916: not the lack of legislation protecting archaeological sites but the fact that existing legal provisions were not being adhered to. Unlike Uhle, Gutiérrez firmly articulated his complaints and demands in national terms (insisting on Peruvian control and ownership of its pre-­ Columbian heritage), but he similarly drew on international forums to do so, not least the “Americanist Congresses attended by delegates of Peru.”18 Gutiérrez de Quintanilla could have been referring here to the Buenos Aires conference of 1910, or to the XIX International Congress of Americanists held in Washington in 1915, which agreed that scientific explorations of archaeological remains were “of utmost importance, for only on their basis will it be possible to reconstruct the lost history of the American race”. Delegates in Washington also urged “countries where such remains exist” to adopt “proper laws and regulations” so that “such remains may be saved to science and not wantonly exploited or destroyed before they could be studied.”19 Science itself was not the problem. The blame was laid instead with “unqualified persons” who dug up archaeological sites without authorisation. In an attempt to balance the two, the Washington congress proposed joint action across the continent in order to formulate “generally acceptable and substantially uniform laws” which would “effectively safeguard these remains,” whilst also aiding properly “organised and accredited research”.20 Presumably Yale, as an “organised and accredited” research centre, had a role to play in the discussions leading to these resolutions. Such discussions stretched beyond the confines of scholarly circuits. When the Fifth International Conference of American States met in Chile in March 1923, delegates in Santiago endorsed the resolutions agreed in Buenos Aires and Washington. They formulated a plan by which “with the approval of scholars and investigators in several countries, approximately  Cited in Cox, Framing a Lost City, p. 159.  Resolution XIX in Juan Comas (ed.), Cien Años de Congresos Internacionales de Americanistas (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas e Instituto de Investigaciones Antropologicas, 1974), p. 60. 20  Ibid. 18 19

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uniform means may be used by the governments of the Americas for the protection of archaeological and other records needed in the construction of an adequate American history”.21 What they meant by “an adequate American history” was not entirely clear, but the conviction that national interests (with regard to creating a usable past) were best protected by continent-wide procedures was clear. Only two years after hosting the Conference of American States, the Chilean government passed Decree Law 651 (17 October 1925), which created a National Monuments Council. We cannot say for certain that the first led directly to the second, or indeed that the Chilean Decree Law of 1925 was effective (as we saw in criticisms of the Peruvian legislation in the mid-1910s), but the adoption of new cultural heritage laws and the creation of new cultural heritage institutions at a national level—which was a reality for both Chile and Peru in the early twentieth century—cannot be fully understood without taking the broader continental or hemispheric picture into consideration. The national and international need to be looked at together, both in terms of the official protection of the indigenous histories created by scholars and governments, and of the contemporary cultural prestige associated with those histories.

Alberto Giesecke: A U.S. Salesman for Peru’s Tourism Industry The interrelation between wanting to claim and protect pre-Columbian archaeological sites as national patrimony and wanting to open these sites up to the world through scientific study—on the basis that such study brought national prestige on the world stage—was intimately connected to the tensions inherent in the development of international tourism in Latin America during the early twentieth century. Peru is an excellent exemplification of this, as numerous scholars such as Victor Vich, Geoffrey Schullenberger and Tim Rice have shown.22 I draw here on their 21  Fifth PanAmerican Conference at Santiago, Chile, 25 March 1923 (New York: ChileAmerican Association, 1923), p. 19. 22  Víctor Vich, ‘Magical, Mystical: The “Royal Tour” of Alejandro Toledo’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 16: 1 (2007), pp.  1–10; Geoffrey Schullenberger, ‘The Obscure Object of Desire: Machu Picchu as Myth and Commodity’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 17: 3 (2008), pp.  317–333; and Tim Rice, Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth Century Peru (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

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broad-reaching studies on the multiple appropriations of Machu Picchu but focus in on one specific figure and his place in the history of mass tourism in Peru. That is Alberto Giesecke (1883–1968), who first arrived in Peru from the U.S. in 1909, invited by Leguía’s government to help modernise the country’s education system (see Part III), and ended up staying until he died. As Rector of the National University in Cuzco (1910–1924), Mayor of Cuzco (1915–1924), and Director General of Public Education (1924–1930), as well as an active member of the Geographic Society of Lima, the Touring and Automobile Club of Peru, and the organising committee of the Second Inter-American Indigenista Congress (held in Cuzco in 1949), Giesecke played a crucial role in making Peru’s indigenous heritage accessible to foreign visitors. A whole variety of these visitors thanked him profusely for doing so. Emily Barhytdt—a student on the Lafayette College Study Tour of South America in 1952—wrote from Chile to Giesecke expressing her gratitude to him for opening “so many doors of understanding and appreciation to us. [….] Cuzco was magnificent treat to us—and Machu Picchu, as you said, was ‘out of this world’.”23 A few years earlier, U.S diplomat Edward Trueblood extolled Dr. Giesecke for helping “a stream of people to become acquainted with the fascinating history and archaeology of Peru.”24 And investment banker John Clifford Folger, writing to Giesecke from Washington in March 1948, proclaimed: “As I told Senator Bingham, to see Peru through your eyes and under your guidance is a real opportunity”.25 To all three visitors from the U.S., Giesecke was something of cultural broker—a foreigner who lived in and understood Peru, and could help them to understand it too. Some prominent Peruvians also spoke effusively of Giesecke’s endeavours, and of the knowledge he passed on to them. Valcárcel—who had been a student at the National University in Cuzco in the early 1910s— once said: “We respected and loved him throughout the fourteen years he held [the] position [of rector]. Don Alberto Giesecke was a great director who taught us how to know our country”.26 As the 1910s moved into the 1920s, Peruvians—such as Valcárcel and Julio Tello—came to dominate 23   Letter dated 15 July 1952. Colección Giesecke, Archivo Histórico del Instituto Riva Agüero. 24  Edward Trueblood, ‘The Philadelphia Schoolmaster who “conquered” Peru’, The American Foreign Service Journal 24:3 (1947), p. 12. 25  John Clifford Folger to Alberto Giesecke, writing from Washington, 3 March 1948. Colección Giesecke, Archivo Histórico del Instituto Riva Agüero. 26  Valcárcel, 1986, cited in Mendoza, Creating Our Own, p. 82.

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the scientific study of Inca and pre-Inca archaeological sites, but it was Giesecke who (as he had done for Bingham), often secured government support for their excavations, and who helped to publicise their work.27 He also, critically, organised the building of roads so that people could access and appreciate the wonders of these sites more easily. When he was mayor of Cuzco, the municipality built a paved road to the Inca fortress of Sacsayhuaman just above the city.28 In Lima, in the late 1930s, he led the restoration of the ruins of Pachacamac—trying to make them tourist-­ friendly and reachable from the Pan-American Highway in time for the XXVII International Congress of Americanists in 1939.29 He also seems to have been closely involved in negotiating the contract with the Ministry of Public Works for the construction of the road “from the bridge at the foot of Machu Picchu on up the trail towards the ruins.” As he wrote to Folger in May 1948, “It is hoped to have this 3km stretch finished within a few months. In fact, if it is not finished prior to the meeting at Cuzco of the Second Inter-American Indian Congress, many delegates will have to walk up the hill on foot, since there will not be horses enough to carry them up the hill.”30 In the case of Pachacamac on the outskirts of Lima, an intriguing exchange of letters with Valcárcel points to some of the doubts Giesecke had about opening-up archaeological ruins to a wider public. On 20 September 1938, Giesecke wrote to Valcárcel—who was then the director of the Museo Nacional in Lima—worried about how to “ensure the conservation of the steps” as the clean-up operation progressed. Later the same day, as his concerns grew, he followed up by asking Valcárcel to send a photographer and draftsman from the museum to monitor and record the discoveries being unveiled at Pachacamac. Clearly, he was worried about the potential damage being done to what was being unveiled, for 27  In one letter of 29 March 1924 (Colección Giesecke, Archivo Histórico del Instituto Riva Agüero), Valcárcel informed Giesecke, who was in Lima at the time, that he would be asking for financial support for the conservation and exploration of Sacsayhuaman. 28  Gregory Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 252. 29  The emphasis on making pre-Columbian sites tourist-friendly was agreed at the highest levels of government, and several years previously. In 1936, Peru’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had commissioned none other than Giesecke to travel to the U.S. to investigate its strategies for tourist-friendly development. 30  Letter dated 17 May 1948. Colección Giesecke, Archivo Histórico del Instituto Riva Agüero.

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making more parts of the buildings visible also meant making them vulnerable (to the weather and people). On 29 September, Giesecke wrote again to say that over the last few weeks many primary and secondary schools had visited the ruins, to see the work being undertaken there. This was good news, but the hordes of children had thwarted the same operation they had come to admire. On 3 October, he asked Valcárcel to send Mr. Muelle, from the Museo Nacional, to see about protecting the painted drawings they had found in the Temple of Pachacamac, and—when he did not hear back—he repeated his request on 14 October, this time with more urgency. Valcárcel replied within the week, suggesting covering the exposed drawings with clay. The restoration work, he said, should be limited to preventing the walls from collapsing. The priority was to get rid of the debris and open-up the access to the three main temples. The two men thus seemed to working slightly at odds with one another, but Giesecke presented their endeavour as a team-effort when he wrote to Frederico Basadre in July the following year—the brother of the Director of Highways—to complain about a general lack of progress: “Valcárcel informs me that he asked […] your brother to send a steam roller and a water truck to go over the roads to and around Pachacamac and Cajamarcilla, so that they will be in an excellent condition for members of the Americanist Congress who want to visit the site”. “That message was sent over a month ago now”, he carped; “You could doubtless urge the importance of this crucial measure.”31 The above epistolary exchange between Giesecke and Valcárcel indicates how important personal connections were for making sure projects such as a tourist friendly Pachacamac happened; it also demonstrates how a desire to show off the ruins co-existed uneasily with a need to conserve and protect them. In this section’s broader discussion of infrastructural development, we see how national and international interests came together, whilst also replicating colonialist and imperialist divides. The construction and reparation of roads was promoted as a hemispheric project at the Conference of American States in Santiago in 1923—a hemispheric project led by the U.S. The latter often provided the materials and machinery needed to build highways as well as the transport needed to travel them, thereby, in Ricardo Salvatore’s words, transmitting “to Latin

31  All seven letters referenced here are from the Colección Giesecke, Archivo Histórico del Instituto Riva Agüero.

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Americans the superiority of U.S. technology.”32 In the case of Peru, Chile too was—at least by the late 1930s—an important supplier of some the construction materials and, in this way, benefitted economically from its northern neighbour’s road building programmes.33 To be sure, these were intimately bound up with a hierarchically organised, racialised labour system (see Part I). Just as it was indigenous men who cleared Machu Picchu for Bingham, it was mainly indigenous men who worked—indeed who were often forced to work—on the new roads, either for free or for a very low wage.34 Thus, these “technologies of modernity”, to quote from Hannah Knox and Penny Harvey, both relied on and reproduced colonial racial and class divisions.35 And yet, the precise fact that indigenous labour was so central to state-led modernisation efforts could also serve to invert dominant stereotypes of indigenous people as non-productive workers, relegated to the past.36

Exhibiting the “Archaeological Capital of South America” in Chile From the 1910s, Giesecke wrote frequently and passionately in the press about how much Peru had to show off to the outside world, particularly Cuzco, which he described as “the tourist mecca of South America”.37 32  Ricardo Salvatore, ‘Imperial Mechanics: South America’s Hemispheric Integration in the Machine Age’, American Quarterly 58: 3 (2006), p. 666. 33  B.P. Root, ‘Highways in Latin America’, International Reference Service (U.S. Department of Commerce), Vol. 1, No.62 (October 1941), pp. 1–12. On Peru it stated: “During 1938 asphalt imports totalled 264,064 kilograms, of which the United States supplied 142,320 and Chile 93,150” (p. 7). 34  “Conscripción Vial”, signed into law by Leguía in 1920, required all able-bodied male citizens to work on the roads. However, in practice, the bulk of the work fell upon indigenous men because they were unable to pay to exempt themselves. By the mid-1930s, this legislation had been abolished, but coercion was still employed in recruiting men, and the daily wage very low. See Davies, ‘Indian Integration…’, pp. 198–203. 35  Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox, Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). 36  In Yawar fiesta, the 1941 novel by Peruvian writer José María Arguedas (discussed in Part I), the indigenous communities of Puquio are cast as leaders of the road building programme; they sign up for it voluntarily and compete with other communities to be the quickest and best road builders. 37  Alberto Giesecke, ‘El Cuzco: Meca del turismo de la América del Sur’, Turismo, Año IV, Vol. V, 1920, p. 54.

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Chileans were well aware that they had nothing to match their northern neighbours when it came to pre-Columbian fortresses and “lost cities”. Whilst the Peruvian scholar and activist Luis Alberto Sánchez was living in exile in Chile in the 1930s, the writer Joaquín Edwards Bello took him to visit La Vega Central, Santiago’s fresh produce market, because he wanted his friend to see what tourists usually did not see: the working men and women of Chile, the agricultural produce of Chile, the “real” Chile. It was in this context, according to Sánchez’s Visto y vivido en Chile (1974), that Bello proclaimed: “We are a country of white Indians, we are missing the bronze-coloured Indians […] Chile really feels the lack of an ancient civilisation like that of your Incas”.38 By “white Indians” Edwards Bello seemed to be saying that Chileans were not biologically or phenotypically indigenous, but that they identified, albeit metaphorically, with indigenous culture. Or possibly he was intimating that Chile’s indigenous peoples had somehow integrated more fully and thus undergone a more successful “whitening” process than Peru’s “bronze-coloured Indians”.39 Key here, regardless of his intended meaning, is the sense that Chile had lost its indigeneity or never been properly indigenous (like Peru) and that this was a deficiency. On 23 January 1933, the Peruvian congress passed law 7688 recognising Cuzco as “the Archaeological Capital of South America”. This was the initiative of the representative of Cuzco, Felix Cosio, and echoed a resolution of the XXV International Congress of Americanists held in La Plata, Argentina, in 1932.40 Clearly, such titles conferred prestige upon Peru as “the country of the Incas”; it was in Peru that tourists would find the cradle of the most awe-inspiring pre-Columbian civilisation in the whole of South America. Addressing the city like one addresses a deity, the Cuzqueño poet and co-founder of the American Institute of Art, Luis Nieto, wrote: “capital of the ‘Tahuantinsuyo’, thou art the eldest among the ancient cities, coming forth with thy brow laden with a crown of exploits and glory upon the earth. How many other cities as old and majestic as yourself, have given in to the furious attacks of time, falling down to the last stone, while you have defyed [sic.] the onslaught of numberless centuries which have fallen stricken to death against thy walls.”  Sánchez, Visto y vivido en Chile, p. 40.  For an interesting discussion of discourses of whiteness in early twentieth Chile, see Walsh, ‘The Chilean exception’. 40  Mendoza, Creating Our Own, p. 73. 38

39

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These words, which formed part of a larger homage, were printed in The Tourist’s Guidebook of Cuzco (1941), a bilingual publication sponsored by the Rotary Club of Cuzco and the American Institute of Art.41 In the same guide-book Alberto Delgado, President of the Institute, summed up Cuzco as a “glorious past, a restless present, and a promising future”. Through its resplendent testimony to the survival of the past, it would “amply satisfy” the “restless tourist”, “whether in search of unknown emotions or as a student, who patiently reflects and mediates upon the contradictions of the present”.42 It was perceived as a national treasure in several different ways, yet—as the accolade “Archaeological Capital of South America” intimates—Cuzco was also part of something larger, and people from all over that larger space could identify with and take something from the city. In 1936, the Quechua-speaking photographer Martín Chambi made a three-month trip to Chile to publicise the “Archaeological Capital of South America”, his home since the early 1920s. As he himself recounted over twenty years later, “[e]ver since I began to take photography seriously, I had one main dream: to show the world the natural beauty of my patria and the striking image of the ruins which speak to our historic past, in order to promote […] tourism in Peru.”43 Press coverage from the time indicates that the visit was sponsored by the Peruvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.44 It also shows that several Peruvian diplomats attended the inauguration of his Santiago exhibition.45 President Arturo Alessandri (1868–1950), moreover, met  with Chambi and  apparently offered to cover the costs of his travels to the southern regions.46 As I’ve argued elsewhere, the Peruvian photographer’s visit  to Chile was a semi  “official” one, and it could be used to boost the tourism industry of both countries: as told by Los Andes of Cuzco, the main purpose of the trip was to “encourage people to come and see our archaeological riches”, and the funding 41  Humberto Vidal (ed.), with English translation by Eduardo Marmanillo, The Tourist’s Guidebook of Cuzco (Cuzco: American Institute of Art, 1941). 42  Ibid., p. 12. 43  Quoted in ‘Martín Chambi, reliquia del Arte Fotográfico del Cuzco’, El Pueblo (Arequipa), 24 June 1958, p.  13. I analyse this trip in more detail in ‘Photographic Encounters: Martín Chambi, Indigeneity and Chile-Peru Relations in the Early Twentieth Century’, Journal of Latin American Studies 51: 1 (2019), pp. 31–58. 44  ‘El artista Martín Chambi viajará a Chile, Los Andes (Cuzco), 23 January 1936. 45  La Nación, 22 March 1936. 46  ‘Artista peruana fue recibido por el Sr. Alessandri’, La Nación, 5 May 1936.

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provided by Alessandri’s government (1932–1938) came specifically from the Department of Tourism, on the basis that Chambi would display the photographs taken on his trip to southern Chile when he returned to Peru.47 It was surely not insignificant that southern Chile was historic Mapuche territory; the Chile that Peruvians would see—if Chambi did indeed organise an exhibition of the photographs he took on the trip— would be a notably indigenous one. We can read this as an official recognition of Chile’s indigeneity, or at least as an acknowledgement that indigenous history and culture interested tourists.48 The pieces chosen for publication that year in En Viaje, the State Railway Company’s monthly travel magazine, would seem to corroborate such a reading.49 In three different issues of 1936 the multi-page “Guía de leyendas” by the Chilean writer Sady Zañartu (1893–1933) focused on Araucanía: (in April) on the history of its military occupation by the Chilean state, and its beautiful natural landmarks including the Laguna of Cucao and the Ten-Ten Mountain; (in June) on legendary figures such as the mayor of Concepción, D.  Luis de la Cruz, who travelled from Concepción to Buenos Aires in 1806, King Orélie Antoine of France who pledged to fight for Mapuche independence in the 1860s, and the Mapuche poet Segundo Kalbúm, born in 1875; and (in December) on the indigenous origins of the names of many towns in the region.50 For the most part, tourists were treated to stereotypical images of Araucanía’s indigenous inhabitants. As presented by Zañartu, they were a heroic but barbaric people who had fought to defend their homeland against the Chilean state, a people closely connected to nature, a long-suffering 47  ‘Martin Chambi, Artista de la fotografia’, La Prensa (Osorno), 6 April 1936. See Crow, ‘Photographic Encounters’, pp. 38–39. 48  In 1940 Ercilla suggested that tourists knew Araucanía better than most Chileans did. See ‘Los araucanos no pololean’, Ercilla, 8 May 1940, p. 15. See also Rodrigo Booth’s work on the state-sponsored Guía del Veraneante—‘Turismo y representación del paisaje: La invención del sur de Chile en la mirada del Guía del Veraneante (1932–1962)’, Nuevo Mundo, Mundo Nuevos 8 (2008). 49  En Viaje (1933–1973) was “directed at a growing urban blue-collar working class and white-collar middle class who had little knowledge of their country’s vast and diverse geography”. Its goal was to build a domestic tourist industry and construct a stronger national identity. See Elizabeth Quay Hutchinson, Thomas Miller Klubock, Nara B. Milanich, and Peter Winn (eds.), The Chile Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 45. 50  Sady Zañartu, ‘Guía de leyendas’, En Viaje, No. 30 (April 1936), pp. 3–8, No. 32 (June 1936), pp. 35–40, and No. 38 (December 1936), pp. 9–12.

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Fig. 6.1  Front cover of En Viaje, No. 2, December 1933

people, a people of the past. The Mapuche were quite literally the “stuff of legend”. Their legacy and “spirit” infused the southern landscape that tourists were keen to see (the lakes and volcanoes, as publicised in Fig. 6.1), but they were largely invisible as modern political actors. In the case of Segundo Kalbúm, readers got a glimpse of his verses, but they were told that he as a person had one day simply disappeared into the forest never to be seen again.51 There was one interesting exception, however. In December 1936, En Viaje published a piece by an L. Nieto, entitled “Itinerario de un viaje”, which had won the Literary Competition on Tourism, sponsored by the transport sector of Concepción.52 The author described taking the train from Santiago and travelling south. He spoke with great emotion of arriving in Lautaro: “a resounding and courageous name, which casts me back 51  This tallies with what historian Patrick Barr-Melej says of literary criollismo in Chile during the 1930s. See Reforming Chile and ‘Cowboys and Constructions’. 52  L. Nieto, ‘Itinerario de un viaje’, En Viaje 38 (December 1936), pp. 37–43.

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in history”.53 “I know little about the history of Chile”, he wrote, “but Lautaro strikes me in the heart with the force and bravery of the ancient race of Arauco”. When Nieto reached Temuco, he got off the train and headed for Nueva Imperial, “following the footprints of the indigenous past.” He wanted to “delve into the soul of those 200,000 Araucanians, living between Galvarino and Osorno”, and he was lucky, for he had “the opportunity of a lifetime to see them in the 15th Araucanian Congress of Traitraico”. This was the congress of December 1935—January 1936, organised by the Araucanian Federation and presided over by the leader of that organisation, Manuel Aburto Panguilef: a “vibrant parlamento, which brought together Mapuche leaders from all over the region”.54 Nieto— possibly Luis Nieto Miranda of Cuzco, a poet and member of the Communist Party who spent time in exile in Chile in the mid-1930s— lamented not being able to say more about Traitraico and promised to return to it in another chronicle. He then made connections between the “huaso” that he saw everywhere in southern Chile, with the “cholo” of Peru, and the “paisano” of Argentina: all of them were representative of the continental reality of mestizaje, and the emergence of “el nuevo indio” [the new Indian] “as observed by a Cuzqueño writer”.55 That writer was surely José Uriel García, author of the pivotal book of 1930 with exactly this title. Uriel García was a friend and colleague of Chambi. To his mind, Chambi epitomised “the new Indian”. In interviews with the Chilean press in 1936, Chambi repeatedly and proudly self-identified as indigenous. Speaking with the magazine Hoy, he declared “I feel like I am a representative of my race, my people speak through my photographs.”56 This self-allocated role was validated by the Santiago daily Las Últimas Noticias: as reported on 16 March, Chambi’s indigeneity allowed him to access and photograph the “lost corners” and “unknown angles” of the archaeological sites that testified to Peru’s glorious Inca heritage.57 For its part, El Mercurio praised Chambi’s ability to capture the rich cultural heritage of Cuzco and the surrounding region.58 In Chambi’s own words,  cited in Las Últimas Noticias, the ruins  of Sacsayhuaman confirmed the “architectonic importance of Inca civilisation”.  Ibid., p. 41.  Ibid. 55  Ibid., p. 42. 56  ‘El alma quechua alienta en los cuadros de un artista vernáculo’, Hoy, 4 March 1936. 57  ‘Grandeza del Viejo Cuzco’, Las Últimas Noticias, 16 March 1936. 58  ‘Las ruinas incaicas en una colección de fotos’, El Mercurio, 24 February 1936, p.19 53 54

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In Ercilla, Juan Fernández wrote about  recent excavations in Pisac and how these revealed  a highly advanced Inca empire.59 El Sol of Cuzco republished this piece by Fernández a couple of months after Chambi’s visit to Chile, an indication, possibly, that Chilean interest in and appreciation of Inca history and culture could be advantageous to regionalist indigenista discourse in Peru.60 In a personal tribute to Chambi, a friend once celebrated his “millenarian Metropolis” of Cuzco as the “pride not just of Peru but of all [Latin] America”.61 To a certain extent, this “pan-Latin American nationalism”, to quote Geoffrey Schullenberger, enabled Chileans too to identify with a resplendent Inca past.62 However, the Chilean press coverage of Chambi’s photography did not go so far as to try to de-nationalise Inca civilisation, for the archaeological treasures that he captured in print were celebrated as  Peruvian. It was more that Inca civilisation was no longer cast as “other” to Chile, as it had been in official militaristic discourses of the late nineteenth century, when Chile and Peru were at war with one another, and in the early twentieth century when scholars debated the Inca empire’s invasion and “civilisation” of Chile (see Chap. 5). As narrated by Chilean periodicals in 1936, Chileans could celebrate the glorious Inca legacy as part of Peru’s history in a non threatening way. They could appreciate it from a distance through Chambi’s photographs or they could travel to Peru to experience it close-up, as communist poet Pablo Neruda did.

Pablo Neruda in Cuzco: Inca History and Revolutionary Continentalism Transnational encounters with Peru’s indigenous past went beyond the sphere of tourism. Chileans’ admiration of Inca Peru during Chambi’s visit was taken one step further in renowned literary works such as Pablo  Neruda’s Canto general  (1950) and its appropriation of the pre-­ Columbian indigenous past as a shared site for a leftist revolutionary consciousness and identity. Neruda visited Machu Picchu in 1943 and wrote 59  Juan Fernández, ‘El alma milenaria de las piedras alienta desde el fondo de Cuzco’, Revista Ercilla, 28 February 1936. 60  El Sol, 26 July 1936. 61  In Andrés  Garay Albújar, Martín Chambi  por si mismo (Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra, 2010), p. 295. 62  Schullenberger, ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’, p. 321.

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his iconic poem “Las alturas de Machu Picchu” in 1945, the same year he officially joined the Chilean Communist Party. In his memoirs written many years later, Neruda described feeling “intimately small […] [in that] deserted world, proud, towering high”, a world “to which I somehow belonged.”63 For Neruda and many other Latin American revolutionary figures, not least Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Machu Picchu was a tremendously important political symbol. Neruda claimed it was as if “my own hands had laboured there at some remote point in time”; “I felt Chilean, Peruvian, American,” he said.64 In the poem Neruda seemed to want to speak for Latin America as a whole and its longstanding struggle for social justice. This is particularly apparent when he calls out to the workers (of the past and the present): “Rise up to be born with me”.65 Neruda was a key figure in Chilean indigenista circles. He also played an important role in indigenista circuits in Peru, particularly in Cuzco, or at least this is the story that comes out from the media coverage of his visit to the country in 1943. Neruda stopped in Lima in October 1943 on his way back to Chile from Mexico City. He gave a talk “Viaje alrededor de mi poesía” and a poetry reading in the capital city’s Teatro Municipal on 20 October—an event sponsored by the National Association of Peruvian Writers and Artists.66 Shortly after this, the President of Peru, Manuel Prado, organised a special luncheon in the poet’s honour. José Uriel García was likely one of the attendees at this luncheon or at the Teatro Municipal recital, for it was he who urged the Chilean poet to visit Cuzco and accompanied him to the world-famous ruins. Once in “the Archaeological Capital of South America”, the mayor of the city, Oscar Saldívar, promptly bestowed on Neruda the title “Illustrious Guest of Cuzco” and arranged an official welcome ceremony. City councillor Daniel Castillo Manrique presided over the ceremony, and two local Cuzqueño writers linked to the American Institute of Art, Alberto Delgado and Luis Nieto Miranda, gave emotive speeches about the Chilean poet.67 Delgado described Neruda as “leader of a continental mission” and Nieto  Pablo Neruda, Memoirs (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 166.  Ibid. 65  Crow, ‘Photographic Encounters’, pp. 47–48. 66  David Schidlowsky, Neruda en su tiempo: Las furias y las penas, 1904–1949 (Santiago: RIL Editores, 2008), p. 585. 67  We have access to this encounter through a special issue of the periodical Cuadernos Korikancha, edited by Nieto, entitled “Pablo Neruda: Miliciano Corazón de América”, and published that same year. 63 64

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Miranda—who had recently spent time in exile in Chile (possibly authoring the aforementioned piece in En Viaje), and attributed his left-wing political affiliation to his stay there—told his guest in notably poetic terms: “I am counting on you; you give me hope [that we will one day see] the night-time spreading of the eagle’s wings, the immortal colours of the heroes of Stalingrad, the heroic colour of the arms of the workers of my country”. Neruda then read eight of his poems, including his “Nuevo canto de amor a Stalingrado” and “América, no invoco tu nombre en vano”—unpublished at the time, but to be part of his epic collection Canto general. The theme of class struggle was omnipresent throughout. Shortly after this ceremonial welcome Neruda and Uriel García set off to Machu Picchu for four days. “Las Alturas de Machu Picchu” was one of the most celebrated results of this expedition. Less commented is a piece of poetic prose that Neruda wrote while he was travelling in Peru: “América, no apagues tus lamparas”.68 Here too the Inca feature prominently, and in several different, intriguing ways, especially in relation to Chile. For Neruda, Peru “was the womb of America, a space enclosed and protected by tall, mysterious stones.”69 Through their “urns, jewels, statues, weavings and silence” the Inca had showed “a thoughtful tenderness [that] lit up, forever, the path of American depths.” They also enlightened Chile: “my homeland received the waves of fertile Inca conquistadors.” “We do not yet fully understand”, he wrote, “the extent to which the vigorous waters of Peru triggered the awakening of my homeland, submerging it in a telluric maturity, of which my poetry is a mere simple expression.”70 In these lines Neruda seemed to perpetuate the narrative elaborated and disputed by archaeologists and historians at the 1908 congress in Santiago: that Inca invaders brought civilisation and progress to Chilean indigenous peoples. He presented himself as heir to that fertile encounter. The poet then addressed Peru directly: “There is something cosmic about your Peruvian land, something so powerful and radiant, that it cannot be hidden away […] America is yours, Peru. América belongs to your mysterious, arrogant and ancient homeland.”71 Neruda attempted to speak in the name of Peru but did so apologetically: 68  This piece can be found in Pablo Neruda, Para nacer he nacido (Barcelona: Brugera, 1981), pp. 179–182. 69  Ibid., p. 179. 70  Ibid. 71  Ibid., p. 180.

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“Americans of Peru, if I have touched with my southern hands your courtesy and opened the sacred fruit of your fraternity, please do not think that I leave you without my heart reaching out to your country and your current magnificence. Forgive me, then, that as an American to the core, I place my hand in your silence.” As editor of a local journal Cuadernos de Korikancha, Nieto Miranda made sure that both Neruda’s words and what his colleagues and friends said about Neruda lived on in print after the encounter in Cuzco in 1943.72 Korikancha was one of the principal Inca temples in Cuzco, which was built over—but not entirely erased—by the Spanish colonial monastery of San Francisco.73 In this way, Cuzqueño intellectuals made Neruda their own, using him and his writing to propagate leftist regionalist indigenista discourse within Peru. As recent representative of Chile in Mexico City, moreover, Neruda served as a link between Peruvians and Mexicans. And in a two-way process of exchange, Neruda laid claim to Cuzco’s Inca past—accessed through mediators such as Uriel García—as part of a continental quest. This exchange was spoken and written in a language of socialist revolution, through which the indigenous warriors of the past became the freedom fighters of the present: an alternative to capitalist modernity in Latin America.

Conclusions In the early independence era, Peruvian elites frequently appealed to a rhetoric exalting the imperial Inca past, which was later to be encapsulated in archaeological sites such as Machu Picchu, to justify their military campaigns against Spain.74 Such glorification of the indigenous past had gone out of fashion by the second half of the nineteenth century. At this point, indigenous peoples were re-imagined as barbaric savages preventing the “progress and modernisation” of the nation, which allowed governments to envisage and try to push forward with their eventual disappearance. This coincided with the widespread expropriation of indigenous lands. As  ‘Pablo Neruda: Miliciano corazón de América’, Cuadernos de Korikancha, 1943.  The Inca foundations are still visible to this day. 74  Cecilia Méndez, ‘Incas Sí, Indios No: Notes on Peruvian Creole Nationalism and its Contemporary Crisis’, Journal of Latin American Studies 28: 1 (1996), pp.  197–225, p.  222. Independence-era Chile had its own equivalent of this “Incaism” in the official appropriation of the Araucanian warriors of the sixteenth century (who successfully resisted Spanish conquest) as “padres de la patria”. 72 73

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shown here in Chap. 6, dominant discourses shifted again in the early twentieth century. One important factor explaining the return to a narrative of past Inca glories was the rise to prominence of indigenismo which, as we see have seen above, had many different strands: Lima-based conservative projects represented by the likes of Gutiérrez Quintanilla (which celebrated Peru’s Hispanic as well as indigenous heritage); Cuzco- and Lima-based but U.S.-led projects represented by Giesecke (which promoted the value of indigenous culture as part of a bid for capitalist modernisation); and Cuzqueño leftist projects, ranging from reformist to revolutionary, represented by Valcárcel and Nieto (which saw the past as a pathway to a more egalitarian future). Another interlinked factor was the Peruvian state’s budding interest in tourism. In this context, Cuzco’s ancient indigenous heritage became a modern attraction for cosmopolitan travellers. Chapter 6 has demonstrated that the national context is not enough to fully understand such developments. As was the case in the early independence era, national celebration of a glorious indigenous past in the early twentieth century was a continent-wide phenomenon,75 and national endeavours to conserve that past (by controlling access to and preventing foreign looting of archaeological sites) were elaborated in and encouraged, indeed, demanded by transnational forums such as the International Congress of Americanistas. Furthermore, it was international tourism that Peruvian governments were trying to promote during this period (as were governments across the region). Foreign visitors were fascinated by the grandeur and mystery of Inca history. Peru’s “Incaism” was revived, surely, with this market in mind, or at least international travellers’ interest could be harnessed to endorse indigenista narratives; the two worked in tandem with one another. Chile played a role in all four of the inter-related stories told about Inca Peru in this chapter. It sent large delegations to the International Congress of Americanistas in Buenos Aires (1910) and Washington (1915) that made the preservation of pre-Columbian archaeological remains a key part of the collaborative agenda, and it hosted the Conference of American States in 1923, which brought scholars together with law makers on this issue. Alberto Giesecke, key protagonist of the second story—for intervening in and promoting the opening-up of Peru’s ancient ruins not least through the building and paving of roads—was commissioned by the  Earle, Return of the Native.

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Peruvian government to work on the Tacna-Arica plebiscite in the mid-­1920s.76 The plebiscite never took place, but scores of individuals and associations from across the country wrote to thank him for his patriotic efforts to defend Peru against an aggressively expansionist Chile, and he drew on and publicised such proclaimed gratitude to justify his authoritative position in official circles when his foreign-ness looked like it might cause problems. In sum, Chile—or rather his attempts to resolve the territorial dispute with Chile—enabled Giesecke’s long-term involvement in multiple spheres of Peruvian government, including education and infrastructural development. Paradoxically, in the decade after the failed plebiscite, Chile contributed to the latter by providing asphalt for highway construction in Peru. The third story centres on Chambi, the “poet of light” who captured the mysterious aura of Cuzco’s Inca ruins in his photography and marketed this in Chile when he visited in 1936. In this section we saw how Chileans admired and identified with Peru’s indigenous past, how this encounter was celebrated back in Peru, and how Peruvians travelling in Chile sought out and made visible its own indigenous heritage for external consumption (with the support of Chilean authorities). The final section underscores the way in which the Chilean Nobel-laureate-to-be, Pablo Neruda, who visited Peru in 1943, revolutionised Machu Picchu and Cuzco through poetry—he repurposed them as poetic material to inspire leftist revolution across the Americas, and his efforts were warmly welcomed by some of his hosts. All in all, Chapter 6 has shown that Machu Picchu’s “path to celebrity” (Cox) in the early twentieth century brought Chileans and Peruvians together, sometimes in dispute, but equally often in collaboration. I have also highlighted the ongoing dialogue co-established by Chileans and Peruvians between tradition and modernity—indigenous tradition marketed for the modern tourist and made accessible through modern technology (road building machinery and photography)—and between the indigenous past and a leftist revolutionary present. The next chapter delves further into these dialogues, focusing on three other ways in which indigenous cultural heritage was put on display in early twentieth century Latin America: museums, folkloric performances, and (popular) art exhibitions.

76  The Archivo Alberto Giesecke at the Riva-Agüero Institute in Lima has hundreds of letters pertaining to this episode in Chile-Peru relations.

CHAPTER 7

Museums Actors, Folklore and Popular Art: Displaying and Performing Indigeneity

In a session of the First Pan-American Scientific Congress in Santiago in 1908–1909, Peruvian geologist Carlos Lisson (1868–1947) presented what El Comercio of Lima called an “extremely important” paper promoting the “creation of American ethnological museums”.1 The emphasis on ethnology, a branch of cultural anthropology, points to the growing academic interest in indigenous cultures of both the present and the past, or at least a growing interest in how much of a supposedly pristine indigenous past currently lived on among indigenous people. The label “American” is also significant. Lisson could have been encouraging the establishment of more ethnological museums in the Americas, or he may have been urging governments and the academic community to set up ethnology museums that were continental or hemispheric in content and outlook. The first section of this chapter highlights the overlaps between the Chilean and Peruvian processes of establishing archaeological and anthropological museums during the first decades of the twentieth century. It also underscores the oft-ambiguous relationship that existed between museums and nationalism at the time. The second section draws out the potential of folklore to engage with contemporary identity politics in innovative and radical ways, especially when projects were led by indigenous people themselves: following the work of Zoila Mendoza, I 1

 El Comercio, 30 December 1908, p. 6.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Crow, Itinerant Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01952-4_7

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explore several folkloric ensembles’ performances of indigeneity in Chile and Peru from the 1920s to the 1940s. The third section examines contesting interpretations of indigenous art circulating through two museums, both established in 1944 and envisaged as fundamentally continental institutions: the Museum of Popular Art within Cuzco’s American Institute of Art and the Museum of American Popular Art in Santiago. The last two sections move on to avant-garde artistic movements and the Inter-­American Indigenista Congresses of 1940 and 1949, exploring how these intersected with institutional developments in Peru and Chile. The chapter’s key protagonists are anthropologists and archaeologists: two previously discussed global travellers from Peru, Julio Tello and Luis Eduardo Valcárcel; the consummate networker Max Uhle from Germany; and Austrian-Chilean Grete Mostny (1914–1991). Artists, writers, and educators appear as well, namely the Peruvian surrealist painter César Moro (1903–1956); the Chilean poet and promoter of popular culture, Tomás Lago (1903–1975); and two women who were educators, writers, and influential political figures—the enigmatic Gabriela Mistral and the Santiago-born Amanda Labarca (1886–1975). As we saw in Part I, the actions and proclamations of Mapuche activist-intellectual Manuel Aburto Panguilef transpire as powerful interventions in Chile during this period. After demonstrating how his class politics merged with folkloric production, I look to two of his contemporaries, Venancio Coñuepán and César Colima, and their efforts to project Chile’s indigenous artistic output onto a Pan-American stage. Overall, this chapter presents museums, folklore, and popular art as vibrant, complex performances of regional, national, and hemispheric indigenous identities, which brought Chileans and Peruvians together in myriad ways.

Institutionalising Archaeology and Anthropology Through Museums When Max Uhle arrived from Peru in 1911, Chile’s capital was in a veritable frenzy of museum-building, an extension of the numerous construction projects associated with the centenary of independence. The government of Ramón Barros Luco (1910–1915) established Santiago’s Ethnological and Anthropological Museum (sometimes referred to as the

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Museum of Indigenous Objects) in 1912.2 This seems to have been part of the National Historic Museum, or at least to have begun life as an Ethnological and Anthropological Collection within the Pre-History Section of the National Historical Museum, which was created by government decree 1770 on 3 May 1911.3 Soon after Uhle arrived in Chile, he was contracted to head up the Ethnological and Anthropological Collection-cum-Museum. Uhle’s work sought to redirect and greatly expand a national narrative that if it mentioned indigenous peoples had rarely looked beyond the Mapuche. He went on expeditions to San Pedro-Chunchurí and Taltal in northern Chile—lands colonised much earlier than Araucanía—and amassed a significant collection of ceramic and stone pieces. These ended up forming an important part of the exhibition of the “Museum of Indigenous Objects” and Uhle wrote up his findings in its the Boletín del Museo de Etnología y Antropología.4 Some articles in the museum bulletin spoke of present-day indigenous cultures, but for the most part it was their past that interested collectors and curators and a distant past at that.5 This is why it published Uhle’s work, and presumably why he was hired. Staff at the museum—possibly Uhle himself—decided to display indigenous Chile only in the “pre-historic” section of the museum. It was placed literally in the basement, below the entrance level where visitors perused criollo, that is, non-indigenous Chile.6 In 1917, the nationally circulating Revista Zig-Zag commented on how the basement display cases failed “to speak to the imagination” of visitors, even though they contained the “real treasures of the [museum’s] collection” and proved that Chile too “had

2  See www.mhn.cl (last accessed 4 July 2019). The title of “Museo de Objetos Indígenas” appears in Colección Max Uhle: Expedición a Calama 1912 (Santiago: Museo Nacional de Historia Natural, 2000). 3  It is intriguingly difficult to establish the precise details about the creation and longevity of this museum. See Luis Alegría Licuime, ‘Museos y Campo Cultural: Patrimonio Indígena en el Museo de Etnología y Antropología de Chile’, Conserva, 8 (2004), pp. 57–70, and Joanna Crow, ‘Narrating the Nation: Chile’s Museo Histórico Nacional’, National Identities 11 (2009), pp. 109–126. 4   This publication ran from 1917 to 1927. Alegría Licuime, ‘Museos y Campo Cultural’, p. 64. 5  The Chunchurí site excavated by Uhle dated from the Pre-Inca Period. 6  ‘Lo que es el Museo Etnográfico’, La Unión, 18 May 1916; ‘Visita al Museo de Etnología y Antropología de Santiago’, Revista Zig-Zag, No. XIII, July 1917.

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culture in an immemorial past”. This was a reality, it said, that was “unknown to our historians.”7 In Peru, as well as in Chile, there are difficulties in tracing the precise history of the founding of anthropological and ethnological museums, not least because of the penchant for renaming institutions. What is today the National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History in Lima dates back to 1822, but then it was simply the National Museum, created by the “Liberator” José de San Martín. In May 1905, the government of José Pardo founded the Museum of National History. This opened on 29 July 1906, under the directorship of none other than Max Uhle, even though he was initially just asked to head up the Archaeology Section.8 By 1913—two years after Uhle had left the country—the indigenous archaeologist Julio Tello was pushing to create an anthropological section within this museum.9 He was successful. Billinghurst’s government created the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in December 1913 and named Tello as director. This appears to have operated from within the same building as the National History Museum, which was also that of the original National Museum. As with the Ethnological and Anthropological Museum in Santiago, it was predominantly ancient indigenous history (symbolised by the objects Uhle, Tello and others had found in their excavations) that was on display to visitors here. There are three important points to take from all of this. First, the institutionalisation of anthropology and ethnology in Chile and Peru (at least in terms of museums) occurred at a similar time. Second, discussions at international conferences, such as the First Pan-American Scientific Congress of 1908–1909, seem linked with developments on the ground, such as the hiring of personnel and commissioning of buildings. Third, that German-born archaeologist Max Uhle, who documents the vast pan-­Andean reach of the Inca empire, was closely bound up in the newly created museums in Lima and Santiago. Despite these connections and the shared broader context, the discursive focus was on  ‘Visita al Museo’, Revista Zig-Zag, op. cit.  See Richard E. Daggett, ‘Julio Tello: An Account of His Rise to Prominence in Peruvian Archaeology’, in Richard Burger, ed., The Life and Writings of Julio Tello: America’s First Indigenous Archaeologist (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2009), p. 17; and John Howland Rowe, Max Uhle, 1856–1944: A Memoir of the Father of Peruvian Archaeology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954), pp. 11–12. 9  Daggett, ‘Julio Tello…’, p. 16. 7 8

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nationhood in both Chile and Peru. The governments funded these as national museums, rather than ones that advocated a continental or hemispheric American identity. In the Peruvian case, we also detect the growing prominence of a regionalist discourse, particularly in Cuzco, but this was not so much anti-­nationalist, as a claim to best represent the riches of the nation. Almost all the scholars discussed in Chap. 5 on indigenous weavings held important positions in the museum world. Uhle, Tello and Valcárcel have already appeared as museum directors. Aureliano Oyarzún, who spoke of Inca influence on Araucanian textiles in Buenos Aires in 1910 and who helped to design and organise the Chilean exhibition in Seville in 1929–1930, worked alongside Uhle at the Ethnological and Anthropological Museum (or on the same titled collection in the National Historic Museum) in Santiago. Not long after Uhle left his post at this museum, Oyarzún, who had donated some of his own collection of pre-­Hispanic antiquities, became director.10 Also working in Santiago, was Walter (Gualterio) Looser, who published on Araucanian textiles in the Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs, illustrating his articles with “authentic genuine old antiques, belonging for the major part to the National Museum”.11 The Bristol-born engineer-cum-anthropologist Ricardo Latcham, who teamed up with Oyarzún on the Ibero-American Exposition in Seville, was likewise appointed to a senior position in the museum sector (thanks to then-Minister of Education, Eduardo Barrios). Latcham served as director of Chile’s National Museum of Natural History from April 1928 until he died in 1943. Latcham, like Oyarzún and Looser, collaborated with Uhle, and attributed to him the beginning of “a new era in the study of archaeology in Chile”.12 Today, the Regional Historic Museum of Cuzco makes sure to impress upon its visitors the importance of the civic role played by museums. Through Tello’s words, spoken in 1924 and painted on the entrance room’s wall in Spanish, English and Quechua, visitors are told that the museum “is the most democratic of educational institutions: it is the most effective means of spreading the teachings of history among the people. If we are to take our duties to the patria seriously, we must work tirelessly 10   Oyarzún became director in 1917. See Alegría Licuime, ‘Museos y Campo Cultural’, p. 64. 11  Looser, ‘Araucanian Textiles’, p. 7. 12  Ricardo Latcham, Alfarería indígena chilena (Santiago: Universo, 1928), p. 7.

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on the great task of educating people, awakening the spirit of group solidarity, and thus forging a national consciousness.”13 Tello, who spoke these words in 1924, had attended the First Pan-American Scientific Congress in Santiago. When Tello returned to Santiago in 1940, the Chilean magazine Ercilla, which was largely run by Peruvians and closely aligned with the Popular Front government of Aguirre Cerda, proclaimed the distinguished visitor to be “the premier champion of Peruvian archaeological science.”14 Tello’s public discourse, emblazoned on the entrance wall of the Regional Historic Museum of Cuzco, projected museums as fundamentally nationalist and patriotic institutions. Valcárcel spoke similarly of museums and the scholars who worked in and for them: “Archaeology is our defence”, he proclaimed in a public lecture of 1931; “the vast collections held in our museums offer definitive proof of the advanced cultural development achieved by mankind in Peru”.15 “We are archaeologists and ethnographers”, he said, “out of primeval scientific and patriotic necessity”. For Valcárcel, like Tello, science and patriotism went hand in hand; the objective of science was to help him and his peers “understand Peru.”16 Uhle’s experience in Peru, in contrast, epitomises the fraught tensions in the relationship between museums and nationalism. As Gänger explains, “Peruvian scholars, politicians, and intellectuals initially called for Uhle because he was a foreigner—a European and a German.”17 The idea was that Uhle’s status as an expert from “the West” or the “Old World” would help to legitimise Peru’s quest—through the National Museum—to become a centre of global scientific endeavour. And yet it was precisely this foreignness that worked against Uhle, for he was “criticised, debated and questioned by the Lima elite” from “the moment he took up his post.”18 13  This text, with a slightly different English translation, can be found in full in Burger (ed.), The Life and Writings of Julio C. Tello. It was a speech delivered during the inauguration of the Museum of Peruvian Anthropology in Lima on 13 December 1924. This was Victor Larco Herrera’s private archaeology museum, purchased by Leguía’s government in 1924. See El Comercio, 14 December 1924. 14  ‘Julio Tello, sabio peruano se encuentra en Santiago’, Revista Ercilla 251, 21 February 1940, p. 5. 15  Valcárcel, ‘Nuevas interpretaciones de la cultura incaica’ (1931), in Valcárcel, Mirador Indio, p. 155. 16  Ibid., p. 141. 17  Gänger, 2007, cited in Henry Tantalean, Peruvian Archaeology: A Critical History (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 41. 18  Ibid.

