Reconstructing Race: Racism, Culture and Mestizaje in Latin America
Cadena, Marisol de la
Culturalist definitions of race have been central to the invention of Latin American nations. Key to those definitions has been the concept of racial mixture-mestizaje-- which remains a highly...
...Indeed, I was surprised at this call for de-Indianization...
...Mario Vargas Llosa, "Questions of Conquest: What Columbus Wrote and What he Did Not," Harper's, December 1990, pp...
...A 1947 remark by the Argentine populist dictator Juan Domingo Per6n prompts some final thoughts: For us race is not a biological concept...
...academics, used "race" as "a catchall that could be applied to various human groups whose sensible similarities of appearance, of manner, and of speech persisted over time, and therefore were to them, evidently hereditary...
...Indigenous mestizos in Peru use their vernacular languages along with Spanish...
...The Latin American tendency to explain and legitimate racial hierarchies through culture preserved its authority as a rhetoric of exclusion, discrimination and dominance framed in the apparent egalitarianism of culture talk...
...The usual local explanation our traveler might receive-whether in metropolitan centers like Lima, Bogotd or Santiago, or in provincial cities like Cuzco, Cali or Temuco-is that the discriminatory behavior, practiced both by the elite and the dispossessed, is not racism because it is based on cultural differences and not on skin color or any other biological marker...
...For example, lving as much to as late as 1965, in a conference entitled "Ideas and Processes of Mestizaje in Peru," the founder of the LILUI UIt - U f ruvIan tu - ies, Jos6 Matos Mar, defined mestizaje as "an imposition from the colonial past, an idea replete with racist prejudices, aimed at the extinction of indigenous cultures...
...We have to stop being Indians to defend ourselves...
...According to this perspective, Peruvian Indians are either behind in terms of ethnic consciousness or have yielded to dominant mestizaje projects...
...2. Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991...
...I would not have paid attention to the significance of these symbols without the help of Mariano Turpo, a self-identified indigenous leader, active since the 1930s, who took part in the 1960s-1980s struggle for land...
...Jos6 Matos Mar, "Algunas consideraciones acerca del uso del vocablo mestizo," Revista Hist6rica (Lima: Instituto Historico del PerO, 1975), Vol...
...Rather, as lived experiences, they distance themselves from conceptual abstractions and present alternatives that at first sight may seem oxymoronic to modern minds...
...When the international scientific community rejected race as biology, it did not question the discriminatory potential of culture, let alone its power to naturalize difference...
...Thus, while neoliberalism may appropriate multi- culturalism, the practices of indigenous mestlzaje are not for its consumption only...
...On the contrary it meant empowering it, and thus pushing it beyond the scope of disenfranchised Indianness...
...8. Franz Fanon, "The Fact of Blackness" in Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1968 [1952]), p. 117...
...DeIndianization meant-as Don Mariano had urged in his letter-becoming literate, being able to live beyond the hacienda territory, in general obtaining civil rights...
...They are no longer Indians.t 3 Although used to promote mestizaje, Vargas Llosa's words illustrate the survival of earlier indigenista culturalist rhetoric, this time dressed in the evolutionary ethnic lexicon to which Peruvian anthropology resorted when race was evicted from scientific mestizaje is ant to be "either Indian evolutionary posed by concepts...
...6. George Stocking, "The Turn of the Century Concept of Race," Modernism/modernity, Vol...
...These modem practices that acquit discriminatory practices of racism, and legitimize them by appealing to culture, are expressions of the intellectual and political history through which, in most of Latin America, "culture" has been racialized and thus enabled to mark differences...
...While these policies might have prevented mestizaje from becoming official nationalist rhetoric, they did not invalidate it...
...They have remained latent both among leftist and conservative ideologues...
...between social and biological heredity...
...Although, of late, new social movements have challenged the "normality" of this practice, it has not subsided...
...Although race was not questioned then, and disputes were not aimed at subverting its existence, Le Bon and Vasconcelos could not have disagreed more on their views of mestizaje...
...2 They thus reversed anti-hybrid arguments and, as illustrated in Vasconcelos' quote, placed the "spirit" at the center of their projects...
...Within this new framework, Indians were an ethnic group that represented an earlier stage of development and were culturally different from mestizos...