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Such problems, as well as successive budget cuts, led Uhle to leave Peru’s National Museum, and from there he moved on to Chile, where he had already established connections.19 Uhle acted as an important broker between the two countries. He helped to explain Peru to Chileans and, vice-versa, Chile to Peruvians. Prior to assuming his prominent if short-lived place in Peru’s museum hierarchy, Uhle had advised and helped the Chilean photographer Fernando Garreaud (1869–1929) when the latter visited Peru at the turn of the century. This trip resulted in República Peruana 1900 (1898–1900), a seminal photographic narrative featuring 495 images of the people, history, and landscapes of Peru.20 More than a custodian, he was a promoter and publicist of the “real” Peru; he enabled its visibility through Garreaud’s photographs. And just over a decade later, Uhle fulfilled a similar role for Peruvians visiting Chile. In March 1915,  for example, El Mercurio of Santiago proudly informed its readers of how impressed the Arica-born Peruvian diplomat and historian, Romulo Cuneo Vidal (1856–1929), had been with Santiago’s Ethnological and Anthropological Museum. Uhle had guided him through its exhibition.21

Performing Authentic Indigeneity Whilst possibly the most important, museums were not the only spaces that celebrated indigenous heritage in early twentieth century Chile and Peru. As the century progressed, intellectuals in both countries became increasingly interested in enacting and performing indigenous cultural practices beyond the institutional confines and static display cases of the museum. One key example was the Peruvian Mission of Incaic Art [Misión Peruana de Arte Incaica] led by Valcárcel. This (mainly but not exclusively non-indigenous) performing troupe took a vast repertoire of Cuzqueño art to Buenos Aires, La Paz and Montevideo in 1923 and 1924. Its performances combined historic Inca themes, such as the colonial Quechua drama production Ollantay, with contemporary indigenous customs,

 Some sources suggest Uhle resigned, others that he was dismissed, due to accusations of sending excavated objects out of the country. See Cox, Framing a Lost City, p. 141. 20  See Paula Trevisan and Luis Massa, ‘Fotografías cusqueñas atravesando el indigenismo’, AISTHESIS 46 (2009), pp. 39–64. 21  El Mercurio, 10 March 1915. 19

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dance, and music.22 The connection between the past and the present was Andean ideology and spirituality, positioned in stark contrast to a corrosive Eurocentric modernity. Key to the (albeit short-lived) success of the group was the effort to resurrect ancient Inca traditions and make people appreciate their continuing value in the present. In a letter of 29 March 1924, Valcárcel informed Alberto Giesecke—who had just left Cuzco to become Director General of Public Education in Lima—that the National University of San Antonio Abad in Cuzco was “compiling a booklet on the work of the Peruvian Mission of Incaic Art”.23 Valcárcel said that he hoped to see it published soon—he likely wanted Giesecke to intervene to this effect—because once the booklet was in circulation, the group could seek reimbursement for their recent trip to Bolivia. Unlike the national museums in Lima and Santiago, this artistic folkloric project was driven not by the state but by individual actors in collaboration with state authorities. The Peruvian Mission of Incaic Art did not visit Chile in 1923–1924, but the Chilean press covered the tour and praised the initiative.24 Earlier Inca drama groups emanating out of Cuzco, such as the Compañía Lírica Incaica Ccorillacta, were similarly well-received when they did visit Chile in 1917, during a tour that had also included Bolivia and Argentina. Apparently, the group travelled to Antofagasta and Valparaíso, where they performed plays in Quechua. In Antofagasta, they were such a hit that they put on their show at least twenty times and collected more than 100,000 pesos from ticket sales.25 Chile had its own folkloric companies dedicated to performing indigenous culture. One such project widely reviewed in the national press was the artistic ensemble Llufquehuenu. Led by Mapuche activist Manuel Aburto Panguilef, it consisted of approximately 70 Mapuche, who in 1940 22  Zoila Mendoza, Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco Peru (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008); Shaping Society Through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and ‘Crear y sentir lo nuestro: La Misión Peruana de Arte Incaico y el impulso de la producción artístico-folklórica en Cusco’, Latin American Music Review 25: 1 (2004), pp. 57–77. 23  This letter can be found in the Colección Giesecke, Archivo Histórico del  Instituto Riva-Agüero. 24  Mendoza, ‘Crear y sentir lo nuestro’, p. 74. 25  Cesar Itier, El teatro quechua en Cuzco, Vol. II (Paris: Institut Français d’Etudes Andines, 2000), pp. 52–53.

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toured Santiago, Valparaíso, Viña del Mar, and Calera exhibiting, in Panguilef’s own words, “the customs, rituals and sporting endeavours of the race.”26 In the stadiums of these cities and towns, the ensemble played palin, staged dances, sang music, and enacted traditional rituals such as the nguillatún. The shows were sold to a paying audience as the epitome of authentic Mapuche culture. Impressed by the reception of Llufquehuenu performances in Viña del Mar, the municipal employee charged with hosting them, Luis Santelices, apparently spoke to Panguilef about the possibility of acquiring some local lands “for Araucanía”, where “real, wholesome Mapuche could live”. As Panguilef recounted in his diary, Santelices went as far as to suggest that “tourists could come […] to see them there.”27 This was reminiscent of the zoological gardens of the world fairs in the late nineteenth century; the difference here was that Panguilef and his compatriots would be in charge, and indeed possibly “make quite a lot of money for [his organisation] the Araucanian Federation”. Such strategic essentialism was nothing new to Panguilef. He had set up an Araucanian Theatre Company as early as 1916, which travelled to Valdivia, Temuco, Concepción, Talcahuano, Tomé, Chillán, Talca, Valparaíso, and Santiago, promising a spectacular exhibition “of all the customs of the aborigenes” by “indigenous performers who would be dressed according to ancient tradition”.28 He had also promoted the value of this kind of display (i.e. of “real” living indigenous artistic and cultural practice) when he delivered his inaugural address to the Eighth Araucanian Congress, held in Llaima between December 1928 and January 1929. On this occasion, he spoke of setting up a pavilion at future congresses to exhibit Mapuche works, and he enthusiastically passed on the news that he had been invited to contribute a demonstration of “Mapuche industry” in an exposition being organised in Talca for the following year.29 Panguilef’s discourse and action plan emphasised an authenticity that co-existed with an openness to and inclusion of other non-indigenous participants and referents. The show in Viña del Mar on 12 October 1940, for example, began with a procession led by representatives of Llufquehuenu 26  Manuel Aburto Panguilef, Diario del Presidente de la Federación Araucana, cited in Andre Menard, ‘Manuel Aburto Panguilef: De la República Indígena al sionismo mapuche’, Ñuke Mapu Working Paper Series 12 (2003), p. 2. 27  Aburto Panguilef, Diario, 1940, p. 140, cited in ibid., p. 11. 28  La Voz de Loncoche, 2 December 1916. For an overview of the significance of the tour, see Crow, The Mapuche in Modern Chile, pp.71–72. 29  In Menard and Pavez, ‘Documentos de la Federación Araucana’, p. 97.

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carrying both the Chilean national flag and the flag of the Araucanian Federation. When he addressed the audience, Panguilef spoke on behalf of an “Araucanian race” which recognised “God Almighty and his son Jesus Christ”, but also stressed that this was a race which had struggled “equal to equal with the King of Spain” to defend their lands, just as they continued to defend their rights “with the Government of Chile and its authorities.”30 He furthermore explained that the Nguillatún ceremony would be performed at the request of the local government official Santelices, who was, in Aburto Panguilef’s words, “the great machi of Viña del Mar.”31 This publicly transformed the non-indigenous Santelices into a traditional faith-healer and respected community authority, whilst Aburto Panguilef—writing of the episode afterwards—described himself as “Patriarchal chief, machi of all machi healers, and future king”. Santelices could become Mapuche, but Aburto Panguilef cast himself as the ultimate spiritual leader who would save his people. And it was in the context of such monarchical and messianic pretensions, that he planned to ask the National Historical Museum in Santiago to give him some of the “sacred stones” (of Araucanía) that it had on display.32 Focusing on Panguilef’s diary accounts of events such as these, the Chilean anthropologist André Menard has rightly argued that Panguilef was not so much insisting on Mapuche purity, as Mapuche difference—a difference (historical independence) that had overtly political implications. In addition, Menard draws attention to Panguilef’s transnational references, not least Judaism and Zionism, King David, and the new State of Israel. Its creation in 1948 was, to Panguilef, a shining light for the Mapuche who hoped to “return” and reclaim their homeland and statehood. Menard also locates Panguilef and his public discourse within a long history of southern Chilean re-appropriations of the mythical figure of the Inka King (Inca Rey or Inkarri in Spanish): the belief that Atahualpa—the Inca leader killed by the Spanish in 1533—buried under the earth, would grow and one day rise-up and take back his kingdom. Panguilef thus adopted the Inca narrative of indigenous resurrection—central to the writings of Peruvian indigenista intellectuals such as Valcárcel—to bolster his own organisation’s discursive struggle in Chile.

 Aburto Panguilef, Diario, 1940, in Menard, ‘Manuel Aburto Panguilef’, p. 3.  In ibid., p. 8. 32  In ibid.’, pp. 27–28. 30 31

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Cuzco’s American Institute of Art and Santiago’s Museum of American Popular Art The narrative of indigenous resurrection shaped the work of Cuzco’s American Institute of Art (IAAC), which was created in 1937. As noted in Chap. 6, this institute was rooted in Cuzco and the region’s drive for touristic development.33 Its founding members were all from Cuzco and its original aim was to promote and protect the artistic and cultural heritage of Cuzco. To this end, it sponsored regional travel guides, and lobbied to enshrine in law “The Day of Cuzco” and “The Week of Cuzco”.34 But it was not confined to Cuzco. Its establishment was a joint effort with artists and intellectuals from Mexico and Argentina. And the extent of its outreach, in terms of hosting visiting artists, was very much American, rather than limited to national or regional boundaries. Moreover, its remit was not just folklore but rather “all the manifestations of modern American art”, including plastic arts, literature, and photography.35 Hence Martín Chambi’s membership (he is in the framed photograph currently displayed on the wall of the stairs leading down to the institute) and its warm reception of Pablo Neruda.36 It is also worth stressing that the modern American art it promoted was popular art.37 To bring in more local people, the institute organised regular art, dance, and music contests. From 1942 onwards, the IAAC funded a weekly radio programme “La Hora Folklórica”, based in Cuzco. And in 1944 it created a Museum of Popular Art. Notably, “popular” transcended indigeneity. It included indigenous people as a theme of art and as producers of art, and this in and of itself was important—indigenous art was analysed and promoted as art, i.e. in aesthetic terms, rather than deemed solely of anthropological or ethnological interest. But there was also a crucial class dimension at work here, exemplified by how Luis Nieto, a prominent member of the institute, introduced Neruda at the tribute event in 1943 (see Chap. 6). Ultimately, the institute showcased the “conjunction of cultural heritages” that comprised “the Andean world”.38 And it did so without formal state-sponsorship, as did the performing troupes that  Mendoza, Creating Our Own, p. 127.  The Day of Cuzco was made official on 8 July 1944, and the Week of Cuzco on 7 April 1945. 35  Mendoza, Creating Our Own, p. 128. 36  I visited the IAAC in April 2019. 37  In the words of director Roberto Latorre, “We dedicated ourselves to stimulating the popular artists.” Cited in Mendoza, Creating Our Own, p. 133. 38  Ibid., p. 132. 33 34

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Valcárcel and Aburto Panguilef led. These were all initiatives driven and sustained by an ethnically and socially diverse group of individual activist-intellectuals. The same year that the IAAC set up its Museum of Popular Art, Santiago’s cultural and intellectual elites celebrated the creation of their own Museum of American Popular Art [Museo de Arte Popular Americano, MAPA]. According to its website, MAPA began as an initiative led by the famed educator and campaigner for women’s rights Amanda Labarca, then-president of the Executive Committee of the Chilean Commission of Intellectual Cooperation.39 In 1940, she agreed to organise the First Exhibition of American Popular Art at the University of Chile as part of its centenary celebrations. This institution, together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—through its consuls and ambassadors such as Neruda, in Mexico at the time—managed to secure the support of seven Latin American governments, including that of Peru.40 Labarca’s idea was that the temporary exhibition would transform into a permanent and “genuinely continental museum.” That idea became reality on 20 December 1944, when MAPA was officially inaugurated in the Castillo Hidalgo on Cerro Santa Lucía in central Santiago.41 It was set up as an institute dependent on the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Chile, and thus—as with Cuzco’s American Institute of Art—we detect, in theory, a shift towards acknowledging that indigenous cultural production (if included) should be exhibited as art, rather than artefact, and displayed/ studied together with non-indigenous art, rather than separated out as “other”.42 The initial director of MAPA was well-connected and energetic Tomás Lago Pinto, a friend of Neruda and of other renowned leftist indigenistas such as Alejandro Lipschutz (prominent in Part I). He had been editor of Chile’s Revista de Educación when it first appeared in the late 1920s. He had also co-founded the magazine Atenea, linked to the University of  See www.mapa.uchile.cl (last accessed 20 June 2022).  The other countries were Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Paraguay. Support meant sending art works to Santiago for the exhibition. 41  In the late nineteenth century, this colonial fortress had been inhabited by The Historic Indigenous Museum (Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna’s project as mayor of Santiago between 1872 and 1875). See Patience Schell, ‘Idols, Altars, Slippers and Stockings: Heritage Debates and Displays in Nineteenth-Century Chile’, Past & Present 226 (2015), pp. 326–348. 42  For an interesting Australia-focused overview of “the changes in Western conceptions of what art is”, see Howard Morphy, ‘Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery’, Humanities Research 8: 1 (2001), pp. 37–90. 39 40

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Concepción and acclaimed by Peruvian indigenista periodicals such as the Boletín Titikaka. A widely published poet, Lago had helped to set up the Sociedad de Escritores de Chile and militated for the creation of the National Literature Prize. Aided by this dense network of contacts, Lago secured sufficient pieces of art, enabling the museum to begin running as a continental operation. In 1945, Lago published a brochure on the “Chilean Section” of the Museum of Popular Art, which included glossy images by the Chilean photographer Antonio Quitana (1904–1972).43 Despite his connections with Chilean and Latin American indigenistas, Lago largely excluded indigenous Chile from this publication. The brochure mentioned textiles from Cautín (decorated ponchos, saddlebags, wall-hangings, and headscarves), but there were no illustrations. Nor did the text note these textiles as having been made by Mapuche people, although it was implicit in the territorial reference. Other objects pictured included pottery from Quinchmalí and Pomaire, baskets from Curicó, woodwork, ironwork, and painted dolls. Perhaps more significantly, despite the title of the museum itself, the publication did not actually use the word “art.” Instead, Lago wrote of “Chilean folkloric objects” and summarised their study as providing a window onto a people “in formation”, i.e. a new, young country, as if separating it from the “old”, developed world. His final paragraph refers to the display pieces as “works of our uneducated people.” Such was the “popular”, and the makers, he asserted, should be admired for their “technical ability” and the “high quality of their imagination and awareness”. Notably patronising, this praise.

Government Interventions and Avant-Garde Challenges to Indigenista Art The first building blocks for MAPA had occurred during Pedro Aguirre Cerda’s Popular Front government (1938–1941). Shortly before Labarca set up the exhibition which would grow into MAPA, this government announced the creation of a new state department dedicated to the “Defense of the Race and Management of Free Time” (November 1939). The initiative had a decidedly nationalist focus and, indeed, went on to become the “Plan de Chilenidad” in 1940. As commented by Patrick 43  Tomas Lago, Museo de Arte Popular: Universidad de Chile, Sección Chilena (Santiago: Editorial Zig Zag, 1945).

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Barr-­Melej, the Popular Front’s “culturally oriented discourse […] centered on the inclusion of marginalized Chileans […] in a more democratic vision of ‘nation.’”44 The “Plan de Chilenidad” said nothing directly about indigenous people. In fact, the unifying “popular” imaginary of Chileanness in many ways reinforced discourses of racial homogeneity.45 Yet, the emphasis on the value of folklore provided a (albeit limited) space for Mapuche  cultural production and it was publicly welcomed by some Mapuche organisers such as Carlos Huayquiñir.46 Furthermore, the story of MAPA—the effort taken to transform a temporary exhibition on American popular art into a permanent museum—indicated an increasing interest not just in Chilean folklore but also the folklore of other countries in the region, and thus we detect a coming together of national(ist) and continental identity discourses. This was further demonstrated in the press coverage given to the public lectures of visiting experts on the subject, such as Gloria Serrano, whose talks on Bolivian and Peruvian folklore in December 1939 attracted large audiences.47 Given this vogue for folklore, it is not surprising to find an article in a 1941 issue of the Ministry of Education’s magazine extolling the benefits of incorporating folklore into classroom activities.48 The author, Gonzalo Latorre Salamanca, described folklore—“customs, games, myths, legends, refrains, proverbs, popular music and song, popular poetry, dance, traditions, pottery, typical dress etc. etc.”—as “the soul of the people” and “an important legacy of the race” (race meaning nation here). Latorre welcomed the surge of scholarship on folklore in recent years and included a suggested reading list for teachers. Two recommended studies focused on indigenous cultures in Chile: Rodolfo Lenz’s Estudios Araucanos and Blanca Santa Cruz Ossa’s Cuentas y Leyendas Araucanas. More pertinently, the author’s discussion of and praise for the work of Santiago’s Experimental School for Children [Escuela Experimental de Niños de Santiago] centred on its dramatisation of the Araucanian legend Licarayen. Children’s theatre, the director was quoted as saying, gave “a new and authentically Chilean feeling” to the play. The magazine included a photograph of the children rehearsing, adorned with feathered headbands,  Barr-Melej, ‘Cowboys and Constructions’, p. 57.  Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises, pp. 40–41. 46  Heraldo Araucano, No. 2, July–August 1941, p. 3. 47  Ercilla, 27 December 1939, p. 8. 48  Gonzalo Latorre Salamanca, ‘El folklore en la educación’, Revista de Educación 1: 2 (1941), pp. 65–69. 44 45

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wrapped in tunics, holding spears, and beating drums. Age of the ­performers apart, it was highly reminiscent of photographs of Valcárcel’s Peruvian Mission of Incaic Art. Through school drama classes, indigenous Chilean folklore was made accessible to children and enacted by children. The itinerant poet Gabriela Mistral, a pioneer in children’s literature in Latin America, wrote as early as 1911 of the natural connection that children had with folkloric tales, of how easily children took to and engaged with them. In her public lectures, Mistral sought to make indigenous folklore accessible to adults too—crucially, adult audiences outside Chile. As shown in Chap. 5, Mistral played an important role in the 1920s in publicising Latin America’s indigenous cultural production to European audiences, through the First International Exhibition of Popular Arts (Prague, 1928). Between January and July 1938, she visited the capital cities of several different countries in the Southern Cone including her own—Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Lima—and gave talks on Chilean Folklore in auditoriums filled with “highly distinguished” people.49 That local newspapers often titled the talk “Araucanian Folklore” indicates the centrality of indigenous voices in the vision of Chile that Mistral promoted. From the full text of the talk Mistral delivered in Montevideo, and the newspaper coverage of her talks in Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Lima, we can see that the content changed little as she and her scripted lecture travelled on from one city to the next.50 Mistral started by reading out several different Araucanian fables and songs. The “Indians” did not need other poets to speak for them, she said, because they had plenty of their own, and always had done. It was “their” poetry and prayers that she reproduced, but it was also “so close to us”, the “us” being mestizo Chileans. “The Chilean always remembers the Indian when he wants to make a show of strength”, she said. The Chilean did “not deny [the Indian’s 49  ‘Gabriela Mistral Habló Hoy Sobre el Foklore Araucano’, La Razón (Buenos Aires), 21 March 1938; ‘En el Teatro Municipal: Gabriela Mistral disertó ayer sobre “el Folklore Chileno”’, El Comercio (Lima) 23 July 1938; ‘La segunda conferencia de Gabriela Mistral estuvo muy concurrido’, La Crónica (Lima) 23 July 1938, p. 6. 50  I am extremely grateful to Elizabeth Horan who gave me these newspaper sources and the full original text (of 25 January 1938) which is 26 pages long and titled “Algunos elementos del folklore chileno”. This was the talk delivered at the Instituto Alfredo Vásquez Acevedo in Montevideo. It is reproduced in Verónica Zondek and Silvia Guerra (eds.), Gabriela Mistral entre los uruguayos: El ojo atravesado (Santiago: LOM, 2007), pp. 72–89.

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presence] in his body”, but he did deny the Indian a place in his “soul”, and yet it was precisely in his soul where the Indian had found “refuge.” Presenting herself as someone who, to the contrary, recognised the Indian “within”, Mistral said: “On the rare occasion that I look in the mirror I do not remember the Indian, but there is never a time when I am alone with my soul and I do not see him. And there comes a time when the masque of Basque-ness that I wear slips away and I am left only with the chemically pure Indian.” That “chemically pure Indian” was a notably male Indian— her public lectures of 1938 referred to “el indio” throughout and, in the original Spanish, “I do not see him” was “no lo veo”—and the choice of Basque, a group indigenous to Spain and France, as her other (albeit superficial) identity, was surely a strategic one.51 Mistral thereby adhered to the notion of racial purity, whilst simultaneously celebrating Chile’s mestizo identity—as long as this allowed for the recovery and recognition, rather than erasure, of indigenous origins (the “subterranean current”). She described indigenous culture as primitive and argued that folklore required “a little laziness and slowness” and thus cut indigeneity and folklore off from the modern and supposedly rational world, wherein people were always in a hurry. But she also stressed how important folklore was in this world, for it acted as a “medicine, an antidote” to the illness of modernisation. And towards the end of the lecture, she reached out beyond the Chilean national scenario to talk about and make Chile part of a larger continental whole. “Without a long register of our folklore”, she said, “we cannot really know ourselves”. Luckily, there were many “loyal men” across the Americas gathering indigenous songs, and prayers, and oral histories, and she was proud to say that Chile—with scholars like Julio Vicuña Cifuentes (1865–1936)—was making an important contribution to this endeavour. People needed to see that “[t]he Indian is not external to us”. The pathway—“the alphabet, the spelling book”—to such recognition was “our folklore.” As noted in the introduction to this book, the Peruvian press widely celebrated Mistral’s lecture at the Teatro Municipal in Lima. Comments in the media sometimes drew on her words to show that Chile was different from other countries. El Comercio, for example, lamented how (until 51  As Elizabeth Horan, and various other researchers have commented, “Mistral strongly identified with those parts of her heritage—Basque, Diaguita, Indian, Jewish—that stood for resistance against oppression”. See Horan, ‘Matrilineage, Matrilanguage: Gabriela Mistral’s Intimate Audience of Women’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 14: 3 (1990), p. 448.

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writers like Mistral took up their cause) scholars tended to ignore the Araucanians especially in contrast to the interest in the Maya and the Toltec and the Quechua peoples.52 In other instances, however, the commentators drew out connections between Chile and Peru—as countries that had been remiss in failing to teach children about the treasure that was national folklore.”53 Not everyone was enthusiastic about indigenista art and literature, however. In an article of 1939, written from Mexico, the Peruvian artist and poet César Moro denounced the hypocrisy and limitations of the kind of realist “indigenista painting” (à la José Sabogal) that had become “alarmingly virulent” in Peru.54 As if painting could help the poverty-­stricken Indians of contemporary Peru, he admonished, especially that “same old image of the Indian in a pre-natal pose, with the quena in his hands, a too obviously countervailing symbol of his dormant virility”. To Moro’s mind, this was a tired narrative that had already been promoted by countless poets “at the service of an exploitative, parasitical [ruling] caste”. He also complained that if an artist dared “to look at the world through eyes that were not those of an intrepid indigenista painter or folkloric writer” he was “immediately deemed a Frenchified devotee of all things foreign and bitter enemy of the Indian”. And “friends of the Indian” were—to the despair of Moro—understood as those “Anglo-Saxon tourists who, watercolours in hand, set out to discover the soul of the Andes”. Moro’s goal was, as Michele Greet has commented, to “perpetuate a global avant-garde that was related to and conversant with its European antecedents, but at the forefront of Latin American artistic innovation.” He sought to establish a “Latin American variant of Surrealism that was at once unique and recognisably surrealist.”55 His was a fundamentally transnational project in which Chileans played a prominent part. In May 1935, Moro co-organised with the Peruvian poet Emilio Adolfo Westphalen (1911–2001) the first exhibition of surrealist art in Latin America at the Academía Alcedo in Lima. This was the same gallery where Martín Chambi 52  ‘En el Teatro Municipal: Gabriela Mistral disertó ayer sobre “el Folklore Chileno”’, El Comercio, 23 July 1938. 53  ‘La segunda conferencia de Gabriela Mistral estuvo muy concurrido’, La Cronica, 23 July 1938, p. 6. 54  César Moro, ‘A propósito de la pintura en Perú’, El Uso de la Palabra, December 1939, pp. 6–7. César Moro was the pseudonym of Alfredo Quíspez Asín. He was living in Mexico at the time. This was the first and only issue of El Uso de la Palabra, co-edited by Moro. 55  Michele Greet, ‘César Moro’s Transnational Surrealism’, Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 7: 1 (2013), pp. 19–51, p. 37.

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had, just two months previously, displayed his photographs alongside the indigenista watercolour paintings of Francisco Olazo. While Moro’s works dominated the show—38 of the 52 were his, “making it essentially a one-­ man show”—there were also contributions by five Chilean artists, who were beginning to experiment with neo-cubism, abstraction, and surrealist automatism.56 Indeed, Chile was more present that any other country apart from Peru.

Art and Anthropology at the Inter-American Indigenista Congresses Despite the success of this 1935 exhibition and its follow up in Mexico City in 1940, the (official) tide seemed to be turning against Moro and his peers in the school of surrealism. The English translation of the proceedings of the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress held in Pátzcuaro, Mexico, the same year as Moro’s “International Surrealist Exhibition”, were illustrated by the kind of realist indigenista art works that Moro decried (see Figs. 7.1 and 7.2).57 The congress made several recommendations about art—focusing on art produced by indigenous people. Resolution XIII insisted that indigenous “artistic authenticity” be protected by government institutions.58 Resolution XIV recommended that the recently established Inter-American Indigenista Institute organise a permanent exhibition in Panama showcasing indigenous artistic production from across the Americas. Resolution XV appealed to national governments to sponsor travelling troupes of indigenous actors, dancers, and musicians, and Resolution XVI urged all American countries to send indigenous ensembles to participate in an inter-American folkloric festival in Mexico City the following year. The overriding aim vis-à-vis indigenous culture was made clear in Resolution XXX: it was to be defended “in order to enrich the cultural heritage of each country.”59 In other words, ­conference delegates 56  The five Chilean artists were Jaime Dvor, Waldo Parraguez, Gabriela Rivadeneira, Carlos Sotomayor, and María Valencia. Ibid., p. 35. 57  Final Act of the First Inter-American Conference on Indian Life (Washington: The U.S. Office of Indian Affairs, 1941). This included a total of 20 illustrations by the Boston-­ born painter Eben Comins (1875–1949)  of named indigenous people from across the Americas. The two images incorporated here are found in the Final Act between p. 16 and p. 17, and between p. 20 and p. 21, respectively. 58  Acta Final del Primer Congreso Interamericano Indigenista, p. 11. 59  Ibid., p. 15.

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Fig. 7.1  Augusto Flores, Mocomoco, Bolivia, September 1938

Fig. 7.2  Venancio and Jesús Chuquichampi, Sicuani, Peru, July 1938

were less interested in indigenous culture per se than in how this could contribute to their respective nations. They also emphasised though—as indicated by Resolutions XIII through XVI—that member states would benefit from working collectively on this (for example, by sharing information with one another and sponsoring indigenous ensembles to visit neighbouring countries); more could be achieved together than alone. In this sense, the endeavour was a national and a hemispheric one.

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Interestingly, cultural heritage was one of the few themes discussed at this (largely white, male- dominated) congress where we see the demands and voices of indigenous peoples incorporated directly. The resolution, promoting a folkloric festival for the forthcoming Inter-American Tourism Congress in Mexico City, celebrated  “the great interest shown by the indigenous groups of Mexico in hosting their brothers of America”. And the recommendation to set up an Inter-American exposition of indigenous popular arts was presented as a response to proposals of “delegates of indigenous tribes”, including “the Cuna of Panama; the Mapuche-­ Araucanian of Chile; the Apache, Tewa, Hopi and Taos of the United States; and the Tzotzil, Tarasca, Huaxteca, Otomí, Mexicana, Mixteca, Zapoteca, Mazahua, Tarahumara, Totonaca and Cora of Mexico”.60 The “Mapuche-Araucanian” delegates representing the government of Chile— Venancio Coñuepán and César Colima—spoke about indigenous arts (as well as land, education, and the justice system) in the paper that they delivered at the conference. They praised Pedro Aguirre Cerda’s government (1938–1941) for having created “an Indigenous Museum in the city of Temuco”, but urged it to do more in this area.61 They also encouraged indigenous museums across the continent to organise exchanges of the art works that they owned.62 The “Indigenous Museum” of which Coñuepán and Colima spoke (the Araucanian Museum of Temuco, now the Regional Museum of Araucanía), was created by state decree on 12 March 1940. This was not much more than month before the Inter-American Indigenista Congress met in Mexico. On 12 February 1940, Carlos Oliver Schneider (general inspector of museums) explained to readers of Temuco’s El Diario Austral that the new museum would teach visitors about the region’s pre-Hispanic past.63 It also, as Schneider wrote in a museum publication, sought to disseminate the “spirit of Chilean nationality” among inhabitants of the “frontier zone”; as was the case at Pátzcuaro, promoting indigenous culture was to serve a greater national purpose.64 Firmly equating indigeneity or Mapucheness with the rural world, the first section of the exhibition was dedicated to the flora and fauna of the region. There was no reference to modern  Ibid., p. 11.  Coñuepán and Colima, ‘Problema indígena de Chile’, p. 4. 62  Ibid., p. 11. 63  ‘Lo que deberá ser el Museo Araucano’, El Diario Austral, 12 February 1940, p. 6. 64  Carlos Oliver Schneider, El Museo Araucano (Temuco: Ediciones Temuco, 1941), p. 21. 60 61

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Mapuche history and the “Conquest and Pacification” of Araucanía was projected as an uncomplicated, civilising process, which Mapuche people embraced. The curators’ decision, moreover, to display the “physical characteristics” of indigenous people suggests their endorsement of ideas about biological determinism. They also seemed keen to  teach visitors about “social hygiene.”65 Adopting the Popular Front’s eugenic rhetoric, the new museum asserted the need to cleanse, educate, and improve the local (indigenous) population. This was perhaps not quite what Coñuepán and Colima wanted to see, although they too (as shown in Part I) at least publicly, or momentarily, brought into the idea of racial uplift. There were also some more inventive ideas being discussed, however. For example, Schneider pledged to show that “static ‘mummy’ museums [were] a thing of the past,” and to this end the last section of the museum’s exhibition aimed to “reunite indigenous people and the region in everything that has inspired artistic creation.”66 Staff also got involved in events outside the museum—events that recognised Mapuche people as political subjects rather than mere objects of curiosity. In 1946, for example, they partook in a commemorative event on Cerro Ñielol paying tribute to Mapuche leaders who rebelled against Chilean occupation in 1881.67 Such developments in the museum sector coincided with shifts occurring in applied anthropology during the 1940s—the move towards an anthropology that involved “clearly expressed values, acted upon by [scholars] who collaborated directly with communities to achieve community-­directed change”68—which the indigenista congress in Pátzcuaro approved and supported in its official resolutions.69 The Second Inter-American Indigenista Congress, held in Cuzco, in June 1949, reinforced the importance of museums as spaces for the promotion of indigenous arts. We see this in its recommendations that “National, Regional and Private Museums collect, conserve, study and teach all aspects of past and present indigenous life” (XVI); that official laws be passed to this effect, so the onus was no longer placed on  Ibid.  Ibid. 67  I discuss this museum and its early activities in The Mapuche in Modern Chile, p. 87. 68  Barbara Rylko-Bauer, Merill Singer and John Van Willigen, ‘Reclaiming Applied Anthropology: Its Past, Present and Future’, American Anthropologist 108: 1 (2006), p. 181. 69  The First Inter-American Indigenista Congress recommended that “American nations […] explore and make use of the teachings of Applied Anthropology” (‘Resolución X’, Acta Final, p. 10), to improve the lives of indigenous peoples. 65 66

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individuals; and that governments enable “the temporary exchange and loans” of “collections of Indigenous Culture and Art”.70 The focus of responsibility was thus national, but the remit for disseminating knowledge remained transnational. This comes across perhaps most emphatically in resolution XVI, which authorised a continent-wide study of each country’s museums—their “ways of working, the legal norms that dictate what they do, the state of their artistic and cultural collections, [and] their research and conservation programmes.” The goal was to ascertain the “potential of museums as mechanisms for circulating [the work and views of] the inter-­American indigenista movement.”71 The importance allocated to indigenous arts is revealed in the conference organisers’ entertainment plans.72 A not insignificant sum was spent on attracting the best indigenous music and theatre groups from the Cuzco region to come and perform for visiting delegates. It was agreed that six ensembles would be chosen in total, with each member paid a salary along with accommodation and transport costs.73 An organising committee was to travel around the region to contract the best groups and help them prepare their performances. An “Art Director” was then to be appointed to assure a set of showpieces that were to be both spectacular and professional. The Peruvian press warmly welcomed such initiatives. El Comercio of Lima, for example, celebrated how these folkloric troupes brought the indigenous ruins in and around Cuzco to life, and testified to the “resilience of the race.”74 As developed in more detail in Part III, the Chilean government sent four official delegates to this congress: Catholic priest Guido Beck de Ramberga, Lieutenant Colonel Gregorio Rodríguez, and Mapuche political leaders Domingo Curaqueo Guaiquilaf and José Inalaf Navarro. It also authorised the attendance of Austrian anthropologist Grete Mostny. Mostny arrived in Chile in 1939, gained Chilean nationality in 1946, and had been working in the National Museum of Natural History in Santiago  Acta Final del Segundo Congreso Indigenista Interamericano, p. 13.  Ibid. 72  The Alberto Giesecke Collection at the Instituto Riva-Agüero in Lima holds scores of documents related to the conference (on Department of Justice and Labour headed paper), because Giesecke was conference treasurer. 73  According to one report entitled “Gastos de organización del congreso”, dated 14 September 1948  and signed by five people on the organising committee including Giesecke, each ensemble was to be paid 1000 soles and they were to be chosen from Pitumares, Quispicanchis, Acomayo, Combapata, Canchis, Chincheros, Canas and Paucatambo. 74  For example, ‘Musica, canto y danza, afirmaciones duraderas de la raza’, El Comercio, 22 June 1949, p. 3. 70 71

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since 1943. From the moment she started at this museum, Mostny sought  to bring indigenous history alive for visitors, especially for children.75 She also began, soon after arriving in Chile, to carry out research on contemporary indigenous communities, rather than focusing solely on prehistory (the subject of much of her published work until then). In the early 1940s, for example, she was invited by Alejandro Lipschutz to ­collaborate on a scientific mission to collect data about the Ona, Yamana and Alakaluf peoples of Tierra del Fuego.76 Lipschutz also called on Ecuadorian anthropologist Antonio Santiana, French anthropologist Louis Robin, and German photographer and filmmaker Hans Helfritz to participate. This transnational research team’s main goals were to gather information about the physical characteristics of indigenous people in the far south of Chile (to establish their racial origins) and to investigate their cultural practices. In many ways, this was traditional anthropology, but the findings triggered concerns about the decrease in the indigenous populations in this region and raised questions about professional hunters being paid to kill Indians. The team was, in short, using anthropology to address immediate social problems. No Peruvians were involved, at least according to existing records, but we know (from Part I) that Lipschutz’s anthropological writings were well received and publicised by Peruvian indigenistas such as Luis Alberto Sánchez. It seems, moreover, that Lipschutz was invited to attend the congress in Cuzco in 1949. He was certainly in touch with key figures involved in the Inter-American Indigenista Institute in Mexico City and he was asked to submit a report on indigenous rights in Chile prior to the congress, which he did.77 Although no documentation exists to prove Lipschutz went to Cuzco, his Austrian-Chilean co-­investigator, Mostny, did go. This suggests she had a good reputation among Peruvian intellectual circles. More indicative of her positive cross-­ border impression, though, is the honorary doctorate in Philosophy that she received from the University of Cuzco whilst she was there.78 75  This was something Mostny could do more extensively when she became director in the 1960s. See Eliana Duran, ‘Homenaje a Grete Mostny Glaser’, Mapocho 31 (1992), p. 256, and Juan Gomez Millas, ‘Apreciación de la labor de Grete Mostny’, Noticiario Mensual 251 (July 1977), p. 9. 76  The project resulted in several publications including Alexander Lipschutz, Grete Mostny, Hans Helfritz, Fidel Jeldes and Margaret Lipschutz, ‘Physical Characteristics of Fuegians’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 5: 3 (1946), pp.  295–322; and Alejandro Lipschutz and Grete Mostny, Cuatro conferencias sobre los indios Fueginos (Santiago: Revista Geográfica de Chile, 1950). 77  Stegeman, To Plow a Lonely Furrow, p. 195. 78  https://geschichte.univie.ac.at/en/persons/grete-mostny-mostny-glaser-profdr.

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Conclusions Existing scholarship both on and beyond Latin America has rightly presented the museum as a vital nation-building institution.79 As shown in this chapter, intellectuals directly involved in museums in early twentieth century Chile and Peru promoted this view: in 1924, for example, Tello pledged that Lima’s new Museum of Peruvian Anthropology would “forg[e] a national consciousness”, and Schneider claimed that the Regional Museum of Araucanía, created in 1940, would “disseminate the spirit of Chilean nationality”. Folklore and popular art have also been widely analysed within the framework of the nation-state—as collective cultural manifestations and practices that help to create what Benedict Anderson has famously referred to as an “imagined” community.80 The consensus among scholars and practitioners alike, however, is that whilst museums (and state-sponsored folkloric performances and exhibitions of popular art) might aim or want to impress a certain (national) narrative upon their visitors or audiences, they do not necessarily succeed in doing so. This is because museum-, art-gallery-, and theatre goers make their own meanings of what they see; there are also many different people involved in creating and mounting a display or a show, each with their own (possibly conflicting) story to tell. In this sense, these sites become forums: “a space for confrontation, experimentation and debate.”81 In line with this way of thinking, this chapter has pointed to how museums, folkloric performances and art exhibitions interrogated and contested, as well as perpetuated, dominant racialised national imaginaries in early- to mid-twentieth century Chile and Peru. They relegated indigenous peoples to the rural world, to the past, sometimes a very distant, already-disappeared or soon-to-disappear past. They presented indigenous peoples as the “soul” of the modern nation yet also distinctly “othered” 79  For example, Jens Andermann, ‘Total Recall: Texts and Corpses; The Museums of Argentinian Narrative’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 6: 1 (1997), pp. 21–32; Patience Schell, ‘Capturing Chile: Santiago’s Museo Nacional during the Nineteenth Century’, Travesia: Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 10: 1 (2001), pp. 45–65; and Regina Duarte, Activist Biology: The National Museum, Politics and Nation Building in Brazil (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016). 80  One excellent example, cited several times in this chapter, is Mendoza, Creating Our Own: Folklore. This work concentrates on regionalist Cuzqueño identity, but also shows how Cuzco claimed to represent the foundations of Peruvian nationhood. 81  Duncan Cameron, ‘The Museum: A Temple or the Forum’, Journal of World History 14: 1 (1972).

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them from it, as mere themes in or objects of artistic and anthropological enquiry. All these actions silenced indigenous peoples as political subjects. We have also seen, though, how some of these same institutional, cultural and political practices connected the indigenous past to the present; how indigenous cultural practice was celebrated as combining tradition with innovation and industry; how indigenous people were acknowledged as producers of art who wanted to show off that art internationally, as well as interact with each other internationally; how indigenous difference could be asserted as a political choice that categorically ruled out erasure in the modern world; and how class and racial categories intersected without the second necessarily being subsumed by the first. Often but not always, indigenous peoples themselves forced this process of interrogation and contestation, often but not always in dialogue with non-indigenous Chileans and Peruvians—as their sponsors, their publicists, their colleagues, their employees or their (paying) audience. So, museums and folkloric companies were state-led and individual-led “contact zones” (to borrow a term from Mary Louise Pratt and James Clifford, who get it, in turn, from the linguistics notion of “contact languages”).82 They enabled a conversation about racial inclusion within Chilean society and within Peruvian society. My argument throughout this chapter has been that they also enabled a conversation between Chile and Peru. To be sure, this was not consistently the case. Visitors to museums often confronted histories of conflict and war, especially in institutions such as Chile’s National Historical Museum, which abounded with paintings and trophy objects related to the War of the Pacific. But, as demonstrated in the detail above, they could equally function as transnational forums—bringing together either Chilean and Peruvian audiences, or Chilean and Peruvian cultural producers, or Chilean and Peruvian social scientists. As an archaeologist, anthropologist, and museum director, working in both countries, Uhle guided Chileans through Peruvian (indigenous) history, and Peruvians through Chilean (indigenous) history. Travelling indigenous troupes, such as the Compañía Lírica Incaica Ccorillacta, took Quechua dramas to Chile; Mapuche leader Aburto Panguilef made the Peruvian indigenista myth of Inca resurrection part of his indigenous rights campaign in Chile; and Mistral educated Peruvian 82  Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession (1991), pp. 33–40; and James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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audiences about Mapuche music and folklore. Surrealist artists of both countries challenged such racialised narratives about the national “soul”, and museums in both countries agreed to exchange indigenous art objects (and knowledge about this art) with each other as part of a broader continental endeavour. The IAAC and MAPA brought indigenous popular art into their more inclusive visions of Peruvian and Chilean national society, but they were also fundamentally “American”, in terms of dissemination and outreach, as well as input and the content of their exhibitions and public events. Such initiatives were championed by international congresses, especially the Inter-American Indigenista Congress—which insisted on the need for cross-border art and knowledge exchange, and the importance of bringing indigenous artists from different countries together. The stories told in all three chapters of Part II point to Chilean-Peruvian collaborative efforts to re-educate people about indigenous history— about both the value of this history and its continuing relevance to the present. In Part III, I move on to formal education policy and schooling. The school is often seen as a nation-building and race-making institution par excellence—more effective than museums because attendance is obligatory, at least for a few years. But, as I will demonstrate, this too becomes an important transnational “contact zone” in early twentieth century Chile and Peru, and one that has the potential, depending on who is in charge, to unmake dominant racial ideologies about indigenous peoples and their place in modern society.

PART III

Indigeneity and Education: Interlocking Ideals of Salvation

Then we’ll be able to send the best kids to study […] So that they may be doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers […] We desperately need Indians who can listen to us, who can teach us and defend us. —Ciro Alegría, 1941

Introduction Peruvian author Ciro Alegría was living in exile in Chile when he wrote El mundo es ancho y ajeno, cited above. The novel was commissioned by the Santiago-based publishing house Editorial Ercilla, which was headed-up by Alegría’s compatriot, Luis Alberto Sánchez.1 Friends in Chile provided financial and emotional support when Alegría was working on the book— just four months, apparently, in order to make the deadline for the Latin American literature competition organised by the New York publishers Farrar & Rinehart.2 The short-list for this prize comprised approximately twenty novels, one from each Latin American country. Despite being 1  In 1937, Raul Silva Castro and Willis Knapp Jones claimed Editorial Ercilla was “turning out eight weekly magazines with a combined circulation of 170,000 and publishing books at the prodigious rate of more than one new title a day”. See ‘Chile: Publishing Center of the Spanish-Speaking World’, Books Abroad 11: 2 (1937), pp. 164–166. Prior to El mundo es ancho y ajeno, Alegría had published two other novels in Chile: La serpiente de oro with Nascimento (1935), and Los perros hambrientos with Zig-Zag (1938). 2  Gerald Martin, ‘Narrative since 1920’, in Leslie Bethell, ed., A Cultural History of Latin America: Literature, Music and the Visual Arts in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 151.

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­ ritten by a Peruvian, El mundo es ancho y ajeno was Chile’s chosen nomiw nation. It won. As interpreted by literary critic Rene Prieto, Alegría’s indigenista novel suggests “that the only way out for the Indian is through education, a process that entails learning about the hegemony in power and, in so doing, becoming culturally mestizo.”3 The words in the epigraph are those of Rosendo Maqui, fictional mayor of the indigenous community of Rumi and the central protagonist of the story. About half-way through the narrative, Maqui initiates a project to build a school for Rumi. To his mind, education is the blueprint for salvation. It is a pathway to social mobility. With a good education, the best students will have the chance to become well-paid and respected professionals—doctors, engineers, lawyers, or teachers. They will also take on the role of mediators and translators for their families and friends in Rumi, as the latter struggle to defend their lands against an avaricious neighbouring estate-owner Don Álvaro Amenábar y Roldán. The students will convey the community’s problems and demands to the authorities; they will also pass on the knowledge and skills they acquire at school to the community. They will, as Maqui envisages it, be able to stand up for the community. Education, characterised thus, not only entails “learning about the hegemony in power” (Prieto), but also accessing the intellectual resources needed to challenge existing power relations. It can serve as a tool for political empowerment, as well as social mobility. Unfortunately, in the story that Alegría tells, the school is left half-built and Maqui’s hopes are not realised because he and his people are forced to leave Rumi. Faced with a landowning elite that is staunchly opposed to the emancipation of the Indian, Maqui’s project is impossible. But he does not accept that this is how things have to be, and El mundo es ancho y ajeno becomes a story of indigenous rebellion.4

3  Rene Prieto, Miguel Angel Asturia’s Archaeology of Return (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 38. 4  Priscilla Archibald argues that Alegría somewhat romanticises the “Indians” in the novel as “unwilling or passive rebels, forced into this position by unscrupulous Andean authorities”. See Imagining Modernity in the Andes (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011), p. 62.

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Both Alegría and Sánchez were members of APRA.5 The “most complete description of the Aprista doctrine and program”, El antiimperialismo y el APRA (1936), was authored by its leader Haya de la Torre and published by the same Editorial Ercilla in Chile that published El mundo es ancho y ajeno.6 Here too was extolled the transformative power of ­education, something which Haya first glimpsed and reflected on whilst working for the Mexican Secretary of Education, José Vasconcelos, in the early 1920s. As noted in Part I, he had been exiled to Mexico and was staying with Gabriela Mistral, who had been invited to take part in Vasconcelos’s rural education campaign, and who helped Haya to establish connections to the Mexican government.7 The Indian was “the great base of our exploited class”, Haya wrote in El antiimperialismo y el APRA; the “rehabilitation, renovation and justice” that APRA sought for Peru was impossible without “fundamentally facing the economic problem of our Indian”, and schooling was to play a major role in this endeavour.8 Expanded and reformed, education would—as Haya saw it—rescue the Indian from his state of ignorance. It would provide training in key skills and knowledge about the culture that governed the country. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, the APRA leader once told Alegría that he was thinking of building a monument to Rosendo Maqui. As Alegría explained to Mistral, in a letter of January 1948, Maqui was “the old Indian man of my novel through whom I’ve tried to demonstrate the virtues of our race”.9 In this instance “our race” was a shared cultural and spiritual collective rooted in the (indigenous) Andes—a racial collective which transcended

5  Sánchez remained loyal to APRA throughout his life. Alegría separated from the party in the late 1940s. The novelist explained his decision in a letter to Gabriela Mistral, dated 5 January 1948. This is accessible through the Archivo del Escritor of Chile’s Biblioteca Nacional Digital http://www.bibliotecanacionaldigital.gob.cl/bnd/623/w3-­article-­143933.html (last accessed 6 September 2021). 6  García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre, p. 35. Haya wrote the book in Mexico in 1928, but it was not published until 1936. 7  Ibid., p. 22. 8  Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, El antiimperialismo y el APRA (Santiago: Editorial Ercilla, 1936), pp. 177–181. 9  Letter from Alegría to Mistral, dated 26 January 1948. Available at http://www.bibliotecanacionaldigital.gob.cl/bnd/623/w3-article-143935.html (last accessed 6 September 2021).

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modern nation-­state boundaries.10 Alegría and Mistral saw themselves as cultural mestizos—not quite like Maqui, who was born in an indigenous community and learned the ways of criollo Peru, but rather as people who could pass as Europeans but identified with indigenous culture and history. One of the key points to take from these interconnected histories is that Peruvian conversations about race and education were circulating in Chile during the 1930s and 1940s, not least because of the significant number of Peruvian Aprista exiles living there at the time. A central strand of my argument in Part III is that the Chilean establishment was not just allowing this conversation to take place; it was promoting it—through its publishing houses, its submissions for international literary competitions and, as I will show in the following chapters, government sponsored magazines such as the Revista de Educación. Crucially, the conversation was not exclusive to Peruvians. Peruvian intellectuals were talking to and exchanging ideas with Chilean intellectuals. Their discussions were as likely to be about Chile as Peru, they wrote in Peruvian periodicals about what they saw in Chile, and they also contributed directly to educational initiatives in their host country. Part III also demonstrates that Chileans were likewise observing, commenting on, and learning from education reforms in Peru. What emerges from the primary materials, in short, is a two-way exchange, and a sense that each drew on—and were consequently shaped by—the experiences of the other. Furthermore, this dialogue was not limited to the 1930s and 1940s, by which point Chile and Peru had re-established diplomatic relations; as I demonstrate, it dates back at least to the early 1900s. Sometimes (similarly to previous chapters) the Chilean-­Peruvian connections that I interrogate occurred through others and are detectable only as part of an analysis of broader continental or hemispheric conversations. The United States featured prominently in these conversations. So too did Mexico. The first three chapters of Part III (Chaps. 8, 9, and 10) are organised around some of the most significant developments in education debates and policy making in early twentieth century Latin America: state-funded obligatory primary schooling; the “New Education” or “New School” approach; and indigenous-led education projects. The last chapter then serves almost as an epilogue by looking at how these all came (or did not 10  As Alegría tells it in his homage to Mistral on the tenth anniversary of her death, the Chilean poet “sympathised with the Peruvian Indians and the empire of Tahuantisuyo”. Theirs was, Alegría said, a “friendship that emerged out of [ancient] ancestral America”. See Gabriela Mistral Intima, pp. 12–13.

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come) together through the Inter-American Indigenista Congresses. The chapters are partially but not seamlessly chronologically ordered. Chapter 8 primarily covers 1900–1920, but dips into the late 1920s at the end. Chapter 9 centres on the 1920s and 1930s. The indigenous-led education projects examined in Chap. 10 date from the early 1900s through to 1950. And finally, the focus of Chap. 11 is the 1940s. My aim is to show that new initiatives in education policy often took place concurrently rather than sequentially, and that weaving all the different conversations together was the notion of education as salvation. By the early twentieth century many Latin American intellectuals concurred that education was the solution to the “Indian problem”—as commented by Marisol de la Cadena, this was a period when culturalist definitions of race were becoming increasingly prominent and, in such a context, education was endowed with “almost eugenic might”11—but there was a great diversity of views as to the exact nature of that problem, how education was to solve it, and what education should look like. This continued to be a reality during the first half of the twentieth century, if not beyond. As in Parts I and II, scores of different actors appear in the forthcoming pages. In comparison with Part II on race and cultural heritage, indigenous people have a more pronounced vocal presence in the primary source materials discussed here, especially in Chaps. 10 and 11, where they feature as teachers, political activists, church members, parliamentary representatives, and (international) congress delegates. In documenting this presence, I build on a rich historical scholarship that has already explored the ambiguities and complexities of state education policies (which depended on many different actors and played out differently in different places), as well as of indigenous engagement with education in modern Latin America.12 Though we see some transnational connections emerge  de la Cadena, ‘Reconstructing Race…’, p. 17.  de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos; Esteban Ticona Alejo, ‘Education and Decolonization in the Work of Aymara Activist Eduardo Leandro Nina Qhispi’, in Gotkowitz (ed.), Histories of Race and Racism, pp.  240–253; Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940 (Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1997); Brooke Larson, ‘Forging the Unlettered Indian: The Pedagogy of Race in the Bolivian Andes’ in Gotkowitz (ed.), Histories of Race and Racism, pp.  134–156; Pablo Mariman, Demanda por educación en el movimiento Mapuche en Chile, 1910–1995 (Ediciones Relmu, 1995); Andrés Donoso Romo, Educación y nación al sur de la frontera: organizaciones mapuche en el umbral de nuestra contemporaneidad, 1880–1930 (Santiago: Pehuen Editores, 2008); Romina Green, To Govern is to Educate: Race, Education and Colonization in Araucanía, 1883–1920 (PhD thesis, UC Urvine, 2018). 11 12

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in the detail of the histories being told in these works, the focus is the nation and contested ideas about what that nation should look like.13 In the context of debates about national progress and modernisation, the existing scholarship shows how indigenous education assumed two contrasting roles, both transformative. Either outwardly denying or merely avoiding biological conceptions of racial inheritance, governments across the region proclaimed the power of education to “modernise”, “civilise” and, in many cases, “de-Indianise” the Indian. Following this line of thought, backward, ignorant “Indians” that attended school would become law-abiding, disciplined, productive workers and consumers. Indigenous organisations often drew on this same discourse of racial uplift for the purpose of economic progress to justify their demands for better access to education. They also, however—along with many non-­indigenous intellectuals—underscored the role of education in indigenous political mobilisation, and the ways in which education strengthened their position in the broader contest over social citizenship. Education could function as a colonising tool, but it could also—as Alegría purported through Rosendo Maqui—be an instrument for decolonisation: a pathway to increased self-­ esteem, enabling indigenous people to defend their rights, challenge the status-quo and assert indigenous autonomy. In the following chapters, I follow this double-edged sword version of the history of indigenous education in Latin America. Clearly, national context (historical specificities, who was in government, internal political disputes) was central to the changes that took place in Chile and Peru over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, and I elaborate on the nationalist dimensions of education debates in each country. However, the main thrust of my argument is that national debates about education were taking place within, fed into, and were shaped by broader continental, hemispheric, and trans-Atlantic conversations and policy developments. These conversations and policy developments were both linked to race and also about much more than race: the “New School” approach, promoted by U.S. and European education philosophers; the expansion of Anglican Protestantism and Pentecostalism in Latin America; the growth 13  Larson, for example, notes that Bolivia’s 1908 “Plan General de Educación” included scholarships for Bolivian trainee teachers to travel to Europe, the U.S., Argentina, and Chile to learn new teaching methods. She also includes a long list of foreign specialists contracted to help develop education programmes in Bolivia. Several were from Chile. See ‘Forging the unlettered Indian…’, pp. 171–173.

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(and attempted suppression) of labour movements and leftist parties in the context of the Great Depression; and the emergence of a strong developmentalist agenda during and after the Second World War. In probing the transnational dimension of debates about indigenous education, I bring to light the great quantity and diversity of individual actors involved in the elaboration, implementation and indeed combatting of official state policy: community organisers, teachers, local governors, government ministers, diplomats, literary figures, and more besides. This, in and of itself, helps us to see beyond the institutional nature of education reform. In many ways, at an official level what we see is a lack of achievement, a failure to implement change, a breakdown in dialogue—and thus how ideas do not travel as well as how they do. Chapter 8 reads the Chilean and Peruvian education reform laws of 1920 alongside one another and investigates the racialised dimensions of the language being used in the official documentation. It investigates some of the key figures involved, and how they fitted into the bigger picture of pedagogic networks of early twentieth-century Latin America. In the process, it shows how the United States served as a critical point of reference for Latin Americans as they debated the transformative potential of education. Chapter 9 then analyses intellectual engagements with the “New School” approach through the Revista de Educación (Chile), Amauta (Peru) and Boletín Titikaka (Peru). These magazines expose Chileans’ interest in what was happening in Peru, and—vice versa— Peruvians’ interest (and involvement) in what was happening in Chile. We also get a sense of Chilean and Peruvian intellectuals’ mutual enthusiasm for the projects underway in post-revolutionary Mexico. Particularly in the 1930s, Mexico seems to take over from or at least compete with the U.S. as a source of inspiration for education reformers. Chapter 10 concentrates on indigenous-driven education initiatives in Peru and Chile. Capitalising on governments’ purported support for a more active and inclusive citizenship (set against a background of continent-­wide concerns about the “social question”), indigenous communities and political organisations asserted their right to have a say about what kind of education they received, and indigenous education became as much about who was delivering and overseeing the teaching, as who was benefitting from it. From the primary source materials available, there is little evidence of indigenous activists in Chile and Peru talking directly to one another about education in the early twentieth century, but they shared the experience of, participated in, and indirectly came together

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through the spread of Protestantism, as well as the growing leftist labour movement, both of which interconnected with education and were fundamentally transnational phenomena. The final chapter of Part III investigates the debates about indigenous education taking place at the First and Second Inter-American Indigenista Congresses (in Patzcuaro, Mexico, 1940, and Cuzco, Peru, 1949). It explores how these conversations travelled back to Chile and Peru, and thus re-emphasises the connection between transnational intellectual conversations and the formulation of national policy towards indigenous peoples. In the case of Chile, it shows that indigenous peoples were important participants in these transnational intellectual discussions, and that this participation was deemed worthy of coverage by the Peruvian press.

CHAPTER 8

Expanding the Estado Docente: Modernisation, Nationalism and U.S. Connections

The “Soldiers of the Republic” pictured below (Fig.  8.1), looking like convicts in prison or adolescents in a workhouse, were being taught to read and write in a “barrack school” in the northern Chilean city of Antofagasta, annexed from Bolivia during the War of the Pacific. The postcard’s label, authored by the Hispanic Society of America, implies that the “mostly Indian boys” had not received a formal education before joining the army. The photograph was taken around 1920. This was the year that the government of Juan Luis Sanfuentes introduced, by way of Law 3654, a system of free and obligatory primary schooling for all Chilean children between six and fourteen years old.1 That same year the second government of Augusto Leguía in Peru passed a new Organic Law of Education, re-affirming that four years of primary schooling was mandatory for all children up to the age of fourteen.2 Chapter 8 discusses the build-up to, passage of, and debates surrounding these laws of 1920  in Chile and Peru, which—in line with efforts across Latin America—attempted to create a more stable and effective education system, a modernised system, with more children attending

1  Lei No. 3654 sobre Educación Primaria Obligatoria (Santiago: Imprenta Lagunas & Co., 1921). Published initially in Diario Oficial on 26 August 1920. 2  Ley orgánica de enseñanza promulgada por el poder ejecutivo en cumplimiento de la ley no. 4004. Edición oficial (Lima: Imprenta Americana, 1920).

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Fig. 8.1  “CHILE—Antofagasta. Soldiers of the Republic, mostly Indian boys from the mountains attending the barrack school where they are taught to read and write”. The Hispanic Society of America, Postcard Collection, ca. 1920. H-112. Courtesy of the Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin

schools, and more centralised control of the teaching done in them.3 It digs into the racial dimensions of the (oft-nationalistic) language of the new legislation in Chile and Peru, and of that used by some of the different intellectual and political figures involved in making sure this legislation came about: the pronounced belief in environmental determinism (as opposed to biological determinism) and in the possibility of racial uplift. It focuses on the widely debated question as to whether the state should provide a separate (special) education for indigenous people. On what basis was this promoted? What would it look like? And what was it was supposed to achieve? References to developments in the U.S. loomed large in such discussions. This first chapter of Part III analyses how the

3  In 1921, the Mexican state created the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP), hoping “to spread schooling throughout the country, especially to rural and indigenous areas”; it also aimed to “secure federal control over instruction.” See Rosemblatt, The Science and Politics of Race, p. 45.

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U.S. featured in and impacted upon Chilean and Peruvian debates about indigenous education. It introduces readers to Darío Enrique Salas Díaz (1881–1941) and Manuel Vicente Villarán Godoy (1873–1958) who took on major leadership roles in educational administration in Chile and Peru respectively. In Chile, Salas Díaz’s interlocutors included fellow Radical Party members Amanda Labarca, Valentín Letelier (both of whom have already featured in Part II) and Malaquías Concha Ortiz (1859–1921). They also included U.S. education philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952), and several Mapuche educators and political organisers, such as Manuel Antonio Neculmán (1854–1946) and Manuel Manquilef (prominent in Part I). As shown below, these indigenous activists were, in turn, part of a broader conversation about schooling in southern Chile with historian Tomás Guevara (1865–1935), German ethno-linguist Rodolfo Lenz (1863–1938), and Canadian Anglican missionary Carlos Sadleir (1860–1935). In Peru, we see Pennsylvania graduate Alberto Giesecke, whose efforts to market Cuzco as a Mecca of tourism was discussed in Chap. 6, take on a starring role in educational developments. He left the U.S. for Peru in 1909 and was still there when he died in 1968. Another important protagonist in Chap. 8, is Mapuche schoolteacher and politician Arturo Huenchullán Medel (1901–1978), who—like Giesecke in Peru, but from the perspective of an indigenous outsider—translated education policy in the U.S. for a Chilean readership.

Indigenous Demands for Education Indigenous leaders in early twentieth century Chile and Peru made frequent demands for increased access to education. Manuel Antonio Neculmán and Manuel Manquilef—founding members of the Caupolicán Society—were themselves trained as teachers and, in their public proclamations, repeatedly urged state authorities to provide more schools for indigenous children (and adults). “The best way to improve the moral and material conditions of our descendants, and incorporate them into […] civilisation”, the organisation pronounced in July 1910, was to provide them with an education.4 In 1916, Manuel Aburto Panguilef—then leader of the Mapuche Mutual Protection Society—organised a tour for his Araucanian Theatre Company (see Part II). Almost every newspaper 4

 La Epoca, 26 July 1910, cited in Donoso Romo, Educación y nación, pp. 126–127.

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report on its performances stated that the money raised from ticket sales would be put toward the construction of a school for indigenous people in Loncoche. When talking to the press, Aburto stressed that the new school would benefit the entire population of Loncoche: its teaching and apprentice schemes were to be exclusive to Mapuche students, but the education and economic well-being of the Mapuche was crucial to the progress of the town.5 It seems that such publicity paid off, not just locally but on a national level, for Aburto later reported how well received the Loncoche school project had been by “the people of Valparaíso”, whose League of Workers’ Societies had started a fund-raising campaign for it.6 On the centenary of Peruvian national independence in 1921, the newly established Tawantinsuyu Pro-Indigenous Rights Committee—“an association of Lima-based pro-Indian ideologues, radical provincial indigenistas, and self-identified indigenous leaders of diverse tendencies”—similarly emphasised the urgency of indigenous education.7 Proclaiming support for President Leguía, who had endorsed the Committee’s First Indigenous Congress, its leaders celebrated 28 July 1921 “as the point of departure of a new era” and in this new era, they said, it was “necessary [for Indians] to be literate”. The organised community should support its school because, with schooling, “the fate of the Indian would change.”8 Key intellectual and political figures in Peru acknowledged these demands. Interviewed by the Lima daily El Comercio in 1908, Villarán Godoy (Minister of Education between 1906 and 1908), spoke of a letter that the indigenous people of Chucuito, Puno, had recently sent to the President of the Republic, protesting how difficult it was to get an education. The petitioners, he said, showed—in the quoted words of their teacher—a “fervent desire to secure an education for our children and to make conscious citizens of them.”9 Peruvian Congressman Alberto Zaa took a slightly more threatening approach in 1916, citing the rebellions that had recently taken place in Huancané, Samán and Juliaca. These were sparked by the land problem, he said, but also by the difficulties people were having in getting an education for themselves and their children.  Crow, The Mapuche in Modern Chile, p. 72.  ‘Los fines que persigue la Federación Araucana de Loncoche’, El Mercurio 20 January 1923, pp. 14–15. 7  de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos, p. 89. 8  In ibid., p. 90. 9  Villarán, ‘Entrevista’, El Comercio, 21 September 1908. 5 6

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Zaa’s point was that indigenous people would continue to protest and potentially act violently if measures were not taken to improve education provision.10 In a letter of 1912, the Canadian pastor Carlos Sadleir, who had set up Anglican missionary schools in Quepe and Chol-Chol in southern Chile, wrote to the ethno-linguist and folklorist Rodolfo Lenz about an “Araucanian chief”, whom he had just met. Sadleir was delighted to pass on the news that this man’s whole family were literate in Spanish. The chief’s brother had been sent away to a government-run school in La Unión, and on returning home taught all his siblings how to read and write. “If all Chileans and foreign settlers were possessed by the same enthusiasm for education as this indigenous man”, Sadleir exclaimed, “the problem of obligatory education would be easily resolved.” (Presumably, he meant there would be no need to make it obligatory). Sadleir also spoke to Lenz of cacique Ambrosio Paillalef who taught his sons and daughters to read and write, and of the “youngsters” of Carürüngi—“a real blessing to the neighbourhood”—who, after completing schooling away from home, returned to the community and set up their own school.11 The laws of 1920 were not a direct response to indigenous demands, but these could be used to justify the need for expanded education coverage.

Shared Official Vocabularies The language of both new educational codes of 1920 was largely technical. Most of the 37 pages of the Chilean law focused on who was responsible for what within the education establishment; they discussed teachers’ pay, detailing what level of training and responsibility equated with what salary; they also outlined the sanctions to be imposed for non-attendance. The latter was significant. One of the overriding messages of both the Chilean and Peruvian laws was not just that the state had the obligation to provide and oversee an education that was free (meaning state education budgets in each country increased substantially),12 but also that parents  ‘En pro de la raza indígena’, La Voz del Obrero II: 39 (Puno), 30 June 1916, p. 4.  Letter dated 12 September 1912, reproduced in Menard and Pavez, eds., Mapuche y Anglicanos, p. 181. 12  According to Robert Austin, the Chilean state’s investment in education “more than trebled in real terms in the decade 1920–1930”. See The State, Literacy and Popular Education in Chile, p. 39. 10 11

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and carers had the obligation to ensure children received this education, and that their efforts would be monitored.13 It was presented as a ­contract—a contract that had some positive results: in Chile, for example, the percentage of enrolled children regularly attending school increased from 61.4% in 1920, to 70.5% in 1930.14 The wider discussions and draft legislative proposals related to mandatory schooling included some slightly more emotive language and underscored the connections between education and nationalism. According to Article 290 of the Peruvian “Proyecto de Ley” (the law presented to Congress for approval), the main objective of schooling was to “awaken and develop a love of […] the Fatherland.” Pedro Aguirre Cerda, who was Minister of Public Instruction under Sanfuentes in Chile and had previously been a teacher himself, similarly embraced the nationalising potential of education: in a report to Congress in 1918, he asserted that “teaching at all levels […] should be geared towards the training of the citizen”; it should promote “solidarity” and a “spirit of cooperation”, and “unite Chileans in the fervent and fundamental belief that it is essential to dedicate our energy to the conservation, well-being and perfecting of our fatherland”.15 And, of course, there was a direct correlation between education and citizenship, in that in both Chile and Peru at the time one had to be literate to vote; with the ability to read and write, acquired at school, people could have a say in who was to take on the responsibility of “perfecting” the “fatherland”. As historian Carlos Newman comments, the increased provision of schooling was to come “about within a homogenous institutional framework”: the Estado Docente [Teaching State] was reformulated as the “principal vehicle of educational services”; it also “determined the contents of the curricula.”16 One of the predominant ideologies behind this move 13  In Chile, school enrolment increased from 6.4% of the total population in 1900 to 12.4% in 1930. In Peru it increased from 2.5% in 1900 to 8.3% in 1930. Overall, across the continent, school enrolment increased from 5.2% in 1900 to 9.4% in 1930. See Carlos Newland, ‘The Estado Docente and its Expansion: Spanish American Elementary Education, 1900–1950’, Journal of Latin American Studies 26: 2 (1994), pp. 450–452. 14  The new legislation aimed to increase enrolment and to make sure enrolment meant attendance. Many parents in poor and rural areas enrolled their children in school but did not send them, because of the difficulty of getting to school or because they needed their children to work. See Francisca Rengifo et al., ‘Managing the 1920s’ Chilean Educational Crisis: A Historical View Combined with Machine Learning’, PLoSONE, 13: 5, May 2018. 15  Cited in Donoso Romo, Educación y nación, p. 85. 16  Newland, ‘The Estado Docente and its Expansion’, p. 449.

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toward a more centralised, hierarchical teaching administration, Newman contends, was positivism. Widely adapted and adopted in the region from the late nineteenth century, this was far from “a unified philosophical position”.17 It was different in Latin America to the U.S. and Europe, and it varied within Latin America according to national contexts, and yet scholars largely agree on the practical and disciplinary inclinations of positivism in the region. Positivist pedagogues and education leaders, such as Salas Díaz in Chile and Villarán Godoy in Peru, asserted that reformed state-led education—with more practical and technical subjects—would bring about greater political cohesiveness, economic growth, and the general modernisation of society. The main purpose of schooling, as they saw it, was to improve the nation through economic development. Interestingly, the nationalist orientation of such changes did not prevent Chile or Peru from basing their reforms on foreign education models, not least that of the United States.

Darío Salas in Chile: Education as Social Progress Darío Salas, who was key to the passage and implementation of the 1920 law in Chile, came from Puerto Saavedra, in the heartland of historic Mapuche territory. His teaching career started at the Escuela Normal in Chillán, the same teacher training institute that Mapuche political leader Manuel Manquilef attended (just a couple of years after him). After Chillán, Salas studied at the Instituto Pedagógico in Santiago, specialising as a teacher of French and Spanish, and in 1905 went on to do his doctoral studies at Columbia University, New York, where he apparently met and conversed with John Dewey, “the most significant educational philosopher of the 20th century.”18 As a proponent of the “New School” approach, Dewey argued for an educational structure that struck a balance between delivering knowledge and paying attention to the interests and experiences of the student. It was important to him that a child realise their full potential as individuals, but 17  Jorge J. E. Gracia, ‘Importance of the History of Ideas in Latin America: Zea’s Positivism in Mexico’, Journal of the History of Ideas 31: 1 (1975), p. 179. 18  Thomas D.  Fallace, ‘Was John Dewey Ethnocentric?’, Educational Researcher 39: 6 (2010), p. 471. See also Caiceo Escudero, Jaime, ‘Genesis y desarrollo de la pedagogía de Dewey en Chile’, Espacio, Tiempo y Educación 3: 2 (2016), pp. 131–155; and Rosa Bruno-­ Jofré and Jürgen Schriewer, The Global Reception of John Dewey’s Thought: Multiple Refractions through Time and Space (New York: Routledge, 2012).

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he also wanted them to use the skills learned in school for the greater collective good. To this end, whilst not entirely condemning the traditionally intellectual classroom-based approach, he advocated for a more practical, active education. The belief in education as a means of social and human progress, and the subsequent view that school curricula needed to be more pragmatic and serve the material needs of society, overlap with positivist ideology in some ways. Indeed, in Salas we see the two come together, or at least some aspects of the two, but they were far from the same thing. Advocates of the “New [or Active or Progressive] School” sought to create a climate of freedom, which ran contrary to positivism’s focus on discipline, and their belief in community-oriented schools, where students were protagonists of the learning process, did not tally with positivists’ enthusiasm for state-led and state-controlled education.19 I will come back to the “New School” movement in more detail in Chap. 9. For the moment, my aim is to highlight the broader pedagogical networks and conversations of which Salas was part, and the fact that these included U.S. educational philosophers like Dewey, whose writings circulated widely in early twentieth century Latin America. They partly circulated because of Salas, who published a Spanish translation of My Pedagogical Creed (1897) in Chile shortly after his return from the U.S. in 1907.20 They were also disseminated by Chilean pedagogist Amanda Labarca who, like Salas, studied at Columbia University, and subsequently published on the new U.S. methods of education in journals such as Chile’s Revista de Educación Nacional.21 Dewey was also in contact with many Peruvian educators and policy makers, and in this way, he functioned (indirectly) as a connector between Chileans and Peruvians.22 In other words, it is still a South-South dialogue being mapped out here, but one that took place in the U.S. or via people of the U.S. Michela Coletta has already shown how in early twentieth-century Chile “the U.S. model of economic progress was quickly replacing the emulation of European intellectualism”.23 She delves into the debates taking place between figures such as Enrique Molina Garmedia (1871–1956),  Newland, ‘The Estado Docente and its Expansion’, p. 440.  Caiceo Escudero, ‘Genesis y Desarrollo…’, p. 140. 21  For example, Amanda Labarca, ‘La moderna arquitectura escolar en los Estados Unidos’, Revista de Educación Nacional 7 (September 1912), pp. 372–384. 22  Mercedes Giesecke, ‘Escuela Nueva y antropología aplicada: La educación rural en el Perú en las decadas de 1920 y 1930’, Antropologica 34: 36 (2016), pp. 31–52. 23  Coletta, Decadent Modernity, p. 104. 19 20

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who promoted the humanist (intellectual) tradition, and Luis Galdames (1881–1941) and Francisco Antonio Encinas (1874–1965), who were dismayed at what they saw as Chile’s moral and economic crisis, and argued that, to overcome such a crisis, education needed to become more practical and technical, “without giving up the scientific approach”.24 Coletta contrasts Chile, which “embraced economic nationalism” and “ostensibly and increasingly looked towards the U.S.”, with the River Plate which was “largely part of a revival of Krausismo”, a philosophy based on the defence of academic freedom and tolerance in the face of dogmatism that was widespread in Restoration Spain.25 In Argentina, discussions about education focused on the need to assimilate large numbers of immigrants and promoted “the idea of the nation as a linguistic unity”, whilst Uruguay developed a meso-regional outlook. Chile is often compared with these Southern Cone countries. It is rarely compared with Peru, and yet what we see happening in Chile in the early twentieth century, in terms of intellectuals and policy makers looking to the U.S. as a model for economic progress and thus also for education, was very similar to the debates and developments taking place in Peru. This chapter draws out some of the similarities and connections, looking at each country in turn, and centring-in on the proclaimed desire to “civilise” indigenous people. In 1918, Salas was appointed Director General of Primary Education in Chile. He stayed in this post until 1927. In El problema nacional, first published in 1917, he argued that the main goal of education was “social efficiency”. Education needed to be universal and obligatory, and it was to be provided by the state. This would allow for equality of opportunity and “preparation for democratic life”. Education was to be vocational—so not merely maths, literacy, and science—and this kind of education would help to improve “the health and the strength of our race”. In this instance, Salas equated race with nationality; he was talking about the raza chilena. Universal, obligatory, state-led education was to provide a “productive” labour force for the nation, develop “social virtues”, and make each member of the collective “a citizen and a patriot”.26 To be “a citizen and a

 Ibid., p. 102.  Ibid., p. 113. 26  Dario Salas, El problema nacional [1917] (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1967), p. 219. 24 25

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patriot” was to be disciplined, obedient and hard-working; it meant making a substantive economic contribution to the nation. Despite growing up in southern Chile and developing connections with Mapuche organisations such as the Sociedad Caupolicán,27 Salas’s law on compulsory primary education made no explicit references to indigenous peoples. Beyond splitting them into girls and boys, it did not distinguish among the thousands of children who it obliged to go to school for at least four years of their lives. The teaching was, in the main, to be standardised across the nation. The subjects included: reading and writing; the national language; Christian doctrine; hygiene; physical education, and singing; line and geometric drawing; manual labour for boys; needlework for girls; calculation, the metric system and elemental notions of arithmetic; national geography and history, and elemental notions of general history and geography, especially commercial and industrial geography; elemental notions of the natural and physical sciences; civic education; and elemental notions of common law and political economy.28 The official document did refer to regional diversity—to the different kinds of areas where the schools were located—and it noted where and how this could be taken into account. The natural and physical sciences, for example, were “to be taught according to the economic needs of the region or the school, so that the student can apply the lessons of the teacher to real life.”29 But there was no direct mention of cultural, ethnic, or racial diversity. Such omissions coincided with the long-held views of Valentín Letelier, who co-founded the Instituto Pedagógico of the University of Chile, was rector of that same university between 1906 and 1913 (during which time he helped to organise the First Pan-American Scientific Congress discussed in Part II), twice served on the Council of Public Education, and died shortly before the passage of the 1920 law: “To not insist on the homogenisation and harmonisation of our education system, is to sow turmoil among the people and sorrow in the soul.”30 The desire for uniformity— for a kind of standard rule-book that all students could follow—merges here with a discourse of social control, which co-existed with the notion 27  Salas attended the first anniversary celebrations of the Sociedad Caupolican in the Bar Aleman in Temuco on 1st July 1911. El Diario Austral 12 July 1911. 28  Lei No. 3654, p. 7. 29  Ibid., p. 8. 30  Valentín Letelier, Filosofia de la educación [1892] (Buenos Aires: Cabut Editores, 1927), p. 160.

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of education as salvation, in that governing elites often equated schooling with crime prevention. This discourse of social control was itself fundamentally transnational, as we see with initiatives such as the ­ International Police Conference of 1920 in Buenos Aires, which brought together representatives from across South America to “forge an agreement that would facilitate policing across and within borders of the various signatories and encourage them to coordinate their police efforts to suppress subversion”.31 That schooling could and should be used to contain dissent and produce compliant, law-abiding citizens was presented more forcefully still by senator Malaquías Concha Ortiz, when mandatory primary education was being debated in congress on 11 June 1918: “Allow me to make a rather vulgar but nonetheless illustrative comparison. We should try to spread education among the people, just as we try to avoid the hazardous, threatening nature of a wild animal by taming it and making it useful; an illiterate who has learnt his duties and rights is transformed from a dangerous ignoramus into a conscious and tranquil citizen.”32 The law of 1920 was a long time coming in Chile.33 Intellectuals and politicians had been pushing for the expansion of education coverage and the modernisation of the teaching system since at least 1900, and whilst indigenous people were not explicitly mentioned in the final document, many public figures brought the specifics of indigenous education into the broader discussion. In 1902, the director of the Liceo de Hombres of Temuco, Tomás Guevara, presented a paper on “Indigenous Education” at the General Conference on Public Education in Santiago.34 Building on the work of Eulojio Robles—then Protector de Indígenas for Malleco— Guevara described the Mapuche as less developed than Chileans and thus proposed a distinct vocational training for them. This would be more suited to their supposed limited abilities; it would also enable the state to capitalise more effectively on Mapuche labour. Citing Sadleir, Guevara spoke of the purportedly great results achieved by specialised institutions in the U.S. such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. This was  Craib, The Cry of the Renegade, p. 35.  Cited in Donoso Romo, Educación y nación, p. 84. 33  Obligatory primary education nearly became a reality in 1910 in the context of Chile’s centenary celebrations. See Darío Salas, La educación primaria obligatoria (Santiago: Imprenta Cervantes, 1910). 34  Romina Green, To Govern is to Educate: Race, Education, and Colonization in La Araucanía, Chile (1883–1920), PhD Thesis, UC Urvine, 2018, p. 93. This was published as ‘Enseñanza indígena’ in Congreso Jeneral de Enseñanza Publica de 1902 (Santiago: Imprenta Barcelona, 1904). 31 32

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established in an abandoned military barracks in 1878 by Captain Richard H. Pratt, whose famed motto was “Kill the Indian […] and save the man.” Serving as a model for many other federal off-reservation boarding schools, it separated indigenous children “from the deleterious influence of their home communities” and brought them “into the cultural main-stream through a program that focused on military discipline.”35 If Pratt’s school in Pennsylvania was Sadleir’s (and, indirectly, Guevara’s) inspiration, the pronounced goal of differentiated or segregated education was, paradoxically, to eradicate cultural difference. A government report of 1908 quoted the Intendant of Cautín, who complained that indigenous children were unable to take in the “knowledge passed on by teachers in state schools”.36 Without such knowledge and thus the tools to survive in the modern world, they would soon become extinct, he said; school was their last chance of salvation. The inability to absorb teachers’ knowledge was attributed to “the Araucanians’ way of being”, which could be read in one of two ways: either indigenous students stubbornly refused to listen to their teachers (and were thus rebelling against the education system), or their innate inferiority prevented them from understanding. On this basis, the local state official urged the “Supreme Government” to set up special schools for indigenous children and argued that these needed to impart “practical as well as theoretical knowledge just as we see happening in the indigenous schools in the U.S. and Canada today.” Like Guevara, he drew inspiration from the Global North. The same report included the views of the governor of Nueva Imperial, who went one step further but in a slightly different direction, by advocating for the building of new schools in indigenous communities.37 This way many more children would be able to attend, and they would not have to change their clothes and try to look mestizo “as they do when they are obliged to attend schools located in the civilised urban centres”. Despite 35  Alexander Dawson, ‘Histories and Memories of the Indian Boarding Schools in Mexico, Canada and the United States’, Latin American Perspectives 39: 5 (September 2012), p. 81. 36  Cited in Daniel Cano, ‘Sin tierras ni letras’, Chapter VIII of Sol Serrano, Macarena Ponce de León, and Francisca Rengifo (eds.), Historia de la Educación en Chile, 1810–2010. Tomo II: La Educación Nacional, 1880–1930 (Santiago: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 2013), no page numbers. All the citations in this paragraph are from the 1908 report reproduced in Cano’s chapter. 37  Ibid.

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an apparent acceptance of indigenous autonomy and difference, which was firmly located in the space of the rural community, the dominant message was still that indigenous people were backward: “If the primary schooling of indigenous children were set up in this way, the process of civilising the Araucanian race would be completed in no time at all”. To become civilised was to be saved from themselves. And this was “all to the benefit of national progress, because agriculture, industry and commerce would be able to count on more manpower, until now wasted due to the ignorance in which [the Araucanians] find themselves”. Expressed thus, the education of indigenous children led not only to their own salvation, but also national salvation. They were to be transformed into manual labourers who contributed to the country’s economic development— quite a different transformation to that envisaged by Ciro Alegría’s fictional character Rosendo Maqui, cited in the introduction to Part III.

Alberto Giesecke in Peru: Education as Racial Uplift Peruvian government figures were making similar points in the early 1900s. For example, Jorge Polar (1856–1932), who was Minister of Education between 1904 and 1906, spoke emphatically of the limited intelligence of indigenous peoples, and argued for a special “minimal” education on this basis. On one occasion in 1906, he lamented that the “majority of our population is retarded”; “children of an illiterate race”, he said, “without the intellectual accumulation or inheritance—which is passed on from generation to generation in educated people—can assimilate only a very elementary [level of] culture.”38 Because they were so “backward”, Polar claimed these children should just be taught to “read, write and count”. Even if “culture” was genetically inherited, these skills were important—especially reading—because it enabled indigenous people to acquire knowledge about morals, hygiene, and national history and geography. During the inauguration ceremony of Lima’s Escuela Normal de Varones in 1905, Polar spoke of his hopes to set up a teacher training college that focused on this kind of basic instruction for the “small village and community schools”.39 “Little science” (i.e. little academic training) 38  Ministerio de Educación Pública, Reformas de la primera enseñanza (Lima: Casa Editorial Galland, 1906), p. 6. cited in Jorge Ccahuana Córdova, ‘La reforma educativa de 1905: Estado, indígenas y políticas racializadas en la República Aristocrática’, Apuntes 86 (2019), p. 11. 39  Cited in ibid., p. 13.

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would be “demanded” of the teachers destined to work in these schools; instead, in order to “lift up” and “win over” such “a backward, dejected, poverty-stricken race”, what was needed was “a lot of kindness, patience and a compassionate heart”.40 Peru’s Organic Law of Education of 1920, in contrast to Law 3654 in Chile, did pay special attention to indigenous people—a shift that coincided with constitutional recognition of the existence of indigenous communities (see Chap. 3). After underscoring the regional diversity of the country and pledging to adjust the curriculum accordingly, especially for rural areas, Article 54 of the new Peruvian law acknowledged the need to have primary schools dedicated specifically to indigenous children.41 It also stated that text books and teaching practices would be adapted to suit “the socioeconomic conditions of the Indian, as well as his/her mental characteristics and abilities,” which indicates an acknowledgement of the importance of the environment in which people live but also seems to adhere to certain aspects of biological determinism. Perhaps more significantly, Article 55 endorsed the use of indigenous languages in the classroom—an explicit recognition of cultural pluralism. However, this was only to facilitate indigenous students’ effective learning of Spanish, and the use of indigenous texts was to be strictly prohibited. There was no interest in promoting or studying indigenous languages in and of themselves; they were valued only as a means of achieving integration. One of the people responsible for implementing the 1920 Organic Law of Education was Alberto Giesecke. Leguía appointed Giesecke as Director General of Education in 1923 and he remained in this post until 1929. He had also been a key advisor in the formulation of the 1920 law. Just prior to 1920, when the law was being discussed in congress, Giesecke called on “the press and […] the intellectual community […] to make sure that this law […] begins to see results”. It was a state-led project, but intellectuals too were to be responsible for ensuring the reform law lived up to “national expectations”; they had the task of disseminating and explaining the changes in policy and of encouraging people to make policy reality. The significance of the revised legislation, for Giesecke, was that “all social classes” would for the first time get “a solid education that truly guarantees a healthy and successful livelihood”.42 He also praised “its modern  Ibid.  Ley orgánica de enseñanza… 42  Giesecke, 1919, cited in Mercedes Giesecke, ‘El progresivismo…’. 40 41

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character” and proclaimed confidence in its beneficial outcome, because of its “carefully considered robust structure” and “nationalist orientation”.43 The aim of primary education, Giesecke claimed in an article of 1919 in La Escuela Contemporanea, was to “encourage and cultivate” good habits in the (intrinsically malleable) child so that he would “forever be a useful citizen to the state”. Education needed to take the “social specificities” of the country into account, including “the different ethnic elements” and “the diverse relations between social classes.” To this end, vocational teaching was essential. Peru would soon “need to widen its connections with other countries as a result of the increasing exploitation of its natural resources and its advantageous geographic position”. If such “exploitation cannot be carried out by Peruvians”, he warned, “foreigners would do it”. Already “the Peruvian business and trade sector was in the hands of foreigners”.44 So, a new type of education was needed, and this required state intervention—in his words, some “administrative centralisation.” As told by Giesecke, such state-led specialist education would benefit the nation enormously. By nation, he really meant the national economy; the country’s “different ethnic elements” were considered only in the context of the economic rationale for change. Giesecke had been invited to Peru in 1909 during Augusto Leguía’s first government to help develop business and technical education in the country.45 At the time he was teaching at the School of Commerce in Pennsylvania’s Central High School.46 The invitation was proffered via Leo Rowe, Professor of Political Science at Penn State University (where Giesecke had recently completed his doctorate) and soon-to-be Director of the Pan-American Union, at the behest of Peruvian writer and Ambassador to France, Francisco García Calderón, who was passing through the U.S. at the time and carrying out the orders of the Peruvian Ministry of Public Education.47 The above-mentioned Villarán also had a role to play. The dates do not quite coincide, but in retrospective accounts Giesecke repeatedly stated that Villarán was Minister when he was 43  Alberto Giesecke, ‘El Estado Moderno y la Educación’, La Escuela Contemporanea, No. 12, April 1919, pp. 247–250. 44  Ibid., p. 249. 45  ‘Conversando con el Doctor Alberto A. Giesecke’, El Comercio, 28 August 1919, p. 1. 46  A letter  dated 13 May 1909 from the President of the Central High School granted Giesecke leave of absence to go to Peru for two years. Colección Giesecke. Archivo Histórico del Instituto Riva-Agüero. 47  The contract was initially signed in May 1909. Colección Giesecke AG24. 253a. Archivo Histórico Instituto Riva-Agüero.

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contracted to work for the Peruvian government.48 According to Joel Spring, Villarán was a leading advocate of the U.S. model—arguing that Peru needed “men of enterprise rather than men of letters”, and precisely because thus far education had only produced the latter it had failed “to meet the needs of the developing national economy”.49 It had also, Villarán said, failed to address the country’s “indigenous element.” Leguía did not need much encouragement to bring in advisers from the United States. He had long since been a big admirer, due to his close contacts with American companies in Peru and Chile.50 Giesecke did not come to Peru alone in 1909. He was part of an education-­ modernising mission which included three other colleagues from the U.S.: Joseph MacKnight, Harry Edwin Bard and Joseph Lockey. MacKnight was appointed school inspector in Puno and, according to G.  Antonio Espinoza, during the 1910s “reformed literacy teaching, issued detailed lesson plans, organised pedagogical talks, and sponsored an educational journal”.51 Bard remained a prominent figure in Peruvian education circles for several years. A government report of 1920, for example, mentioned his recently being sent to the U.S. to recruit “fifteen technical advisors” who would oversee broader educational changes and fifteen teachers, who were to serve as school directors (specifically of “Professional Schools”).52 As well as international education experts coming to Peru, Peruvian teachers and students were sent to “the centres of the most advanced civilisations, to soak themselves in their scientific environment”.53 One teacher, Elias Ponce Rodríguez, who had studied at the University of Columbia, was “to go on an educational trip to see the schools of Indians of the West of the United States”. The U.S. was the main reference point,  E.g. ‘Conversando con el doctor Alberto A. Giesecke’, op. cit.  According to Joel H.Spring, “Peruvian education leaders called for the adoption of the U.S. model of education to aid in industrial development or, in other words, to more closely tie education to economic planning.” See Pedagogies of Globalization: The Rise of the Educational Security State (New York: Routledge, 2011), p.  118. See also Cynthia McClintock and Fabian Vallas, The United States and Peru: Cooperation—At a Cost (New York: Routledge, 2003). 50  Rolland G.  Paulston, Society, Schools and Progress in Peru (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1971), p. 52. 51  Espinoza, Education and the State in Modern Peru, p. 174. 52  The report entitled “El movimiento de la instrucción pública en el año que expira” (found in the Colección Giesecke, Archivo Histórico Instituto Riva Agüero) has no author and no day or month, just the year. 53  Ibid., p. 2. 48 49

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both in terms of advisors coming to work in Peru, and as a destination for Peruvian educators wanting to learn from the experiences of other countries. But it was not the only reference point. As documented in the same 1920 report, a committee had recently been set up to hire 250 teachers from Europe. Moreover, the Peruvian Consul in Bremen was to carry out a study of the reforms underway “in the centres of superior culture, especially in Germany, Belgium and Switzerland” (to ascertain “what changes should be introduced in our primary education system”), and a certain José Varela y Arias was to go to Berlin to “further his training in business studies.” Unsurprisingly, not everyone welcomed the employment of foreign educational advisors. In 1925 Isidro Montoya published a piece on the “Failure of the American Mission” in El Tiempo,54 complaining how little had been achieved and how much government funding had been wasted. It named “Mr Bard, Mr Wilson and Mr Crone”, as “the creators of the current order of things in education”. These had now left the country and gone back to the U.S., prompting the question: “To what end do we have to maintain this constant stream of employees and the [vast] number of offices that they leave behind?” Montoya’s complaints replicated concerns raised by congressional deputies, such as José Antonio Encinas (1888–1958), who features more prominently in Chaps. 9 and 10. Speaking as representative for Puno in the Peruvian National Congress in March 1923, Encinas asserted that he was not against these “misiones extranjeras” per se; indeed, he was full of praise for certain individuals such as MacKnight (who he described as a “competentísimo pedagogo”), but he lamented how much money the state had invested in the scheme and how disorganised the scheme was.55 As told by Encinas, many of the advisors came to Peru with little relevant knowledge or training, and therefore no useful advice to impart. Bard (“unable to give an opinion of any kind on anything”) was one of them. Worse still, Bard was responsible for appointing other advisors (as documented in the report above), and, to Encina’s mind, he chose them not for their expertise but because they were personal contacts.56 Giesecke’s frequent efforts to draw out the 54  Isidro Montoya, ‘El fracaso de la misión americana: las rentas escolares’, El Tiempo 13 February 1925. 55  ‘Situación de la educación’, 27 March 1923, in José Antonio Encinas, Por la libertad del pensamiento: Discursos parlamentarios (Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2013), pp. 352–406. In particular, pp. 385–388. 56  Ibid., p. 388.

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nationalistic dimension of education and to cast himself as a true Peruvian patriot were likely an attempt to head off such criticisms. He had come to Peru, he said in an interview of 1919, because he admired its history: “I was seduced by the wonderful, captivating past of this country.”57 In another newspaper interview of July 1925, he described Peru as a “great, rich [nation] in land and history” and teachers as “the most tireless guardians of its progress”.58 More than a decade before becoming Director General of Education, Giesecke had been considering how education could help tackle Peru’s “racial problem”. In an article of 1911, aimed at a U.S. readership, he claimed that “the organisation and extension of public instruction” was without doubt “the greatest problem confronting Peru”.59 The second greatest problem was the “social organisation of the country”, which in turn was inhibiting the “rapid development of a rational education system”. As in the United States, he said, Peru had “a great mixture of races”; the difference was that in the U.S. “the white element” predominated, whilst in Peru, “the Indian, or Cholo, element, the descendants of the Incas come first”.60 Citing a census of 1902, Giesecke stated that, countrywide, there were 67,928 white children, 198,674 indigenous children, 144, 298 mestizo children and 5644 black children who were within the age limit for primary education. He perpetuated the dominant discourse of Peruvian dualism, by stressing that the Andean region was much more indigenous than the coast. Even in coastal cities like Lima, though, he noted the prominence of racial diversity and mixture. Giesecke concluded that “Peru has its racial problem to settle, from the educational point of view, just as we have in the United States” and that the Peruvian government would do well to consider the “introduction of American teachers and American methods, from sections where the education of mixed races is prominent.”61 This was already happening, he said, but needed to be “carried out on a larger scale to attain the best results”.62 It is not quite clear what Giesecke meant here by “American methods”. In 1911, the main trend in indigenous education policy in the U.S. was to  ‘Conversando con el doctor Alberto A. Giesecke’, op. cit.  La Prensa, 23 July 1925. 59  Albert Giesecke, ‘Public Instruction in Peru’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 37: 3 (1911), p. 86. 60  Ibid., p. 86. 61  Ibid., p. 91. 62  Ibid. 57 58

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remove children from their homes and to send them to distant boarding schools, “with the hope of alienating them from reservation life”.63 The model was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School discussed above— government-­funded schools that segregated indigenous children but with a view to assimilation, similar, in some ways, to what the Mexican state would test-run with the Casa del Estudiante Indígena in Mexico City in the mid-1920s.64 Giesecke, however, seemed to be referring here specifically to “mixed races”, not the supposedly isolated, community-rooted indigenous children that the U.S. boarding schools targeted. The question of whether to segregate indigenous children or teach them alongside non-indigenous children was a contentious one in Peru and took place at the highest levels. In the Alberto Giesecke Archive at the Instituto Riva-Agüero in Lima, there is a report, written in the context of the draft law of 1920 and addressed to the Minister of Public Education, that explicitly argued against separate schooling for indigenous children: “it would accentuate our lack of national unity; it could lead to the fragmentation and eventual ruin of the Republic, given the separatist trends of races and nations that we now see the world over.”65 It made specific reference to the United States, “where special schools exist for Blacks, and where yellow children are not allowed to attend the same schools as whites”. If Peru followed the U.S. model, it “would drown in racial distrust, which becomes hatred”. The signature is difficult to read but is not that of Giesecke. The author suggested removing or amending the above-­ cited Article 55 on special schools: “Prudence advises us to cast aside such divisions”. No wonder racial distrust existed in Peru, it said, given that “aborigines rightly or wrongly see other [non-indigenous] people as a continuation of the conquistadors and colonial oppression”, but this could be resolved if “all children were brought together in an intimate fraternal embrace, and imbued with the same social spirit, and the same love of the Peruvian nation.” Its author thereby cast Peru—and the Americas more broadly—as a potential melting pot, where in all races could unite in harmony. It suggested the possibility of what Vasconcelos would later proclaim with more certainty in La raza cósmica.66 63  Darcy McNichol, ‘The Indian did not Vanish: A New Indian Service Policy’, The Foreign Service Journal (1938), p. 748. 64  Dawson, ‘Histories and Memories…’; Rosemblatt, The Science and Politics of Race. 65  Document AG-D-005 in the Alberto Giesecke Archive, Instituto Riva Aguero, Lima. 66  As Minister for Education, Vasconcelos sought to “totally assimilate the Indian into our nationality”, not to “shunt him aside”. Cited in Rosemblatt, The Science and Politics of Race, p. 47.