...Blinded by the success of class rhetoric, leftist social scientists have ignored the indigenous cultural aspects of the struggle, which were abundant...
...45-53...
...or mestizo" Yet, adding to its multiple meanings, mestizaje in its popular ver- choices ii sion-what I have called "indige- modern nous mestizaje"-may correspond to some of the demands for multiculturalism leveled by the Maya or Aymara social movements in Guatemala and Bolivia respectively...
...It is his most glorious triumph," asserted the Peruvian aristocrat Javier Prado, thus coinciding with his political rival, the radical Gonzales Prada...
...This brings me to a second invented dialogue-and intrinsic discrepancy-this time between Le Bon and the Limefio anarchist Manuel Gonzales Prada...
...Flesh of the whorehouse, one day she will die in the hospital...
...As a result of this redefinition, "indigenous Andean culture" exceeds 22 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 0 0 22 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON RACE the scope of Indianness...
...Nevertheless, I want to link this Peruvian idiosyncrasy, to another one: While in the countries that I have just mentioned powerful ethnic social movements have emerged since the late 1970s, similar efforts in Peru are still very marginal...
...50-56...
...Moreover, within this culturalist definition, race could be biology, but it could also be the soul of the people, their culture, their spirit and their language...
...Artists, literary writers, and politicians, indigenistas are usually identified only after their pro-Indian leanings...
...For example, discarding European forms of whiteness as marks of racial status, the conservative writer Manuel Atanasio Fuentes reported: "In Lima, even those men who immediately descend from the European race have a trigueiio color [literally 'like wheat,' light brown] which is pale and yellowed...
...We repudiate the idea that spon- taneous generation, mutation, or any form of biological life determine history because they lack history...
...MdlC VOL XXXIV, No 6 MAYIJUNE 2001 REPORT ON RACE Girls from the Huayruro community leaving school in the Valley of Urumbamba in Pisac, Cuzco...
...They proudly call themselves "mestizo," without, however, agreeing to disappear in the cultural national homogeneity that the current dominant definition of mestizo conveys...
...3 For the French thinker, racial essences were inalterable, fixed and determined by heredity...
...5 Referring to the interconnectedness of race and culture, the historian of anthropology George Stocking remarked that U.S...
...they were called "cholos"and were considered immoral and corrupted...
...I practice indigenous culture but I am not an Indian," an indigenous woman in Cuzco told me...
...On the contrary, it was championed by a broad array of politicians, from reactionary partisans of General Francisco Franco to anti-imperialist supporters of C6sar Augusto Sandino...
...not normal amo Men were gentlemen, their women were ladies, and as it was the attl such they displayed appro- commoners, priate sexual behavior...
...In g gente decente...
...Llosa, and leads discourse...
...Yet they were especially explicit in defining race through culture...
...In the years to come, and under such ambiguous slogans as "unity in diversity" the state promoted purist manifestations of indigenous folklore, emphatically discouraging those considered "inauthentic" or ed people to fall "mestizo," while at the same time "modernizing" crossing racial the countryside through ial disorder was development programs...
...Indigenous Cuzquefios have appropriated the mestizo identity and given it an alternative meaning: They use it to identify literate and economically successful people who share indigenous cultural practices yet do not perceive themselves as miserable, a condition that they consider "Indian...
...I know this sounds strange, but I will tell you what I mean and how I learned about it...
...And these beliefs could become state policies...
...n relative contrast, and during the same period, Mexico, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Ecuador implemented "assimilationist" policies that promoted Spanish literacy and explicitly or implicitly fostered the elimination of vernacular languages and indigenous cultures...
...Most importantly, these grassroots forms of mestizaje cancel the immorality imputed to cholos, and they stress instead their proud endurance of, and struggle against poverty and adverse social conditions...
...The conflict, organized in alliance with leftist parties and waged under the colors of class struggle, destabilized the political order and eventually forced a military coup and a radical Agrarian Reform in 1968...
...There, Valcircel claimed, they degenerated morally...
...9 18 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 18 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON RACE Thus, while opposing terminal racial hierarchies, the culturalist definition of race had room for discrimination flowing from purist racial-cultural views and their dictum of sexual morality...
...But, most importantly it disregards that "indigenous culture" exceeds the scope of Indianness...
...Alejandro Toledo's "market economy with a human face" can also come with a cholo face...
...Undoubtedly, the markers of indigenous mestizaje that Toledo used throughout both his campaigns represent an unprecedented public challenge to "decency," and this has provoked the explicit revulsion of the upper classes...
...Gustav Le Bon: The influence of race in the destiny of peoples appears plainly in the history of the perpetual revolutions of the Spanish republics in South America...
...Yet, since racial markers could include some biological aspects, physical characteristics were not canceled out...
...Thanks to Eloy Neira for introducing me to Mariano Turpo...
...Obviously, I do not think the Peruvian state represented the Latin American pro-Indian vanguard...
...The price they must pay for integration is high-renunci- ation of their culture, their language, their beliefs, their tradi- tions, and customs, and the adoption of the culture of their ancient masters...
...thus education could only polish external appearances...
...This might have been the result of its exclusionary class nature, according to which only commoners were mestizos...
...it is ethnicity that matters...
...28, pp...
...Reconstructing Race 1. Gustav Le Bon, in Alice Widener, ed., Gustave Le Bon: The Man and His Works (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1979 [1913]) p. 240...
...4 ulturalist definitions of race, which endowed education with almost eugenic might, were central to the invention and legislation of Latin American nations...
...From this view, mestizos were ex-Indians who had abandoned their proper natural/cultural environment-the countryside-and migrated to the cities...
...For us, it is something spiritual...
...And many others echoed her...
...Caballeros were responsi- Being mestiz ble patriarchs and damas racialized fact, 1 virtuous women, but more do with educa importantly decencia inspired them to fall in r It n riI t a It IUVe wIIl cII w elverI, I IUs preventing the transgression of racial boundaries...
...Yet, obviously, the sanctuary was not class-blind...
...Gustav Le Bon: A Negro or a Japanese may easily take a univer- sity degree or become a lawyer...
...Every personality, every group is born within a culture and can only live within it," wrote Valcdrcel, who finished his sentence: "the mixing of races only produces deformities...
...Mestizos started where decency ended...
...But it could have also been one of the hidden legacies of indigenismo...
...Whether this resignification serves the market or the people is a historical matter...
...Mestizaje was the impure consequence of rape or female sexual deviance...
...We are the offspring, that is, the heirs, of a being that has been shaped by the inter- action of Nature and Culture...
...28, pp...
...Thanks to education, man can today transform the physical milieu and even the race...
...The economic identity that neoliberalism requires, and the social success it offers, is not measured by the "refinement" standards imposed by "decency," because with globalization as one of its premises, ident~tles can be multicultural...
...Se) people, people of worth...
...The same author claimed: "The impure Indian woman finds refuge in the city...
...Rather de-Indianization implied shedding a social condition entailing absolute denial of civil rights...
...At the turn of the century this was a nationalist doctrine that anchored the Peruvian nation in its pre-Hispanic past, and most specifically in the Inca legacy...
...Valcdrcel's project could have been ambiguous enough as to bring consensus into the assortment of ideas proposed by the politically heterogeneous and even antagonistic champions of mestizaje...
...The celebrated writer Mario Vargas Llosa revived them when he said: Indian peasants live in such a primitive way that communica- tion is practically impossible...
...Thus, within the Latin American racial field, phenotype (skin, hair, and eye color as well as facial features) could be subordinated to "culture" as a marker of difference...
...It is only when they move to the cities that they have the opportunity to mingle with the other Peru...
...This attitude, in turn, was expressed through a certain dismissal of whiteness...
...Unveiling the discriminatory potential of "culture" and its historical embeddedness in racial thought is important...
...I mean present-day peo- ple acting politically...
...Far from equating "indigenous culture" with "being Indian"-a colonial label that carries an historical stigma of inferiority-they perceive Indianness as a social condition that reflects an individual's failure to achieve educational improvement...
...Yet it never became an official, state-led, nation-building project...
...8 In Peru instead, triguefio whiteness provided racial sanctuary to the mostly brown-skinned elites across the country...
...It also gives a nonracist allure to images like those produced by Vargas to the current denials of racism in Peru...
...After my lessons with Don Mariano, it was impossible for me to assume that "the loss of indigenous culture" explained the lack of ethnic movements in Peru...