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Arturo Huenchullán: A Mapuche Publicist for the U.S. System Article 55 stayed in Peru’s new Organic Law of Education, but it does not seem to have led to the creation of many Indian boarding schools à la Carlisle style. Nor did such schools really take off in Chile. Mapuche organisations in Chile repeatedly demanded the creation of new boarding schools, but not like Carlisle, which itself was closed in 1918. They asked for these schools to be near to the communities, and those that were set up were often run by church missionaries rather than the state. Interestingly, though, one Mapuche educator was still talking about the virtues of the U.S. system in the late 1920s. At the Eighth Araucanian Congress in December 1929, Manuel Aburto Panguilef passed on his greetings to fellow member of the Executive Committee of Araucanía, Arturo Huenchullán.67 Huenchullán was in the United States at the time “carrying out research at the behest of the Government”.68 According to the U.S. magazine School Life, he was one of eight school-teachers selected by the Chilean government “to study American methods of instruction.”69 And he had, just prior to this congress, published a report on indigenous education in the U.S. in the re-launched Revista de Educación, the official mouth-piece of Chile’s Ministry of Education.70 Huenchullán’s report noted four types of schools for indigenous children in the U.S.: federal government schools; state government schools (often mixed schools); church or mission  schools (less important and often located in the “reserves”); and “schools set up by the Indians themselves which are supervised by the relevant educational authorities”. Huenchullán described in detail one of the latter which he seemed particularly impressed by—the Haskell Institute, a “co-ed boarding school for indigenous students” founded in 1884 in Lawrence, Kansas, with the capacity for approximately 850 children. Students came from many different states and enrolled for a minimum of 6 elementary grades. Huenchullán claimed the school “provided indigenous boys and girls with the means to  In Menard and Pavez, ‘Documentos de la Federación Araucana…’, p. 97.  Ibid. 69  ‘Chilean Teachers Will Study in America’, School Life 13: 3 (3 November 1927), p. 49. 70  Arturo Huenchullán, ‘La educación de indígenas en los Estados Unidos’, Revista de Educación (October 1929), pp. 759–762. Allison Ramay and I discuss this in a recently co-­ authored article ‘Indigenous Politics and Education in the Early to Mid-20th Century Chile: Foregrounding Mapuche Women and Transnational Conversations’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, December 2021. 67 68

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secure a suitable job after leaving”; they would be able to have an active life and get by “comfortably”. Everyone learned English. Boys were trained in farming, carpentry, iron-mongering, shoemaking, and accounting, amongst other things, and girls were trained in domestic tasks such as cooking, serving, laundry, bird-keeping, and nursing. Huenchullán implied that this was an impressive range of skills to have. He also commented, though, that “the study of literature or classical antiquity” was not an option; these kinds of subjects were not considered suitable for students at Haskell. Huenchullán reported on the Haskell Institute as an example of a school “set up by the Indians themselves”, yet other sources mention no such origins. The Haskell Institute—at least until the early 1930s when Henry Roe Cloud became its first Native American super-intendant and started to renovate the curriculum—has often been equated with the likes of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and broader government endeavours to “kill the Indian”. This kind of educational project also opposed the cultural pluralist politics of Aburto Panguilef who publicly celebrated Huenchullán’s trip to the U.S. From the wording of the piece, it is not entirely clear whether this Mapuche activist was passing on information he had been told, or whether he went in person to the school. The purpose of his trip was to visit indigenous schools and report back on what he saw. And yet the voice of the Head of the Indian Bureau’s Department of Education also comes through loud and clear: citing an interview with him, Huenchullán affirmed it was this type of school “that was getting the best results in the quest to civilise indigenous people”. Huenchullán concluded by saying how grateful he was for the kindness shown to him by U.S. education officials, and how he hoped on his return to Chile to “be able to achieve both my own and my country’s aspirations” and to serve “my brothers, the Araucanians”—a story that I will return to in Chap. 10.

Conclusions Huenchullán’s report leaves us with more questions than answers, but this is the nature of studying the circulation of ideas—it happens in nebulous ways—and it is important to embrace this, rather than try to impose a uniform narrative on people’s experiences. Huenchullán’s article enables us to speculate on the multiple interpretations of U.S. indigenous education policy, and the fact that these were publicised in official teaching forums back in Chile, just as they were in Peru. It also demonstrates that

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it was not just criollo educators like Salas and Labarca who travelled to and were inspired by developments in the Global North. Salas and Labarca were members of the Radical Party. So too were Concha Ortiz and Letelier. As noted by Patrick Barr-Melej, Radicals were the leaders of public education reform in Chile.71 The law of 1920 which made state-led primary schooling obligatory was a national development partially explained by the growing prominence of the Radical Party and rooted in earlier attempts at reform when Chile was celebrating its centenary of national independence. But, as outlined in this chapter, education debates in Chile paid close attention to what was happening in the U.S., and chimed with developments underway across the Americas, not least in Peru, where reform was not just inspired by the U.S. but directed by U.S. advisors. There are important differences between the 1920 legislation in Chile and Peru. In Chile, the priority was getting more children into secular schools. This was the aim of the Peruvian law too, but it coincided with the introduction of a new constitution (see Part I), discursive efforts to create a new society (Leguía’s “Patria Nueva”), and official recognition of indigenous communities as corporate units within the state. It is therefore no surprise that the law in Peru paid special attention to indigenous people and allowed for segregated education. In Chile, the new law of obligatory schooling—as with its constitution—made no explicit reference to indigenous people. One of the main aims of Chap. 8 has been to show how, regardless of this difference on paper, Chilean and Peruvian political debates about indigenous education were remarkably similar: the principal motive for expanding education and making sure indigenous children went to school was national economic development.

 Barr-Melej, Reforming Chile.

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CHAPTER 9

Periodical Pathways through the Silence: Race and the “New School” Approach

“Escuela Nueva” was a broad idea that shaped education policy discussions across the Americas during the early twentieth century. Pedagogic thinkers who subscribed to this idea proposed a more active type of education—a more child-oriented education, which was closely connected to developments in the Social Sciences, especially Applied Anthropology. One highly influential figure in this regard was the U.S. education philosopher John Dewey.1 A recent study by Mercedes Giesecke has shown how Peruvian educators engaged with the “Deweyan” way of thinking during the 1920s and 1930s, and how this connected with debates about indigenous education in the country, not least the increasing recognition that teaching should be relevant to the needs of indigenous communities.2 She helpfully describes the interventions of a variety of prominent intellectuals such as Luis Miró Quesada (1880–1976), Luis Eduardo Valcárcel, and José Antonio Encinas. The main text Giesecke cites by Encinas is La educación de nuestros hijos (1938), which argued that schooling should aim to “develop to the maximum the personality of the child”, meaning that teachers had the duty to take account of the individual needs of each 1  See Alejandro Torres Colón and Charles Hobbs, ‘The Intertwining of Culture and Nature: Franz Boas, John Dewey and Deweyan Strands of American Anthropology’, Journal of the History of Ideas 76: 1 (2015), pp. 139–162; Melia Nebeker, ‘The Teacher and Society: John Dewey and the Experience of Teachers’, Education and Culture 18: 2 (2002), pp. 14–20. 2  Giesecke, ‘Escuela Nueva y antropología aplicada…’.

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child. Giesecke does not incorporate the following detail into her analysis, but it is crucial to the argument of this chapter: Encina’s book was published by Ediciones Ercilla in Chile. In Chap. 8 I noted that Dewey’s New School philosophy circulated in early-twentieth century Chile, not least through the interventions of Darío Salas Díaz.3 As shown though, Salas largely failed to incorporate the “indigenous question” into national debates on education reform, despite having close connections with indigenous Mapuche organisations. Chapter 9 explores how Chilean and Peruvian intellectuals drew on and fed into global discussions about the New School approach. It analyses how they were talking to each other and about each other’s national experiences, and it maps out some of their collaborative efforts to push for a greater democratisation of education. In some cases, there was no explicit racial dimension to their conversations. Indeed, race was often elided, especially in the Chilean context. The purpose of this chapter is to expose such elisions. It also, though, shows how—even if not dealt with explicitly—contesting ideas about indigeneity frequently hovered in the background of Chilean-Peruvian conversations or percolated into what was being said. My analysis starts with an article published by Gabriela Mistral in 1928. That same year a major teacher-led education reform bill was passed in Chile, and Buenos Aires hosted the First Congress of Teachers of the Americas. Referencing this international convention, Robert Austin has commented that by the late 1920s many teacher organisations in Latin America had begun to condemn U.S. and European influences.4 My findings partially corroborate his argument: as shown in the following pages, during the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, Chilean and Peruvian pedagogues—as well as reflecting on each other’s experiments—often looked to Mexico as a source of inspiration. The same pedagogues also, however, linked what was happening in post-revolutionary indigenista Mexico to Dewey, as well as to European educators such as María Montessori (1870–1952) of Italy, Adolphe Ferrière (1879–1960) of Switzerland, and Ovide Decroly (1871–1932) of Belgium. In this sense, it is not a simple either-or (us-versus-them) story that we’re confronted with when we study the New School approach to education in Chile and Peru, but rather a potpourri of multi-sourced ideas. I tell this story through three print periodicals: the government-sponsored Revista de Educación 3 4

 See Caiceo Escudero, ‘Génesis y Desarrollo…’  Austin, The State, Literacy and Popular Education in Chile, p. 39.

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in Chile, and the two most widely studied avant-garde indigenista magazines in Peru: Amauta, edited by Mariátegui in Lima, and Boletín Titikaka founded and directed by the Peralta brothers in Puno.5 The first was markedly different in content, form and political agenda from the last two, but this chapter shows how they also crossed paths, both in terms of the writers they published and the ideas they circulated. The key voices that I draw out from these magazines—alongside those of Dewey, Encinas, Mistral, Mariátegui and Churata (Peralta), already mentioned above—are those of Peruvian Apristas Magda Portal and Carlos Manuel Cox (1902–1986), the Chilean poet Zaida Zurah (1895–1970), and Aymara-speaking writer and teacher Emilio Vásquez (1903–1986). The latter became a prominent figure in the Peruvian education establishment. So too was Luis Enrique Galván (1892–1966), whose acclamations of Chilean school reforms in Amauta are discussed below. Speaking from Chile, as direct participants in those reforms, are Ramón Alzamora Ríos (1895–1974) and the Peruvian-educated novelist and career civil servant Eduardo Barrios (1884–1963).

Race as Part of a bigger Social Picture: New School Thinking in Chile’s Revista de Educación Mistral published widely on the “Escuela Nueva” in the 1920s and 1930s. She railed against the problems caused by an overly interfering state, not least the suppression of cultural pluralism, and urged governments across the region to “limit their role to subsidising education founded on individual or popular initiatives”.6 In July 1928—six years after first leaving Chile and now living in France—she reported back to the Ministry of Education’s Revista de Educación on the First International Child Protection Congress that she had recently attended in Paris.7 Mistral highlighted the significance of two sessions in particular: one organised around the theme of “Open Air Schools” and another on “The New School in Europe”. Most of her report focused on a talk given by Ferrière. In brief, 5  For an excellent study of the significance of Boletín Titikaka as a cultural and political project see Cynthia Vich, Indigenismo de vanguardia en el Perú: un estudio sobre el Boletín Titikaka (Lima: Editorial PUCP, 2000). On Amauta see Majluf and Adams, The avant-­ garde networks of Amauta. 6  Newland, ‘The Estado Docente and its Expansion’, p. 459. 7  Gabriela Mistral, ‘Un congreso de protección a la infancia’, Revista de Educación Vol. 35, No. 7, 1928, pp. 377–380.

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Mistral passed on the advice—endorsed by many delegates at the ­congress—that children should only have between three and four hours of formal classroom teaching a day, and at least two hours of play time outside. She also noted the praise bestowed upon Uruguay as the only country in Latin America to have “truly embraced the new pathways in education”.8 Implicit here was that Chile should do the same. Mistral made no reference to race in the above article, but it did feature in two other pieces that she wrote for the Revista de Educación in the 1930s.9 In the first, written from Madrid, the reference was tangential. This was a piece congratulating the achievements of the Escuela del Hermitage in Brussels—a school where “one can barely hear the voices of the teachers” and where there was no fixed timetable. Instead, the teacher simply stopped the class once the activity was finished. Nor was the learning process confined to the classroom. In the case of music lessons, the singing “follows the child; it goes home with him”.10 Mistral sensed in this Belgian experiment a “rhythm of the ancient race”, a rhythm which “America [still] sees in the children of Mexico and Peru”—an allusion to indigenous America, and thus an intimation that Mexico and Peru were more indigenous than other countries, including Chile. If this were the intended message, Mistral seemed to reduce indigeneity to a slow, organic, spontaneous way of life (as opposed to the fast, busy, noisiness of “modern” times). It was, above all, the simplicity of the school that Mistral appreciated: just four basic classrooms, with loving, all-giving women teachers, and a “small plot of land where little pink clumsy hands plant all over the place, without a whiff of pedantic geometry”. In the second piece, the reference to race was more direct and substantive. Speaking to and in the name of school students on the “Day of the Americas” in 1934, Chile’s “queer mother of the nation” (to quote the title of Licia Fiol Matta’s controversial monograph) celebrated both what the continent had already achieved and what it was destined to achieve in the future.11 In particular, Mistral proclaimed a proud belief in the promise of racial co-existence and harmony across the region: “Children of the  Ibid., p. 380.  Gabriela Mistral, ‘Sugestiones para la formación de proyectos’, Revista de Educación 38, May 1933, pp. 18–21; ‘Voto de la juventud escolar en el día de las Américas’, Revista de Educación 49, April 1934, pp. 51–53. 10  Mistral, ‘Sugestiones...’. 11  Mistral, ‘Voto de la juventud escolar…’; Licia Fiol-Matta, A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 8 9

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Old World, and of two unmistakably indigenous cultures”—again, likely a reference to (Aztec) Mexico and (Inca) Peru—“we are looking to ­transcend both Europe and the aboriginal empires by creating an all-­ inclusive democracy, with a richer understanding of human liberty.”12 “Our obligation”, she exhorted, “is to understand that when we have two different cultures living side by side, neither is inferior [or superior] to the other [just different].” Elsewhere Mistral made broader references to the need to maintain and promote cultural pluralism, be this linked to religious freedom, regional identity, party-political beliefs, or the specific needs of the communities (parents, teachers, and students) that schools served. Here—in the context of the “Day of the Americas” and having witnessed the rising tide of Fascism across Europe—she focused on the need to accept, indeed, acclaim ethnic and racial difference. Another poet who wrote for Revista de Educación about education projects taking place beyond Chile was Magda Portal.13 Whilst in Chile in 1930, Portal published an article commending the new open-air Schools of Painting and Sculpture that she had seen in operation in Mexico.14 These schools of “fine arts” were mainly aimed at the “popular classes”, as was the country’s education reform programme generally—for which Portal was full of praise. In these open-air schools, she said, artistic practice was what it should be: authentic, local, organic; it did not copy or imitate foreign models. Indigenous children featured prominently in the photographs that accompanied Portal’s piece.15 They were a key component of “popular” Mexico. They were also the “most naturally gifted” of 12  Mistral focused on the Maya and the Inca when she lectured on “Latin American History and Civilization” at Barnard College in the U.S. in late 1930s. Her lecture notes are published in Luis Vargas Saavedra, Tan de Usted: Epistolario de Gabriela Mistral con Alfonso Reyes (Santiago: Universidad Católica de Chile 1990), pp. 66–73. 13  Portal published in many other Chilean magazines such as Acción Feminina and Índice. The chief editor of Acción Feminina at the time was the pedagogue Amanda Labarca. Under her watch the magazine made frequent references to “Indo-America” and claimed to fight “for a democracy free of racial hatred”. See Asunción Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 308. 14  Magda Portal, ‘Intuición estética en el niño mexicano. La pintura infantíl’, Revista de Educación, Año II, No. 15, 1930. 15  Tatiana Flores describes the open-air schools “as alternative centres of art education (as opposed to the traditional academy) that catered to students of indigenous communities and impoverished urban neighbourhoods.” See ‘Dialogues along a North-South Axis’, Third Text 28: 3 (2014), pp. 297–310, p. 308.

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the students in the classes. Portal thus simultaneously applauded and belittled indigenous students’ achievements. Their talent was presented, in line with Mistral’s way of thinking, as intuitive and organic rather than acquired through intellectual or scholarly pursuits. Perhaps more importantly, though, Portal called on other governments in Latin America to do a better job with art education. The article was a plea from a Peruvian for a different kind of education—inspired by developments in post-­ revolutionary Mexico, dedicated to the Costa-Rican pedagogue and writer Carmen Lira,16 and disseminated by the Chilean Ministry of Education’s monthly magazine. Some articles published in the Revista de Educación focused specifically on Peru, and what the New School approach looked like there. In 1931, for example, Nicanor Rivera Cáceres—who would later work for Peru’s Instituto de Experimentación Educacional—narrated a story about a class group that learned maths and literacy through the experience of organising and performing a circus show at their school.17 The students themselves had decided to do it based on their own desires and interests, and the teacher—“a friend, a motivator”—was there mainly to guide and support them. The result was full attendance and enthusiastic children. “This is NEW EDUCATION”, Rivera pronounced, “all practical, activity-based, subjects drawn from the necessities of life, co-operation between students; they develop individual and group interests and inclinations. The child expresses what he feels, thinks, tries out and practices.”18 Dewey’s educational philosophy seemingly underpinned all the opinions put forward in the articles discussed above. The same magazine, moreover, published at least four of Dewey’s own essays and public lectures between the late 1920s and mid-1930s, including an extract from his widely circulated work of 1897 (translated as) Mi credo pedagógico.19 At the end of the latter, there is a “biographical note” that can be read as an 16  Carmen Lira (1888–1949) was the pseudonym of María Isabel Carvajal Quesada. She set up and directed the first Montessori school in Costa Rica and co-founded the country’s Communist Party. 17  Nicanor Riveres Cáceres, ‘La escuela nueva en Perú’, Revista de Educación, July–August 1931, pp. 53–56. 18  Ibid., p. 56. 19  John Dewey, ‘Mi credo pedagógico’, Revista de Educación 2 (April 1928), pp.71–73; ‘¿Cuánta libertad en las escuelas nuevas?’, Revista de Educación 23 (1929); ‘La educación y los problemas sociales actuales’, Revista de Educación 59 (February 1935); ‘Principios generales de reorganización pedagógica’, Revista de Educación 72 (March 1936).

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official endorsement of Dewey’s ideas: “Jhon Dewey has had an enormous influence on the new education process. His pedagogical philosophy has inspired new teaching methods and constitutes one of the strongest pillars on which the new school is based. Every teacher should read the works of Dewey if they really want to learn the fundamentals of [this] new education.”20 As conveyed through Dewey’s publications in the Revista de Educación— which were reproductions of previous writings rather than new pieces addressing the specificities of the Chilean context—New School teaching sought to enable each child to develop their individual strengths and abilities, but “as members of a unit” and, thus, according to the social situation in which he or she found him/herself. Their education needed to be made relevant to that situation. In addition, Dewey explained that public schools were under attack because of the global economic crisis and its ensuing social problems. These problems were not alien to teachers; teachers were workers. They therefore needed to think in socioeconomic terms and to become involved in the running and organisation of the school. This was the only way to help solve the existing social problems. The goal, overall, was community-led and community-engaged education. This U.S. education philosopher has been praised by many scholars for his enlightened views on race and how this intersected with broader social issues.21 Such scholars often point to Dewey’s renowned address to the National Negro Conference in 1909, during which he declared that there was “no inferior race” and that “the members of a race so called should each have the same opportunities of social environment […] as those of the more favoured race”, and to the fact that he became involved in the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) soon after this conference. As John Fallace notes, however, Dewey largely evaded the question of race before 1909 and, once he did start talking on the subject, promoted notably assimilationist theories. Fallace also spotlights Dewey’s linear view of cultural progress—the suggestion, for example, that “indigenous societies represented not merely different or alternative forms of living but earlier forms which modern civilised culture had moved beyond”.22 In sum, Dewey’s views on race and education, particularly vis-à-vis indigenous peoples, were highly ambiguous.  Dewey, ‘Mi credo pedagógico’, p. 73.  Fallace, ‘Was John Dewey Ethnocentric?’ 22  Ibid., p. 473. 20 21

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Subscribers to Chile’s Revista de Educación did not get to read about these views, however. The only time Dewey mentioned race in the writings he published in this government-sponsored magazine (a reference to the “social conscience of the race”), he seemed to be talking about the “human race”. But these publications did draw out the connection between social problems and education in the context of the global economic crisis of the 1930s. Dewey urged teachers to see what was going on in the community around them and to engage with the needs of that community—a point that came up time and time again in debates about indigenous education in both Chile and Peru.

The Connection between Race, Class and Education as Told by Mariátegui in Chile In Siete ensayos (1928), Mariátegui argued that Peru’s education system, influenced by a neo-imperial United States, served only to preserve existing socioeconomic structures. Despite the expansion of education coverage that came with the law of 1920, there was no real social mobility. The rich remained rich and the poor indigenous majority received only enough education to become menial (and easily exploitable) labourers; it did not enable them to pursue the kind of professional careers that Rosendo Maqui envisioned in Alegría’s El mundo es ancho y ajeno. As pin-pointed by Nicola Miller, Mariátegui felt that “if conditions of economic servitude and political exclusion were not changed for the better, then education would be worth little to its recipients.”23 He highlighted the constraints of new legislation, but also the lack of resources, which made it difficult to implement any changes. “Indigenous illiteracy continues unabated”, he wrote in Siete ensayos in 1928; “still today, the state fails to extend schooling to all corners of the Republic. The disconnect between its means and the scale of its endeavour is enormous.”24 And even if the budget covered a “modest programme of popular education”, there were no teachers to deliver it. Primary education was a “miserable career” in Peru, he said; it was “subject to derision and distortion by an entrenched system of gamonalismo and caciquismo” and teachers were “not even guaranteed basic financial security”.25  Miller, Reinventing Modernity, p. 175.  Mariátegui, Siete ensayos, p. 39. 25  Ibid. 23 24

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In March 1930, Chilean congressman and educator, Ramón Alzamora Ríos wrote to his “Comrade Mariátegui” to thank him for sending on copies of Amauta.26 Alzamora said he had noted down all the “names and addresses” that Mariátegui had given him “of the Peruvian compañeros who were living in Santiago” and promised to visit them soon. He reported having read Mariátegui’s letter out to his friends, who were delighted to hear of his forthcoming trip to Chile. Alzamora signed off the letter with “Don’t forget [to let us know your arrival date], for we are anxious to talk to you about Chilean issues”. As we know, Mariátegui never made the anticipated trip. Before his untimely death, Mariátegui was also in regular contact with Chilean writer Eduardo Barrios, who had spent much of his childhood in Peru.27 As Director General of the National Library, Barrios was keen to make the writings of his “great friend” available to Chilean readers—not because he wanted to promote the specific political ideas contained therein (Barrios was no leftist), but because he wanted to promote a better understanding of Peru. Here I quote almost in full one revealing letter of 7 April 1927. It indicates the lack of availability of contemporary Peruvian literature in mid-1920s Chile, but also the concerted efforts underway to counter this lacuna. It also provides an insight into how an individual figure in an influential position could make a big difference to what people were able to read: We have little access here to writings on modern-day Peruvian culture, or to information on the recent progress of Peru, and I would like it if at least our National Library received some books and journals that represent your [generation’s] thinking. Amauta and Guerrilla would be splendid acquisitions. Could you possibly […] send these journals—the whole series from the first issue onwards—to the Library? I am keen to acquire them and make them available to our readers. It is worth saying that we also have many Peruvians who come here looking for news of their fatherland in our reading rooms. These and other periodicals, as well as books, would be greatly beneficial to […] Chilean scholars, much more beneficial than the work carried out so inefficiently by governments, due to their shameless self-interest and poorly concealed [political] inclinations. Knowing Peru, having lived in 26  Letter dated 22 March 1930. This is available through the Archivo José Carlos Mariátegui online at www.mariategui.org. 27  Barrios’s mother was Peruvian. He moved to Lima when he was five years old, after his Chilean father died.

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Peru, having been part of Peru in many ways, I am fully aware that such an understanding would have very positive consequences, and I hope to plant the seeds for the future by bringing [to Chile] just a little of the young Peruvian mindset. I urge you to encourage writers to send me their books, and editors or directors to send me their journals.28

We know from Part I that Mariátegui’s ideas were circulating in 1920s Chile. What the letters above expose is how his ideas circulated, the significance of personal connections (as well as the life stories that help to explain those connections), and the fact that Mariátegui had connections at the highest level in the Chilean establishment, specifically the education establishment, and indeed in the education counter-establishment. The author of the first letter, Alzamora, was a prominent member of the General Association of Chilean Teachers, whose reform agenda and eventual repression is discussed below, and whose journal Nuevos Rumbos took inspiration from Amauta.29 The author of the second letter, Barrios, was appointed Minister of Education in 1928 and managed to enshrine in law (albeit only momentarily) the radical reforms elaborated and promoted by the General Association of Chilean Teachers. These reforms, in turn, were widely dissected in Peru, not least by intellectuals writing in Mariátegui’s Amauta.

Amauta: Narrating Chile as a Model for a Mestizo Continent One particularly laudatory article to appear in this Peruvian magazine was that by the Ayacucho-born teacher Luis Enrique Galván, published in October 1928.30 Just to the south, “so close to our homeland”, Galván began by saying, “a mighty shift [was occurring] in the organization of education”—a change that was “inspirational both for being so thorough and so immense”. It was impossible to remain indifferent to, or unaffected “by such noble enthusiasm for the rejuvenation of mankind on our continent”.31 As Galván told it, Chilean writer and politician Tancredo  Letter from Barrios to Mariátegui, dated 7 April 1927. Available at www.mariategui.org.  See Nuevos Rumbos 1:1 (5 June 1927), p. 17. 30  Luis Galván, ‘El plan de la reforma educacional en Chile’, Amauta 18 (October 1928), pp. 59–63. 31  Ibid., p. 59. 28 29

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Pinochet Lebrún (1879–1957) had visited Peru twenty years earlier and reported back to his own government on the impressive changes afoot in primary education there.32 The “Plan of Educational Reconstruction developed by the General Association of Chilean Teachers, brought into law by supreme decree 7500 of last December” prompted the question in Galvan’s mind as to whether “Peruvian teachers could not [likewise] go to observe the achievements of Chile’s new national education system?”33 Organised around three different aspects of the reform—the philosophy behind it, the administrative and technical side, and the action plan involved—Galván’s report highlighted the focus on cultivating an individual’s strengths and abilities in dialogue with his/her social context; the possibility of co-education for girls and boys; the idea—following Dewey, Montessori, Ferrière and Decroly, who were named directly—that school should not so much prepare children for life, as constitute life in and of itself; and the move towards an “Escuela Unica”, as proposed at the recent International Education Congress in Prague. This meant one, united school system, from primary level through to 18 years of age, wherein rich and poor would be educated together, and where education would be both intellectual and practical. Galván signed off the piece with a note which deftly connected this national educational endeavour with a broader continental racial mission akin to that promoted by the Mexican philosopher and politician José Vasconcelos: “Foreign educational reforms serve as […] highly useful lessons for our country […] today we fervently applaud the brave and noble project of pedagogical renovation taken forward by Chilean teachers […] which beckons a great future for our people in this continent of Manco and Columbus.”34 This Peruvian pedagogue, soon to be Director of Indigenous Education (1931–1932), lauded Chile’s education reform of 1927 and attributed it to the dedication and tenacity of the country’s teachers, whilst simultaneously decrying the repressive nature of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo’s government (which would soon abrogate this new law). Chile was presented as a model for Latin America—a continent born of the coming together of the Inca and Spanish empires. Rather than being “exceptional”, Chile was cast as central to the continental collective, and that collective was fundamentally mestizo.  Presumably, this was the law of 1906.  Galván, ‘El plan...’, p.  60.  Supreme Decree Law 7500 was enacted on 10 December 1927. The full text is available at http://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/archivos2/pdfs/ MC0057582.pdf 34  Galván, ‘El plan...’, p. 63. 32 33

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Chile’s model status in the educational sphere is reinforced in some interesting Chilean-Peruvian epistolary exchanges. In May 1924, for example, Pedro Zulen, who founded Peru’s Pro-Indigenous Association (Part I), wrote to José Toribio Medina (the “Humanist of the Americas” introduced in Part II) about the importance of mobile libraries—an initiative very much in line with the New School’s emphasis on reaching out to the community. Zulen told his Chilean friend how impressed he was by the work Chilean mobile libraries were doing to “counteract the ignorance of the masses”.35 This was several years before the reform bill of 1927, meaning that community-focused projects were underway before state legislation pushed them forward. A couple of years after the same reform bill was repealed, Portal who had been a regular contributor to Mariátegui’s Amauta—and who published the above-discussed article on art schools in Mexico in Revista de Educación—reached out to the Chilean teacher Victor Troncoso to ask his views on education. His reply of 1st May 1931 urged APRA to listen to “teachers, especially primary-school teachers” and to enable them to elaborate “their own solution to the educational problem”.36 “You could invoke the case of Chile, which I understand is very familiar to Peruvian teachers”, he said; “that way, you would be able to combine professional and political aspirations”, undertaking an education reform programme “in conjunction with the triumph of the only political force that offers it any guarantees.” This was in the context of the 1931 elections in Peru, which APRA lost, so Troncoso’s hopes failed to bear fruit. What is important for the purposes of this book though is the confirmation—through these two letters—of how closely Chilean and Peruvian educators were following and commenting on what was going on in each other’s country. So, the Santiago-based Revista de Educación published updates on Peruvian developments and opinion pieces by Peruvian intellectuals, and Peruvians writing in Amauta disseminated the news of educational reforms underway in Chile. Each issue of this avant-garde magazine—a “lovingly tended display case for all things deemed by its editors to be modern”—contained “a majority of Peruvian authors […], complemented by one or two from elsewhere in Latin America and a few others from further afield.”37 Chileans featured prominently among those authors  Letter dated 10 May 1924. Archivo Pedro Zulen. Biblioteca Nacional del Perú.  This letter can be found in the Magda Portal Papers, Benson Collection, University of Texas at Austin. 37  Miller, Reinventing Modernity, pp. 184–185. 35 36

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“from elsewhere in Latin America”. One was Mistral. In 1927, Mariátegui’s magazine published a piece by her entitled “The New School in Our América”.38 This was a letter that she had sent to the Argentine school inspector Julio Barcos (1883–1960), as a response to—and soon-to-be prologue for—his book manuscript Cómo educa el estado a tu hijo. Following Barcos, Mistral’s essay openly condemned the “asphyxiating” Estado Docente as a calamity. In the words of Newland, she saw it as “a kind of monopolistic power that allowed governments to create a harmful uniformity”.39 Mistral’s principal preoccupation was the defence of political and religious freedom, but this had implications for indigenous education too. She used her platform in Amauta to speak out against what she saw as narrow-minded nationalisms, and lazy teachers who never spent “a peso on a single book or magazine” and showed only “indifference toward the workers’ problems, despite these being so closely related to the school.”40 Increased reading would transform teachers, she said, “but let us not ask more for the moment, than that they familiarise themselves with the new school”. This “spiritual creation” that could only be undertaken “by new men and women, truly enabled by the desire to do something different.” Mistral finished by urging Barcos to visit “the wonderful schools of Ferrière and Decroly”. For her, like Haya de la Torre, Europe represented a source of infection when it came to the xenophobic nationalism that she saw sweeping across Latin America, but it also boasted inspirational education projects which, if followed, could lead to a much-needed “socially conscious reform of American schooling”.41 That “socially conscious reform” had the potential to address the demands of indigenous communities, who were culturally asphyxiated by narrow minded nationalisms, and practically disadvantaged by state governments which (as shown in Part I) prioritised the urban over the rural in their bids to modernise the nation. This was nowhere more apparent than in the educational sphere. The Mexican post-revolutionary state sought to counteract such disadvantage with an ambitious school building, library constructing, book distributing and teacher training campaign that focused on rural areas. This 38  Gabriela Mistral, ‘La escuela nueva en nuestra América’, Amauta 10 (December 1927), pp. 4–6. 39  Newland, ‘The Estado Docente…’, p. 459. 40  Mistral, ‘La escuela nueva…’, p. 5. 41  Ibid., p. 6.

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campaign, initiated in the early 1920s, was led by Vasconcelos, with the help of Mistral—who was paid handsomely for her work and who brought Haya into a three-way conversation with her Mexican host.42

Amauta and Boletín Titikaka on Education and (Racial) Revolution in Mexico The Peruvian lawyer and Aprista activist Carlos Manuel Cox was exiled in Mexico in the late 1920s and from there wrote a piece for Amauta on “The Indian and Education in Mexico”, which lavished praise on Haya de la Torre and a talk that he had given at the Casa del Estudiante Indígena in Mexico City.43 Cox claimed that the event enabled him to finally “understand the profound solidarity that the Indian soul feels toward their brothers from the rest of the continent”. Imaging Haya as a spokesperson for indigenous peoples, Cox recounted how students at the school had “renewed their affection” for this “ambassador who brought [with him] the message of the South American Indian.”44 Cox was impressed by what he saw at this indigenous boarding school, especially the “artistic talent and spirit” that he detected in the students’ creative work, and their acquisition of “a new consciousness” which they would take back to their communities. More broadly, Cox lauded the Mexican post-revolutionary state’s “efforts to incorporate the Indian into the nation” through a practical, realistic form of rural education: less classroom teaching; more experience-­focused learning; lessons linked to the needs and aspirations of the rural community. Not dissimilarly to the Chilean and Peruvian government figures cited in the first chapter of Part III, Cox spoke of how useless an overly intellectual education was to the “peasant brain”, as if such a “brain” were a given—a statement that seemingly contradicted his optimism for the “new consciousness” that students gained at the school.45 Overall, his focus was on the desire for collective improvement that he witnessed in Mexico: “Mexican teachers”, he said, “have endorsed and made their own Dewey’s definition [of education as] ‘the sum total of processes by which a community or social group […] transmits its worth  Horan, Preciadas cartas, p. 15.  Carlos Manuel Cox, ‘El indio y la escuela en México’, Amauta 15 (May–June 1928), pp. 15–17. 44  Ibid., p. 17. 45  Ibid., p. 15. 42 43

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and its aims, with a view to securing its own continued existence and growth’”.46 It was a U.S.-inspired, Mexico-led change that he wanted to see happen in Peru. The Puno-based literary magazine Boletín Titikaka (1926–1930), which advertised Amauta and acted as its distributor in the southern Andean region, was equally effusive about developments in post-­ revolutionary Mexico. Sometimes the praise came in the form of commentary pieces by Mexican writers themselves, such as Germán List Arzubide (1898–1998).47 It came in the form of poems, like that by the Cuban writer Mariblanca Sabas Alomá (1901–1983), which celebrated Mexico as a “melting pot” where “the most beautiful ideal to light up the human soul/ glows ever more purely”, and where soldiers had become mentors, churches had become libraries, and prisons had become schools.48 We see it in reviews of newly launched magazines, like Forma—described as “the most promising exponent of contemporary art emerging from the Aztec country”—and Mexico, edited by Martí Casanova, a Catalan writer exiled from Spain who had adopted Mexican nationality and Aprista credentials.49 From Casanova’s magazine, Boletín Titikaka spotlighted an essay by the Cuban Secretary of Education on Mexico’s efforts to resolve “the educational problem of the […] Indian”. Finally, we find ample praise in broader commentaries on Mexican art: for example, a piece by Casanova himself which—in line with Portal—acclaimed the new artistic production emerging in the open-air schools as “an authentically indigenous expression” that was only made possible through the Revolution.50

Boletín Titikaka: Pedagogic and Poetic Encounters with Indigeneity Chile too was allocated an inspirational role in Boletín Titikaka. Gamaliel Churata’s magazine described the new Revista de Educación, directed in the initial years by Tomás Lago, the folklorist discussed in Part II and himself a contributor to the Boletín Titikaka, as “one of the best of its kind  Ibid.  Germán List Arzubide, ‘Proletarios’, Boletín Titikaka, June 1928, p. 3. 48  Mariblanca Sabas Alomá, ‘Mexico’, Boletín Titikaka, January 1927, p. 2. 49  See Ricardo Melgar Bao, Redes i imaginario de exilio en México y América Latina (Mexico City: CIALC, 2018). 50  Marti Casanovas, ‘La nueva pintura de México: testimonio de cultura indoamericano’, Boletin Titikaka II: XXVI, (January 1929), p. 1. 46 47

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on the continent”, not least due to its “refined aesthetic spirit”. According to Churata’s editorial team, the Revista de Educación revealed how “honourable, well-prepared and agile” the country’s teachers were.51 They also lauded Nuevo Rumbos, the mouthpiece of Chile’s General Teachers Association, for “its restless spirit and brave language.” As Galván had said in Amauta, teachers in Chile—“the literary vanguard” of the country— were leading the way in continental education reform. In one news report of April 1929, Boletín Titikaka denounced the persecution and repression that these crusaders were suffering at the hands of Ibáñez del Campo, the president who signed the aforementioned decree 7500 into law in 1927 and then repealed it a year later.52 Teachers had been outlawed “for being teachers, for proposing ideas as to how to improve their profession, for publicising these ideas and taking them to the Government as a solution to the educational conflict afflicting the Republic.” Many members of the association had been deported and escaped the immediate horrors of military authoritarianism, but they were worried for their colleagues who suffered confinement in “the most inhospitable regions of the country”, “torture”, and “all forms of deprivation”. To that end, the magazine announced a continent-wide collection to help the teachers of Chile. Exemplifying Peruvian teacher and writer Armando Rivera, who had generously contributed to this endeavour, it urged more people to join the solidarity campaign and offered to act as a vehicle for donations. A couple of months after publicising the plight of Chilean teachers, Boletín Titikaka ran a noteworthy three-page report by the puneño writer and educator Emilio Vásquez on the “Plan de programa de la Escuela Ambulante Indígena de Ilave”—the kind of independent, popular initiative which Mistral promoted and which was very much focused on the practical needs of the local community, in this case the rural Andean population.53 Vásquez was director of the Ilave mobile school programme, having recently qualified as a primary school teacher in Puno (he later trained as a secondary school teacher in Lima and, in the 1940s, took on key leadership roles in the Ministry of Education). The desire for racial betterment or improvement—frequently found in official government documents in both Chile and Peru—comes across loud and clear in Vásquez’s  Boletin Titikaka III: XXXIII (August 1929), p. 4.  ‘Los profesores de Chile’, Boletin Titikaka II: XXIX (April 1929), p. 4. 53  Emilio Vásquez, ‘Plan Programa de la Escuela Ambulante Indígena de ILAVE’, Boletín Titikaka II: XXXI (June 1929), pp. 2–4. 51 52

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essay, but he reframed and, in some ways, subverted it. The Escuela Ambulante, Vásquez argued, had “to make of the Indian, especially the adult Indian, a good citizen, capable of defending what belongs to him by natural and statutory law, in front of the state, so that he is no longer the eternal object of exploitation”.54 This was precisely the empowering kind of education that Alegría would later celebrate in his classic indigenista novel of 1941. Vásquez—who was born in the largely Aymara district of Acora—promoted the virtues of the “autochthonous race” and sometimes included himself as part of that race: “Let us keep our good customs”, he said, but get rid of “those that make us look like nomadic tribal hunters”. The “good customs” included indigenous people’s propensity for cooperation. Whether it was building a house, organising a marriage, or fixing a problem, “the Indian”, he said, came forth unconditionally to offer his help: “This is called ayni and it is something to take advantage of, to promote a better way of living.”55 Not only, then, was the Indian to learn from school; broader society could learn from the Indian. The willingness to work together was, however, the only “good custom” described in the piece. The other customs were all “bad”, “indeed, in the worst extreme, abominable”. The main “vices” that Vásquez’s travelling school sought to combat were “the Indian’s resentment” and his tendency to take out lawsuits for the sake of it (due to of a “mistaken understanding of ‘land ownership’”), and his fame for lying.56 In this sense, the mestizo poet and teacher seemed to perpetuate elite views that school served to educate children about the law, so as not to break it or misunderstand it, rather than to use it to defend themselves. The other vices which the travelling school aimed to eradicate were indigenous people’s “addiction to alcohol and coca”. Vásquez described these vices as “organic”—a slip in expression or irresolvable paradox, for how could teachers stamp out practices that were biologically or naturally programmed? Vásquez’s Escuela Ambulante also sought to improve farming practices: to teach students about new tools that would transform the “completely simple” techniques that they had been using “since the times of the Incas”; and to pass on modern agronomy to people who “still look after their

 Ibid., p. 2.  Ibid. 56  Ibid. 54 55

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livestock without any sense of progress”.57 The travelling school was not going to teach literacy; this was the task of the permanent rural school. It was going to work on their Spanish though—through music and song— because Vásquez aspired to “establish, at last, linguistic unity, which we do not yet have, and which causes so many problems”. Vásquez associated the combatting of vices, the improving of agricultural techniques, and the speaking of Spanish with the need “to love the fatherland.” He lamented that the Indian “conceives patriotism only in bellicose terms”.58 This was not the Indian’s fault; he lived patriotism as forced recruitment into the rank and file of the army. (Vásquez was speaking from personal experience as he had served in the Peruvian military before becoming a teacher). This had to change. As Vásquez put it, the Indian needed to start thinking of patriotism as a “feeling of social solidarity” and “love for the plot of land that bears fruit for economic sustenance”. To be “an excellent patriot” meant becoming conscious of one’s rights and duties, and not living off the production of others. Articulated thus, citizenship was not equated with political agency; instead, it was equated with agricultural productivity, with keeping quiet and getting on with one’s work. The state was largely absent from Vásquez’s story of the Ilave mobile school. Many schools in the mountains of Peru, he said, were small, private ventures—organised by enthusiastic indigenous men recently let-go from the army (like himself), or women who wanted to earn some money and were keen to teach. The “Escuela Ambulante” provided advice and training to such teachers. The state did not support this educational provision, and lack of resources was a major problem. Teachers often had to use foreign books, brought back by members of the community who had been to Chile or Bolivia. He himself had seen “indigenous children with books that said: ‘My flag has three colours and a star’, ‘My fatherland is called Chile’, ‘Chile is stronger than Peru’ etc.” “What kind of education is this”, he bemoaned, “if it uses foreign materials and methods?”59 The problem was not so much that the school texts were Chilean—although this likely angered some people—but rather that they were not Peruvian. It was difficult to instil patriotism if they had no books on Peru.

 Ibid., p. 3.  Ibid., p. 2. 59  Ibid., p. 3. 57 58

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Fig. 9.1  Boletín Titikaka Vol. II, No. XXXI, June 1929, p. 2

In addition to the main content of this long tract by Vásquez, it is worth drawing attention to the way in which it was presented and spatially located in the journal (see first page in Fig. 9.1 above). Three particularly interesting features stand out. First, the brief editorial preface to the piece (in a comment box on the top left), which criticises some of Vásquez’s major points before he makes them, especially the notion that indigenous people were wrong to take up lawsuits in defence of their land rights. (For

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Churata, such actions were not only legitimate but also key to the survival of indigenous communities). Second, the fact that the page is shared (on the bottom left) with the final paragraphs of a story by Mateo Jaika, which includes many words in Aymara, when Vásquez promoted Spanish as the standard national language.60 Third, and most significantly, that it is also shared (on the right-hand side) with the poem “Siete palabras de una canción ausente” by Chilean writer Zaida Zurah (pen-name for Olga Acevedo).61 Zurah invokes the sixteenth century Mapuche warrior Caupolicán several times in this 84-line poem. He is the only person named. She thereby seemingly relegates Chile’s indigeneity to the past, and a long-lost past at that. Possibly, the Mapuche warrior is the “absent song” of the title. And yet, Caupolicán is spoken of in the present tense. His rebellious spirit lives on in the 1920s. The poem’s narrator carries it within: “it sometimes stirs like a lion in our blood”. “Maybe from him” came “the magnificent ferocity, the boldness, the incredible adventure, and the disdain for both life and death”. Zurah thus appeared to lay claim to Caupolicán as the basis for a collective, shared mestizo identity, similarly to the way in which the Peruvian novelist Alegría spoke of “our race” (the Andean race) when writing to Mistral in the 1940s. The heterogeneity of narratives that come together on this one page is quite remarkable. As commented by Priscilla Archibald, “instead of a finished and internally coherent work”, magazines of the 1920s such as Boletin Titikaka, encouraged “experimentation and invite[d] provisional drafts”.62 There was no imperative of permanence, as there was with books. Magazine culture of the 1920s, she said, had “a distinctly anti-­ academic and anti-professional character”; it aimed to promote intellectual and artistic activity particularly among young and developing writers, and to respond to historical developments in an immediate fashion. Boletín Titikaka endeavoured to create an intellectual community, but an internally diverse one. That community was also fundamentally transnational. Boletín Titikaka addressed the pressing social and political issues affecting Peru, not least the country’s “indigenous question” but, in its four-year  Mateo Jaika was the pseudonym for Victor Enríquez.  By the 1940s, Acevedo had achieved some fame in Chile for navigating the difficult world of literature, politics, and religion, as a female poet who was both profoundly Christian and a militant leftist. See ‘La educaron las monjas…’, Ercilla, 3 January 1940, p. 12. 62  Archibald, Imagining Modernity, p. 32. 60 61

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lifespan, the journal also disseminated the work of scores of writers from outside Peru, and expressly pitched itself as a continental publication. From 1926 until 1929, “SURAMERICA” was printed in capitals across the top of the front page; from January 1929 until it closed in 1930, this changed to an affirmation, inscribed below the title, that the magazine had “continent-wide circulation”. Of the non-Peruvian writers who claimed a voice in Boletín Titikaka, Zaida Zurah was by no means the only Chilean. She was accompanied by Ruben Azócar, Humberto Díaz Casanueva, María Rosa Gonzáles, Juan Marin, Letelier Maturana, Pablo de Rokha, and many others. Indeed, quantitatively speaking, Chileans were more visible in this magazine dedicated to Indo-America than writers of any other country apart from Peru. Boletín Titikaka brought Chilean and Peruvian writers together; it placed them in dialogue with one another, literally on the same page.

Conclusions These magazine-based conversations of the 1920s and 1930s show that nations were defined as much from the outside as within. Chilean and Peruvian intellectuals were talking to and learning from each other about the “New School” approach (often via Mexico); they were reporting on each other’s education experiments, and thereby projecting an image of each other to the transnational readership of Revista de Educación, Amauta and Boletín Titikaka. Both the input and output of these magazines resisted the confines of national borders. This did not “just happen”. It depended on the people running these magazines, who invited contributions from abroad, chose to publicise other magazines from abroad, sent their own magazines to friends abroad, and set up formal distribution channels abroad, all the while rarely using the word “abroad”, for the overriding aim was to create a collective sense of purpose. The Revista de Educación, Amauta and Boletín Titikaka were separate publishing ventures; they were led by different people (bureaucrats in Chile’s Ministry of Education, Mariátegui, and the Peralta brothers) but they did not stand alone. They promoted one another other and disseminated some of the same authors and ideas as each other; in some contexts, they operated as components of the same circuit. Scholarship often uses the term “New School” interchangeably with “Progressive Education” or “Active Education”. Yet, despite the focus on

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engaging the child as an autonomous participant in the learning process, the discussions that circulated through the Chilean and Peruvian magazines analysed above rarely portrayed indigenous students as active agents, or as individuals with their own independent needs. They were mainly depicted as a homogenous collective rooted in the past: an ancient race, with slower rhythms (Mistral), an “earlier” civilisation (Dewey), heroic warriors of a bygone era (Zurah). When indigenous people were invoked in the present tense, it was for their “authentic” and “spontaneous” artistic talents (Portal and Cox) and their “natural” solidarity (Vásquez); readers were told they are not suited to an overly intellectual education (Cox). Moreover, education appears as something indigenous students receive: a “new [national] consciousness” bestowed upon them (at the Casa del Estudiante Indígena in Mexico); modern agricultural techniques taught to them (by Vásquez’s Escuela Ambulante). Building on the above, this chapter has shown how discussions about the New School intertwined with discourses of mestizaje in Chile and Peru (and Mexico). The protagonists of Chap. 9 who spoke about racial and cultural mixture did so in quite different ways. Mistral urged the creation of a new democratic modernity wherein the European and “Aboriginal” cultures of old—others were ignored—accepted each other in their alterity. When Galván wrote about Chilean education reforms, he made this republic a beacon of light for the continent “of Manco and Columbus”. Here the Inca and Spanish came together and fused à la Raza cósmica of Vasconcelos. Vásquez—himself mestizo—cast his mobile school project as a pathway to racial improvement. This meant eliminating certain “vices” associated with traditional indigenous culture, but also protecting “good” indigenous customs. To become “less-Indian”, then, was not the same as becoming “non-Indian”. Zurah wrote of an indigeneity that “stirs like a lion” within. The indigenous element was more powerful in the sixteenth century, but it was still there—threatening subversion—in the twentieth century. The “New School” did not quite work with or against official education policy in the Americas, but rather fell somewhere in between the two; parts of it were adopted and adapted in teaching programmes, but not consistently or fully. Often its uptake depended on individual teachers or school directors. José Antonio Encinas put this educational philosophy into practice when he became director of the Centro Escolar 881 in Puno in 1907. Encinas wrote of this experience in Un ensayo de Escuela Nueva

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en el Perú, published by (Mariátegui’s) Editorial Minerva in 1932. In his prologue to the book, Gamaliel Churata described Encinas, as the “soul” of the Centro Escolar 881; under his directorship, it became “a school of the people” serving the needs of “local children, many of whom attended barefoot.”63 Encinas, like Mariátegui and Haya, saw education as part of a bigger social picture. Without other socioeconomic reforms, access to education meant little. Churata’s prologue to Encina’s Un ensayo de Escuela Nueva picks up on the transnational dimension(s) of education policy in Peru. It criticises foreign influence: “Peruvian education fails to acknowledge the importance of the indigenous factor, guided as it is only by the results of European or Yankee experience.”64 But it also points to another, more equal process of exchange, whereby foreigners learned from Peru: one visitor, “Doctor Kimmich, the distinguished Bavarian philologist”, became more interested in researching “the inductive methods of aboriginal education” underway in Puno “than in applying the methods that he was supposed to pass on,” and on his return home planned “to write a monograph on the possibility of Peruvian education based on the profoundly social experience of indigenous customs.” In Peru Kimmich had learned that “the priority of those working in the field of education” was “to react against [its] overly intellectual and coldly dialectical tendency.” The editor of Boletín Titikaka added that Mexico “offers us impressive lessons”: none other than Dewey had shown “great admiration for the results achieved there, through their own methods, applied straight-forwardly in their own terrain.” What we have here, therefore, is a demand for autonomous national education reform in Peru—focusing on the reality of indigenous communities—inspired by the experience of Mexico and validated by the most renowned proponent of the “New School” in the U.S. Another theme to emerge from Churata’s prologue is indigenous agency. He quotes from Encinas directly: “The Indian is dynamic por excelencia. His life is constant action. It is absurd to suspect in him mental lethargy or indifference.”65 Apart from Vásquez, no educator cited in this chapter self-identified with indigenous culture, and the overwhelming image of indigenous students propagated, through the magazine 63  Prologue to José Antonio Encinas, Un ensayo de Escuela Nueva en el Peru (Lima: Minerva, 1932), p. iv. 64  Ibid., p. viii. 65  Ibid., p. vii.

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discussions, counters that articulated by Encinas. Vásquez himself attended the Centro Escolar 881 when Encinas was its director. Many other indigenous students who went on to become prominent political activists in Puno similarly connected with Encinas, through schooling initiatives or political activism. Their interventions in the sphere of education are the focus of the next chapter. And we will see how they—like Encinas, Dewey, Mistral, Portal, Mariátegui and Haya—often crossed national borders, sometimes specifically the Chilean-Peruvian border, either physically or through the written word.

CHAPTER 10

A Persistent Pursuit of Schooling: Indigenous Led Education Projects

Redemption of the Indian can only be achieved by the Indian himself. —Francisco Chuqiwanka Ayulo, 19261

Speaking at the University of Arequipa in January 1927, Luis Eduardo Valcárcel insisted that indigenous students always arrived punctually at school, whatever obstacles they had to overcome to get there.2 In the same lecture, Valcárcel applauded the formation of Cuzco’s Resurgimiento group. The cusqueño indigenista proudly asserted that this group’s pro-­ indigenous crusade was spreading to other countries in the region including Chile. Equally significant was his emphasis—in line with the Quechua educator, linguist, and political activist Francisco Chuqiwanka Ayulo, cited in the epigraph, and himself a member of the Resurgimiento group— that it was the “Indian” who would resolve the “indigenous problem”. Indigenous organisations in both Chile and Peru continually prioritised increased access to education as one of their main demands, and they often framed this demand within the language of national citizenship. Participation in the national community, however, was not conceived solely in terms of duties, as it so often was by governing elites, but also of rights—and education, especially literacy, was hailed as a powerful weapon 1  Taken from the pamphlet entitled ‘El problema indígena en Saman’ (1926), cited in Augusto Ramos Zambrano, Ezequiel Urviola y el indigenismo puneño (Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso de la República, 2016), p. 440. 2  Reproduced as ‘El problema indígena’ in Amauta 7 (March 1927), pp. 2–4.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Crow, Itinerant Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01952-4_10

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to help defend these rights. In early twentieth-century Chile, Mapuche intellectual and political leader Manuel Manquilef astutely blended duties with rights in his public proclamations on education. In a newspaper article of April 1911, for example, he asserted that “civilised Indians” were obliged to maintain “their honor and alertness” and to show that they could defend “with energetic penmanship and the reasoned word” what their ancestors “had defended with spears and arrows.”3 What their ancestors had defended—in wars against the Spanish imperial state and the Chilean republican state—was political and territorial sovereignty. Manquilef was thus urging fellow Mapuche to make use of the literacy gained through education to stand up for their rights as an independent people. In this way, he both appropriated and challenged the civilising and nationalising goals of state education policy. He also unsettled the perceived equation between these goals, for it was precisely “civilised” Mapuche like him who sought to maintain a sense of cultural and racial difference. Similarly, Manquilef both affirmed and questioned education as a pathway to “de-Indianisation” when he stated that “in stark contrast to most of [his] Araucanian brothers” who had received an education, he had “never tried to hide [his] origins nor change the spelling of [his] surname.” In Peru, when the Tawantinsuyo Pro-Indigenous Rights Committee proclaimed that with an education the “fate of the Indian [would] change” (see Chap. 8), this was because he would “be respected for his knowledge” and “have strong fists to defend his rights.”4 It was time “to protest and rebel against the oppressive hand” but “before being bold”, it was “necessary to be literate.” And “Indians” themselves needed to be the driving force behind education, as well as benefiting from the tools it provided: “Even if the government has the best intentions, if we do not impel those intentions, we will never be able to do anything that will really favour us.” Indigenous people were ready, the organisation asserted, “to do by themselves what the Supreme Government would not be able to …” If the organised community did not have a school, they should “build another one at their own expense”. Education was thereby directly connected to political struggle and indigenous autonomy. One of the key points that Marisol de la Cadena makes in her discussion of the Tawantinsuyo Committee’s campaigns during the early 1920s is that 3 4

 La Epoca, 26 April 1911.  In de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos, p. 91.

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literacy was not equated with de-Indianisation.5 For members of this organisation, as for Manquilef in Chile, Indians who could read and write lost nothing; they only benefitted. The written word became a contested domain. No longer were state legislative processes, regional laws, or private property titles illegible to them. They could, moreover, author their own written documents, access the “lettered city” without the help of others, and forge alternative literary conventions. It is not therefore surprising that many elite groups were against indigenous education. In the same declaration of 1921, the Tawantinsuyo Committee affirmed that an “educated Indian is an inconvenience for gamonalismo; gamonales know that their regime will end the day the Indian knows how to read and write, and that is why they prevent the functioning of schools.” Despite laws that made primary schooling mandatory, Jaymie Patricia Hellman writes that “educational opportunities in rural Andean communities were [still] so grossly lacking” in the 1930s “that few indigenous peasants could realistically aspire to much more than a life of agricultural labor”.6 Hellman’s book was co-authored with the Quechua campesino activist Manuel Llamojha (1921–2016), who recalled that when he was growing up many communities in Andean Peru “had no schools at all, and those that did exist rarely taught past the earliest grades.”7 Writing in Amauta in May 1927, Valcárcel was slightly more optimistic about the state of things, but only in the context of indigenous-led education. He claimed there were approximately 350 “new Indian schools” operating in the rural communities. Seemingly pre-empting Rosendo Maqui’s project in El mundo es ancho y ajeno, he zoomed in on one school which he described as the pride of the ayllu. It was built by all members of ayllu, looking out over the natural landscape, and was led by an indigenous teacher. Schools like these, he said, were “reawakening the souls” of Peru’s indigenous population.8 Chapter 10 concentrates on indigenous-led educational initiatives in Peru and Chile. It analyses the decisive interventions of three activists from Puno, Peru: Ezequiel Urviola (1895–1925), Francisco Chuqiwanka  Ibid., p. 90.  Manuel Llamojha Mitma and Jaymie Patricia Hellman, Now Peru is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 19. 7  Ibid. 8  Luis E. Valcárcel, ‘Los Nuevos Indios’, Amauta 9 (May 1927), p. 3. 5 6

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Ayulo  (1877–1957) and Manuel Camacho (1871–1942). As well as inhabiting each other’s social circuits, all three men were closely connected to José Antonio Encinas, who wrote extensively on the social role of the school and on indigenous education.9 Encinas also reflected on the chauvinistic, militaristic form of nationalism promoted in Peruvian schools. Un ensayo de Escuela Nueva en el Perú (1932), recalled his experience of growing up and going to school in Puno in the 1890s and early 1900s: children were taught to hate Chile and “whatever their age, had to learn to use a rifle and a sword.” He linked this back, inevitably, to the War of the Pacific (1879–1883): “Spiritually annihilated, the country had no option but to seek refuge in the Primary School. It needed the school’s support to reenergise people, repair the damage, and prepare for revenge”.10 Encinas was critical of this kind of teaching: “It is a mistake to work up children’s imagination on the basis of a ruthless denunciation of the victor, without simultaneously analysing one country’s own errors and weaknesses.” “The post-war school taught how to hate,” he said, “but it did not teach children about responsibility”.11 We can consequently assume that Encinas adopted a different kind of teaching when he was working in the classroom, or directing educational institutions, such as the Centro Escolar 881 in Puno or Lima’s Escuela Normal de Varones. Encina’s networks extended far beyond the national sphere. In 1924— due to his opposition to Leguía—he was deported to Guatemala. In 1927 he travelled to England and studied anthropology at Cambridge. From there he went to Italy and France, eventually obtaining a doctorate in education at the Sorbonne in Paris. Encinas returned to Peru in the early 1930s, but it was not long until he was again forced into exile. During the mid to late 1930s, he spent a substantive amount of time in Chile. He was invited to give talks to university students in Santiago and he published two books with the Peruvian-led Editorial Ercilla: Higiene mental (1936) and La educación de nuestros hijos (1938). He also published the Enciclopedia Escolar Ercilla (1938) for Chilean school children. This Peruvian educator was therefore—like Magda Portal (see Chap. 2)—not 9  For example, Educación del Indio (1908), Educación de la raza indígena (1909), Problemas de la Educación Nacional (1909), La Educación y su Función Social en el Perú en el Problema de la Nacionalización (1913), Contribución a una Legislación Tutelar Indígena (1918). 10  Encinas, Un ensayo de Escuela Nueva en el Perú [1932] (Lima: Imprenta Minerva, 1986), p. 62. 11  Ibid., p. 63.

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only talking about education with Chileans, but also directly involved in Chilean education initiatives. In this way, Encinas confounded the anti-­ Chilean feeling propagated during his early school years. So too did Urviola and Camacho, both of whom fled to Chile when persecuted by the Peruvian government. Their experiences in Chile are less documented than that of Encinas, but they nonetheless help to paint a clearer picture of the transnational dimensions of indigenous activist education in early twentieth century Latin America. From Puno, Peru, which is the focus of the first three sections of this chapter, my analysis moves to Chile, where Mapuche interventions in the educational sphere became increasingly prominent over the course of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. As in Peru, indigenous political organisers in Chile campaigned for a more indigenous-oriented education as well as greater access to education. The organisers that feature most prominently in my discussion are the previously cited Manuel Aburto Panguilef and Arturo Huenchullán, and Domingo Tripaylaf and José Inalaf Navarro. Their demands for an indigenous-oriented education shifted between a focus on practical (agricultural and industrial) training and a subversive pursuit of the ability to read and write, or sometimes encompassed both. As will be shown below, Mapuche demands focused on the specific economic and social needs of local communities, but—particularly as we move into the 1930s—they often drew on and attempted to connect with teaching projects underway across the Americas. In this context, we see how indigenous activists’ strategy of seemingly complying with the dominant “civilising” discourses behind educational reforms, whilst simultaneously undermining and questioning said discourses, was strengthened by an awareness of and engagement with transnational (as well as national) developments.

Ezequiel Urviola: Education, Flexible Racial Identity and Social Justice Ezequiel Urviola campaigned tirelessly on behalf of the Comité Tawantinsuyo during its early years. According to Peruvian sociologist Osmar Gonzáles, Urviola was biologically mestizo, but—as a teacher who lived in and worked with rural communities—he adopted an indigenous lifestyle, became actively involved in local indigenous struggles, and began

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to self-identify as indigenous.12 In the words of Alberto Flores Galindo, “he abandoned the suit and tie, and replaced them with a poncho and sandals”.13 Prior to the formation of the Tawantinsuyo Committee, Urviola had been one of the Puno delegates—alongside Encinas—for the Pro-Indigenous Association (1909–1916). He was also involved in several smaller Puno-based organisations: in 1918, he founded the Sociedad Agitadora Pro Puno, and in 1920, he co-founded the regional Consejo de Defensa e Instrucción Indígena.14 As José Luis Enrique tells us, we do not know whether these last two organisations came into being in a functional sense, but even if their creation was limited to paper it nonetheless tells us something about Urviola’s trajectory and way of thinking.15 For him, education was fundamentally connected to political action. Religion also had a role to play, for Urviola was a member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church; in Enrique’s account, Urviola acted as an important bridge between Adventists and Socialists in southern Andean Peru. In Indigenous Mestizos, de la Cadena quotes from two letters that Urviola penned to president Leguía in the early 1920s.16 In one, the Puno born activist spoke of a future in which indigenous people, empowered by literacy, would become “citizens and conscientious workers, valuable for the progress of the fatherland.” This replicated the modernising discourse of the Tawantinsuyo Committee and of indigenous organisations in Chile such as the Caupolicán Society. In the second letter, Urviola went one step further: “in the spirit of patriotism and progress” he pleaded with Leguía to allow indigenous people “to establish schools of [their] own [across] the department of Puno”. He finished by “earnestly beg[ging]” the president to “favour us with the foundation of a school of arts and trades for the indigenous race and preparation of pure-blooded Indian teachers in the city of Cuzco.” 12  Osmar Gonzáles, translated by Mariana Ortega Breña, ‘The Instituto Indigenista Peruano: A New Place in the State for the Indigenous Debate’, Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 39, No. 5 (September 2012), p. 42. 13  Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca: Identidad y Utopía en los Andes [1986] (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1994), p. 269. 14  One of the most thorough accounts of Urviola’s life is Ramos Zambrano, Ezequiel Urviola y el indigenismo puneño. 15  José Luis Enrique, ‘Indios y indigenistas en el altiplano sur andino peruano, 1895–1930’, in Maya Aguiluz (ed.), Encrucijadas estético-políticas en el espacio andino (Mexico City and La Paz: UNAM/UMSA, 2015). 16  de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos, p. 91.

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In Siete ensayos (1928) Mariátegui characterised Urviola as “a revolutionary Indian, a socialist Indian”—“la chispa de un incendio por venir”. Urviola died at the age of 29 in 1925 but he had “sparked a fire” of political consciousness and rebellion which would continue to spread after his death. Precisely because of his leftist (anarchist) politics, Urviola often found himself on the run from Peruvian state authorities and at one point escaped to Chile. The fact that he found a temporary safe house there suggests that Urviola’s social networks extended into Chile, possibly via Adventist connections. Very little has been written about this part of his life story; it is mentioned in passing in most accounts of Urviola’s life, but no detail is provided. Most likely this is because Urviola has only ever been studied from Peru, using Peruvian archival sources.17 What the passing references might also suggest, though, is that such cross-border movements were by no means unusual for indigenous educators-cum-preachers-­ cum-activists in the Puno region during the early twentieth century. Manuel Camacho, who will be discussed below, spent time in Chile. So too did another renowned “agitator” of the period—Teodomiro Gutiérrez Cuevas (see Part I). Thus, the history of leftist campesino activism in Peru and its links to education cannot solely be understood within a national framework.18

Francisco Chuqiwanka Ayulo: A Thwarted Project of Linguistic Decolonisation In October 2019, Roxana Quispe Collante became the first student at the Universidad de San Marcos in Lima to write a doctoral thesis in Quechua. She passed with flying colours and the news was celebrated around the world as indicative of the important decolonial thinking taking place in

17  I have not yet uncovered any references to Urviola in Chilean press sources. This is an ongoing research project. 18  News about indigenous political mobilisation in Puno was circulating in many other countries including Mexico, Bolivia, and Chile. For example, through Machete in Mexico (e.g. ‘Los trabajadores del Peru son comunistas a despecho de los vendidos. Manfiesto de la Federacion Indigena Obrera Regional Peruana’, Machete, 27 November 1924, p.  3), and through the pamphlet of the Lima-based feminist-anarchist Angelina Arratia, El Comunismo en América. The latter was disseminated across the continent by Lux, a Chilean anarchist publishing house. See Peter de Shazo, Trabajdores urbanos y sindicatos en Chile, 1902–1927 (Santiago: DIBAM, 2007), and Arturo Vilchis Cedillo, ‘Anarquistas y educación’, p. 40.

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contemporary Latin America.19 Together with the other sections in this chapter, the story of Francisco Chuqiwanka Ayulo shows us that there is a much deeper history to such decolonial thinking than is often recognised. Chuqiwanka was closely acquainted with Urviola as a fellow member of the Tawantinsuyo Committee, and, before that, the Pro-Indigenous Association.20 Born in Lampa, Puno, Chuqiwanka attended the same Colegio de San Carlos as Urviola would several years later. He went on to study Law in Arequipa, qualifying in 1908 with a thesis on indigenous property. Soon after this, the Puno region was shaken by widespread indigenous rebellions (1910–1925), which were a response—among other things—to the ongoing dispossession of indigenous lands. Chuqiwanka defended the protests via the press and some of the individual protesters via the law courts. In tandem with his activism in defence of indigenous community lands, Chuqiwanka was a renowned champion of literacy in indigenous languages. In contrast to the mandatory primary education law of 1920, which endorsed the use of indigenous languages in the classroom primarily as a pathway to learning Spanish more effectively, Chuqiwanka promoted reading and writing in Quechua and Aymara as an end in and of itself. He and others used written Quechua and Aymara to spread the word of protest in the Peruvian Andes; as Alan Durston tells us, it enabled the mobilisation of monolingual campesinos in the context of increasingly violent disputes with local landowners.21 More broadly, he saw writing as a means to affirm the contemporary value of indigenous languages—to show that they were not confined to the past, to bring them into the urban intellectual sphere, and to put them on a level footing with Spanish. In 1914, with the help of Julian Palacios—who was fluent in Quechua and Aymara and had previously worked as an interpreter for state officials, such as Gutiérrez Cuevas (before he became Rumi Maqui)—Chuqiwanka compiled an Alfabeto syentifico keshwa aymara. This was an attempt to 19  Dan Collyns, ‘Student in Peru makes history by writing thesis in the Incas’ language’, The Observer, 27 October 2019, available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ oct/27/peru-student-roxana-quispe-collantes-thesis-inca-language-quechua. 20  Chuqiwanka received the notification of his appointment as an official delegate (Circular No. 18) from the API on 10 April 1910. Encinas joined at the same time. Archivo Pedro Zulen. Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. 21  Alan Durston, ‘Quechua-Language Government Propaganda in 1920s Peru’, in Alan Durston and Bruce Mannheim (eds), Indigenous Languages, Politics and Authority in Latin America: Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), pp. 161–180.

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standardise spelling and to establish a phonological orthography that included unfamiliar letters like “k” and “w” (contrasting with the Spanish-­ based Quechua orthography that was intimately connected with colonial rule). In the introduction, the authors wrote of the existing overlap between Spanish and these indigenous languages—“el sinqwenta por syento de sus boqabularyos es tomado del qastellano”. “Spanish”, they said, “[now] forms part of Quechua and Aymara”, but Aymara and Quechua were important in their own terms, and to give them a standard written form was “to bestow on the soul of the natural owners of this land the most powerful means of culture and improvement.” “Who knows”, they continued, “perhaps it will resuscitate the freedom and civilisation of a whole people!”22 The work was published in July 1914 in La Escuela Moderna, the monthly magazine of Lima’s Escuela Normal de Varones. Joseph MacKnight—who had come to Peru from the U.S. at the same time as Alberto Giesecke (Chap. 8)—was director of this Teacher Training College at the time and had himself promoted the study of indigenous languages and the implementation of bilingual education when he was Education Inspector in Puno.23 A decade later, the Puno-based Boletín Titikaka relaunched Chuqiwanka’s work. Over half of the magazine’s front page for the December 1927 issue was dedicated to his “ortografía indoamericana”—a brief manifesto, wherein Chuqiwanka both celebrated and explained the quest of EDITORYAL TITIKAKA.24 He foregrounded the “beautiful legend” of Manqo Kahpajj and Mama Ojjllo, who had embarked on Mother America’s civilising mission several centuries earlier, and he explained that the Boletín sought to conclude “the civilisation of the Kolla-Quechua and Aymara of the region”. This meant “undoing [their] illiteracy” by creating their “own culture with their own magazines and books.” The rest of the front page was filled with a commentary piece by the magazine’s editor Gamaliel Churata. Deftly calling on the good and the great of Spanish academia to validate Chuqiwanka’s decolonial agenda, this opened with the words of the Spanish essayist Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936): “To revolutionise language is the most profound type of 22  Francisco Chuqiwanka Ayulo and Julian Palacios, ‘Alfabeto cientifico keshwa-aymara’, La Escuela Moderna 4–5 (July 1914), pp. 152–157. 23  Luca Citarella, ‘Peru’, in Francisco Chiodi  et al., La Educación en América Indígena (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1990), p. 26. 24  ‘ortografía indoamericana’, Boletín Titikaka, December 1929, p. 1.

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revolution”. To Churata’s mind, it was Boletín Titikaka’s responsibility to try to enable the “shared network of [continental] communication, conceived by Chukiwanka”. In December 1928, Churata again drew readers’ attention to the Chuqiwanka’s “Ortografía Indoameriqana”, by publishing a letter he had received from the author.25 The aim, as in 1927, was to reach as wide an audience as possible and elicit a reaction; in Churata’s own words, to “initiate a philosophical debate of incalculable transcendence”. The letter re-­ produced one of the paragraphs of the original work from La Escuela Moderna, re-stated U.S. educator Macknight’s support for a revised (Quechua and Aymara) alphabet, further elaborated on the detail of and reasons behind this alphabet, and—last, but not least—acclaimed the radical cultural project that was Boletín Titikaka. “Our logical judicious orthography was missing a name”, Chuqiwanka wrote to Churata, “and Boletín Titikaka has found one”—Indo-America. Chuqiwanka was the sole author of this letter, but he foregrounded Julian Palacios as the creative expert behind their co-produced Alfabeto syentifico keshwa aymara. From early 1928 until mid-1930, Palacios’s name appeared in almost every issue of Boletín Titikaka. His presence took the form of an advert for Aymara and Quechua classes, and often for translation services too. He also published an important essay on “The Pedagogy of Mayku Qqapa and Mama Ojjllu”.26 This started by admonishing those “who write in the vernacular languages without really knowing or understanding them” (evidenced by their misspelling of the name of the founder of the Inca empire as Manco Capac) and then explained how this couple “pedagogically organised the great social complex that history has called Tawantinsuyo” (my emphasis).27 Palacios contrasted the kind of natural, organic, collective education that he saw at work in the contemporary ayllu with the “pompous” teaching programmes elaborated by the government and implemented within asphyxiating and unhygienic “four-walled classrooms”. The time had come, he said, to look to the pre-Columbian pedagogy of Makyu Qqapa and Mama Ojjllu “in order to organise our system of education on 25  Francisco Chuqiwanqa (this time his surname was spelt with a second “q”), ‘Ortografía Indoameriqana’, Boletín Titikaka II: XXV (December 1928), p. 1. 26  Julian Palacios, ‘La Pedagogía de Mayku Qqapa y Mama Ojjllu’, Boletín Titikaka II: XXXII, July 1929, pp. 1–3. 27  Ibid., p. 1.

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foundations as solid as Sacsayhuaman”. The seeds that educators such as “Froebel, Pestalozzi, John Dewey” had sown—what he called “foreign formulas”—would “not bear fruit” in the Andean region.28 Instead, Palacios insisted that each day people grew more attached to what “our land and the ingenuity of our race gives us”. However, he then went on to assert that the practice of Mayku Qqapa and Mama Ojjllu met the “conditions of the pedagogical ideals of […] the ‘social school’ of Dewey”; their philosophy was “positivist, integral, social, active, all of these things…”, for “without rules, or teaching plans, or timetables” it “consisted in travelling around the countryside, teaching producers how to tend their land, care for their animals, make their homes and look after their children.”29 His overriding aim seemed not so much to critique New School-type ideas from Europe and the U.S. in and of themselves, as the fact they were being presented as something new when local indigenous educators had been practicing similar methods for centuries. In the penultimate paragraph of this essay, Palacios asked: “What do we want Indian children to be?”; “unscrupulous lawyers, office workers, intellectuals, church keepers?”, or “do we believe that the indigenous multitude is rural and productive, and that it needs to continue [to work] in agriculture, cattle farming, manufacturing, and trading; in other words, that it needs to continue as a productive—rather than parasitic—force?”30 He concluded that indigenous children had “more willpower and drive, than intelligence” and showed “more propensity for manual labour than verbal tasks”. Palacios’s earlier collaboration with Chuqiwanka had clearly failed to dispel the belief that the “indigenous masses” were unsuited to intellectual pursuits. But this was not to position indigenous people as lacking, for rural labour was what Peru needed; intellectuals, in contrast, seem to be depicted as parasitic and unproductive. And yet somewhat paradoxically Palacios’ proposal for education reform rooted in the traditional pedagogic practice of the ayllu was itself an intellectual as well as political project. Noteworthy too is the celebration of indigenous languages, through the bilingual verses of Eustakyo Aweranka published in the top right-hand corner of the second page of Palacio’s essay. In some respects, Boletín Titikaka’s defence of indigenous languages was not entirely new. Several periodicals such as El Mercurio Peruano were  Ibid., p. 2.  Ibid., p. 3. 30  Ibid. 28 29

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already disseminating scholarly works on indigenous languages during the 1900s and 1910s.31 Scientific study helped to validate Quechua and Aymara as living languages, but these published works rarely touched on the political dimensions of language, and they did not mention the work of figures like Chuqiwanka or Palacios. Notably, this growing scholarship on indigenous languages reached far beyond Peruvian national boundaries. It featured prominently at the International Congress of Americanists (held in Buenos Aires and Mexico in 1910, and Washington in 1915), and renowned figures of the Society of Americanists, such as the French ethnologist Paul Rivet (1876–1959), endeavoured to keep track of new related works emerging from across the Americas. Rivet’s “Bibliographie Americaniste (1914–1919)”, published in Paris in 1920, includes a vast variety of scholarship from Moises Bertoni’s study of Guaraní in Paraguay to Gustavo Lemos’ work on Quichua in Ecuador; from the essays by Jeronimo de Amberga and Felix de Augusta on Mapudungun in southern Chile, to Romulo Cuneo-Vidal’s investigation of the linguistic legacy of the Inca in Peru.32 Chile was present in these transnational discussions, both as a subject of study and as a national academy interested in publicising developments taking place elsewhere, including Peru. The work of German-Chilean ethno-linguist Rodolfo Lenz on the “Indian elements of Spanish”, for instance, was widely circulated across the region, not least in Mariátegui’s Lima-based Amauta, but also as far afield as Costa Rica, through Repertorio Americano.33 And the above-cited work of Peruvian historian Cuneo-Vidal was printed by the recently founded Revista Chilena de Historia y Geografía in Santiago.34 It was not just scholars who were interested in indigenous languages; as the 1920s progressed into the 1930s, the Peruvian government made a concerted effort to disseminate presidential speeches in Quechua. However, as Durston has shown, such developments went little way towards recognising the value of Quechua for its own sake. It was, instead, an attempt by Leguía, during the last years of his “Oncenio”, to co-opt indigenous languages and control what was being said in them.35 In one 31  E.g. José Gabriel Cossio, ‘Etimología quechua de la palabra gaucho’, El Mercurio Peruano, II: 3 (1919), pp. 24–25. 32  Paul Rivet, ‘Bibliographie Americaniste’, Journal de la Societe des Americanistes 12 (1920), pp. 287–331. 33  See Repertorio Americano 1: 23, 15 July 1920. 34  ‘De algunas etimologías del bajo collasuyo de los Incas’, Vol. XIII (1915), pp. 295–305. 35  Durston, ‘Quechua-Language Government Propaganda...’.

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of his translated speeches of January 1930, for example, Leguía instructed indigenous people to rely on government protection rather than seeking revenge for the abuses they had suffered at the hands of unscrupulous gamonales. As recounted by Durston, the Quechua translation was printed on ten thousand fliers and given the headline “President Leguía speaks to the Soul of Five Million Indians who Hope to be Redeemed by Him”. This headline mirrored the argument of “Nosotros los indios”, an essay written a couple of years earlier by José Angel Escalante (Minister of Education just prior to Leguía’s fall).36 Both the essay and speech attacked leftists for being “fake friends” of the Indians and asserted that they were better off with a fatherly Leguía. Under Escalante’s watch, the government created an Office of Indigenous Education (June 1929) and Jose Rafael Pareja, a protégé of Escalante, was appointed as its first director. This, according to Durston, marked “the first official efforts to incorporate Quechua into the education system”.37 Such efforts continued during the subsequent government of Luis Sánchez Cerro (1930–1932). On 15 October 1931, Luis Enrique Galván—who had sung the praises of the Chilean education reform bill of 1927  in Amauta and was now Director of the Office of Indigenous Education—sent the following letter to Alberto Giesecke, who had recently been appointed to the post of “Technical Inspector of Education”: One of the most important tasks of the Office of Indigenous Education is to protect everything constituting the treasure trove that is [Peruvian] popular culture, maintaining its purity, and to study the means to improve or perfect it […] Currently in Peru—incomprehensibly and ironically, and despite the efforts of our renowned intellectuals, who are dedicated to this kind of philological research—the orthography for Quechua is in complete chaos. Attempts to write the sounds of its alphabet have so far sown only confusion. This department [of indigenous education] is about to print [a series of] notebooks and songs in Quechua for use by children and adults. I believe that this initiative would benefit greatly from the authoritative and positive endorsement of someone like yourself, who has expert knowledge of this beautiful language…38 36  On this essay see Jorge Coronado, ‘Against Indigenismo: José Ángel Escalante, Culture and Andean Modernity’, Latin American Literary Review 36: 71 (2008), pp. 53–74. 37  Durston, ‘Quechua-Language Government Propaganda’. 38  Galván  to Giesecke, 15 October 1931. Colección Gisecke AG0061 (Oficio 3938). Archivo Histórico Instituto Riva-Agüero.

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Galván noted the existence of a well-known body of philological research in Peru but did not mention Chuqiwanka or Palacios. Either he was unaware of their work—unlikely given that he was a regular contributor to and reader of Amauta, which included several pieces by and on Chuqiwanka in its four-year lifespan—or he did not see its value, or he refused to publicly acknowledge its value. Whatever the reasoning, Galván’s summary of the state of affairs seems to point to ideas not travelling, at least from indigenous intellectuals and avant-garde indigenista magazines to government agencies, or, rather, it illustrates how an idea (in this case that indigenous languages required a standardised alphabet) could catch on and gain ground but be distorted and misappropriated in the process of travel.

Manuel Camacho and Transnational Adventism The life story of Manuel Camacho intersects with both Chuqiwanka and Encinas, for his work was promoted, and to a certain degree protected, by them. I first came across his name in a 1908 newspaper interview with Peruvian Minister of Education, Manuel Villarán—an interview cited in Chap. 8 to show how political figures in Peru publicised the growing indigenous demand for education.39 Villarán spoke specifically of indigenous people in Chucuito, who had written to the president affirming their desire to secure an education for their children, despite all the obstacles created by local landowners. Indeed, one of the aims of the petition was to get the central state to try to break down these obstacles. Camacho had led this protest. Villarán told readers of El Comercio that Chucuito’s indigenous people not only demanded state financial support for the schools they had set up but also defended the presence of “self-sacrificing teachers” like Camacho, who “because they are part of our society and speak our Aymara language, are familiar with our living conditions and our capabilities.” Another source that provides helpful insights into Camacho’s life and work is In the Land of Incas (1920) written by U.S.  Adventist pastor Fernando Stahl (1874–1950).40 Camacho features prominently in this book as a driving force behind the growth of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Andean Peru. Stahl started his South American missionary trail  Villaran, ‘Entrevista’, El Comercio, 21 September 1908.  Ferdinand Stahl, In the Land of the Incas (Mountain View, California: Pacific Press, 1920).

39 40

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in Bolivia in 1909, with the Swiss-born pastor Eduardo Werner Thomann (1874–1955) as his guide. Thomann had come to Bolivia from his “own field of labour in Chile”, where he had been living since 1885.41 They parted ways in Oruro, because Thomann needed to return Chile. From Oruro, Stahl went on to Puno, and from there to Platería, where he was met by “a great concourse of Indians”.42 Camacho, “the chief of these Indians”, “had been [in Platería] for the past three or four months trying to interest his people in the better things of life.” Apparently, he had come into possession of some of the Adventist mission’s Spanish publications, distributed through the region by Thomann, and had begun “to teach his people what he had learned” from this literature.43 According to Stahl, “after a few months, as [Camacho’s] interest grew, he wrote to our mission office in Lima requesting that a teacher be sent to them.” When Stahl and his wife arrived, Camacho let them have “part of his house to live in; and it was here that the mission was started.”44 By 1921, Adventist missionaries had established ten churches in the Lake Titikaka region.45 And in 1922 an Adventist Academy was established near Juliaca, which trained local teachers for the mission schools.46 Much of the publicised story about this evangelisation campaign—not least and not surprisingly that told by the church’s own magazine, Review and Herald—focuses on the educational methods of the missionaries such as Stahl and his wife, and on how quickly they managed to “civilise” local indigenous people. Yet, as Stahl himself acknowledged, this was no outside imposition on naïve, passive “Indians”. Camacho had set up his own school before Stahl arrived. It was “Brother Camacho’s school” that was praised by the local newspapers (cited at length by Stahl). The detail of Stahl’s narrative indicates that the Adventist mission grew from Camacho’s school, and at the instigation of Camacho, because it served his political purposes. This was also how Churata presented the history of rural indigenous education in Peru when reviewing the book

41  See Daniel Planc et al., Foundational Missionaries of South American Adventism (Entre Ríos: Editorial Universidad Adventista de la Plata, 2020). 42  Stahl, In the Land of the Incas, p. 102. 43  Ibid.  44  Ibid., p. 126. 45  Gary Land, Historical Dictionary of the Seventh Day Adventists (Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2005), p. 231. 46  These apparently numbered 113 by 1951. Ibid., p. 87.

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Tempestad en los Andes, by Valcárcel, in a 1928 issue of Boletín Titikaka.47 Churata, whose father had invited Stahl to stay in his own house when the pastor first arrived in Peru,48 applauded Valcárcel’s “aggressive attitude” and the larger story that he told of the “revival of autochthonous Andean culture”, but he contested Valcárcel’s emphasis on evangelical protestants from the U.S. “The Indian evangelist” he said, “or rather the evangelist social state of the kola Indian masses is not […] the fruit of actions alien to the indigenous way of life—Indian evangelism is the deed of an Indian—MANUEL CAMACHO—the result of his shrewdness and tenacity.”49 As asserted by Churata, “Camacho, the Indian preacher maintained a school for several years, with his own earnings and efforts.” He realised that “the priests” were holding the Indian back, and “he invited the Adventists to help carry on his work and widen its reach across the region.” Camacho reportedly trained ten indigenous teachers who were then “cast like seeds” across the Andean plains and became more than 200 by the late 1920s. Churata’s narrative, with Camacho as the main protagonist, was one of indigenous leadership in the sphere of education.50 As was the case for Urviola and Chuqiwanka, Camacho equated literacy with political consciousness and the struggle for social justice. As told by Stahl and local newspapers, the gamonales and Catholic church authorities in the region denounced and attempted to violently repress the Adventist education campaign, precisely because they felt threatened by the power to speak out that came with literacy, and, in the case of the church, by the possibility of losing its monopoly over the transmission of the word of Christ.51 In March 1913, several indigenous people linked to the Adventist mission were arrested and imprisoned at the behest of the bishop of Puno, 47  Gamaliel Churata, ‘Tempestad en los andes por Luis E.  Valcárcel’, Boletín Titikaka, January 1928, p. 1. 48  Vilchis Cedillo, ‘Anarquistas y educación…’, p. 31. 49  Churata, ‘Tempestad en los andes…’. 50  Present-day Adventist webpages cast Camacho in a similar light. See Adventist News report of 2004 about local government recognising and honouring Camacho’s pioneering work: https://adventist.news/en/news/peru-local-government-recognizes-adventist-pioneereducator. 51  Bishop Valentín Ampuero once stated: “It was never God’s intention that Indians go to school and learn. They should dedicate themselves to looking after the sheep and the harvest; if they keep going to school, their harvest will be ruined, and pestilence will kill their sheep.” Cited in Vilchis Cedillo, ‘Anarquistas y educación’, p. 30.

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Valentín Ampuero (1869–1914). Camacho was one of them. Over the next couple of years, the controversy went beyond the issue of indigenous education, leading the National Congress to amend the Peruvian constitution in November 1915 and give religious liberty to all denominations. Camacho had asked for state support for his school project back in 1908. Clearly, this did not materialise. The Adventists stepped in to fill the void, as well as to spread their own religious beliefs, and the government allowed this to happen because it was impressed by the accomplishments of the mission schools. As Encinas affirmed in Un ensayo de Escuela Nueva en el Perú, the protestants had achieved more in 25 years than the Catholic Church had in 400 years: they were “transforming the soul of the Indian, incorporating him into civic life, teaching him about his rights and obligations, easing him off alcohol and coca, ridding him of his superstitions and curing his illnesses”.52 The “civilisational” dimensions of both Encina’s discourse and the Adventist mission that he commended are striking. So too, though, is the point that the “clean, sober, literate Indian” would be aware of his rights and able to defend them. Ample scholarship exists on the development of Protestantism in Peru, particularly the growth of evangelical Protestantism in Andean Peru.53 Seventh Day Adventist missionaries first came to Peru in 1898. There was just a handful of them initially. They arrived in Mollendo and Lima from Chile and were financed by the Adventist Church in Chile. Not for nothing, have some researchers studied the growth of Protestantism in Chile and Peru together.54 More significantly, it looks like Camacho himself went to Chile in 1896 and returned in 1898. Stahl claimed Camacho was baptised in 1910  in Peru, but other accounts assert that he became an

 Encinas, Un ensayo…, p. 149.  For example, J. Fonseca, ‘Protestantismo, indigenismo y el mundo andino (1900–1930)’ in Paulo Drinot and Leo Garafalo (eds.), Más alla de la dominación y la resistencia: Estudios de historia peruana, siglos XVI-XX (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005), pp. 282–311. 54  J. B. A. Kessler, A Study of the Older Protestant Missions and Churches in Peru and Chile (Oosterbaan & Le Cointre, 1967); Frederick Pike, ‘Church and State in Peru and Chile since 1840: A Study in Contrasts’, The American Historical Review 73: 1 (October 1967), pp. 30–50. Pike highlights the differences between the two countries, but with a focus on the Catholic Church. He recognises that Protestantism became a threat to the Catholic Church in both countries during the early twentieth century. 52 53

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Adventist in Chile.55 If the latter is true, he actively contributed to the spread of the Seventh Day Adventist Church from Chile to Peru. As was the case for Urviola’s reported exile, little has been written about Camacho’s time in Chile—just a few online sources, noting how he went first to Iquique, where he worked in the nitrate mines and became friends with local Chilean labour organisers such as Manuel Vivanco and Melchor Estrada, and then moved on to the Chilean capital.56 Whilst in prison in Puno more than a decade later, Camacho sent some letters to people in Santiago.57 The precise identity of the recipients remains unknown, but the existence of such correspondence suggests that the contacts this indigenous educator and preacher established in Chile in the late 1890s were lasting ones, or at least that he wanted them to be lasting ones. Existing scholarship hints that Camacho also wrote to contacts in Buenos Aires from his prison confinement.58 Biographical sketches note that he travelled to the United States in the 1880s when he was only sixteen years old. Apparently, he went with an Italian friend from Moquehua, a shop owner by the name of Iscardi, and they worked in San Francisco together for a year before returning to Lima.59 Stahl, from Ohio, writes of his own close working relationship with Camacho; he also tells us that Camacho’s initial request for support from the Adventist Church in Lima was triggered by reading materials circulated by Thomann from Chile. Despite most studies and commentaries placing Camacho firmly within the rural Andean sphere, specifically the Titicaca/Puno region, the detail glimpsed in the same materials suggests he was a transnational activist in more ways than one. His transnational networks, moreover, were what enabled his local community education projects.

55  In his PhD thesis, Ruelas states that Camacho attended an Adventist church in Iquique, and that he was later baptised in Santiago. See La escuela rural de Utawilaya y los Adventistas en el Altiplano puneño 1898–1920 (Universidad Nacional del Altiplano, 2016), p.  32 and p.35 respectively, available at http://repositorio.unap.edu.pe. 56  See for example, Edwin Quilla, Eliana Barreda and Wilber Choque, ‘La primera escuela Rural Manuel Z. Camacho’, Los Andes, 31 January 2010. Available at http://www.losandes.com.pe. 57  David Ruelas Vargas, ‘La escuela rural de Utawiyala: Una educación libertadora desde Puno, Peru, 1902’, Revista de Historia de la Educación Latinoamericana 18: 27 (2016), p. 254. 58  Ibid. 59  Quilla, Barreda and Choque, ‘La primera escuela…’.

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Manuel Aburto Panguilef, Protestantism and Indigenous Education in Chile Chile was renowned for strong Protestant growth during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.60 It welcomed and officially recognised the presence of Anglican, Methodist, Seventh Day Adventist, Baptist, and Pentecostal churches. The Anglican church was the first Protestant church to start operating in Chile and it is this church—especially the endeavours of the Canadian clergyman Carlos Sadleir—that has recently attracted the attention of scholars working on indigenous Mapuche history.61 Sadleir, mentioned in Chap. 8, set up two mission schools in Quepe (Maquehue) and Chol-Chol in southern Chile in the 1890s, and three of the most prominent Mapuche leaders of the early twentieth century— Manuel Manquilef, Manuel Aburto Panguilef, and Venancio Coñuepán— attended these schools. In rural southern Chile, as in rural Andean Peru, church missionaries were more active than the state in providing an education for indigenous people, even after the Law of Obligatory Education of 1920. Venancio Coñuepán and César Colima publicly admonished such neglect in the paper they delivered to the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress in Mexico in 1940; until recently, they said, missionaries had been “the only civilisers of the race” in Araucanía.62 Coñuepán’s (and his peers’) political trajectory is testimony to the fact that a religious education did not necessarily hinder indigenous activism or claims to cultural autonomy. Indeed, as in Puno, the two often seemed to go hand in hand. Aburto Panguilef once said of himself: “I am the offspring [fruto] of the Araucanian Mission, led by Reverend Sadleir”.63 It was 1923 and he was addressing readers of the Santiago-based newspaper El Mercurio and recounting his life story, not least how he became the leader of the Araucanian Federation and what he had achieved in that role. The link between his protestant education and his political activism is exemplified by the fact that he made Sadleir honorary president of the Araucanian Federation, the largest indigenous rights organisation of its time in Chile. It is also exemplified by the quotation above: it was the Araucanian Mission 60  Henri Gooren, ‘The Growth and Development of Non-Catholic Churches in Chile’, Review of Religious Research 57: 2 (June 2015), pp. 191–218. 61  For example, Menard and Pavez (eds.), Mapuche y Anglicanos. 62  Coñuepán and Colima, ‘El problema indígena en Chile’. 63  ‘Los fines que persigue la Federación Araucana de Loncoche’, El Mercurio, 20 January 1923, pp. 14–15.

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that made him what he was. As told here, after Chol-Chol Aburto went to work with the missionary H.I. Weiss in Valdivia, and then trained as a pastor, under the theological guidance of Alberto Dawson, in Rio Bueno and Osorno. He left in 1906, went back to his community in Collimallin, Loncoche, “married according to the customs of [his] race”, and then started working as an interpreter for the Indian Protectorate of Valdivia in 1910. This triggered Aburto Panguilef’s desire to study law. He worked with two lawyers in Pitrufquen and, for his efforts, earned the commendation of a local civil judge Constantino Muñoz. Together with the governor of Pitrufquen, Muñoz supported Aburto Panguilef’s request for funding from the Liga de Estudiantes Pobres, which enabled him to enrol in law school in Santiago. He did not complete the formal qualification, however, as his campaign for indigenous rights absorbed too much of his time and energy: he founded the Mapuche Mutual Protection Society in 1916, and the Araucanian Federation in 1921. The historical narrative mapped out by this Mapuche leader and disseminated by El Mercurio was made up of multiple, influential contacts and professional stepping-stones, all of which could be attributed to the Araucanian Mission school in Maquehue. This stands in contrast to the accounts of Camacho’s endeavours in the Puno region of Peru, where Stahl’s Adventist mission schools were very much the “fruit” of Camacho’s work. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Aburto Panguilef pleaded with Mapuche parents to send their children to school because, as publicly agreed at the Araucanian Congress of 1925, “the only way to advance as a people was to become civilised.”64 The Araucanian Federation thereby perpetuated dominant modernising discourses on education, but, as I have argued previously, it also insisted on the autonomy of the Mapuche people and the fact that they  would remain distinct from  mainstream Chilean society  despite receiving an education.65 At the same congress of 1925, delegates resolved to petition the government to create more primary schools in or near rural communities, to establish special boarding schools for indigenous boys and girls, and to provide more grants for Mapuche children to attend secondary school. At the 1926 Araucanian Congress a special working group was set up on the topic of “the Education of the Araucanian People”.66 Amongst other things, this raised concerns about  In Menard and Pavez, ‘Documentos de la Federación Araucana’, p. 93.  Crow, The Mapuche in Modern Chile, p. 72. 66  In Menard and Pavez, ‘Documentos de la Federación Araucana’, p. 80. 64 65

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the Teacher Training College in Victoria being  transferred to Temuco. Members of the group protested such a move, as it was “the only such establishment in the country that could provide the training for the many Araucanians who wanted it.”67 This interaction with Chilean state authorities and the demand for the state to lead on and invest in special education for Mapuche children continued through to the Araucanian Congress of 1929. Delegates demanded sixty million pesos of government funding to build six hundred new schools and employ trained teachers to work in them.68 These repeated escalating demands seemed to go unheard by the government, for at the Araucanian Congress of 1931 Aburto condemned the authorities for their complete neglect of the rural communities.69 Aburto  did not give up, however. He persisted with his campaign to improve indigenous education. He also, more importantly, started to advocate for a more indigenous-­ oriented teaching practice, led by indigenous teachers. What Aburto Panguilef sought was a state-driven indigenous education, but one that acknowledged cultural difference, indeed, one that recognised the existence of an autonomous “República Indígena” within the Chilean state.70

Trying to Make Themselves Heard: Mapuche Teachers at the Crossroads of National and Transnational Forums From the 1920s, when Francisco Melivilu (1882–1934) and Manuel Manquilef—both of whom trained and worked as teachers—were elected to the Chilean National Congress, Mapuche leaders were in a position to articulate and promote their views at the highest levels.71 Manquilef, for  Ibid., pp. 88–89.  Ibid., p. 97. 69  Whilst investment in education greatly increased between 1920 and 1930, it focused on urban rather than rural areas. And between 1930 and 1935, investment was slashed almost fourfold. So overall, fewer children in Chile were attending school in 1935 than in 1920. See Austin, The State, Literacy and Popular Education, p. 37. 70  Crow, The Mapuche in Modern Chile, p. 76. 71  Melivilu, like Manquilef, attended the Liceo de Temuco as an adolescent. He qualified as a teacher of maths from the Instituto Pedagógico in Santiago in 1916, but—like Aburto Panguilef—went on to study law. Unlike Aburto Panguilef, he finished his studies, and graduated as a lawyer from the Universidad de Chile in 1924, the same year he was first elected deputy to congress. 67 68

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example, sat on the Permanent Commission on Public Education between 1926 and 1930, a period which saw both the passage and the repeal of the continent-inspiring education reform law led by the General Association of Chilean Teachers. I have not yet found any documents that allow us to trace Manquilef’s contributions to the meetings of the commission, so we do not know if he tried to bring an indigenous-oriented education to the table (presumably not, as he tended to focus on extending the coverage of education, rather than the content or methodology of that education). My main point here, regardless of the nature of his contributions, is that this Mapuche teacher was part of a government educational body. And he was followed, in the mid-1930s, by Arturo Huenchullán who—in the late 1920s—had travelled to the U.S. to investigate its indigenous education provision.72 Shortly after his return, Huenchullán met with Manquilef, Aburto Panguilef and several other Mapuche political leaders to try to unite the many different “Araucanian institutions” campaigning for indigenous rights in Chile. An assembly to this end was held in Temuco on 1st November 1930. Huenchullán’s interventions were quoted in El Diario Austral.73 He asserted the need for “indigenous people themselves to resolve the indigenous problem” saying that it was up to indigenous people to “convert their poor rucas into clean [modern] houses, their ugly, skinny animals into better quality beasts, and their paltry trees into ­productive orchards.” One way to do this was to come together to support the formation of an Indigenous Boarding school, where “new generations [would] learn how to cultivate the land and be trained in all the professions related to it.” With such an education “the race” would be able to push itself forwards and contribute “to the progress of the nation.” This was what happening in “other nations, like the United States, Mexico, Peru and Bolivia”, he asserted. It was therefore “logical and necessary” that it happen in Chile too. The day before this assembly, the same newspaper interviewed the Regional Inspector of Primary Education, Luis Moli Briones, who promised to dedicate more time and resources to indigenous education in Araucanía. As a result of listening to Mapuche educators, such as 72  Huenchullán was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the period 1933–1937 and served on the Comisión Permanente de Educación Pública during this time. 73  ‘La asamblea indígena de ayer aprobó la unificación de todas las instituciones aborigines’, El Diario Austral, 2 November 1930, p. 13.