...Jos4 Maria Arguedas, "El mestizaje en la literatura oral," Revista Hist6rica (Lima: Instituto Hist6rico del Pero, 1975), Vol...
...l 2 Don Mariano, who speaks Quechua and Spanish, has signed many documents...
...Thus, despised by prominent Indigenous intellectuals, and lacking an overt official life, mestizaje was not me embraced by the working classes resolved in as an empowering identity project...
...62-63...
...What I find peculiar about Peruvian racial thought and racial relations during this period, is that there existed a tendency to subordinate manifest phenotypic markers to allegedly invisible racial characteristics such as "intelligence" and "morality...
...Composed of individuals whose diverse heredities have dissociated their ancestral characteristics, these populations have no national soul and therefore no stability...
...Conversations with Mariano Turpo, Cuzco, 1990...
...It is what dissuades us from falling into the imitation of other communities whose natures are foreign to us...
...the meantime, intellectuals faithful to the teachings of bute of urban Valcircel-most of them he mestizos...
...And by history I do not mean the past...
...and they commute between city and countryside, and are versed in both ways of life...
...Obviously, I do not thmk neoliberalism needs to raise anti-discriminatory banners, or to generalize the advocacy of multiculturalism...
...Being mestizo in Peru was a racialized class fact, where class was not only judged in terms of income but of education and origin...
...Through this program, the Minister of Education expressed his desire to preserve Indians as agriculturalists, yet to offer them the benefits of civilization through bilingual Quechua and Spanish literacy programs, agricultural training, and hygiene lessons...
...Juan Domingo Per6n, October 12, 1947, DIa de la Raza, Buenos Aires, Argentina...
...The elite, regardless of skin color and of cultural mixture, were sheltered from the stains of mestizaje...
...None of the above means that mestizaje lacked supporters in Peru...
...If our fellow traveler ignores this background, she will be puzzled upon the realization that brown-skinned individuals can be white and Indian-looking fellows do not selfidentify as Indians...
...Our Negro or our Japanese may accumulate all possible certificates without ever attaining to the level of the average European...
...Yet I do think that in countries like Peru, neoliberalism has a certain amount of seductive room for selective class-blind multiculturalisms...
...In a moment of historical crisis, they formulated the transcendental mission assigned to that region of the globe: the mission of fusing all peoples ethnically and spiritually.l Similar discussions were at the core of the creation of the scientific definition of race in the late nineteenth century...
...In Peru, the case I know best through personal experience and academic analyses, the culturalist tendencies of racial thought were reaffirmed and sharpened by indigenismo...
...Jos` Vasconcelos: Hidalgo, Morelos, Bolfvar, Petion the Haitian, the Argentines in Tucumdn, Sucre all were concerned with the liberation of slaves, with the declaration of equality of all men by natural right, and with the civil and social equality of Whites, Blacks and Indians...
...VOL XXXIV, No 6 MAY/JUNE 2001 Manuel Gonzales Prada: Whenever the Indian receives instruc- tion in schools or becomes educated simply through contact with civilized individuals, he acquires the same moral and cul- tural level as the descendants of Spaniards...
...7. Manuel Atanasio Fuentes, Lima: Esquisses historiques, statistiques, administratives, comerciales, et morales (Paris: Fermin Didiot, 1867), p.194...
...they combine formal education and indigenous practices...
...People can be different and similar at the same time...
...Key to those definitions has been the concept of racial mixture-mestizaje-- which remains a highly contested concept...
...Ardent insurrectional speeches were delivered in Quechua, and the massive demon- strations in the Plaza de Annas of Cuzco were attend- ed by peasants wearing ponchos and woolen capschullos--clothes that express indigenous identity and which were specially and symbolically worn for those occasions...
...VoL XXXIV, No 6 MAY/JUNE 2001 '^"" ""'" """" ^'""' '""" '~""""" ^' """^~ """ 19REPORT ON RACE Some analysts have interpreted the absence of "ethnic social movements" in present-day Peru to reflect indigenous "assimilation" and cultural loss...
...it broadly includes Cuzquefio commoners who claim indigenous cultural heritage, yet refuse to be labeled Indians...
...After one generation they become mestizos...