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Huenchullán and Manquilef, he said he had revised the “Regulations on Rural Education”. These would now support “the creation of schools in the indigenous communities with special teaching programs” and ideally they would employ “teachers of the same race”. Some of the new schools would likely become “escuelas granjas”, possibly boarding schools, with a focus on agricultural-industrial education. According to El Diario Austral, local community leaders would gain the right to participate in the ProIndigenous Rural Education Committee and an Indigenous Education Inspector would oversee the teaching provided by both state and private schools in the area. These forthcoming changes, Briones said, proved that the “authorities have the best intentions of finding a satisfactory solution to the problem of indigenous education.” Preempting Huenchullán’s proclamations of the following day, Briones stressed the importance of creating a new “agricultural-industrial boarding school” and of studying “how other nations, like the United States, Mexico and Peru [were] trying to solve this problem.”74 So, both Mapuche activists and state education officials were keen to align Chile with—or at least keep an eye on—what was happening elsewhere in the Americas. Policy developments in the United States, Mexico, and Peru, and Bolivia took different paths and had different goals, and both these paths and goals shifted constantly, but there were also some common patterns emerging in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the U.S., indigenistas such as John Collier “helped create the political climate” that led to the publication of the Meriam Report on The Problem of Indian Administration in 1928. As summarised by Rosemblatt, this “argued for the dismantling of boarding schools that ripped Native children from their homes, taught them to speak English only, and aimed to assimilate them to a presumably superior ‘American’ culture.”75 Rosemblatt draws out the 74  ‘Una intensificación de la educación indígena’, El Diario Austral, 1 November 1930, p. 9. See my co-authored piece with Allison Ramay, “Indigenous Politics and Education in Early to Mid-Twentieth Century Chile: Foregrounding Women and Transnational Conversations” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History (December 2021), for an earlier analysis of these developments. 75  Rosemblatt, The Science and Politics of Race, p. 20. New legislation, passed in 1934 as part of Roosevelt’s “New Deal”, “defended the right of indigenous students to preserve their own languages, customs, and religions” and “made it more difficult for […] officials to remove children from their homes and place them in boarding schools.” See Dawson, ‘Histories and Memories of Indian Boarding Schools’, p. 85, and Rosemblatt, The Science and Politics of Race, p. 105.

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similarities in this regard between the United States and Mexico: “in both […] melting pot was giving way to mosaic as people searched for ways of integrating difference without annihilating it.”76 It was not until 1932 that the Mexican government closed the Casa del Estudiante in Mexico City, but already in the late 1920s—especially under the watch of Moisés Sáenz, who had studied with John Dewey at Columbia Teaching College—more focus was being placed on creating indigenous schools in rural areas, initiating bilingual education, and developing a closer relationship between schools and the community. In the case of Bolivia, Brook Larson shows how by the 1920s governing elites firmly opted for the “education of the Indian in his own environment”; they promoted segregated indigenous rural schooling that focused on an industrial curriculum and manual labor training, with the aim of producing artisans and agriculturalists.77 In Peru, the new education law of 1920 allowed for the creation of special (rural) schools for indigenous students. And in 1929—as noted earlier in this chapter—a separate  Office of Indigenous Education was created within the Ministry of Education, and indigenous languages were officially incorporated into the teaching system. There was no large-scale rural school expansion program in Peru, as there had been in Mexico, but the Peruvian government spoke of rural-based, community-focused schooling, and this is certainly what activists such as Urviola and Camacho campaigned for. So, when Huenchullán and Briones promoted the creation of a new indigenous boarding school in Temuco in 1930—and made references to what was happening in the U.S., Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia—this was likely a school that, in theory at least, was to allow for indigenous difference. Domingo Tripaylaf was present at the public meeting of 1st November 1930. Tripaylaf consistently asserted the need for people working in the education sector to listen to Mapuche teachers. He did not have direct access to the corridors of power as Manquilef and Huenchullán did, but he organised important discussion forums such as the First Pedagogical Conference of Araucanian Teachers, which took place in Temuco in February 1946.78 As reported by El Diario Austral, delegates at the conference agreed to set up a permanent institution “to unite all the teachers  Ibid., p. 20.  Larson, ‘Forging the Unlettered Indian…’ 78  ‘Primer congreso de maestros araucanos dio termino ayer a sus deliberaciones’, El Diario Austral, Temuco, 11 February 1946. All quotations in this paragraph are from the same article. 76 77

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of the aboriginal race” for both their own “cultural and economic protection” and to “look out for the social interests of the children of the Araucanian race.” This meant demanding more—and sometimes distinctive—provisions from the state (vis-à-vis school buildings, teaching resources, accommodation for teachers, medical support, and breakfast and dinner for the children), and advocating for more Mapuche education inspectors, on the basis that it was “only indigenous teachers [who had] a formal interest in the cultural uplift of the race.” But this was no isolationist or inward-looking entity: one of its priorities was to “make immediate contact with the National Teachers’ Society and the Teachers’ Union”; it also planned to reach out to “other related institutions across the Americas.” Discussions were not restricted to education either. El Diario Austral published the delegates’ declaration regarding a recent “deplorable” occurrence in southern Chile: The First Pedagogical Congress of Araucanian Teachers cannot turn a blind eye to the [recent] Mapuche deaths in Ercilla. Two days ago, three Araucanians were killed for defending six quintals of wheat, which was to be part of their sustenance for the year. As well as protesting publicly against such a shameful episode, [we] ask the Supreme Government to take the necessary measures to repair the harm caused, and to avoid such things— reprehensible in a cultured country like Chile—happening again. These events indicate certain authorities’ disregard for and refusal to understand indigenous reality.79

The remit of this Pedagogical Congress included speaking out against the violence of land-owning elites in southern Chile and urging the hitherto inactive central government to intervene. Demands for a fairer education system were, in short, part of a broader campaign against social injustice. That campaign tapped into the elite imaginary of Chile as a “cultured country”—an imaginary intended for international circulation—and laid the blame for any blemishes on that reputation squarely at the feet of the government. Moreover, whilst the government did nothing, indigenous people—more precisely, indigenous teachers—sought to make sure Chile lived up to modern standards of “civilisation”.

 Ibid.

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José Inalaf Navarro, teacher of History, Geography and Physical Education, was an acquaintance of Tripaylaf.80 In September 1939, he attended the Congress of Radical [Party] Teachers, held in Santiago, where delegates agreed to set up a commission to study indigenous education. Inalaf Navarro, known for promoting secular state-led education and for demanding that the teaching system took account of the specificity of indigenous culture and traditions, presided over this commission. It reached twelve conclusions about what was needed in Chile: for example, state schools in all Mapuche communities; bilingual teaching at these schools; more grants for indigenous students to go to teacher training college; less bureaucratic and rigid promotion procedures for Mapuche teachers; a system to enable the most accomplished Araucanian teachers and professionals to continue their studies abroad; the creation of an Indigenous Education Department to mediate between the Ministry of Education and Indigenous [School] Inspectors; and the foundation of a Library and Centre of Araucanian Studies, under the aegis of this Indigenous Education Department to “help disseminate writings on the Araucanian race” and “to awaken public interest in indigenous issues, folklore and art”.81 Four other Mapuche worked on this commission with Inalaf. One of them was César Colima.82 Less than a year after this congress and commission, Colima was invited—together with Venancio Coñuepán—to attend the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress in Pátzcuaro, Mexico. Colima and Coñuepán presented a paper of approximately 15 minutes to their fellow indigenista delegates in Mexico. Many of the points they raised about education echoed those made by Inalaf’s commission. Thus, as with the 1930 discussions that brought various indigenous organisations together in Temuco, and that were publicised by El Diario Austral, this report drew on and fed into a transnational as well as national conversation on education.

 They had, for example, been at the Araucanian Congress in Ercilla together in 1926.  In Foerster and Montecino, Contiendas, p. 263. 82  Colima was rapporteur for this commission. Manuel Huenchullán was its vice-president, and Adela Huenchullán and Juan Caniuqueo were secretaries. 80 81

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Conclusions Chapter 10 has mapped out numerous individual connections established through schools, church groups, congresses, political organisations, and periodicals. The indigenous linguist Chuqiwanka Ayulo, for example, was a delegate of the Pro-Indigenous Association and  the Tawantinsuyo Committee alongside Urviola. The first organisation also brought him together with Encinas and Gamaliel Churata. Encinas was on the editorial board for La Escuela Moderna when it publicised Chuqiwanka’s Aymara and Quechua dictionary in 1914, and Churata relaunched this linguistic decolonisation project through his journal Boletín Titikaka in the late 1920s. In Chile, the Mapuche teacher Inalaf Navarro attended the 1926 Araucanian Congress in Ercilla, together with of scores of other outspoken Mapuche educators, including Tripaylaf, who would later organise the First Pedagogical Congress of Araucanian Teachers. Navarro himself played a key role in the Congress of Radical (Party) Teachers, presiding over a newly established commission on indigenous education, which included César Colima. These individual connections build up into a much larger collective picture of interweaving indigenous activist networks that persistently pursued the right to education during the first half of the twentieth century. Indigenous education demands were by no means uniform or free of tensions, but most of the protagonists discussed in this chapter shared a proclaimed belief in the transformative power of education when that education catered to the socioeconomic needs of indigenous communities and took place in the communities, or at least did not require students to be removed from their communities. They also pushed for more indigenous teachers as well as for more teaching in indigenous languages. In all, they made education an important part of their campaign against social and racial injustice, not least the ongoing dispossession of indigenous lands. In this sense, indigenous views of education ran counter to the government focus on social control, discussed in Chap. 8. It was change at a national level that indigenous activists demanded (for example, more grants from the state for indigenous students to attend teacher training colleges, or the creation of new government departments dedicated entirely to indigenous education), but the broader framework for those demands was often transnational (e.g. growing scholarly interest in indigenous languages across the Americas and Europe, or calls for governments to look to educational developments in neighbouring

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countries). Many of the indigenous actors in this chapter, moreover, moved in transnational circles. The puneños Urviola and Camacho both travelled to Chile. Camacho also travelled to the U.S., and later worked with U.S. missionary Stahl. Chuqiwanka collaborated with U.S. pedagogue MacKnight. From Chile, Tripaylaf reached out to other teacher organisations in Latin America. Huenchullán studied indigenous education in the U.S. Colima attended the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress in Mexico in 1940, and Inalaf Navarro attended the second, held in Cuzco, Peru, in 1949. These two Inter-American congresses are the focus of the next and final chapter of Part III.

CHAPTER 11

Conferencing Indigenous Education

This final chapter of Part III investigates Chilean and Peruvian contributions to the conversations about indigenous education which unfolded at the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress hosted by Mexico in 1940, and the Second Inter-American Indigenista Congress hosted by Peru in 1949. It illustrates how the ideas discussed by delegates in Pátzcuaro and Cuzco travelled back to Lima and Santiago, as national sites of policy making, and afterwards to different local or regional sites of policy action. I re-emphasise the importance of international congresses as “contact zones” or sites of encounter, interrogating how these worked, not least their efforts to contain and co-opt indigenous voices. Whilst indigenous people were present at these congresses, their voices were largely drowned out by non-indigenous delegates. Significantly, Chile stood out as one of the only countries to send indigenous political leaders to Mexico and Peru as official government representatives—César Colima and Venancio Coñuepán went to Pátzcuaro, and Domingo Curaqueo and José Inalaf Navarro to Cuzco—and its contributions to both congresses were given ample press coverage in Peru. Thus, as with previous chapters, this chapter shows how the subject of indigenous education rights could bring Chileans and Peruvians together in dialogue and mutual understanding. Alongside the Mapuche activists mentioned above, readers will re-­ encounter the German-born Catholic missionary Guido Beck de Ramberga

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Crow, Itinerant Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01952-4_11

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from Chap. 2. As bishop of Araucanía, he accompanied Curaqueo and Inalaf Navarro to Cuzco in 1949. From Peru, we re-encounter educator and congressman José Ángel Escalante, the ethnologist and novelist José María Arguedas, and the famed indigenista historian Luis Eduardo Valcárcel. The voices of the last two, especially of Valcárcel, have been prominent in many chapters of this book. We begin, though, with the Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas. Starting with the words of his opening speech in Pátzcuaro in 1940 and then following the transnational and (Chilean and Peruvian) national conversations on education through to 1950, this chapter demonstrates how a country’s prestige on the international stage during this period was closely linked to how active its government was seen to be in the indigenous rights arena, even if such an image largely contradicted the reality lived by indigenous people.

Speaking for Indigenous Education in Pátzcuaro, Mexico In his welcome address to congress delegates in Pátzcuaro on 14 April 1940, Cárdenas denounced supposedly modern and progressive ideas about “incorporat[ing] the Indian into civilisation” as “a remnant of old systems that tried to hide de facto inequality”. As the Mexican president told it, people who spoke of incorporation in this way in actual fact sought to “de-Indianise” the Indian by uprooting “regional dialects, traditions [and] customs”. He hoped that in  Mexico as in other countries represented at the conference, mainstream society would start to respect and value the Indian’s “racial personality, his conscience, and his identity”. He also asserted, however, that no one could “expect a resurrection of the pre-Cortesian indigenous systems or a stagnation that is incompatible with the flux of life today.”1 Education was central to his vision—and delegates’ discussions—as to how to best maintain a balance between indigenous “tradition” and national “modernisation”. Despite Cárdenas’s seemingly radical opening statement, this congress has been criticised in recent scholarship for exhibiting a colonialist view towards indigenous peoples, for it was predominantly a conference of “white” men talking about rather than with indigenous 1

 In Rosemblatt, The Science and Politics of Race…, pp. 135–136.

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peoples.2 In Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico, art historian Jennifer Jolly observes that the only “Indian delegates” in Pátzcuaro were invited at short notice and that their interventions were not included in the published proceedings. She also notes that Indian delegates were accommodated at the local boarding school, in contrast to government delegates who were booked into hotels.3 In this sense, those few indigenous delegates that did attend were treated very much as second-class participants, or as students there to learn rather than pass on knowledge. “The guiding assumption” of the conference, according to Jolly, “was that it was the job of government bureaucrats to save the continent’s Indians.”4 This notion of the Indian in need of salvation is depicted on the front cover of the printed version of the paper delivered by one of the Peruvian delegates in Pátzcuaro, Manuel T.  Calle Escajadillo: a pious, humble Indian, praying to be enlightened and guided towards redemption (Fig. 11.1).5 The Chilean government sent three delegates in total to Pátzcuaro: Manuel Hidalgo, who was serving as Ambassador of Chile in Mexico City at the time, and Colima and Coñuepán, who travelled from Chile. These two Mapuche activist-intellectuals do not fit the rule that Jolly elucidates, for they attended not as “Indian delegates” but as representatives of the Chilean government, and, in this capacity, presented  a paper on “The Indigenous Problem in Chile”.6 This is not to say they had no problems whilst there. According to letters that Hidalgo sent to the Minister of 2  Laura Jiraudo, ‘Neither “Scientific” nor “Colonialist”’: The Ambiguous Course of InterAmerican Indigenismo in the 1940s’, Latin American Perspectives 39: 5 (2012), pp. 12-32; Jennifer Jolly, Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation-Building under Lázaro Cárdenas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014). Significantly, the New York Times described the congress as a “Meeting on Indians” (my emphasis), as opposed to an Indian Meeting, or a Meeting of Indians. See Betty Kirk, ‘A Meeting on Indians: An InterAmerican Conference is Held on Shore of Lake Pátzcuaro in Mexico’, New York Times, 14 April 1940, p. 139. I talk about this conference in more detail, and from a more geographical perspective, in ‘Contesting representations of indigeneity at the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress, 1940’ in Stephen Legg et  al. (eds.), Placing Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 55–69. 3  Jolly, Creating Pátzcuaro, p. 165. 4  Ibid. 5  Manuel T.  Calle Escajadillo, Ponencia presentada al Primer Congreso Indigenista de México (Lima: Imprenta Moderna, 1940). 6  As commented previously, I would like to thank Jorge Iván Vergara for sharing a copy of this document with me.

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Fig. 11.1  Manuel T. Calle Escajadillo, Ponencia Presentada al Primer Congreso Indigenista de Mexico, 1940. Courtesy of The Library of Congress, Washington

Foreign Affairs in Santiago on 12 and 25 April 1940, Coñuepán and Colima were unable to cover their costs in Mexico, and he pressed his superiors to send them the money they had been promised.7 Nonetheless, it is intriguing that Chile, renowned for disavowing its own indigenous-­ ness, was one of the only countries to send indigenous political organisers to speak in an official capacity at this transnational indigenista forum.8 In their presentation, Coñuepán and Colima applauded the efforts of the Chilean administration that had sent them to Pátzcuaro. As they put it to their fellow delegates, “The Indian cherishes the hope that “the government of his Excellency Don Pedro Aguirre Cerda will tackle [their 7  Cited in Jorge Iván Vergara and Hans Gundermann, ‘Chile y el Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, 1940–1993: Una visión del conjunto’, Chungara, Revista de Antropología Chilena, 2016, pp. 129–130. 8  Crow, The Mapuche in Modern Chile, pp. 87–88, and p. 101.

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problems] once and for all”.9 Those hopes were founded on “the work already undertaken by this government”, which included “the building of rural schools” and “the establishment of an Inspectorate of Indigenous Education (led by an indigenous person).” Not for nothing did the Mexican, Colombian, and Peruvian delegations at the congress formally congratulate the Chilean government for “its ample indigenista work”. At least, this was how El Comercio of Lima recounted events when it informed readers, on 24 April 1940, about the significance of the agreements reached in Pátzcuaro.10 El Comercio seemingly missed out the other part of the paper delivered by Coñuepán and Colima (if this was indeed the paper that it was summarising), for these Mapuche leaders were not entirely positive about the situation of indigenous people in Chile; far from it. Praise for the Popular Front government apart, the core message of their presentation was that indigenous people in Chile had  long been neglected by the state. They lamented that successive past governments had failed in their duty to provide Mapuche people with an education; its passivity, they said, meant that missionary churches had been forced to fill the void (see Chap. 10). Moving from the past to the future, Coñuepán and Colima focused on how the state could make up for these errors: more investment to be able to build new primary schools in rural areas, two teacher training colleges for indigenous students, a vocational school for indigenous women, an agricultural school, and a school of indigenous craftmanship. These Mapuche organisers concluded by stressing that the “Indian problem” had to be dealt with in a holistic manner, which meant  addressing the issues of land ownership (discussed in Part I), for example, as well as education. Coñuepán and Colima also made it clear that the indigenous constituencies they spoke for, as leaders of the Corporación Araucana (set up in 1938), were by no means passive victims of state policy, or indeed lack of such policy. As I have already noted in a recent edited volume on international conferences, they took advantage of the public platform they had in Pátzcuaro to encourage the  Chilean state “to adopt the suggestions of indigenous organisations in order to create new laws that will resolve our

 Colima and Coñuepán, ‘El problema indígena de Chile’.  ‘El Congreso Indigenista Interamericano adoptó importantes acuerdos’, El Comercio, 24 April 1940, p. 10. 9

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problems in a definitive and satisfactory way” (my emphasis).11 What is more,  indigenous people were to play a leading role in the educational changes that Coñuepán and Colima proposed. They insisted, for example, that staff in the new rural schools should be indigenous and that they should teach in the indigenous language if they could. Many of the points raised by Coñuepán and Colima coincided with the recommendations of the 1939 Congress of Radical [Party] Teachers held in Santiago (see Chap. 10). They also pre-empted the recommendations mapped out in the Acta Final of the congress. Resolutions XXXV, XXXVI, and XXXVIII encouraged the wide-spread implementation of indigenous education policies adopted in Mexico, the United States and Bolivia.12 In the case of Mexico (XXXV), delegates lauded the validation of indigenous languages and cultural traditions that came with teaching in indigenous languages (as well as in the “national language” Spanish). They also celebrated the positive steps taken with the employment of indigenous teachers, the publication of texts in indigenous languages, and the study of indigenous ways of life. Similar lessons  were to be taken from the U.S. (XXXVI), where John Collier was trying to make sure indigenous communities benefitted from Roosevelt’s “New Deal”. In addition, delegates underlined the link between indigenous education and public health (the teaching of good hygiene practices, the provision of clean drinking water, schools’ employment of nurses and doctors), economic development (training in soil management and crop production), and the possibility of “community self-government within the national unit”.13 As in Mexico, the priority of U.S. indigenistas was to provide education in the rural communities. Where necessary the state was prepared to finance larger residential schools, but these were generally being phased out. In line with Mexico and the U.S., one of the principal recommendations of the Bolivian delegation (XXXVIII) was that schools be “constructed in the very heart of indigenous communities”, with an aim of “not separating [indigenous people] from their land”, and with the active involvement of

11   Crow, ‘Contesting representations of indigeneity’, in Legg et al. (eds.), Placing Internationalism, p. 62. 12  Acta Final del Primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano, pp.  17–21, discussed in Crow and Ramay, ‘Indigenous Politics and Education in Early to Mid-Twentieth Century Chile’, op. cit. 13  Acta Final del Primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano, p. 19.

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the community.14 Consolidating the specific proposals stemming from the experiences of Mexico, the U.S. and Bolivia, was the more comprehensive resolution (XXXVII) that “the educational process should promote new attitudes, drawing on all the opportunities offered by the indigenous way of living, and without distorting or shaming this way of life.”15 In sum, Pátzcuaro did not so much create new ideas about indigenous education, but rather pushed for continent-wide application of policies already underway. Such policies were not a reality in Chile, but—as shown by Colima and Coñuepán’s report—they were a subject of conversation, and firmly on the agenda of Mapuche activists and educators.

Pátzcuaro Resolutions Taken Back to Peru Peru sent the same number of government representatives to Pátzcuaro as Chile did, although its delegation, overall, was much larger. Presiding over it was José Angel Escalante, a leading newspaper proprietor in Cuzco, and Minister of Justice, Education and Culture in the early 1930s (see Chap. 10). When Escalante attended the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress in 1940, he was serving as a representative for Espinar in the Chamber of Deputies (1939–1944). On his return to Peru, he was invited to tell Congress about the discussions that had taken place in Pátzcuaro and the agreements that had been reached. Supporting this motion, the President of the Chamber of Deputies spoke of how important it was that all countries of the Americas work together “in the urgent task of liberating [the Indian] from ignorance and lack of education, affirming their rights, [and] respecting their distinct way of being as well as their active participation [in society]”.16 The deputy for Chumbivilcas, Mr Ponce de León, followed the President of the Chamber by stressing the national relevance of the Pátzcuaro resolutions, for the Peruvian government was

 Ibid., p. 21.  Ibid., p. 20. 16  ‘Sesión efectuada el 28 de agosto de 1940’, La Cámara de Diputados y el Primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano: Exposición ante la Cámara del señor Diputado por Espinar Doctor José Ángel Escalante (Lima: Librería e Imprenta Gil S. A., 1940), p. 5. This publication reproduces all the relevant interventions recorded in the proceedings of Peru’s National Congress including: a brief introduction to and justification of Escalante’s report, two weeks before this was presented; the report itself; and responses to it. 14 15

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just at that moment studying the possibilities for a new Organic Law of Public Education.17 Escalante presented his understanding of the Pátzcuaro resolutions on education to the Peruvian National Congress on 11 September 1940.18 First, he underscored the agreement to respect indigenous people’s “positive customs of social organisation”, to recognise the importance of native languages, and to develop a curricular and extra-curricular programme “in accordance with the cultural state of indigenous groups”.19 He noted specific practical proposals, such as the introduction of school-­texts in indigenous languages and the preferential employment of qualified indigenous teachers. The other more general recommendations the Peruvian deputy brought to the attention of his peers included providing the “indigenous masses” with an education so they could contribute directly to national progress, building schools in the communities and involving parents in the running of these schools. The Pátzcuaro congress, as Escalante presented it, agreed to respect a certain level of indigenous autonomy, yet it also stressed that such regionalised teaching programmes required (centralised) co-ordinated organisation. Having outlined this internationally agreed framework, Escalante made a forceful appeal for education reforms in Peru. Instead of trying to incite pity for indigenous people, he underscored the economic rationale for attempting their more effective inclusion in the nation. Peru’s industry and manufacturing would never develop if there were no consumers, he said. A large part of the population was indigenous and poor; education would enable these people to gain employment and with an income came increased consumer activity.20 This was an innovative point to make, for the focus of the transnational discussions about education, as well as about labour and cultural heritage, that I have interrogated so far in this book has tended to be on indigenous people’s role as producers. And yet the link between education and consumption, Escalante stressed, was something on which the “eminent, experienced and highly trained pedagogues” gathered in Pátzcuaro were all agreed.21

 Ibid., p. 7.  ‘Sesión efectuada el 11 de septiembre de 1940’, in ibid., pp. 9–51. 19  Ibid., p. 30. 20  Ibid., p. 35. 21  Ibid. 17 18

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For Escalante, Mexico was a model to follow: his proposals responded to the “multiple trials and revisions that Mexico had carried out over the last twenty-five years, in its tireless quest to educate the Indian.”22 What he prioritised of all directives to come out of this Inter-American Indigenista Congress was the call to “create and maintain special schools for Indians”, with distinct study programmes, with indigenous teachers, in establishments prepared especially for indigenous children, and with teaching in indigenous languages—at least in the early stages. In the 1940s, he affirmed, “no one believes that indigenous children can be incorporated into western-type schools”, for they came from a different home environment and a distinct “spiritual structure”. They had a “inferiority complex born from their sorrowful social reality”. Education could help to resolve this, but not education as it had been—in mixed schools, where indigenous children felt “the disdainful glare of their masters” and “suffer[ed] silently the pain inflicted on them”.23 He accused Peruvian leaders, including himself as previous Minister of Education, for not doing enough, and drew on the words of Mexican educator Ismael Rodríguez Aragón to force home the message that “the Indian [was] not lacking reason”; it was just that “their reason” or way of reasoning was “different.”24 Carefully praising President José Pardo’s “watchful spirit”, Escalante called on his fellow diputados to increase the education budget and lead a revolution from above.25 According to the official parliamentary records, all of this was greeted with rapturous applause.26 In 1941, the government of Manuel Prado Ugarteche passed a new Organic Law of Public Education (Law 9359).27 It is not clear whether Escalante’s public celebration of Pátzcuaro had any direct impact on this new legislation; we do not know whether any amendments were made because of his intervention. We do know, though, that the new legislation acknowledged the urgent need to democratise education, and the fact that everyone in the country had a right to education. It acknowledged five types of primary schools: rural schools, community schools, mobile school units (presumably, like Vásquez’s project discussed in Chap. 9),  Ibid., p. 43.  Ibid., p. 44. 24  Ibid., pp. 45–46. 25  Ibid., p. 51. 26  Ibid., p. 53. 27  Law 9359 was known as the “Olivera Reform”, after Pedro Olivera, the then Minister of Education. 22 23

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home-­schools, and urban schools. As summarised by a U.S. government report of 1964, primary education, in general, became more industrial in orientation, and rural education more agricultural.28 A National Education Commission was established to oversee the changes, and detailed teachers’ guides were to be prepared and distributed throughout the country. The law also provided for the organisation of “Patronatos Escolares” to encourage social, cultural, and economic cooperation between the school and the students’ homes and communities. More specific changes following the general line of reform outlined above were introduced in 1946, when the Peruvian government created a new rural education program organised around “núcleos escolares campesinos”. According to the above-cited report produced for the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, this was an important initiative, and in many ways seemed to respond to what indigenous peoples had long since been demanding (see Chap. 10). Luis Eduardo Valcárcel was the Minister of Education at the time and therefore oversaw this new state-led project. Indeed, as Valcárcel himself later presented it in his Memorias, he was the driving force behind the project.29 Existing scholarship largely concurs with Valcárcel’s account. In the words of Tracy Devine, “When he was appointed to the Ministry of Education in 1945 by President Bustamante y Rivero, Valcárcel’s indigenismo was transferred out of educational discourse and into the realm of official State policy.”30 María Elena García helpfully adds the ethnologist and novelist José María Arguedas into this equation. He was one of the “prominent intellectuals” of the 1940s who—in contrast to the “heavy paternalism and even racism of some early indigenista projects” (Leguía’s government, for example)—rejected the language of assimilation and “began to see bilingual education as a way to enhance the capacity of indigenous people to be autonomous actors in constructing a modern and plural Peru.”31 Arguedas, who was fluent in Quechua and who had studied with Valcárcel as a university student, stressed the importance of teaching highland 28   Adela R Freeburger and Charles F.  Hauch, ‘Education in Peru’, report for U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Bulletin No. 33 (1964). 29  Valcárcel, Memorias, pp. 351–353. 30  Tracy Lynne Devine, ‘Indigenous identity and identification in Peru: Indigenismo, education and contradictions in state discourses’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 8: 1 (1999), p. 67. 31  María Elena García, Making Indigenous Citizens: Identity, Development and Multicultural Activism in Peru (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 71.

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indigenous populations in the Andean languages. In the early 1940s, he was contracted as General Conservator of Folklore in the Ministry of Education, and—according to García—it was “[a]s a result of his work, and under the influence of Valcárcel”, that the Peruvian government “began to implement bilingual education in indigenous schools in 1945.”32 Arguedas and Valcárcel also promoted the recovery of indigenous languages beyond the school. Arguedas did so in his own literary writing, his studies, and his recording and publication of community oral traditions. As a teacher in Sicuani between 1939 and 1941, he encouraged his students to gather oral histories and songs from their communities, and as General Conservator of Folklore, he worked together with Francisco Izquierdo Ríos (1910–1981) on a questionnaire that was distributed to teachers in provincial schools across the country with a view to them too collecting local folklore in collaboration with their students.33 According to Javier García Liendo, Arguedas and Izquierdo Ríos received more than 30,000 responses and, through the Ministry of Education, published a book entitled Mitos, leyendas y cuentos peruanos (1947).34 Most of the materials never made it into formal teaching texts but they were at least accessible to the educated, book-buying public in Lima. Before becoming Minister of Education, Valcárcel used his position as director of the National Museum (1931–1945) to promote wider awareness and appreciation of the value of indigenous Andean languages. Amongst other things, this museum published a magazine, Revista del Museo Nacional, which disseminated numerous scholarly investigations about and reproductions of spoken and written Quechua in the 1940s.35 Looking back on this period several decades later, Valcárcel recounted that “the confrontation between two cultures” had been “a fundamental problem” in Peru, but that he and his team in the Ministry of Education “rejected the idea of ‘incorporating’ indigenous peoples into occidental civilisation”. “We wanted an active school”, he wrote in his memoirs, “attentive to the environment in which it operated”, a school that belonged  Ibid., p. 73.  Javier García Liendo, ‘Teachers, Folklore, and the Crafting of Serrano Cultural Identity in Peru’, Latin American Research Review 52: 3 (2017), pp. 378–392. 34  Ibid., p. 386. 35  For example, J.M.B.  Farfan, ‘La clave del lenguaje Quechua del Cusco’, Revista del Museo Nacional, Vol. X, No. 2 (1941) and ‘Colección de Textos Quechuas del Peru Central’, Revista del Museo Nacional Vol. XVI (1947); Jorge Lira, ‘Fundamentos de la lengua kkechuwa’, Revista del Museo Nacional Vol. XVI (1947). 32 33

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to the communities. As remembered by Valcárcel, it was “all-hands-on-­ deck” once the legislation was signed, and by 1947 there were 320 schools in operation, throughout the Lake Titikaka region and the Urubamba Valley, which catered to more than 36,000 students.36 The “núcleos escolares campesinos” consisted of an escuela central [central school] offering the complete elementary school program, and 15 to 20 escuelas seccionales [sectional schools] offering the first 3 years of elementary schooling. These schools provided instruction in farming, gardening, sanitation, arithmetic, shop-work, and in the regional indigenous language, as well as literacy classes and vocational training. The central school—which served as the headquarters for the director of the school and its supervisors for health, agriculture, and literacy—administered, supervised, and coordinated all-­ the operations of the sectional schools.37 Based on this initiative, Devine claims Valcárcel “believed in the race-­ improving capacity of education” and “advocated indigenismo as a project that could ‘improve’ people without detracting from their pure ‘Indianness’”. State-sponsored indigenismo under Valcárcel “perpetuated his characterizations of mestizos as degenerated Indians. The administration attempted to thwart the expansion of what it considered undesirable cultural hybridity with policies that transformed the Peruvian educational system, especially in rural areas.”  For Devine, the “núcleos escolares campesinos” were one of the most important elements of such changes: “Through these new schools, the Ministry of Education implemented an educational policy infused with a purist, anti-mestizo ideology that sought to forge a State out of two physically and culturally separate nations that ideally would never have to meet.”38 Marisol de la Cadena (2001) interprets Valcárcel’s education reforms differently. She homes-in on his idea of “unity in diversity”, presented as the “context for his rural education program in a 1946 speech to the national Congress.” “Through this program”, de la Cadena argues, “the Minister of Education expressed his desire to preserve Indians as agriculturalists, yet to offer them the benefits of civilisation through bilingual Quechua and Spanish literacy programs, agricultural training, and hygiene lessons.” “While these policies might have prevented mestizaje from 36  Valcárcel, Memorias, p. 353. These figures were corroborated by Freeburger and Hauch, ‘Education in Peru’. 37  Freeburger and Hauch, ‘Education in Peru’. 38  Devine, ‘Indigenous Identity…’ p. 68.

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becoming official nationalist rhetoric”, she said, “they did not invalidate it.” In sum, Valcarcel’s project was “ambiguous enough as to bring consensus into the assortment of ideas proposed by the politically heterogeneous and even antagonistic champions of mestizaje”.39 De la Cadena’s work reminds us that just as with institutions, individual actors rarely act or speak as one constant, uniform whole. Despite the story that he himself later told in his Memorias, it is possible to assert that by the 1940s Valcárcel’s thinking had shifted quite considerably from the purist ideology that infused his messianic announcement of a return to the Inca Empire in Tempestad en los Andes of 1927 (see Chap. 10). Such a shift is surely at least in part explained by the wider, transnational context in which Valcárcel was operating. When he recalled how he and his team in the Ministry of Education “rejected the idea of ‘incorporating’ indigenous peoples into occidental civilisation”, Valcárcel was echoing Cárdenas’s opening address to delegates at the First Inter-­ American Indigenista Congress in 1940. Valcárcel had attended this congress as an independent scholar interested in the “indigenous question”. So too had Arguedas. Both Arguedas and Valcárcel met and collaborated with the main organiser of the Pátzcuaro conference and first director of the Inter-American Indigenista Institute, Moisés Sáenz, when the latter was serving as Mexican Ambassador to Peru (1936–1941). Valcárcel drew on Sáenz’s work to defend his own argument about the close relationship between the Indian and the land in an article he published in the Inter-­ American Indigenista Institute’s official magazine América Indígena, and he took on the directorship of the Peruvian Indigenista Institute when this was founded in 1946.40 Furthermore, the “núcleos escolares campesinos”, set in motion under Valcárcel, came to Peru from Bolivia. They were first inaugurated in Bolivia—the result of the reorganisation of rural education worked out in collaboration with the U.S. based Inter-American Education Foundation—and then became official policy in Peru through a joint Peru-Bolivia program for the Lake Titikaka basin (agreed by both countries on 1st November 1945).41 In 1947, Lloyd Hughes, who worked for the Inter-American Education Foundation in Washington, described this  de la Cadena, ‘Deconstructing race…’, pp. 18–19.  Luis Valcárcel, ‘Moisés Sáenz y el indio peruano’, América Indigena 3: 1 (January– March 1943), p. 64. 41  Lloyd H. Hughes, ‘Rural Education in the Andes’, Agriculture in the Americas Vol. VII, Nos. 10–11 (October–November 1947), pp. 131–134. 39 40

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cooperative initiative (reportedly the brain child of the then president José Bustamante y Rivero while he was Peruvian Ambassador in Bolivia) as a “spectacular education development”—one that would go on to incorporate Ecuador too, and one that “in essence” was “an adaptation of the community school program as it is known in Mexico and the United States.”42 Indeed, not only were the “núcleos escolares campesinos” interpreted as an adaptation of the U.S. education system—a segregated system in a state of flux43—and designed in conversation with U.S. development agencies; they were also partly financed by the U.S.  In short, the new indigenous education scheme implemented under Valcárcel was about much more than this one man, and as much about what was going on outside Peru as within.

Pátzcuaro Resolutions (Partially) Taken Back to Chile This type of system was not adopted in Chile, but teachers, political activists, and policy makers there were very much part the continent-wide discussions about indigenous education. They participated in the forums established by the Inter-American Indigenista Institute, and they attempted to use Pátzcuaro to promote pedagogical changes back home. In 1943, the institute’s Boletín Indigenista published part of a report that it had received from J. Andrés Aguayo Paillalef, a Mapuche teacher and “inspector of Indian education in Temuco”.44 The magazine re-produced a list of “urgent improvements which Sr Aguayo recommends for the benefits of 42  This involved “the establishment of firm ties between the school and the community, the study of community problems by the pupils, and the assumption of leadership in the solution of community problems by the school” (ibid., p. 131). 43  As noted in Chap. 10, Indian industrial boarding schools, which removed children from their homes, were condemned by the Meriam Report of 1928, and many were closed. By the 1930s, the official focus had moved to community day schools. From the mid-1930s (as per the Indian Re-Organisation Act of 1934), there was also more federal funding for Native American children to attend public schools. The questioning of racial segregation in schools gathered pace in the 1940s: there were court rulings against the segregation of Mexican American students in California in 1947, for example, and that same year Catholic schools in some states started to desegregate. Disputes about segregation often emphasised discrimination against black students, and 1954 saw the momentous civil rights case Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, where the Supreme Court ruled that separate schools for white and African American students were inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. 44  ‘Chile: Proposed Benefits for the Indians’, Boletín Indigenista 3: 1 (1943), p. 23.

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[Chile’s] Indian population.”45 After petitioning for better provision of technical and educational services—as well as the return of indigenous lands and improved credit facilities for indigenous communities—Aguayo Paillalef prevailed upon the Chilean government to ratify the Pátzcuaro Convention and establish a National Indigenista Institute, which should work to defend “the race without exercising tutelage or monopolising the Indian program.”46 He drew on the language spoken at Pátzcuaro to exort Chilean authorities to make these kinds of changes. He also, simultaneously,  challenged continental indigenista imaginaries of indigenous people as in need of salvation or reliant on enlightened souls to speak for them. This Mapuche education inspector showed that they were perfectly able to speak for themselves and very keen to be actively involved in the reforms that were urgently needed. Coñuepán too used Pátzcuaro to support the struggle for indigenous rights back in Chile. He also used it to try to secure his status as an important transnational political figure. In one session in the Chilean National Congress in 1947, he asserted that the “old theory of ‘civilising the Indian’” was nothing more than a “pretext for the oppression of indigenous peoples”—as with Valcárcel, his words closely emulated Cárdenas’s inaugural address at the conference—and that this had been robustly “rejected by the representatives who met in Pátzcuaro, at the Indigenista Congress of Mexico”.47 How on earth could Chileans hope to show “the world the goodness of their civilisation by killing and murdering Indians?”, he asked his fellow diputados. In a similar vein to Escalante in Peru, Coñuepán publicly claimed that the “men at Pátzcuaro know much more than others” about the indigenous question; he was passing on this knowledge and urged congress to act upon it.48 On the subject of education, he assured his audience that, if able to go, indigenous students would do well at school  because they were fully aware of the benefits that education could bring, not least literacy and the ability to understand their rights and duties as enshrined in law.  Ibid., p. 25.  Ibid. I touch upon Aguayo Paillalef’s published recommendations in ‘Contesting representations of indigeneity’, in Legg et al. (eds.), Placing Internationalism, p. 65. 47  Cámara de Diputados, Sesiones extraordinarias, 25 November 1947, p. 861. 48  Crow and Ramay, ‘Indigenous Politics and Education in Early to Mid-Twentieth Century Chile’. For a more extensive analysis of Coñuepán’s parliamentary speeches in the late 1940s, see Crow, The Mapuche in Modern Chile, pp. 102–105. 45 46

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As congressman in the late 1940s and director of the newly created Department of Indigenous Affairs between  1953  and  1958, Coñuepán was able to introduce some of the reforms recommended by himself, Colima, and other delegates at Pátzcuaro. As noted in Part I, Coñuepán managed to restrict indigenous land sales, renegotiate numerous community contracts with forestry companies, secure increased credit loans, and thwart certain development projects. He also managed to secure more grants for indigenous students to finish their secondary education.49 The latter, though, was one of his only accomplishments in education. Despite the continual promises of state education authorities—which date back to at least 1930 and the new regulations approved by Araucanía’s Regional Inspector of Primary Education (see Chap. 10)—the annual DASIN reports show that very little progress was made, even in the 1950s. Between 1953 and 1958, Coñuepán persistently pushed for the creation of more indigenous schools near rural communities. He made this one of his key demands as a government minister and yet, even in this position, his demands went unheeded. The main problem, as always, was a lack of funds.50

The Chilean Delegation in Cuzco, Peru By the time Coñuepán had a ministerial position, the Second Inter-­ American Indigenista Congress had taken place in Cuzco, Peru (24 June–4 July 1949). The four main Chilean delegates to this conference—Guido Beck de Ramberga (bishop of Araucanía at the time), lieutenant colonel Gregorio Rodríguez, and two Mapuche educators and political organisers, Domingo Curaqueo and José Inalaf Navarro—received a notably warm welcome from the Peruvian press. Rodríguez, Curaqueo and Inalaf took it upon themselves to visit the offices of the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio whilst in Lima on their way to Cuzco.51 In the write-up of this visit, published on 26 June 1949, readers were told that Curaqueo was attending the congress as a representative of the Chilean Ministry of Education, and that Inalaf was representing the Chilean Ministry of Lands and  For more detail, see ibid., pp. 106–107.  Rolf Foerster, Alejandro Clavería and Jorge Iván Vergara (eds.), ‘Memorias de la Direccón de Asuntos Indígenas, 1953–1959’, Anales de Desclasificación 1: 2 (2005), pp. 1–24. 51  ‘Visita a “El Comercio” de delegados chilenos al II Congreso Indigenista’, El Comercio, 26 June 1949. 49 50

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Colonisation, based on his experience “as member of the (national) Commission for Indigenous Legislative Reform; a trained teacher in History, Geography and Physical Education; a qualified lawyer; and Vice-­ President of the Alianza Cultural Araucana.” The newspaper’s editorial team had a “highly enjoyable conversation” with these authoritative figures, who explained “the constructive intentions behind their planned contributions to the deliberations in Cuzco.” We do not know the exact nature of their contributions (El Comercio did not give any detail as to their intentions), but we do have access to the Acta Final for the congress, which included 68 resolutions, recommendations, and agreements.52 Nineteen of these related to indigenous education, and we detect herein both divergences from and continuities with Pátzcuaro. Public health featured in the education-related recommendations of the first congress, but it became much more prominent in 1949: how schools could help with vaccination campaigns, for example, and how they could support the crusade against drug addiction, alcoholism, and other common “vices” (XXV, XXIX). Delegates also agreed that governments needed to provide more education opportunities for women (XXVI, XLII). The Cuzco Congress ratified resolution XXXVI of 1940, which promoted the community education schemes introduced in the U.S., and it applauded the experimental programmes underway in Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, and Bolivia (XL). There seemed to be slightly more focus on literacy teaching (XXXI), and in this context, whilst indigenous languages were to be taught and valued, the end goal was the “exclusive use of the national language in schools” (XXXV). Delegates placed more emphasis on the rights of the child (XXXVII)—as opposed to the community, which was at the forefront of the road map for continent-­wide reform agreed at Pátzcuaro—and on individual human rights (XXXVI, XLI), both of which tied in with the recent establishment of UNESCO in Paris. Overall, the official developmentalist discourse promoted at Cuzco—in line with that of the military government of Manuel Odría in Peru (1948–1956), the anti-communist administration of Gabriel González Videla in Chile (1946–1952), and with developments in Mexico after Cárdenas—seemed to have reclaimed the aim of “civilising” the Indian. It is remarkable how much positive coverage the Peruvian national press gave to the Chilean delegation and its views on this civilising quest. 52  Acta Final del Segundo Congreso Indigenista Interamericano (Mexico City: Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, September 1949).

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Alongside the piece on Inalaf, Curaqueo and Rodríguez, Lima’s daily newspaper El Comercio frequently cited the bishop of Araucanía, Guido Beck de Ramberga, who several decades previously had condemned Mapuche leaders like Aburto Panguilef as communist subversives. Indeed, de Ramberga was quoted at significantly greater length than his co-­ delegates. This reflects his prominence at the conference itself, where he nominated people to key administrative posts,53 was invited to sit on the “platform of honour” at one of the opening events,54 and gave a speech on behalf of all the foreign delegations.55 In this apparently much-admired speech, de Ramberga saluted the “Church’s crusade in defence of western civilisation” and pledged to continue working for the “redemption of the Indian, following the Bible and the Social Encyclicals.” The church was thus back in favour, after the anti-clericalism of Cárdenas’s Mexico. One issue of El Comercio dedicated a full half-page to an interview with de Ramberga.56 The piece is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, Ramberga’s self-promotion: the celebration of his own efforts, as leader of the Capuchin mission in southern Chile, to help the Chilean government “extend Christianity and civilisation to the Araucanian aboriginals” by setting up 174 day-schools and 21 boarding schools, and by studying and translating the Mapuche language. Despite the fact his own delegation included two Mapuche, there was no mention of what indigenous people themselves were doing. Second, Ramberga’s adherence to and simultaneous contradiction of the notion that Chile was somehow a racial “exception” in Latin America: on the one hand, readers were told that Chile did not suffer the same “indigenous problem” as other Latin American countries, for there were only 200,000 “Araucanians” in a country with a total population of 6  million, and they were based exclusively in the south, where they lived in widely spread out reducciones. Ramberga also described the Mapuche as “profoundly individualistic, in contrast to […] other aboriginal races of the Western hemisphere.”, a suggestion, perhaps, that they were culturally closer to modern capitalist society. On the other hand, this Chilean bishop noted how similar their “current primitive state” was 53  ‘En la mañana de hoy será inaugurado el II Congreso Indigenista en la ciudad del Cuzco’, El Comercio, 24 June 1949. 54  ‘Sesión solemne del Concejo Provincial del Cuzco recepcionando a las Deleg. al Congreso Indigenista Interamericano’, El Comercio, 23 June 1949, p. 1. 55  Ibid. 56  ‘Con Monseñor Guido Beck de Ramberga, Presidente de la Delegación Chilena al Segundo Congreso Indigenista’, El Comercio, 22 June 1949.

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to that of the “Jíbara tribes of Peru”, the Aymara and Quechua people, and “the red-skinned race of North America”. For that reason, as told by this newspaper, he had a valuable contribution to make to the conversations at the congress. Next to one report on the lavish inauguration ceremonies taking place in Cuzco, El Comercio printed a piece on “The First National Congress on Indigenous Education in Peru” of 1932.57 In the context of the Second Inter-American Indigenista Congress, this newspaper wanted to stress that Peru had long been preoccupied with trying to “improve its indigenous population”, and that it “was the first nation on the American continent” to move forward with an “indigenista teaching programme.” As with de Ramberga, there is a great deal of (national) backslapping on display here. The First National Congress of Indigenous Education, which the newspaper lauded as an important watershed moment (for the seriousness with which it took indigenous education), was organised by the Director of Indigenous Education at the time, Luis Galván, and scheduled to begin on 10 February 1932.58 The newspaper report included the government decree authorising the congress, the call for participants issued by Galván, and the list of proposed themes. Despite the reality of indigenous leadership in numerous education projects in Peru (see Chap. 10), the coordinators framed the discussion points as if it were clear that the participating teachers were not going to be indigenous themselves. More significantly, this report did not discuss what happened in 1932, just the plans and hopes for the congress. This was possibly because the congress did not end up happening. U.S. consular reports sent back to Washington in 1932 suggest that the event was postponed by President Luis Sánchez Cerro due to economic problems and lack of facilities, and I have found no further references to it taking place.59 It is interesting to see how closely U.S. officials were following such educational developments in Peru.60 The story also 57  ‘El primer congreso nacional de educación indígena en el Perú’, El Comercio, 24 June 1949. 58  Ibid. 59  Enclosure #60 to Embassy Despatch No. 1828, 30 May 1932. In Alberto Giesecke Collection, Archivo Histórico Instituto Riva-Agüero, AG-D-009. This despatch included a copy of an article from El Comercio – ‘Se aplaza la reunión del congreso de educación indígena’, 20 January 1932. 60  Enclosure #113 to the same Embassy Despatch contained a copy of an essay by Mexican indigenista Moisés Sáenz on “native Indian education […] with special reference to recent Peruvian authors”, published in El Socialista, Lima, 25 April 1932.

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serves as an excellent illustration of ideas not circulating, of what was not achieved—as we saw in Chap. 10 with official attempts to take ownership of indigenous languages—and of the ways in which the history is so easily re-told and distorted to suit present-day needs. In this case, we see how the Peruvian state, in 1949, sought to present itself as a leader in the field of indigenous rights, just as Cárdenas had done in Mexico almost a decade earlier. Significantly, Chile did not fair too badly in the Peruvian celebratory narrative.

Conclusions In Race, Education and Citizenship, María Elena García comments: “A remarkable number of solutions have been offered for [the Indian] problem, coming from a variety of ideological directions but often grouped under the label indigenismo. Remarkably, all these projects evidence an almost constant concern with […] education. In order to understand the current politics of intercultural activism, it is essential to understand how it grows from and in reaction to the patterns of the past.”61 This chapter’s revelations about the Inter-American Indigenista Congresses in Pátzcuaro and Cuzco—the conclusions reached, the Chilean and Peruvian interventions, the ways in which the congresses were evoked in Chile and Peru afterwards, and to what end—help us to map out some of “the patterns of the past” that García mentions. Building on Chaps. 8, 9, and 10, we detect the radical potential of indigenous education projects when developed at a local level in dialogue with communities and led from the communities—a shift partly endorsed by Pátzcuaro and partly enacted with the “núcleos escolares campesinos” in the Cuzco and Puno regions of Peru. We can also see the ways in which such potential was reduced when the state assumed overall direction, as Pátzcuaro encouraged, and as we see in Peru in the late 1940s with the institutionalisation of indigenismo and the increasing involvement of U.S. development agencies and funds. In Chile, Mapuche activists drew on Pátzcuaro to support their demands for more schools and to publicly question dominant “civilising” discourses but failed to make much headway in terms of securing significant state investment in education in rural indigenous communities. One newspaper report of January 1950 encapsulates the continuity of both  García, Race, Education and Citizenship, p. 63.

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state neglect and indigenous people’s persistent pursuit of schooling in Chile: “Thanks to Mr H. Morales Maliqueo, who has donated one hectare of his own property in the community of Painecura near Truf Truf, residents of the area are going to build a school, which will be up and running from March. This initiative has been joyously received by local indigenous reducciones […] and it will become a reality through the person of Francisco Huentemil L., who will not only set up the school but also do the hard work of teaching.”62 How similar this is to the story of Rosendo Maqui’s project narrated by Alegría in El mundo es ancho y ajeno, the novel cited at the beginning of and throughout Part III. I have not been able to find any other documentation about the school in Painecura, so we do not know if the plans—conceived and enabled by Morales Meliqueo (the provider of land), Huentumil (the director and teacher), and the residents of Truf Truf (the construction team)—ever came to fruition. We do know, though, that widespread state-provided schooling did not become a reality in rural areas in either Chile or Peru until the 1960s. The Inter-American Indigenista Congresses in Pátzcuaro and Cuzco insisted on the urgency of state investment in indigenous education and this hemispheric message was received loud and clear by Chilean and Peruvian state authorities—sometimes from indigenous activists directly, such as congressman Coñuepán in Chile—but it was not acted upon until the governments of Eduardo Frei Montalva in Chile (1964–1970) and Juan Alvarado Velasco in Peru (1968–1975), and, even then, there were still many exclusions, limitations and problems. Whilst many of the conversations of the first half of the twentieth century were repeated in the 1960s, there are also elements of a new story about indigenous identity discourses and indigenous rights campaigning emerging during this period, a story that is beyond the scope of Itinerant Ideas.

62  ‘En la localidad de Painecura, Truf-Truf, levantarán escuela’, Diario Austral, 1st January, 1950.

CHAPTER 12

Conclusion: Roots, Routes, Connections and Threads

This book has revisited well-known stories about anti-indigenous racism in Latin America, about indigenous and indigenista attempts to challenge such racism, and about Chilean-Peruvian relations during the first half of the twentieth century. It recirculates these stories and brings to light new sources pertinent to them. I returned to the widely-narrated “discovery” of Machu Picchu, for example, and the development of these pre-­ Columbian archaeological ruins as a key tourist attraction through an array of revealing texts: publications about the First Pan-American Scientific Congress in Santiago in 1908–1909; press coverage of Martín Chambi’s photographic exhibitions in Chile in 1936; accounts of Pablo Neruda’s reception at the American Institute of Art in Cuzco in 1943; and the epistolary exchanges of Pennsylvania-born Alberto Giesecke, who arrived in Peru in 1909 and was still there in 1949, when Cuzco hosted the Second Inter-American Indigenista Conference. Giesecke acted as treasurer for this major cultural and political gathering and had been a driving force behind the construction of a paved road which helped transport congress delegates to the so-called “lost city of the Incas.” In the process of weaving together and scrutinising these and many other underexplored materials, my analysis has also exposed and elaborated new stories, in this case stories of cross-border intellectual and political exchanges, and a vast web of social networks. These new stories are important because they counter hitherto dominant nationalistic

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narratives of Chilean-­Peruvian hostility and Chilean (racial) exceptionalism and encourage us to understand both the hegemonic and counter-­ hegemonic discourses and projects of indigeneity in both Chile and Peru as fundamentally transnational works in progress. The argument that I make about indigeneity throughout this book overlaps closely with what Australian historians, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, say about “whiteness”, as a “new religion” emergent in the late-­ nineteenth and early-twentieth century, in their recent study Drawing the Global Colour Line—a title inspired by the words of African American activist and intellectual W.E.B. Dubois.1 Lake and Reynold acclaim whiteness studies as “a productive new field of historical enquiry” but note that “most investigations have conceptualised their subject within a national frame of analysis, identifying local dynamics at work within histories deemed distinctive or even exceptional.”2 And yet “DuBois and contemporaries on the other side of the colour line saw clearly” that the “new religion of whiteness” was a “transnational phenomenon and all the more powerful for that, inspiring in turn the formation of international movements of resistance, such as the pan-African and pan-Asian alliances”.3 Lake and Reynolds “trace the transnational circulation of emotions and ideas, people and publications, racial knowledge and technologies that animated white men’s countries and their strategies of exclusion, deportation and segregation”, and conclude that the “project of whiteness was thus a paradoxical politics, at once transnational in its inspiration and identifications but nationalist in its methods and goals.”4 The data mapped out in the ten  main chapters comprising Itinerant Ideas—hundreds of conversations filtered through almost 20 different congresses, over 40 newspapers, journals, and magazines, and approximately 45 letters; spanning 20 cities; and incorporating nearly 50 different cultural and political organisations and institutions—provides a clear view of myriad transnational connections. In contrast to most of the existing historiography on indigeneity and indigenismo in Latin America, I have made these transnational connections central to my analysis. To focus on cross-border circuits of knowledge exchange, of course, is not to deny or 1  Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 2  Ibid., p. 4. 3  Ibid. 4  Ibid.

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ignore the persistent strength of, and contestation over, the nation state in the region. I have shown that indigeneity—as multiple, contesting discourses and projects—was transnational in its “inspiration and identifications”, just like the “religion of whiteness” discussed in Drawing the Global Colour Line, but nationalist or nationally bounded in its “methods and goals” because transnational conversations about indigeneity fed through to and impacted on state policies towards indigenous peoples. Building on existing scholarship on Latin America (a region largely left out of the discussions developed by Lake and Reynolds), Itinerant Ideas has reasserted the influence of the United States and Mexico in these transnational conversations about indigeneity. Several chapters have shown how Peruvian and Chilean intellectuals and policy makers looked to both these countries for inspiration when debating how to improve the lives of indigenous peoples (and indeed when thinking about the whole notion of racial improvement). More innovatively and significantly, the book has illustrated how important Chilean and Peruvian experiences were to each other: how Chileans were following what was going on in Peru, and vice-­ versa, how Peruvians paid close attention to developments in Chile. Chileans and Peruvians were speaking to each other, about each country’s achievements and failings in the realm of indigenous rights, and—what is more—they often participated directly in and thereby affected initiatives underway in the other country. This is particularly true of Peruvian Apristas living in exile in Chile during the 1930s and 1940s, such as Magda Portal and Luis Alberto Sánchez. What we have also seen at different moments in Itinerant Ideas is how Chileans and Peruvians sought to bear upon continental and hemispheric debates, and how they performed their imagined national identities and indigeneities far beyond their state borders, at events such as the Inter-American Indigenista Congresses in Mexico in 1940, the International Congress of Popular Arts in Prague in 1928, and the Ibero-American Exposition in Seville in 1929. This book has thus revealed and analysed an ongoing dialogue between two very different nation states from the Global South (with their own complex coloniser-­colonised relationship) that was shaped by and helped to shape a much broader conversation where the power of the Global North was undeniable but also continually contested. Anthropologists Francesca Merlan and Andrew Canessa have written some thought-provoking works on the relationship between the national and transnational dimensions of indigeneity in contemporary Latin America, drawing out the “growing diversity and mobilising inclusiveness

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of the term”, as well as the way in which it is “frequently the outcome of government policies imposed from above”.5 Merlan studies the language of global institutions such as the United Nations and the International Labour Organisation and how this has been articulated and enacted in different national contexts across the world including in Latin America, highlighting notable developments such as the collusion between indigeneity and environmentalism that emerged in the 1970s. Canessa explores indigenous conflict in Bolivia (namely conflicts between lowland and highland indigenous populations) “through an African lens”, and in doing so, stresses the diversity of indigenous discourses (by indigenous discourse, he means the claiming of an indigenous identity to make rights-based demands). Indigeneity in Latin America, Canessa explains, is understood to be intimately connected with European colonisation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, whereas in Africa fewer Europeans settled and most countries have an overwhelming majority of people of non-­European descent. One interesting and confounding overlap, though, that Canessa perceives between Bolivia and Africa is that in neither do indigenous discourses always fall “neatly into the realm of the unambiguously oppressed”.6 In Bolivia, for instance, Aymara and Quechua speaking people have acted as colonists in the lowland regions. In Itinerant Ideas, I have suggested that what Canessa detects in recent discourse was there in the early twentieth century. I have revealed how historical narratives about conflict between pre-Columbian Inca and Araucanian peoples—with claims of heroic resistance (by the Araucanians) contesting those of glorious conquest (by the Inca)—were reworked to suit Chilean and Peruvian nation building endeavours throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Readers will also have found many instances, though, of these historical indigeneities being brought together in their status as colonised subalterns in the present to help buoy leftist campaigns for a continent-wide class revolution. Canessa makes the obvious but important point that indigenous is not an indigenous concept.7 This book has traced a vast repertoire of intersecting ideas about indigenous peoples and how these shifted—and in some cases did not shift—over the course of the first half of the twentieth ­century, when indigenista discourses and movements emerged, gained 5  Merlan, ‘Indigeneity’, p.  303. On the latter point, Merlan cites Rodolfo Stavenhagen (1994). 6  Canessa, ‘Indigenous Conflict in Bolivia’, p. 324. 7  Ibid., p. 316.

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prominence, and began to lose sway, in line with evolving debates about the “social question” and the unevenness of modernisation. Itinerant Ideas has also demonstrated that, whilst not an indigenous concept, indigenous activist-intellectuals in Chile and Peru have been using discourses of indigeneity—especially claims to originariness (“we were here before you”), a deep attachment to the land, and autonomous institutions—in multiple, creative ways, to both make demands of and challenge their respective states since at least the early twentieth century. Canessa argues that it was only “in the late twentieth century that indigenous peoples began to develop shared political identities across borders”.8 The constructing or imagining of cross-border identities has certainly become more widespread, and therefore more visible and vocal over the last few decades (the alignment of international NGOs with indigenous communities in the fight against rainforest destruction being one key example), but this book has shown that indigenous attempts to internationalise their struggles—whether this means reaching out to and speaking with people and organisations beyond nation-state boundaries, or being aware of international developments and citing those in their localised resistance efforts—were a reality in the early twentieth century too. Puneño activist Manuel Camacho’s international travels, the publicity Manuel Butrón’s rural sanitary brigades received in Chile, Arturo Huenchullán’s visit to and reports on the U.S., and Venancio Coñuepán’s participation in and use of the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress in Mexico are just some of the examples explored in this book. Both Canessa and Merlan helpfully show us how indigeneity has been understood as either criterial (cultural specificity) or relational (a political positioning) or indeed as both at the same time: to be indigenous is to be “patently different” to other sectors of national society (with distinctive cultural characteristics, social practices, and community institutions) “but also marginalised and disadvantaged” (marginalised from the state, dispossessed of land, lacking access to resources).9 Focusing on Bolivia, Canessa presents indigeneity as a language—usually seen “by scholars and activists as a language of the oppressed”,10 which can become a language of resistance against the state, but also, crucially, a language of the state. Under Evo Morales, for example, indigeneity was embraced as official political  Ibid., p. 322.  Merlan, ‘Indigeneity’, p. 304. 10  Canessa, ‘Indigenous Conflict in Bolivia’, p. 320. 8 9

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ideology and “taken to articulate a wide range of social causes as well as defence of natural resources for the nation.”11 Itinerant Ideas has looked back in history and interrogated diverse languages of indigeneity that fit into—but also expand—the contemporary picture outlined by Merlan and Canessa. In Part I of the book (“Indigeneity and Labour”), we saw how the “Indian” was closely associated with backwardness, ignorance, and poverty, and with humiliation and exploitation: Gabriela Mistral’s “social tragedy”; César Colima’s accounts of ongoing violent abuse; José Carlos Mariátegui’s subaltern proletariat, battered by hacendados and neglected by the state. For many intellectuals and policy makers the “Indian race” was a “social race” in need of social redemption. Stories of victimhood and passive resignation abounded. And yet in this same context—as indigeneity became coterminous with class and anti-­ imperialism—we also saw emphasis placed on the ongoing strength of autonomous social organisation (the ayllu), on the power of the collectivist tradition, on the possibility of self-government (Aburto Panguilef’s Indigenous Republic in Chile), and on indigenous political mobilisation as a blue-print for a radical utopian future (Aprista, Communist and Socialist visions of “Indo-America”). Organised indigenous people claiming originariness became threatening rebels to governing elites and an inspiration for leftist revolutionary forces. For many leftists they were instinctive and sometimes irrational and naïve rebels; some recognised them as strategic thinkers with co-ordinated plans for moving forward and changing society. Somewhere in between these two extremes of the victim and powerful rebel, the “Indian” also appears as a (self- and externally imagined) epitome of hard work and resilience, with unique skills and superior knowledge of the land, and thus a valuable resource to the national economy—”an important part of American nationalities” (at the Inter-American Social Security Conference in Santiago in 1942) which needed protecting. Only once in the three chapters that make up Part I of Itinerant Ideas was indigeneity directly connected to colour—to “dark skin” in Chap. 3—but we have seen references to indigenous blood running through people’s veins, as well as to distinctive cultural and physical markers, such as clothing, jewellery, and hairstyles. In all, the predominant image of the Indian to emerge in the conversations documented in Part I was of a “worker” with a distinct culture and history. For the most part, the focus was the rural worker, but indigenous voices were heard in the urban sphere too. In  Ibid., p. 314.

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some cases, this development was perceived to symbolise a displaced, fragmented indigeneity; in others, more simply an updated, modern indigeneity that was not cancelled out by speaking Spanish or wearing a suit. Part II (Chaps. 5, 6, and 7) on cultural heritage has demonstrated how indigeneity in Chile and Peru was equated with the past—often a distant, bygone past—but also an alternative way of being modern in the present. It could equally denote the closing down and pigeon-holing of one’s identity, or openness and inclusivity, not least in the case of claims to a metaphorical indigenous ancestry. In Chap. 5 on weaving, we saw how ideas about pre-Columbian homogeneity (broad sweeping ideas about “Indian” or indigenous cultures across the continent) circulated alongside narratives of cultural specificity (how different the Araucanians were to the Inca, for instance, or how the Inca were not the only important legacy-­ leaving pre-Columbian indigenous group in Peru). Similarly, Chilean and Peruvian intellectuals perpetuated ideas of indigenous purity at the same time as they pointed—sometimes inadvertently—to the adaptable, shifting nature of indigenous cultural and social practices. Moving from weaving to archaeology, Chap. 6 emphasised indigeneity as a valuable national resource in a very different way to that seen in Part I. The equation made between indigeneity and antiquity—a glorious imperial history, “the stuff of legend” (Sady Zañartu in Chile’s En Viaje magazine)—helps to explain the Chilean and Peruvian governments’ increased efforts to conserve and protect indigenous practices and relics, and to market them as national heritage on the international conference and exhibition circuit. In that process, however, one perceived how the glorious past connected with a troubled present and animated disputes about the future. Again, as in Part I, indigenous people were represented as victims of conquest and colonisation, but also as the inspiration for social revolution, and, in this context, tradition came together with modernity. For cuzqueño activist and writer, José Uriel García, Chambi epitomised such a convergence. This Quechua-­ speaking artist embraced the technological modernity of the camera to re-present Inca ruins as living sites and to capture the value of indigenous cultural and social traditions in the present. To Uriel García’s mind, Chambi exemplified the “new Indian”, who would not only survive but flourish in the twentieth century. Chapter 7 returned to the notion of indigenous-ness as a static state of distinctiveness to be studied and preserved, by foregrounding the narrative of possible loss. Many intellectuals in Chile and Peru perceived indigenous culture to be on the verge of disappearing—the authentic “soul” or

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“spirit” of the rural nation threatened by capitalist expansion and urbanisation. It was that historic “soul” that art galleries and museums celebrated. And yet something else often emerged through or via these institutional displays, especially when indigenous people themselves—such as Julio Tello in Peru or Aburto Panguilef in Chile—were involved or engaged in the process: a story of diversity, movement, and entrepreneurship, as well as the possibility of indigenous resurrection. The latter was imagined for audiences across Chile and Peru by the folkloric dance and drama troupes which became increasingly popular over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. We see this with Valcárcel’s Peruvian Mission of Incaic Art and Aburto Panguilef’s two theatre groups—excellent examples of how indigeneity became a highly contested, mobile performance during this period, not least in terms of who was able to embody it on stage. Part III (Chaps. 8, 9, 10, and 11) probed the development of these multiple ideas and imaginings through the sphere of education. It started with the dominant government-endorsed view of the Indian as an inherently “illiterate race”, intellectually deficient and degenerate, lacking and desperately wanting an education, and in need of new knowledge and skills, if he or she (although discussions mainly focused on men) were to avoid extinction. Up for dispute in Chap. 8 was whether education served to produce a compliant and productive manual labour force (relegating indigenous-ness to rurality) or opened-up the possibility for (both rural and urban) intellectual pursuits. In Chap. 9, the Indian was the “eternal object of exploitation” (Emilio Vásquez in Boletín Titikaka), but also epitomised boldness, adventure, ferocity, and subversion (Zaida Zurah in the same magazine), which is precisely why elites often tried to prevent indigenous education initiatives. Artistic talent emerges as a more acceptable way of being Indian—a “new consciousness” that did not exclude class activism but could transcend it. Indigenous art is deemed slow, organic, simple, spontaneous, and therefore antagonistic to (the quick pace of) modernity, but it speaks to and promotes indigenousness as central to mestizo continental nationalism, and, through discussions about local education projects, we also detect the corroboration of community values, collective labour, and a “natural solidarity” (Vásquez again) as a better way of living to that envisaged and necessitated by capitalist paths to progress. In the penultimate chapter of Part III, indigeneity became equated with ingenuity, shrewdness, tenacity, with deep knowledge and literacy, through indigenous-led education projects that formed part of strategic campaign

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against the reality of disadvantage, exclusion and subalternity. Again, the collective (communal autonomy and knowledge production) was key, as indigenous people came to be seen as the bearers of civilisation rather than an obstacle to it. In the final chapter we returned to a discourse of social improvement and redemption that envisaged the (rural) Indian as a problem to be resolved. Indigenous people—as a work in progress—were the target of developmentalist programmes, but by reframing them as potential consumers, not just producers, intellectuals and policy makers envisaged new ways of being indigenous, and in some cases, indigeneity was aligned not just with the “soul” or “spirit” of the nation, but also with its active and effective leadership. The most common singular terms to be equated with indigeneity in the conversations mapped out in Itinerant Ideas were (in descending order): past, lack, nation, distinctive, community, tradition, class, land, autonomy, spirit, openness, modernity, inclusivity, and exploitation. In the separate chapters, we have seen how they bind together and pull apart. By prioritising transnational dialogues over a nationally bounded study, we have gained a deeper sense of the messiness, plurality and nuances of the histories that lie behind such terms and of the processes of their reproduction and circulation in different contexts.

Roots and Routes To some extent—and following the work of James Clifford—these diverse, contesting vocabularies can all be joined up with either a story of “roots” (the static, “local” Indian, fixed in the rural community, working the land according to traditional custom, antagonistic to the existence of the modern state) or “routes” (the changing, strategising, consuming as well as producing Indian moving in various circuits, central to the success of the modern state).12 The Chilean and Peruvian nation-states wanted both in the early twentieth century, as they still do today. Indigenous activists too drew on, propagated, and reworked notions of roots and routes. In all three parts of Itinerant Ideas, we have seen how indigenous activists appropriated colonial discourses for their own agenda. The chapters on labour, for example, showed how they reiterated the idea that working the land meant having rights to it in order to hold on to or reclaim usurped 12  James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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communal property. The chapters on cultural heritage discussed how they reproduced the exotic, ethereal image of the “lost city of the Incas” in order to assert the presence and vitality of indigenous cultural production in contemporary Peru. And the chapters on education underscored how they demanded increased access to schooling to correct indigenous people’s supposed backwardness and ignorance in order to counter precisely these stereotypes and to gain the tools to write, in public, against white or creole backwardness and ignorance. By focusing our interpretative lens on Chilean-Peruvian dialogues— enabled, enacted, and represented through travelling intellectuals and texts—I have revealed indigeneity as a transnationally as well as nationally constructed political discursive field, and by extension, I have indicated how the transnational and national can work together. We see both Chile and Peru differently as a result, especially Chile. Contrary to popular and dominant perceptions, we encounter a country where debates about race were intense during the early twentieth century, and we find Peruvians such as educator and politician José Antonio Encinas heralding Chile as a country that offered “better life opportunities” for its indigenous citizens. In a speech delivered to the Peruvian National Congress in September 1920, Encinas asserted that Chile (like Bolivia) had “far-reaching laws, effective rights, covenants, and bylaws that guarantee the full development of [people’s] strengths and aptitudes”. It was a worrying situation, he told his congressional peers, because “Bolivian and Chilean state agents beckon our Indians to their borders, impressing on them the benefits of their legislation”.13 In particular, he stressed the “lack of legal recognition of indigenous property rights” in Peru, and yet the newly promulgated constitution was supposed to offer just that. Encina’s public statement reverses the dominant story in a couple of different ways. He made Chile a focal point for discussions about the Peruvian state’s failings, rather than blaming Peru’s problems on Chilean expansionism, and he re-presented this neighbouring country—often depicted as the racist, anti-indigenous enemy in official Peruvian discourse—as a model to follow in terms of indigenous rights legislation. Encinas’ speech was simultaneously anti-­ nationalist and nationalist: a condemnation of how ineffectual Peruvian laws were, as part of a bid to enact protectionist measures, which 13  ‘Tutelaje indígena’, 28 September 1920, reproduced in José Antonio Encinas, Por la libertad de pensamiento: Discursos parlamentarios (Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso de Perú, 2013), pp. 236–244, p. 239.

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in turn would help to protect national sovereignty and territory. Encinas seemed to be urging fellow congressmen to look after the “Indians”— notably he used the possessive “our”—to keep them loyal to and bounded within the Peruvian nation. Itinerant Ideas has also demonstrated how the narrative of each nation’s indigenous “roots” were validated and indeed sometimes even constructed via international “routes”. In this way, the national histories of Chile and Peru are presented as transnational, collaborative productions. In 1936, for example, at least one Peruvian newspaper recycled Chilean journalists’ congratulatory reviews of Chambi’s photographic exhibitions in Santiago to promote regional indigenista narratives of a glorious Inca past within Peru. A few years later, Pablo Neruda laid claim to a shared Inca history— a history of imperial expansion  still visible today in the  Inca roads that cross the Atacama Desert, the image on the front cover of this book—to uphold his own account of indigenous awakening in Chile. As narrated by Neruda, Chile gratefully  “received the waves of fertile Inca conquistadors”. Perhaps more illustrative still is the story of how Ciro Alegría’s classic indigenista novel El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941) came into being in Chile, with the financial and emotional support of Chilean friends, and was catapulted to international fame through a literary competition in New York, which it won as Chile’s chosen national entry. This tale of repression and rebellion in Andean Peru was thus claimed as Chilean intellectual property. Through Chilean-Peruvian dialogues, indigenous people appear clearly as transnational travellers. They and their ideas materialise literally in movement: the cuzqueño drama group, Compañía Lírica Incaica Ccorillacta, performing in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile; Chambi exhibiting his photographs and giving press interviews in Chile; Francisco Chuqiwanka Ayulo’s letters to Mariátegui printed in the magazine Amauta, being made available to Chilean and Peruvian readers in the National Library in Santiago because of Eduardo Barrios’ interventions. The reality of cross-border activism has already been well studied in the context of contemporary indigenous rights struggles, and indigenous mobility is also well studied in the colonial context. We knew less about it for the modern republican period, and so Itinerant Ideas has provided evidence of some important and neglected historical continuities over the longue durée. It has shown how nation-states failed to limit “their” indigenous peoples within borders, and—simultaneously—how they used their indigenous populations to showcase national achievements abroad.

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Crucially, the travelling texts and people do not cancel out the importance of roots, or of “locales and homes”, as Clifford says.14 The preceding ten chapters expose indigenous activist-intellectuals as people participating simultaneously in international cultural, economic and political networks and in traditional community practices: the entrepreneurial Mapuche weavers, for instance, whose ancient motifs and techniques were lauded by the Swiss-Chilean engineer Gualterio Looser in the U.S. magazine Chile: A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs; indigenous delegates who travelled to the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress in Mexico and pushed for a permanent exposition of local indigenous artistic production in Panama City; Mapuche craftsman, Antonio Peñalef, who posed for the Montenegrin artist commissioned by the Chilean Socialist Party to sculpt a bust to gift to a visiting Mexican labour delegation. These stories encapsulate the intersection of the local and the global; they also point to indigenous-­ness as a co-production (albeit one embedded in racial hierarchies) in which both indigenous and non-indigenous people participated.

Routes and Obstacles By putting Chileans and Peruvians at the centre of a much larger network of intellectuals, as Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler urge us to do in their provocative book Connected, we appreciate not only how conversations circulating through that network shaped developments in Chile and Peru—the frequent citation of Mexican agrarian reform, for example, or the apparent impact of the International Congress of Americanists on legislation related to national monuments—but also how Chileans and Peruvians, in turn, shaped the bigger, cross-border debates. Chilean composer Humberto Allende made “Araucanian” music part of a discussion about popular arts in Prague in 1928. That same year Spanish-Peruvian architect Manuel Piqueras Cotolí grabbed the attention of ABC newspaper in Seville, with the thick walls of his pavilion evoking “the colossal stones of the Inca fortress of Sacsayhuaman”; the Peruvian pavilion, moreover, was to remain in place long after the Ibero-American Exposition finished, serving as residence for Peruvian students undertaking research in the Andalusian city. The works of Latvian-Chilean endocrinologist-­ cum-­anthropologist Alejandro Lipschutz on the urgency of land reform and the vitality and dynamism of indigenous cultures circulated via print  Clifford, Routes, p. 36.

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periodicals in Mexico City. His views, like those of Chile’s most renowned labour lawyer, Moisés Poblete Troncoso, on the extensive contributions of indigenous labour in Peru, were woven into the road map for social change promoted by the Inter-American Indigenista Institute. Itinerant Ideas has shown how intellectual discussions paved the way for legislative reforms and it has demonstrated that individuals matter because they helped to make things happen: Luis Eduardo Valcárcel in Peruvian education, museums and folklore performances; Max Uhle in Chilean and Peruvian museums; Butron’s sanitation brigades in Puno; Barrios’ additions to Chile’s National Library; Edgardo Rebagliati in Peruvian social security legislation; Alberto Giesecke in Peruvian road building; Tello in Peruvian archaeological excavations and restorations; Chuqiwanka in academic publications of and about the Quechua and Aymara languages. We have also seen how their life stories and relationships matter, and, most significantly of all, how these life stories and relationships help to explain their interventions or the success of their interventions. Gamaliel Churata and Joseph Macknight enabled the publication of Chuqiwanka’s work. A medical education in Lima and Barcelona empowered Butrón to lead his own rural public health campaign in Andean Peru; it bestowed a certain legitimacy, made him less threatening in the eyes of state authorities, and helped to secure some (albeit minimal) state funding. Similarly, Huenchullán’s visit to the U.S. facilitated his increasing contributions to discussions about indigenous education in Chile. Leo Rowe helped the Peruvian government contract Giesecke when it was looking for people to modernise the country’s education system. Mistral helped Magda Portal find work and meet key political figures whilst she was exiled in Chile. Salvador Allende supported Portal’s involvement with the Chilean Socialist Party. Hiram Bingham’s so-called “discovery” of Machu Picchu can be traced back to the contacts he made and the conversations he had at the First Pan-American Scientific Congress in Santiago in 1908–1909. This congress conferred upon him the prestigious label of scientist, and such a label opened doors in Peru. These connections and routes of encounter have been disinterred from previously disconnected published sources as well as unexplored archival materials. Congresses are live, face to face meetings, sometimes involving many people but also, possibly, co-ordinated by an individual, such as Valentín Letelier with the First Pan-American Scientific Congress in Santiago in 1908–1909, or Moisés Sáenz with the First Inter-American Indigenista Congress in Mexico in 1940. A periodical is printed and has an

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editorial board so is a many-hands-in-the-pot venture, but in early twentieth-­century Latin America, periodicals often had a single figure who directed the editorial line, such as Joaquín García Monge with Repertorio Americano in Costa Rica, or Mariátegui with Amauta in Peru. Correspondence falls somewhere between orality and writing. A letter is often an extension of a conversation, a continuation of the conversation by other means. Letters are performative: we see friendships (between Mistral and Portal, for instance, or between Mariátegui and Chuqiwanka), created and sustained by the act of writing a letter and responding to it. In all, this book has provided substantive evidence of the generative power of prominent individuals and their networks. Moreover, by travelling the routes taken by prominent intellectuals, through letters, congresses, and periodicals, I have encountered other less canonical intellectuals and have seen how important they were in their moment. Emilio Vásquez and Chuqiwanka came together and amplified their voices through Churata as editor of Boletín Titikaka, for example. I came across the leftist cuzqueño writer Luis Nieto Miranda through Neruda when I was investigating newspaper coverage of the latter’s 1943 trip to Machu Picchu, and I first read about the director of Chile’s Radio Experimental, María Teresa Femenias, when researching Portal’s literary engagements in Santiago. As well as meeting unheralded individuals through this transnational story of network building, I have also been able to go beyond conventional categorisations such as left versus right. This is particularly the case in discussions about cultural heritage, where these party-political categorisations fail to encapsulate individuals as complicated as Mistral, Chambi, Coñuepán and Manuel Aburto Panguilef. Finally, and equally significantly, the book has told some stories of blockages and impeded conversations: the transformations that were thwarted, the changes that were not enacted. These included the untimely deaths of Mariátegui in 1930, which meant he did not make his intended trip to Chile and Argentina, and of Sáenz in 1941, which led to a new Mexican ambassador being sent to Peru and a less radical indigenista, Manuel Gamio, taking over as head of the Inter-American Indigenista Institute. They included letters that were not delivered or read, laws being repealed (for example, Chile’s potentially far-reaching education reform law of 1927), the cancellation of congresses (as seems to have happened with the National Congress on Indigenous Education in Peru in 1932),

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committee meetings’ resolutions being overturned by governments (not least Pedro Aguirre Cerda on agrarian reform). They included imprisonment—for instance, of Aburto Panguilef several times over during the 1930s and 1940s—and political repression, which meant that Chilean Communists were prohibited from attending the First Conference of Communist Parties of Latin America in Buenos Aires in 1929. They also included disputes between individuals such as Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and Mariátegui, or Haya and Portal. To be sure, the major obstacle to reforms regarding indigenous rights was the globalised logic of capitalism and the civilising discourse that intertwined with and perpetuated it, and this was as much a reality in 1950 as it was in 1900. Part I of Itinerant Ideas shows how labour legislation in Chile and Peru still largely excluded rural indigenous workers in the mid twentieth century, despite international congresses and numerous intellectual publications urging their inclusion, and Part III points to the continuing lack of state schooling in and for rural indigenous communities in the 1950s. At this point indigenous people were still widely neglected and marginalised as supposedly backward, ignorant, and unproductive citizens. They were treated as second-class citizens, or indeed sometimes as non-citizens, for literacy requirements prevented many from being able to vote. But one of the points to come out from the detail of the chapters is that individuals were able to work within racist, capitalist structures to effect minor but meaningful changes: expanded credit schemes for Mapuche communities when Coñuepán was congressional deputy and minister of state in Chile; Butrón’s state-supported sanitation brigades in Puno; Chuqiwanka’s validation of Aymara and Quechua as living languages through prestigious scholarly journals; the circulation of Mapuche newspapers in Santiago; the creation of indigenous Adventist schools— and later the “núcleos escolares campesinos”—in the Titikaka region of Peru; exhibitions and recognition of indigenous art (as art, not merely artisanship). The state clearly played a critical role, either as an enabler of, driving force behind, or obstacle to indigenous rights initiatives in Chile and Peru. But it is important, as I and others have argued elsewhere, to recognise that the state is not some monolithic entity, but rather an internally diverse apparatus, made up of hundreds of thousands of individual actors—from presidents and government ministers, to congressional representatives and committee chairs, to school inspectors and museum

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directors, to health care workers, military officials and interpreters—and all of them informed and helped to shape the diverse languages of indigeneity circulating in the early- to mid-twentieth century.15

Labour, Cultural Heritage, and Education Itinerant Ideas has endeavoured to fill in some of the pieces of a big puzzle. As well as connecting intellectuals and the state, indigenous and non-­ indigenous activists, Chile and Peru, their intellectual communities and bigger networks, and letters, congresses and print periodicals, this book has connected three different policy areas: labour, cultural heritage, and education. Discussions about land and labour intersected with education in particularly obstructive ways, for example when there was no land to build schools, or when landowning elites did not want indigenous campesinos to learn to read and write. These conversations connected with cultural heritage too, whether regarding what histories to teach in schools and museums or contested claims to the ancestral ownership of land. Each chapter in the book adds another layer to the previous one—sometimes showing how debates shifted over time, sometimes how they went round in circles—and makes increasingly visible the intricacies of transnational networks and exchanges. By putting Chile and Peru in dialogue with one another and making this dialogue the centre of a story about wide-reaching transnational networks in Latin America and beyond, I have uncovered forgotten connections, traced the routes of encounters, and disentangled the threads that lead to our own day. There were major differences between the two nation-states which were, at least in part, rooted in their distinctive pre-­ Columbian and colonial histories: the expansionist, centralised Inca empire, with its monumental architecture, which was defeated by the Spanish colonial state in the 1500s, contrasted markedly with a cattle-­ farming Mapuche society which functioned around multiple lof spread out across southern Chile and Argentina, had no “lost city” to conquer, no single figurehead to capture, and maintained its political and territorial independence until the late nineteenth century. Demographically speaking, republican Peru was more “indigenous” than its southern neighbour, 15  I make the argument about the state as an internally diverse apparatus in The Mapuche in Modern Chile. For other scholarship on this, see Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood, and Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises.

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and indigenous people there—living throughout the national territory, without recent memories of internal frontiers, and referred to more often as indígenas or indios than specifically Quechua or Aymara—were recognised as having distinctive community status under law (with Leguía’s constitutional reform of 1920).16 In Chile, in contrast, where it was common to talk specifically and only of the Mapuche or “Araucanians” in the southern frontier region, indigenismo never became official state policy, at least until Salvador Allende’s government in the early 1970s, and even then, there was no constitutional recognition of Chile’s indigenous reality. In practice, however, both the Chilean and Peruvian states in the period under study attempted to exploit and repress indigenous people. Whilst recognising these shared continuities, we do see some important changes occurring in Chile and Peru between 1900 and 1950: government programmes enabling indigenous rural workers to be more “productive”, and, in some cases, legislation protecting their labour rights, for example with the sharecropping law in Peru in 1947; the growing visibility of indigenous culture and history through museums, popular art exhibitions, and theatre groups; the (direct or indirect) declaration of indigenous people’s rights to state-funded and state-directed education, and an increasing acceptance that the most effective schooling was that provided in the rural communities with indigenous input. (For a list of key moments and laws covered in the book see the timeline provided as Appendix B). What stands out above all else, though, throughout the chapters on labour, cultural heritage, and education, is that we can only fully understand the national developments by bringing into view the transnational conversations underway at the same time: the continental or hemispheric labour and social security conferences that framed Chilean and Peruvian legislative reforms; the “Americanista” scholars’ focus on the study and preservation of archaeological ruins which made sense of each government’s endeavours to claim state ownership of monuments and leadership of museums; global ideas about the “new school” approach that filtered through into local education projects and were reworked in the process. More than seventy years on from the period under scrutiny in this book, Chileans are rewriting their constitution (a constitution created in 1980 during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet). Individual people coming together made this happen. Triggered by a rise in public transport costs in October 2019, hundreds of thousands of Chileans took  Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided.

16

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to the streets, demanding changes to the neoliberal economic system and the authoritarian, militaristic form of governance that had dominated for decades, in democracy as well as dictatorship. The protests were violently repressed by the police, but they forced the government of Sebastián Piñera to respond in some way, and one of the results was a national plebiscite, held in October 2020. This asked whether a new constitution should be drafted and, if affirmative, whether a newly elected Constitutional Convention (rather than Congress) should be responsible for drafting it. There was a good turnout (51%), and the answer was a resounding yes (78% to the first question, 79% to the second). In May 2021, Chileans voted for 155 conventional constituents. As a result of indigenous campaigning, 17 seats on this body were reserved for indigenous participants. Linguist and indigenous rights activist, Elisa Loncón (1963–), was elected as one of seven Mapuche representatives, and—after the inauguration of the Constitutional Convention—she was elected as its president. This was a defining historical moment. Voters chose a Mapuche feminist who grew up in poverty to lead a political process that has the potential to make of Chile a more just and inclusive society: “It is possible, brothers and sisters, to rebuild this Chile”, Loncón asserted in her acceptance speech; it is possible, she said, “to establish a relationship between the Mapuche people […] and all the nations that make up this country”.17 At the time of writing, there is much uncertainty, and fear as well as hope about the changes ahead, but Loncón’s presence and voice on the national political stage testifies to the fact that individuals matter, as do their life stories and the connections they develop with other individuals—in other words, the larger networks of which they are part and thereby shape. Being born into a working-class Mapudungun-speaking family in the rural community of Lefweluan in southern Chile impacted the pathways she took; so too did her primary and secondary school education in Traiguén, and her undergraduate studies in teaching and English in Temuco.18 At this point, the national connected with the transnational: Loncón took a master’s degree in linguistics at UNAM in Mexico City and then achieved 17  Cited in Eva Ontiveros, ‘Elisa Loncón: From poverty to PhD to writing Chile’s constitution’, BBC News, 11 July 2021. Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latinamerica-57733539. You can listen to Loncon’s acceptance speech directly at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=NAyy88Gk7WE (last accessed 11 November 2021). 18  Loncón writes about her childhood in Elisa García Mingo (ed.), Zomo Newen: Relatos de vida de mujeres mapuche en su lucha por los derechos indígenas (Santiago: Editorial LOM, 2017).

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a PhD in humanities at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, before returning to Chile and doing another doctorate, this time in literature at the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago. The contacts that she has made and the conversations she has had along the way influence how she speaks today—that is, the words she uses, the ideas she articulates and disseminates, and the manner in which she addresses and engages with her audiences. Loncón has spoken consistently and powerfully for decolonisation, not least the decolonisation of language. She began her acceptance speech (mentioned above) in Mapudungun. For many people in Chile, this was the first time they had heard the language. Roxana Quispe Collantes, who received a PhD in literature from Lima’s San Marcos University in 2019, has also campaigned for the decolonisation of language. As noted in Chap. 10, the news of Quispe’s highly commended study was picked up, circulated, and celebrated by media outlets across the world for it was the first doctoral thesis in Peru to be written and defended in Quechua. Loncón’s achievements too have been celebrated across national borders. In Peru her election as president of the Constitutional Convention on 5 July 2021 received a lot of press coverage. Several commentary pieces linked it to Peru’s own national story, for later that same month Peruvians would vote for Pedro Castillo, a schoolteacher and union leader, born into an impoverished, illiterate family in rural Cajamarca, to become president of the republic.19 On the day of her victory, Castillo had publicly congratulated Loncón: “A great milestone for indigenous peoples, marking the winds of change for a more fraternal and just Latin America!”20 In his first speech as Peruvian president on 28 July, Castillo spoke of a country “founded on the sweat of my ancestors”, of a “silenced Peru”—indigenous Peru—that he wanted to see and hear in all its diversity through government institutions, especially the newly named Ministry of Cultures.21 Loncón was due to visit Peru a few days before Castillo took office for an “Encuentro de 19  For example, Daniel Parodi Revoredo, ‘Pensando el Perú, mirando a Chile’, posted on www.daupare.lamula.pe on 5 July 2021. For an interesting analysis of Chile’s social uprising from a Peruvian and Memory Studies perspective, see Ponciano del Pino, ‘¿Cuán reciente es la historia reciente?’, Public History Weekly 14 October 2021, available at https://publichistory-weekly.degruyter.com/9-2021-8/memory-studies/. 20  ‘Pedro Castillo Saluda a Elisa Loncón’, posted on www.tvperu.gob.pe on 5 July 2021. 21  Dan Collyns, ‘Leftwing rural teacher Pedro Castillo sworn in as president of Peru’, posted on www.theguardian.com on 28 July 2021.

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Luchadoras Sociales” [Meeting of Female Social Rights Activists].22 So too was machi (shaman) Francisca Linconao, previously imprisoned on charges of terrorism in Chile and at the time, like Loncón, a Mapuche representative on the Constitutional Convention. It seems neither ended up going to Lima, partly due to Covid restrictions, but both reached out to social movement leaders in Peru through social media.23 In the 2020s, when indigenous rights have become central to global disputes about land, labour, cultural heritage and education, Chileans and Peruvians are in close dialogue with one another. They are reflecting on, responding to, and sometimes taking part in each other’s national experiences: “Thinking about Peru, [by] looking at Chile” was the title of one of the Peruvian online articles on Loncón.24 Itinerant Ideas has shown that there is a long and deep history behind these transnational connections and conversations.

22  ‘Elisa Loncón, presidenta de la Convención Constituyente de Chile, llegará este jueves a Lima’ posted www.larepublica.pe 20 July 2021. 23  Francisca Escalona, ‘El día de furia de la machi Linconao en el Aeropuerto de Santiago’, posted on www.ellibero.cl on 31 July 2021. 24  Parodi, ‘Pensando el Perú…’.