...Most Peruvians, whether anarchists or conservatives, could not have disagreed more...
...These responses, far from whimsical or innocuous social conventions, are at the crux of Latin American racial formations...
...Valcdrcel believed that the essential peculiarities of a people were determined by what he called their history...
...This perspective places indigenous Peruvians within the bounds of "an ethnic group," and forgets that ethnicity is only one among the host of social relations-race, gender, class, geography, generation (to name commonplaces)-that organize (and disorganize) indigenous and nonindigenous life processes...
...Obviously, dominant definitions of mestizaje, and the evolutionary racial-cultural projects those definitions entail, have not disappeared from the national political scene...
...4-16...
...anthropologists-contin- ued to blacklist pro-mesti- in Peru was a zaje efforts...
...In his view, culture was the imprecise concept, yet powerful force, that determined races: The universal relationship between human beings and the nat- ural world is resolved through culture...
...They were educated, occupied their racial proper places-both geographically and socially-and "Decency" inspi thus lived within the dictum of moral order...
...For us, race constitutes our personal seal, indefinable, and irrefutable.14 Culturalist visions of race have been pervasive among Latin American thinkers, and their efforts have not necessarily been aimed at separating race from culture...
...This understanding goes a long way towards explaining the puzzle-racism accompanied by its denial--confronted by our innocent traveler in the Americas...
...There was, he said "no clear line between cultural and physical elements or 17REPORT ON RACE Townspeople of Maras, Cuzco dress as Inca warriors during the feast of Moray Raimi, a November ritual that gives thanks to the Earth...
...16NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Marisol de la Cadena is assistant professsor of anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill and Member of the Board of Directors of the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (Lima, Peru...
...5. Luis Eduardo Valoarcel, Tempestad en los Andes (Lima: Editorial Universo, 1978 [1927]), p. 109...
...In one of them, written while imprisoned under the charges of being a Communist, he urged his compafieros to "learn how to read and write, as being illiterate, makes us more Indian, easy preys of the hacendados and their lawyers...
...it was the attribute of urban commoners, the mestizos...
...I, No...
...it can shed light on Latin American culturalist forms of racism which are neither exclusive to rightist politicians nor limited to academia...
...And none of this meant shedding indigenous culture...
...It constitutes a sum of the imponderables that make us what we are and impel us to be what we should be, through our origins and through our destiny...
...1, 1994, pp...
...What no education can give him, because they are created by heredity alone, are the forms of thought, the logic, and above all the character of the Western man...
...Thus, it potentially decouples the dominant identification of popular classes with immorality and perennial marginality...
...They were supported by ubiquitous images in which erratic combinations of heredity, nature, climate, culture, and history resulted in distinctively identifiable spirits or souls of the races that peopled the world...
...Yet, I gradually learned from Don Mariano-and from many other indigenous Cuzqueiios-that "not being Indians" did not mean shedding indigenous culture...
...6 Peruvians therefore were not exceptional in conflating race and elements of what we now consider "culture...
...From the 1950s to the mid 1970s, indigenous peasant leaders from all over the country, but most specifically from Cuzco, led a long political insurrection against the traditional hacienda system...
...It had resulted in mestizos: sexually irrepressible, culturally chaotic, and therefore immoral social beings...
...A people of half-castes is often ungovernable...
...Valcircel became Minister of Education in the 1940s, and since then, either overtly or surreptitiously, indigenismo has inspired significant official educational policies...
...Luis Eduardo Valcircel, a Cuzco resident historian and lawyer, and the undisputed intellectual leader of this nationalist movement, was exceptionally clear in this respect...
...One of the most puzzling, disconcerting phe- nomena that the non-native visitor confronts while traveling in Latin America is the relative ease with which pervasive and very visible discriminatory practices coexist with the denial of racism...
...Anti-mestizo daily life feelings were academically authorized by indigenistas, who borrowed from North Atlantic thinkers (those that they had otherwise contested) the idea that races degenerated if they were moved from their proper geographical places...
...This allegedly nonracial yet evolutionary lexicon, which allows for images of "indigenous improvement" and speaks of hierarchies of reason, is facilitated by the "culture talk" provided by certain notions of ethnicity...
...In fact, this was common to other racial projects that optimistically rejected the dominance of heredity in determining race...