Appendices

Appendix A: Timeline—Chile-Peru Relations 1879–1883 March 1884

April 1884 January 1894 March 1894 July 1894 1898

War of the Pacific (declared over between Chile and Peru with Treaty of Ancón on 20 October 1883) Ratification of Treaty of Ancón. This ended Chilean occupation of Peru but sanctioned its permanent annexation of the Peruvian province of Tarapacá and dictated that the sovereignty of the provinces of Tacna and Arica (then controlled by Chile) would be decided in plebiscite after ten years Chile and Bolivia negotiated truce, but treaty not signed until 1904 Jimenez-Vial Solar Protocol signed as basis for plebiscite Expiration of the ten-year period following the ratification of the Treaty of Ancón The Chilean government officially rejected Jimenez-­ Vial Solar Protocol Chilean territorial dispute with Argentina; talks between Chilean and Peruvian representatives produced the Billinghurst-Latorre Protocol for plebiscite

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Crow, Itinerant Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01952-4

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May 1900 November 1900 January 1901 March 1901 July 1901 1904 1905 1906–1913 1907 September 1909 March 1910 1911 1913 1917 November 1918 December 1918

Chilean intendant of Tacna issued decree ordering the closure of all Peruvian-run private primary and secondary schools in Tacna and Arica New Chilean intendant arrived in Tacna, and informed Peruvian teachers they could re-open their schools Chilean Chamber of Deputies voted not to ratify the Billinghurst-Latorre Protocol Peruvian leaders severed diplomatic relations with Chile First procession of the Peruvian flag in Tacna Máximo Lira—leading force in efforts to Chileanise Tacna and Arica—became intendent of Tacna Re-establishment of official relations between the governments in Lima and Santiago; study of highland border between Chile and Peru near Tarata Building of Arica-La Paz railroad Massacre of striking nitrate workers in Iquique (the dead included many Peruvians and Bolivians, as well as Chileans) New Colonisation Law passed by Chilean government Peruvian priests expelled from Tacna and Arica; Peruvian government severed diplomatic relations with Chile Chilean authorities deport M. Artidoro Espejo, delegate of the Peruvian government in Tacna; mass violence in Tacna and Arica Workers from Peru and Chile signed a solidarity pact, which led to the creation of the Centro Internacional Obrero de Solidaridad Latino-Americana del Perú Peru broke relations with Germany, whilst Chile remained neutral Peruvians attacked Chilean consulates in the port cities of Paita and Salaverry; Chileans attacked Peruvian consulate in Iquique Chilean government enacted the Residency Law, which prohibited “undesirable elements” entrance into or residency in Chile; this also set up mechanisms for the expulsion of foreigners already in Chile

 APPENDICES 

1919

341

U.S. president Woodrow Wilson endeavoured to establish new frameworks for international cooperation at Versailles; thirty-fifth anniversary of the Treaty of Ancón; election of Augusto Leguía as President of Peru (he pledged to secure the return of the provinces of Arica and Tacna to “the bosom of the fatherland”) 1920 Major change in leadership in Chile too, with election of Arturo Alessandri from Tarapacá as president; founding of the League of Nations July 1920 Chilean Senate discussed alleged presence of Peruvian anarchist “subversives” in Chile August 1920 Peruvian consul in Iquique informed U.S. ambassador in Santiago that the Chilean Liga Patriotica was mistreating and expelling Peruvians living the city; reports that the Chilean police were ordering the arbitrary deportations of Peruvians November 1920 Peruvian leaders asked the Assembly of the League of Nations to reconsider and revise the Treaty of Ancón 1921 Chile established Office of the Census in Tacna January 1922 Representatives of Chile and Peru invited to talks in Washington May 1922 Formal negotiations between Chile and Peru (the Washington Conference) began, with Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes as host July 1922 Peruvian and Chilean representatives signed both Arbitration Protocol and Supplementary Act, delineating arbitral powers of the president of the U.S. November 1923 Arbitration cases of Chile and Peru submitted to the U.S. government December 1923 Provincial Census of Tacna 1925–1926 Years of the attempted Tacna-Arica plebiscite March 1925 Arbitrator ruled that a plebiscite should be held August 1925 John J. Pershing and his delegation arrived in Arica Jan.–Mar. 1926 Riots in Tacna 1929 Treaty of Lima, reincorporating Tacna to Peru, and awarding Chile permanent possession of Arica (Chile agreed to build port facilities at its expense for Peru in Arica; territory known as El Chinchorro given to Peru)

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1934 1968 1973

1986 1993 1994 February 2000 March 2000

Chile attempted to annul obligations regarding the port for Peru in Arica Agreement on construction plans for Peru’s port facilities in Arica Bilateral relations turned tense under military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile (1973–1990) and Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru (1968–1975); two countries engaged in an arms race that included Chile placing landmines along the border with Peru Chilean and Peruvian governments agreed to initiate construction of the monument of friendship on the Morro in Arica Conventions of Lima signed between Chilean and Peruvian negotiators claimed to solve outstanding issues related to treaty of 1929 Peruvian Congress rejected the Conventions of Lima Peruvian state officially received and began to operate the port facilities and (Arica-Tacna) railroad terminal in Arica Inauguration of the monument of friendship between Chile and Peru on the Morro of Arica

Note: The details included here are drawn from many different sources, but predominantly William Skuban, Lines in the Sand, and Raymond Craib, Cry of the Renegade.

Appendix B: Timeline—Key Events, Initiatives and Legislative Reforms 1883–1929 Resettlement of Mapuche communities, following the Chilean state’s occupation of Araucanía 1905 Foundation of Museum of National History in Peru 1908–1909 First Pan-American Scientific Congress, Santiago, Chile 1909 Creation of the Pro-Indigenous Association in Peru 1910 Creation of the Caupolicán Society Defender of Araucanía in Chile

 APPENDICES 

1910

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XVII International Congress of Americanists, Buenos Aires (I) and Mexico City (II) 1911 Hiram Bingham’s first official visit to Machu Picchu 1911 Peruvian Supreme Decree makes all archaeological sites property of the state 1911 National Historical Museum created by state decree in Chile 1912 Foundation of the Socialist Workers Party in Chile 1912 Massacre of Mapuche campesinos in Forrahue, southern Chile 1912 XVIII International Congress of Americanists, London 1912 Ethnological and Anthropological Museum created in Chile 1913 Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology created in Peru 1915 XVIII International Congress of Americanists, Washington 1915–1916 Indigenous uprising in Azángaro, Peru 1916 Creation of Mapuche Mutual Protection Society in Chile 1916 Araucanian Theatre Company’s national tour in Chile 1917 Mexican Constitution recognised labour rights and indigenous rights to collective land ownership 1919 Establishment of the Communist International (Comintern), Moscow 1920 New Constitution in Peru (part of Leguía’s efforts to forge a “patria nueva”) recognised existence of indigenous communities as corporate entities 1920 Creation of Department of Indian Affairs, as part of Peru’s Ministry of Development 1920 Organic Law of Education in Peru 1920 Law of Obligatory Education in Chile 1920 Creation of the Tahuantinsuyo Indigenous Rights Committee in Peru 1920 International Police Conference, Buenos Aires 1921 Foundation of the Araucanian Federation (at the First Araucanian Congress held in Collimalliñ) 1922 The Socialist Workers Party becomes the Communist Party of Chile 1923 Creation of Peruvian Regional Indigenous Workers Federation 1923 Indigenous uprisings in La Mar and Huancané, Peru 1923 Fifth International Conference of American States, Santiago

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1923–1924 Peruvian Mission of Incaic Art’s tour of Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and La Paz 1924 Labour reforms in Chile (for example, 48-hour week, minimum daily wage, prohibition of child labour) 1924 Creation of International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, Paris 1925 New Constitution in Chile 1925 Decree Law creates National Monuments Council in Chile 1926 Creation of first cell of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), Paris 1926 Creation of U.S.  Committee on Cultural Relations with Latin America 1927 First International Congress against Imperialism and Colonialism, Brussels 1927 Indigenous Lands Division Law in Chile 1927 Educational Reform Law in Chile 1927 Formation of Grupo Resurgimiento, Cuzco 1928 Creation of Socialist Party of Peru 1928 Southern Property Law, Chile 1928 First International Child Protection Congress, Paris 1928 First International Congress of Popular Arts, Prague 1929 Establishment of Office of Indigenous Education in Peru 1929 First Conference of Communist Parties of Latin America, Buenos Aires 1929–1930 Ibero-American Exposition, Seville 1930 The Socialist Party of Peru becomes the Communist Party of Peru 1930 Formation of the Peruvian Aprista Party 1930 Revisions to Regulations on Rural Education in Chile 1931 Modification of Indigenous Lands Division Law in Chile 1931 Proclamation of Indigenous Republic at the 11th Araucanian Congress in Raguintuleufu, southern Chile 1931 Passage of Labour Code in Chile 1932 XXV International Congress of Americanists, La Plata, Argentina 1933 Creation of the Socialist Party of Chile 1933 New Political Constitution in Peru 1933 Launch of Manuel Butrón’s rural sanitary brigade in Puno, Peru

 APPENDICES 

1933 1934 1936 1936 1936 1936 1937 1937 1938 1938 1938 1938 1938 1939 1939 1940 1940 1940 1940 1941 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1945 1946

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Cuzco named “Archaeological Capital of South America” by Peruvian National Congress Peasant rebellion in Lonquimay, Chile Peruvian Social Security Law Creation of Popular Housing Fund, Chile First Labour Conference of the American States, Santiago, Chile Indigenous Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi visits Chile World Exposition in Paris Creation of Cuzco’s American Institute of Art Creation of Araucanian Corporation, Indigenista Movement of Chile Preventative Medicine Law, Chile Establishment of Compulsory Insurance Fund, Chile Creation of Agricultural Credit Fund, Chile VIII International Conference of American States, Lima, Peru XXVII International Congress of Americanists, Lima, Peru Establishment of Small Farmers’ Cooperatives, Chile First Inter-American Indigenista Congress, Pátzcuaro, Mexico First Congress of Democratic and Popular Parties of Indo-­ America, Santiago Tour of Mapuche artistic ensemble Llufquehuenu around Chile Creation of Araucanian Museum in Temuco, Chile (to become Regional Museum of Araucanía) New Organic Law of Public Education in Peru Establishment of Commission on Indigenous Issues, Chile Inter-American Conference on Social Security Chilean poet Pablo Neruda visits Machu Picchu Museum of American Popular Art created in Santiago Foundation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), London Creation of government-run Agricultural Committee in Peru Start of rural education programme in Peru, organised around “núcleos escolares campesinos”

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1946 1947 1949 1951 1953

First Pedagogical Conference of Araucanian Teachers in Chile Sharecropping Law, Peru Second Inter-American Indigenista Congress, Cuzco, Peru First International Congress of Peruvianists, Lima, Peru Creation of State Department of Indigenous Affairs in Chile

Selected Bibliography

Archives Archivo Nacional de Chile Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Perú   Archivo Particular del Presidente Augusto B. Leguía Archivo José Carlos Mariátegui Archivos Históricos, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú   Colección Alberto Giesecke (Archivo Histórico Instituto Riva-Agüero)   Colección Luis Enrique Galván Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile Biblioteca Nacional de Chile Biblioteca Nacional Digital de Chile   Archivo del Escritor, Colección Gabriela Mistral Biblioteca Nacional del Perú   Archivo Pedro Zulen Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin   Magda Portal Papers Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University   Luis Alberto Sánchez Papers

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Crow, Itinerant Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01952-4

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Newspapers, Journals and Magazines ABC Agricultural Economics Literature Amauta América Indígena Atenea Babel Boletín Bibliográfico de Antropología Americana Boletín del Museo de Etnología y Antropología Boletín Indigenista Boletín Titikaka Bulletin of the Pan American Union Chile: A Monthly Survey of Chilean Affairs Cuadernos de Korikancha Ecran El Comercio El Deber Pro-Indígena El Diario Austral El Frente Araucano El Machete El Mercurio El Periódico Araucano El Perú El Tiempo En Viaje Ercilla Forma Heraldo Araucano Hispanic American Historical Review Hoy Illustrated London News Índice Los Andes La Nación Las Últimas Noticias Mexico National Geographic Nature Nuevos Rumbos Repertorio Americano Revista de Educación

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 

349

Revista del Museo Nacional Revista de Seguros Revista Universitaria Runa Soncco School Life The Americas The Times Zig-Zag

Books and Articles Actas de la Primera Conferencia Interamericana de Seguridad Social, Realizada del 10 al 16 de septiembre de 1942 (Santiago: CIEDESS, 1992) Acta Final del Primer Congreso Indigenista Interamericano celebrado en Patzcuaro, México, abril de 1940 (Mexico City: Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, 1948) Acta Final del Segundo Congreso Indigenista Interamericano celebrado en Cuzco, Perú, junio 24–julio 4 1949 (Mexico City: Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, 1949) Aguiluz Ibargüen, Maya (ed.), Encrucijadas estético-políticas en el espacio andino (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2009) Albertus, Michael, ‘Explaining Patterns of Redistribution under Autocracy: The Case of Peru’s Revolution from Above’, Latin American Research Review 50: 2 (2015), pp. 107–134 Alegría, Ciro, Gabriela Mistral Íntima (Lima: Editorial Universo, 1968) Alegría, Ciro, El mundo es ancho y ajeno (Santiago: Editorial Ercilla, 1941) Alvarado, Claudio, and Enrique Antileo (eds.), Diarios Mapuche 1935–1966: Escrituras y pensamientos bajo el colonialismo chilenos del siglo XX (Temuco: Ediciones Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, 2019) Archibald, Priscilla, Imagining Modernity in the Andes (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011) Arce, Magda (ed.), Gabriela Mistral and Joaquín García Monge: Una correspondencia inedita (Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1989) Arguedas, José María, Yawar fiesta [1941] (Lima: Editorial Huascarán, 1949) Arroyo Reyes, Carlos, Nuestros años diez: La Asociación Pro-Indígena, el levantamiento de Rumi Maqui y el incaismo modernista (Libros en Red, 2007) Austin, Robert, The State, Literacy and Popular Education in Chile, 1964–1990 (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2003) Barr Melej, Patrick, Reforming Chile: Cultural Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) Barr-Melej, Patrick, ‘Cowboys and Constructions: Nationalist Representations of Pastoral Life in Post-Portalian Chile’, Journal of Latin American Studies 30: 1 (February 1998), pp. 35–61

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Bastias Saavedra, Manuel, and Camila Plaza Armijo, ‘From Control to Social Reform: the Latin American Social Question in the Latin American Scientific Congresses (1898–1908)’, Estudos Ibero-Americanos 42: 1 (2016), pp. 283–307 Bazley, Colin, ‘“The Fair-Haired Mapuche”: Charles Sadleir, Pioneer Missionary in Araucanía, 1895–1918’, Anglican and Episcopal History 66: 3 (1997), pp. 329–353 Becker, Marc, ‘Mariátegui, the Comintern, and the Indigenous Question in Latin America’, Science & Society 70: 4 (October 2006), pp. 450–479 Bell, Michael, ‘The Metaphysics of Modernism’, in Michael Levenson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 9–32 Berdichewsky, Bernardo, Alejandro Lipschutz: Su visión indigenista y antropológica (Santiago: Ediciones LOM, 2004) Bewes, Wyndham, ‘The New Constitution of Peru (January 18, 1920)’, Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law 2: 3 (1920), pp. 266–269 Bingham, Hiram, Lost City of the Incas: The Story of Machu Picchu and its Builders [1948] (London: Phoenix Press, 2003) Bingham, Hiram, ‘In the Wonderland of Peru’, National Geographic, April 1913, pp. 387–573 Bingham, Hiram, Across South America: An account of a journey from Buenos Aires to Lima by way of Potosí (London: Constable & Co., 1911) Booth, Rodrigo, ‘Turismo y representación del paisaje. La invención del sur de Chile en la mirada de la Guia del Veraneante’, Nuevo Mundo, Mundos Nuevos (2008) Browman, D.L., ‘Max Uhle and the Museo Historia Nacional – Lima’, Bulletin of History of Archaeology 9: 1 (1999), pp. 7–9 Bruno-Jofré, Rosa, and Jürgen Schriewer, The Global Reception of John Dewey’s Thought: Multiple Refractions through Time and Space (New York: Routledge, 2012) Burger, Richard L. (ed.), The Life and Writings of Julio C. Tello: America’s First Indigenous Archaeologist (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009) Caiceo Escudero, Jaime, ‘Genesis y desarrollo de la pedagogía de Dewey en Chile’, Espacio, Tiempo y Educación 3: 2 (2016), pp. 131–155 Canessa, Andrew, ‘Indigenous Conflict in Bolivia Explored through an African Lens: Towards a Comparative Analysis of Indigeneity’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 60: 2 (2018), pp. 308–337 Carrero Carrasco, Ranulfo, ‘El maestro Luis Enrique Galvan y el indigenismo en Ayacucho-Peru, siglo XX’, Educación 28 (54), 2019, pp. 161–181 Carrière, Jean, Landowners and Politics in Chile: A Study of the ‘Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura’, 1932–1970 (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1981) Casa Museo José Carlos Mariátegui, ‘100 intelectuales saludan a Mariátegui’, Boletín de la Casa Museo José Carlos Mariátegui 100 (January–March 2009)

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‘Chile: Artes Manuales Indígenas’, Boletín Indigenista 2: 1 (1942), pp. 22–23 Chiodi, Francisco (ed.), La Educación en América Indígena (Quito: Abya-­ Yala, 1990) Chile bajo el Imperio de los Inkas (Santiago: Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, 2010) Cid, Hugo Marcos, El recado social de Gabriela Mistral (Santiago: Ediciones Primicias, 1990) Coletta, Michela, Decadent Modernity: Civilisation and ‘Latinidad’ in Spanish America, 1880–1920 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018) Comas, Juan (ed.), Cien Años de Congresos Internacionales de Americanistas (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas e Instituto de Investigaciones Antropologicas, 1974) Congrès International des Arts Populaires: Prague, Du 7 au 13 Octobre 1928 (Paris: Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 1931) Cotler, Julio, Clases, estado y nación en el Perú [1978] (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005) Cox, Amy, Framing a Lost City: Science, Photography and the Making of Machu Picchu (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017) Craib, Raymond, The Cry of the Renegade: Politics and Poetry in Interwar Chile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) Crow, Joanna, ‘Photographic Encounters: Martín Chambi, Indigeneity and Chile-­ Peru Relations in the Early Twentieth Century’, Journal of Latin American Studies 51: 1 (2019), pp. 31–58 Crow, Joanna, The Mapuche in Modern Chile: A Cultural History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013) Cueto, Marcos, ‘Indigenismo and Rural Medicine in Peru: The Indian Sanitary Brigade and Manuel Nuñez Butrón’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 65: 1 (1991), pp. 22–41 Currier, Charles Warren, ‘Seventeenth International Congress of Americanists First Session-Buenos Aires’, American Anthropologist 12: 4 (October– December 1910), pp. 595–599 Cushman, Gregory, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Davies, Thomas, ‘Indian Integration in Peru, 1820–1948: An Overview’, The Americas 30: 2 (1973), pp. 184–208 Davies, Thomas, ‘The Indigenismo of the Peruvian Aprista Party: A Reinterpretation’, Hispanic American Historical Review 51: 4 (1971), pp. 626–645 Dawson, Alexander, ‘Histories and Memories of the Indian Boarding Schools in Mexico, Canada and the United States’, Latin American Perspectives 39: 5 (September 2012), pp. 80–99

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de la Cadena, Marisol, ‘Reconstructing Race: Racism, Culture and Mestizaje in Latin America’, NACLA Report on the Americas 34: 6 (2001), pp. 16–23 de la Cadena, Marisol, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics and Culture of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991) de Shazo, Peter, Trabajadores urbanos y sindicatos en Chile, 1902–1907 (Santiago: Dibam, 2007) Dillehay, Tom, and Francisco Rothhammer, ‘Quest for the Origins and Implications for Social Rights of the Mapuche in the Southern Cone of South America’, Latin American Antiquity 24: 2 (June 2013), pp. 149–163 Dirección Jeneral de Educación Primaria, Lei No. 3654 sobre Educación Primaria Obligatoria (Santiago: Imprenta Lagunas & Co., 1921) Donoso Romo, Andrés, Educación y nación al sur de la frontera: organizaciones mapuche en el umbral de nuestra contemporaneidad, 1880–1930 (Santiago: Pehuen, 2008) Dorais, Geneviève, ‘Coming of Age in Exile: Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and the Genesis of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, 1923–1931’, Hispanic American Historical Review 97: 4 (2017), pp. 651–679 Dorais, Geneviève, Indo-America and the Politics of Exile: APRA, 1918–1945 (PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2014) Drachewych, Oleksa, and Ian McKay (eds.), Left Transnationalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019) Drake, Paul, ‘The Chilean Socialist Party and Coalition Politics, 1932–1946’, Hispanic American Historical Review 53: 4 (1973), pp. 619–643 Drake, Paul, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 1932–1952 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1978) Drinot, Paulo, ‘Creole Anti-Communism: Labor, the Peruvian Communist Party and APRA, 1930–1934’, Hispanic American Historical Review 92: 4 (2012), pp. 703–736 Drinot, Paulo, The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race and the Making of the Peruvian State (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011) Drinot, Paulo, ‘Food, Race and Working-Class Identity: Restaurantes Populares and Populism in 1930s Peru’, The Americas 62: 2 (2005), pp. 245–270 Drinot, Paulo, and Leo Garafalo (eds.), Más allá de la dominación y la resistencia: Estudios de historia peruana, siglos XVI–XX (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005) Ducci, Annamaria, ‘Le musée de l’art populaire contre le folklore: L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle à l’époque de Congrès de Prague’, Revue Germanique Internationale 21 (2015), pp. 133–148 Durston, Alan, and Bruce Mannheim (eds.), Indigenous Languages, Politics and Authority in Latin America: Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018)

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Earle, Rebecca, Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) Encinas, José Antonio, Un ensayo de la Escuela Nueva en el Perú [1932] (Lima: Imprenta Minerva, 1986) Espinoza, G. Antonio, Education and the State in Modern Peru: Primary Education in Lima, 1821–c. 1921 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) Fallace, Thomas D., ‘Was John Dewey Ethnocentric?’, Educational Researcher 39: 6 (2010), pp. 471–477 Fernos, Rodrigo, Science Still Born: The Rise and Impact of the Pan-American Scientific Congresses, 1898–1916 (Lincoln: iUniverse, 2003) Flores Galindo, Alberto, Buscando un inca: Identidad y utopía en los Andes (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1986) Flores Galindo, Alberto, La agonía de Mariátegui: La polémica con la Komintern (Lima: DESCO, 1980) Flores, Edmundo, ‘El problema agrario del Perú’, El Trimestre Económico 17: 67 (1950), pp. 355–395 Flores, Tatiana, ‘Dialogues along a North-South Axis’, Third Text 28: 3 (2014), pp. 297–310 Foerster, Rolf, and Sonia Montecino, Contiendas, líderes y organizaciones mapuches, 1900–1970 (Santiago: Ediciones CEM, 1988) Fox, Claire, Making Art Pan American: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) Frazier, Lessie Jo, Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007) Galvan, Luis Enrique, El premio nacional de literatura y los escritores de Chile (Lima: Asociación Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Peru, 1945) Gänger, Stefanie, ‘Circulation: Reflections on Circularity, Entity, and Liquidity in the Language of Global History’, Journal of Global History 12 (2017), pp. 303–318 Gänger, Stefanie, Relics of the Past: The Collecting and Studying of Pre-Columbian Antiquities in Chile and Peru, 1837–1911 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) García-Bryce, Iñigo, Haya de la Torre and the Pursuit of Power in Twentieth-­ Century Peru and Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018) García-Bryce, Iñigo, ‘Transnational Activist: Magda Portal and the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA)’, The Americas 70: 4 (2014), pp. 677–706 García Liendo, Javier, ‘Teachers, Folklore, and the Crafting of Serrano Cultural Identity in Peru’, Latin American Research Review, 52: 3 (2017), pp. 378–392 Giesecke, Alberto, ‘El estado moderno y la educación’, La Escuela Contemporánea 12 (April 1919), pp. 247–250

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Giesecke, Alberto, ‘Public Instruction in Peru’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 37: 3 (1911), pp. 85–104 Giesecke, Mercedes, ‘Escuela Nueva y antropología aplicada: La educación rural en el Perú en las décadas de 1920 y 1930’, Antropología 34: 36 (2016), pp. 31–52 Giesecke, Mercedes, ‘El progresivismo y la formación de los intelectuales en el Perú: La labor de Giesecke, rector de la Universidad del Cusco’, Investigaciones Sociales 20: 36 (2016), pp. 38–39 Gooren, Henri, ‘The Growth and Development of Non-Catholic Churches in Chile’, Review of Religious Research 57: 2 (June 2015), pp. 191–218 Gootenberg, Paul, ‘Secret Ingredients: The Politics of Coca in U.S.-Peruvian Relations, 1915–1965’, Journal of Latin American Studies 36 (2004), pp. 233–265 Gonzáles, Michael J., Plantation Agriculture and Social Control in Northern Peru (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985) Gonzáles, Oscar, and Mariana Ortega Breña, ‘The Instituto Indigenista Peruano: A New Place in the State for the Indigenous Debate’, Latin American Perspectives 39: 5 (2012), pp. 33–44 Gotkowitz, Laura (ed.), Histories of Race and Racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012) Gracia, Jorge J.E., ‘Importance of the History of Ideas in Latin America: Zea’s Positivism in Mexico’, Journal of the History of Ideas 31: 1 (1975), pp. 177–184 Green, Romina, To Govern is to Educate: Race, Education and Colonization in La Araucanía, Chile, 1883–1920 (PhD Thesis, UC Urvine, 2018) Greet, Michele, ‘César Moro’s Transnational Surrealism’, Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 7: 1 (2013), pp. 19–51 Grez Toso, Sergio, Historia del comunismo en Chile: La era de Recabarren, 1912–1924 (Santiago: Ediciones LOM, 2011) Gutiérrez Donoso, Patricio, ‘La recepción del pensamiento de José Carlos Mariátegui en Chile’, Analecta Revista de Humanidades 4 (2010), pp. 35–50 Haya de la Torre, Víctor Raúl, El imperialismo y el APRA (Santiago: Editorial Ercilla, 1936) Haya de la Torre, Víctor Raúl, ‘Intensidades Americanas’, Revista de Educación 49 (April 1934), pp. 47–50 Harvey, Penny, and Hannah Knox, Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015) Hazen, Dan, ‘Meanings of Literacy in the Third World: The Concepts and Consequences of the Rijchary Reform Movement in Highland Peru’, Journal of Library History 16: 2 (1981), pp. 404–415 Heilman, Jaymie Patricia, ‘We will no longer be servile: Aprismo in 1930s Ayacucho’, Journal of Latin American Studies 38: 3 (2006), pp. 491–518

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Helleiner, Eric, and Antulio Rosales, ‘Toward Global IPE: The Overlooked Significance of the Haya-Mariátegui Debate’, International Studies Review 19: 4 (December 2017), pp. 667–691 Hernández Toledo, Sebastián, ‘Apristas en Chile: circuitos intelectuales y redes políticas durante los años 1930’, Revista de Historia y Geografía 31 (2014), pp. 77–94 Herr, Pilar, Contested Nation: The Mapuche, Bandits and State Formation in Nineteenth Century Chile (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019) Hiatt, Willie, ‘Indians in the Lobby: Newspapers and the Limits of Andean Cosmopolitanism, 1896–1930’, The Americas 68: 3 (2012), pp. 377–403 Hirsch, Steven, and Lucien van der Walt (eds.), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2010) Hoffman, Barbara (ed.), Art and Cultural Heritage: Law, Policy and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Horan, Elizabeth, and Doris Meyer (eds.), This America of Ours: The Letters of Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003) Horan, Elizabeth, Carmen Urioste-Azcorra, and Cynthia Tomkins (eds.), Preciadas cartas (1932–1979): Correspondencia entre Gabriela Mistral, Victoria Ocampo y Victoria Kent (Seville: Editorial Renascimiento, 2019) Huenchullán, Arturo, ‘La educación de indígenas en los Estados Unidos’, Revista de Educación (October 1929), pp. 759–762 Jolly, Jennifer, Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation-­ Building under Lázaro Cardenas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014) Junyk, Ihor, Foreign Modernism: Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Style in Paris (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) Kersfeld, Daniel, Historia de la Liga Antiimperialista de las Américas (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2012) Knight, Alan, ‘The Peculiarities of Mexican History: Mexico Compared to Latin America, 1821–1992’, Journal of Latin American Studies 24: 1 (1992), pp. 99–144 Labarca, Amanda, El mejoramiento de la vida campesina: Mexico-Estados Unidos-­ Chile (Santiago: Ediciones de la Unión Republicana, 1936) Labarca, Amanda, ‘La moderna arquitectura escolar de los Estados Unidos’, Revista de Educación Nacional 7 (September 1912), pp. 372–384 Lago, Tomas, Museo de Arte Popular, Universidad de Chile, Sección Chilena (Santiago: Editorial Zig Zag, 1945) Lake, Marilyn, and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

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Index1

A Aburto Panguilef, Manuel, 41, 52, 52n61, 53, 72, 93, 94, 96, 97, 182, 190, 196, 198, 200, 213, 225, 226, 242, 243, 273, 287–290, 289n71, 314, 324, 326, 332, 333 and Araucanian Congresses, 52, 53, 93, 112, 114, 288, 289, 294n80, 295 and the Araucanian Theatre Company, 54n70, 197, 225 and the Llufquehuenu artistic ensemble, 196 and the proclamation of an autonomous Indigenous Republic, 52, 96, 324 (see also Araucanian Federation) Adventism, 282–286

Agrarian laws and reform, 15, 21, 36, 73–75, 77, 79–81, 95, 109, 330, 333 See also Land Agriculture, 47, 74, 160, 235, 279, 308 Aguirre Cerda, Pedro, 14, 42, 81, 86, 113, 194, 201, 208, 228, 300, 333 Alegría, Ciro, 72, 75, 76, 91, 215–218, 215n1, 217n5, 218n10, 220, 235, 252, 261, 264, 317, 329 Alessandri, Jorge, 81, 81n43 Alessandri Palma, Arturo, 14, 92, 179, 180 Allende Gossens, Salvador, 3, 38n4, 60, 81n43, 104, 106, 107, 123, 127, 131, 331, 335 American Institute of Art, Cuzco, 178, 179, 184, 190, 199–201, 319

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Crow, Itinerant Ideas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01952-4

363

364 

INDEX

American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), 1, 1n2, 21, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 43, 44, 54–57, 59, 60, 67, 73, 74, 79, 80, 105, 217, 217n5, 256 in exile, 56, 74, 80 Peruvian Aprista Party, 1n2, 37, 43, 60 Araucanian Corporation, 87 Araucanian Federation, 52, 54, 182, 197, 198, 287, 288 Araucanians, 3, 7, 9, 64, 84, 89, 116, 135, 136, 145, 146, 149, 149n24, 150, 152, 153, 157–159, 163, 182, 186n74, 193, 202, 203, 205, 235, 270, 289, 293, 294, 314, 322, 325, 330, 335 Archaeology institutionalisation of, 142, 190–195 looting, 187 Arequipa, 32, 92, 276 Argentina, 19, 30, 33, 34, 40, 45, 47, 48, 50, 55, 85, 93, 97, 105, 109, 115, 130, 138, 146, 148n20, 158, 178, 182, 196, 199, 200n40, 220n13, 231, 329, 332, 334 Arguedas, José María, 72, 98, 104, 116, 117, 177n36, 298, 306, 307, 309 Aymara, 9, 10, 30, 47, 64, 72, 82, 247, 261, 264, 276–278, 280, 282, 295, 315, 322, 331, 333, 335 B Barcelona, 131, 331 Barrios, Eduardo, 193, 247, 253, 253n27, 254, 329, 331 Benavides, Óscar, 105

Billinghurst, Guillermo, 90, 91, 192 Bingham, Hiram, 135–140, 142–144, 146, 159, 167–170, 167n2, 172, 174, 175, 177, 331 Blackness, 5, 10, 10n35 Bolivia, 8, 9, 19, 33, 45, 47, 48, 50, 58, 64, 72, 82, 109, 111n32, 146, 148, 158n51, 196, 200n40, 207, 220n13, 223, 262, 275n18, 283, 290–292, 302, 303, 309, 310, 313, 322, 323, 328, 329 Buenos Aires, 18, 19, 23, 30, 35, 40, 45–47, 49, 50, 56, 62, 67, 70, 90, 91, 93, 137n3, 147, 147n16, 148, 150, 151, 164, 171, 172, 180, 187, 193, 195, 203, 233, 246, 280, 286, 333 C Camacho Alqa, Manuel, 50, 272, 273, 275, 282–286, 288, 292, 296, 323 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 75, 77, 77n26, 102, 110, 122, 123, 298, 309, 311, 313, 314, 316 Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 233, 241, 243 Casa Concha (Machu Picchu) Museum, Cuzco, 136, 140, 143, 144, 167–188, 319, 331, 332 Casa del Estudiante Indígena, Mexico City, 241, 266, 292 Castro Pozo, Hildebrando, 76 Caupolicán Society [Sociedad Caupolicán Defensora de la Araucanía], 53, 225, 232, 232n27, 264, 274 Chambi, Martín, 141, 169, 179, 180, 182, 183, 188, 199, 205, 319, 325, 329, 332

 INDEX 

Chile Catholic Church in, 53, 284, 285, 285n54 Commission on Indigenous Issues in, 86 Constitution of, 81 Indian Courts in, 82 Office of Indigenous Resettlement in, 64 Chillán, 77, 197, 229 Chuqiwanka Ayulo, Francisco, 41, 49, 54, 269, 271, 275–282, 284, 295, 296, 329, 331–333 Churata, Gamaliel, 24, 31, 247, 259, 260, 264, 267, 277, 278, 283, 284, 295, 331, 332 Class relations, 70 struggle, 27, 29–37, 39, 51, 52, 56, 169, 185 Codovilla, Victorio, 45, 46 Colima, César, 53, 72, 72n10, 89, 99, 104, 114, 190, 208, 209, 287, 294–297, 294n82, 299–303, 312, 324 Collier, John, 64–66, 291, 302 Columbia University, 229, 230 Communist International (Cominten), 41, 45–49 Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) and Lonquimay uprising (1934), 52 origins of, 41 Concepción, 180, 181, 197 Contreras Labarca, Carlos, 41, 49, 52, 84 Coñuepán Huenchual, Venancio, 72, 72n10, 87, 89, 97, 98, 104, 114, 133, 190, 208, 209, 287, 294, 297, 299–303, 311, 312, 317, 323, 332, 333 Cuzco, 9, 23, 24, 33, 50, 61, 62, 73, 88, 92, 128, 143, 144, 160, 167–188, 190, 193, 196, 199–201, 209–211, 212n80,

365

222, 225, 269, 274, 296–298, 303, 312–317, 319 D Developmentalism, 118, 224, 310, 313, 327 Dewey, John, 225, 229, 230, 245–247, 250–252, 255, 258, 266–268, 279, 292 Drinot, Paulo, 13, 43, 51, 101, 102, 103n9, 105, 134 E Earle, Rebecca, 15, 16, 127, 140, 163 Education Catholic missionary schools, 297 education reform laws, 221, 290, 332 literacy, 231, 250, 269, 270, 308, 311 Ministry of Education (Chile), 3, 242, 247, 250, 260, 265, 312 Ministry of Education (Peru), 61, 260, 292, 306–308 Protestant missionary schools, 227, 282–287 Edwards Bello, Joaquín, 30–33, 32n13, 32n15, 178 Encinas, José Antonio, 239, 245, 266, 272, 328 F Federation of Chilean Workers (FOCH), 46 First Conference of Communist Parties of Latin America (Buenos Aires, 1929), 23, 35, 40, 49, 66, 90, 115, 333 First Inter-American Conference on Social Security (Santiago, 1942), 107, 118

366 

INDEX

First International Congress Against Imperialism and Colonialism (Brussels, 1927), 20, 44 First International Congress of Popular Arts (Prague, 1928), 23, 156, 157 First Labour Conference of the American Member States of the ILO (Santiago, 1936), 110 See also International Labour Organisation First Pan-American Scientific Congress (Santiago, 1908-1909), 137, 137n3, 139, 140, 144, 147, 162, 189, 192, 194, 232, 319, 331 Folklore, 3, 28, 142, 165, 189–214, 294, 307, 331 G Galván, Luis Enrique, 247, 254, 255, 260, 266, 281, 282, 315 Gamio, Manuel, 64, 65, 332 Gänger, Stefanie, 8, 8n30, 11, 13, 145, 146, 194 García, José Uriel, 160, 169, 182, 184–186, 325 García Monge, Joaquín, 20, 20n66, 31, 154, 155, 157, 332 Gender and health care, 107, 108, 122, 334 and indigeneity, 5, 10, 18, 23, 102 and modernisation, 15–17, 74, 100, 102, 110, 116, 122, 127, 140, 145, 177, 187, 220, 223–244, 298, 323 and textile production, 122 General Association of Chilean Teachers, 254, 255, 290 repression of, 254 Giesecke, Alberto, 169, 173–177, 187, 188, 188n76, 196, 225, 235–241, 277, 281, 319, 331 González Videla, Gabriel, 42, 51, 313

Guevara, Tomás, 225, 233 Gutiérrez Cuevas, Teodomiro (‘Rumi Maqui’), 90, 91, 275, 276 H Harvard University, 98 Haya de la Torre, Víctor Raúl, 21, 32n13, 40, 43, 55, 67, 72, 74, 79, 217, 257, 258, 333 Health care hospitals, 128, 131 medicine, 122–125, 128, 130, 131, 204 Hispanic Society of America, 223, 224 Hooker, Juliet, 6, 7, 55 Huenchullán Medel, Arturo, 225, 290 I Ibáñez del Campo, Carlos, 46, 141n17, 157n49, 255, 260 Ibero-American Exposition (Seville, 1929), 78, 157, 158, 193, 321, 330 Inalaf Navarro, José, 210, 273, 294–298, 312 Inca in Chile, 136, 145, 148, 153, 169, 183, 185, 255 the Inca Empire, 47, 62, 79, 153, 183, 192, 278, 309, 334 Indigeneity and environmentalism, 322 and identity, 4 and literacy, 5 See also Aymara; Indigenous; Mapuche; Quechua Indigenismo, 14–17, 35, 38, 41, 59, 62, 97, 142, 164, 168, 187, 306, 308, 316, 320, 335 institutionalisation of, 15, 35, 316

 INDEX 

Indigenous the “indigenous question,” 3, 6, 12, 14–17, 24, 38, 39, 43, 55, 63, 66, 67, 246, 264, 309, 311 the left and, 38n4 political mobilisation of, 37, 220, 275n18, 324 Indo-America First Congress of Democratic and Popular Parties of Indo-­ America (Santiago, 1940), 3, 21, 23, 60, 61 indoamericanismo, 60, 63–65 Inter-American Indigenista Institute First Inter-American Indigenista Congress, 65, 76, 89, 95, 102, 110, 113, 116, 117, 206, 222, 287, 294, 296, 297, 303, 309, 323, 330, 331 Second Inter-American Indigenista Congress, 174, 209, 222, 297, 312, 315, 319 International Conference of American States, 110, 172 International Congress of Americanists, 23, 98, 147, 162, 170–172, 175, 178, 187, 280, 330 International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), 154, 155 International Labour Organisation (ILO), 36, 103, 104, 106, 109–111, 322 International Police Conference (Buenos Aires, 1920), 233 Iquique, 32n13, 91, 286, 286n55 L Labarca, Amanda, 190, 200, 201, 225, 230, 244, 249n13 Labour industrial labour, 102, 103, 110, 117–122

367

labour legislation, 28, 36, 103, 105, 106, 112, 116 rural labour, 102, 104, 107, 110–112 in urban sphere, 116 Lago, Tomás, 190, 200, 201, 259 Land the ayllu, 47, 50, 91, 271 expropriation of, 29, 72, 99, 186 indigenous community lands, 73, 77, 276 (see also Territory) privatisation of, 66, 83–85 Latcham, Ricardo, 125, 126, 144, 145n9, 146, 158, 161–163, 161n67, 193 Latin American Workers Confederation, 110 Leguía, Augusto B., 14, 19, 34, 43, 49, 78, 79, 82, 84, 101, 139n13, 141n17, 145n13, 159, 168, 172, 174, 177n34, 194n13, 223, 226, 236–238, 244, 272, 274, 280, 281, 306, 335 Lenz, Rodolfo, 148n20, 202, 225, 227, 280 Letelier, Valentín, 139, 225, 232, 244, 265, 331 Lima, 1, 3, 11n37, 18, 23–25, 30, 30n4, 33, 57, 60, 63, 90, 110, 116, 117, 127, 128, 129n85, 130, 131, 138, 139, 146, 147, 151, 159n58, 160, 162–165, 170, 175, 175n27, 184, 188n76, 189, 192, 194, 194n13, 196, 203–205, 210, 210n72, 212, 226, 240, 241, 241n65, 247, 253n27, 260, 272, 275, 277, 283, 285, 286, 297, 301, 307, 312, 314, 331, 337, 338 Teatro Municipal in, 3, 18, 204 Lipschutz, Alejandro, 35, 41, 62–67, 73, 82, 200, 211, 211n76, 330

368 

INDEX

Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 104, 110 London, 20, 25, 56, 98 M Machu Picchu, 136, 140, 143, 167–188, 319, 331, 332 MacKnight, Joseph, 238, 239, 277, 278, 296, 331 Mallon, Florencia, 5n17, 13, 14, 71, 78, 83, 87, 94, 102 Manquilef, Manuel, 72, 72n10, 83–86, 86n61, 99, 225, 229, 270, 271, 287, 289–292, 289n71 Mapuche, 9, 41, 63, 70, 104, 136, 145, 145n9, 180, 190, 225, 242–243, 246, 270, 297, 330 Mapudungun, 145n9, 149, 280, 337 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 24, 29–35, 30n4, 30n5, 32n14, 32n15, 37, 38, 40, 42–46, 48–51, 59, 62, 63, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 76, 90, 91, 93, 107, 127, 247, 252–254, 256, 257, 265, 267, 268, 275, 280, 324, 329, 332, 333 Mayer de Zulen, Dora, 88 Mestizaje, 5, 64, 67, 99, 160, 182, 266, 308, 309 Mexico agrarian reform in, 36, 73–75, 77, 80, 109, 330 art-schools in, 256 Constitution of, 73, 78 Mexico City, 24, 50, 63, 65, 82, 91, 117, 147, 147n16, 161, 165, 184, 186, 206, 208, 211, 241, 258, 292, 299, 331, 336 Migration, 15, 72, 76, 114 Miller, Nicola, 11n37, 17, 30n4, 31, 42, 252

Mistral, Gabriela, 1–4, 3n8, 16–20, 20n66, 55, 56, 58, 59, 72, 74–76, 78, 80, 80n41, 81, 93, 98, 146, 154–157, 154n40, 157n49, 190, 203–205, 203n49, 213, 217, 217n5, 218, 218n10, 246–250, 249n12, 257, 258, 260, 264, 266, 268, 324, 331, 332 Modernisation/modernity, 15–17, 61, 74, 85, 100, 102, 110, 116, 118, 122, 127, 140, 145, 154, 177, 186–188, 196, 204, 220, 223–244, 266, 298, 323, 325–327 Montt, Pedro, 138 Mostny, Grete, 190, 210, 211, 211n75, 211n76 Museum of American Popular Art, Santiago, 190, 199–201 N National Geographic Society, 167–168 National Historical Museum, Santiago, 191, 198, 213 National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History, Lima, 192 National University of San Marcos, Lima, 127, 128, 163 Neruda, Pablo, 32, 58, 59, 63, 77, 169, 183–186, 188, 199, 200, 319, 329, 332 Networks, 8, 13, 17–22, 22n72, 30, 31, 35, 55, 157, 161, 201, 221, 230, 272, 275, 278, 286, 295, 319, 330, 332, 334, 336 New York, 17n56, 19, 30n4, 119, 155n43, 164, 169, 215, 229, 329 Núñez Butrón, Manuel, 104, 128, 131

 INDEX 

O Ocampo, Victoria, 1, 18–20 Oyarzún, Aureliano, 146, 148–151, 149n24, 153, 157, 158, 193 P Pan-American Union, 33, 33n16, 237 Paris, 23, 30n4, 43, 145n9, 147, 169, 170, 247, 272, 280, 313 Pátzcuaro, Mexico, 23, 76, 97, 98, 102, 111, 114, 117, 118, 122, 123, 206, 208, 209, 222, 294, 297, 298, 303–313, 316, 317 Peru Constitution of, 81, 83, 105, 244, 285, 328 Department of Indian Affairs in, 78 Peruvian Communist Party (PCP), 67 Peruvian Mission of Incaic Art, 195, 196, 203, 326 Peruvian Regional Indigenous Workers Federation (FIORP), 50 Pesce, Hugo, 41, 46, 70, 90 Poblete Troncoso, Moisés, 104, 106, 109, 110, 115, 133, 331 Portal, Magda, 1–4, 17, 19, 21, 41, 45, 55, 57, 60–62, 66, 80, 106, 247, 249, 249n13, 250, 256, 259, 266, 268, 272, 321, 331–333 Positivism, 229, 230 Prague, 23, 30n4, 154–157, 164, 203, 255, 321, 330 Pro-Indigenous Association, Peru, 88, 256, 274, 276, 295 Puno, 9, 31, 49, 50, 73, 90, 128–131, 129n85, 226, 238, 239, 247, 260, 266–268, 271–277, 275n18, 283, 284, 286–288, 316, 331, 333

369

Q Quechua, 9, 38, 41, 47, 56, 64, 72, 90, 93, 129, 193, 195, 196, 205, 213, 269, 271, 275–278, 280, 281, 295, 306–308, 315, 322, 331, 333, 335, 337 R Race and class, 7, 48, 66, 110, 134 and nation, 4–10, 202, 241, 290 See also Racism Racism, 5, 12, 28, 44, 65, 306, 319 Radical Party of Chile, 32, 42, 225, 244 Ravines, Eudocio, 40, 42, 42n14, 51 Rebagliati, Edgardo, 104–107, 131, 331 Regional Historic Museum of Cuzco, 193, 194 Regional Museum of Araucanía, Temuco, 208, 212 Ríos, Juan Antonio, 42, 86, 86n61 Rivet, Paul, 169, 280 Rosemblatt, Karin Alejandra, 6, 7, 102, 291, 291n75 Rowe, Leo, 139, 237, 331 S Sadleir, Carlos, 225, 227, 233, 234, 287 Saénz, Moisés, 72, 76, 77, 79, 292, 309, 315n60, 331, 332 Salas Díaz, Darío Enrique, 225, 229, 246 Sánchez, Luis Alberto, 41, 55, 57–60, 65, 66, 72, 74, 94, 178, 211, 215, 217, 217n5, 321

370 

INDEX

Santiago de Chile, 1–3, 18, 21, 23–25, 45, 53, 55–58, 60, 91, 97, 104–109, 110n28, 112, 115, 116, 116n51, 118, 123, 126, 127, 144, 145, 147, 148, 151, 158, 161, 161n67, 162, 164, 167, 167n2, 172, 176, 178, 179, 181, 182, 185, 189–203, 200n40, 200n41, 210, 229, 233, 253, 256, 272, 280, 286–288, 289n71, 294, 297, 300, 302, 319, 324, 329, 331–333, 337 Seoane, Manuel, 1, 3 Seville, 78, 157–161, 160n64, 164, 193, 321, 330 Socialism, 29, 31, 37–67 Stahl, Fernando, 282–286, 288, 296 State, the, 5, 32, 39, 70, 101, 141, 146, 169, 217, 224, 247, 270, 301, 321 intellectuals and, 25, 36, 334 T Tawantinsuyo Pro-Indigenous Rights Committee, 76, 270 Tello, Julio, 72, 98, 99, 146, 159, 161–163, 165, 171n15, 174, 190, 192–194, 212, 326, 331 Temuco, 53, 61, 85, 86, 89, 113, 114, 150, 182, 197, 208, 232n27, 289, 290, 292, 292n78, 294, 310, 336 Territory annexation of Peruvian territory, 9, 82 historic Mapuche territory, 71, 84, 123, 180, 229 See also Land Textiles, see Weaving Tourism, 15, 24, 141, 141n17, 142, 160, 164, 165, 168, 169, 173–177, 179, 183, 187, 225

Transnational, 1–28, 32, 35, 36, 39–41, 55, 63, 72, 77, 78, 85, 88–95, 103, 104, 106, 110, 142, 156, 162, 164, 183, 187, 198, 205, 210, 211, 213, 214, 219, 221, 222, 233, 264, 265, 267, 273, 280, 282–286, 289–296, 298, 300, 304, 309, 311, 320, 321, 327–329, 332, 334–336, 338 turn in historical scholarship, 6 Travel, 17, 19, 30, 46, 62, 135, 141, 175n29, 176, 179, 180, 183, 199, 210, 220n13, 221, 282, 323 Tripaylaf, Domingo, 273, 292, 294–296 U Uhle, Max, 142, 145, 146, 146n14, 148, 148n20, 149, 151, 157, 162, 168, 171, 172, 190–195, 191n5, 195n19, 213, 331 United States, 19, 25, 40, 46, 47, 66, 98, 102, 106, 109, 137, 139, 152n33, 167–170, 177n33, 208, 218, 221, 229, 238, 240–242, 252, 286, 290–292, 302, 310, 321 University of Chile, 63, 126, 139, 200, 232 Urviola, Ezequiel, 50, 271, 273–276, 275n17, 284, 286, 292, 295, 296 V Valcárcel, Luis Eduardo, 147, 163, 168–170, 174–176, 175n27, 187, 190, 193–196, 198, 200, 203, 245, 269, 271, 284, 298, 306–311, 326, 331 Valparaíso, 1, 11, 30, 54n70, 91, 123, 196, 197

 INDEX 

Vasconcelos, José, 6, 18, 217, 241, 241n66, 255, 258, 266 Vásquez, Emilio, 247, 260–264, 266–268, 305, 326, 332 Velasco Alvarado, Juan, 14 Villarán Godoy, Manuel Vicente, 225, 226, 229 W War of the Pacific, 9, 11, 82, 95, 126, 146, 160, 163, 171, 213, 223, 272 Tacna-Arica question, 160

371

Washington, 23, 172, 174, 187, 280, 300, 309, 315 Weaving, 28, 118, 122, 134, 140, 143–165, 185, 193, 201, 219, 319, 325 Whiteness, 5, 10, 12, 178n39, 320, 321 Y Yale University, 137, 167 Z Zulen, Pedro, 88, 256