...They in love withou were gente decente, decent boundaries...
...quoted in Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (Walnut Creek, CA.: Altamira Press, 1999), p. 54...
...7 Indeed, the Latin American academic ambivalence towards whiteness represented a significant difference with the experience of, for example, Franz Fanon, whose intellectual sophistication, he declared, did not remove the derogatory fact of his black skin: "No exception was made for my refined manners, or my knowledge of literature, or my understanding of the quantum theory...
...4. Javier Prado, "Memoria del Decano de letras del Aho 1908," in Revista Universitaria de San Marcos (Lima: Universidad de San Marcos, 1909), pp...
...Key to indigenista success and relative consensus might have been Valcircel's idea of "unity in diversity" which he presented as the context for his rural education program in a 1946 speech to the national Congress...
...As the quote from Per6n makes clear, the Latin American political contribution has consisted in emphasizing the "spiritual" aspects of race, and in privileging "culture" over "biology" as its defining essence...
...Rather, it was couched in the ideology of decency, a racialized class practice, according to which an individual's skin color marked him or her depending on the moral standards reflected by his/her level of education...
...While North Atlantic thinkers, like Le Bon, imagined Latin Americans as hybrids and thus potentially-if not actually-degenerates, Latin American intellectuals tended to praise the benefits of racial mixture, and proposed "constructive miscegenation...
...Neither were they the only ones to postulate the eugenic might of education to improve the races...
...Don Mariano helped me realize that the absence of overt culturalist (or ethnic) political slogans during that period may have resulted instead from the need to distance the movement from state-sponsored indigenismo and its allegedly pro-Indian, and highly antimestizo language...
...271-275...
...Indigenous mestizaje is not meant to be resolved in "either Indian or mestizo" evolutionary choices imposed by modern concepts...
...3. Gustav Le Bon, Gustave Le Bon: The Man and his Works, p. 289 and Manuel Gonzales Prada in Jorge Ruedas de la Serna, ed., Manuel Gonzales Prada: Una Antologia General (Mexico City: SEP, 1904), pp.173174...
...I thus returned to the notion of mestizaje and found that it had had more than one trajectory, and more than one meaning...
...Rather, they were subordinated to the superior might of morality, which although innate, was perceived as susceptible of being improved through education...
...This definition of Indianness was reinforced when, in the midst of the struggle for land, and while state cultural activists were busy promoting indigenous folklore, other state representatives-the police-used the label "Indian" to deny peasant leaders their rights to public speech while torturing people like Don Mariano...
...Insofar as they connote images that defy exclusion, they can be used by the new soc~al movements to resignify the traditional cultural politics of race and class in Peru...
...Andean deity] before going on any strike, before signing any document...
...the sort of varnish he thus acquires is however quite superficial and has no influence in his mental constitution...
...0 0a O NACILA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 16REPORT ON RACE To help our imaginary traveler understand the modem history of race in Latin America, I would invite her to start by reading the following dialogue (recreated by myself) between the French Anglophile Gustav Le Bon and the Mexican thinker Jos6 Vasconcelos...
...From him I learned that indigenous utilization of class rhetoric was a political option that did not represent -and its promchon of a consumer who can come from any background, provid- ed that helshe can buy and sell...
...9. Valcarcel, Tempestad en los Andes, p. 45...
...Sexual disorder was not normal among gente decente...
...and Jos4 Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997 [19251), p. 16...
...It is only in appearance that a people suddenly transforms its language, its constitution, its beliefs or its arts...
...Race is not important in Latin America, our foreign friend would also be told...
...In so doing, it connects with popu- lar mestizaje projects and promises an historically unprece- dented possibility for the inclusion of the "unrefined" members of the "popular classes" in official politics...
...1 0 In the same conference, the celebrated Quechua writer Jose Maria Arguedas-who had worked with ValcArcel in the Ministry of Education-presented for the first time in public a version of what Peruvian anthropologists call "the myth of Inkarri," a story predicting the return of the Incas.11 Three years later, in 1968, when the military regime issued the Agrarian Reform, they used the label "Inkarri" to name a major annual event...
...Her latest book is Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru (Duke University Press, 2000...
...Hence, cholos represented not biological, but moral degeneration, stirred by the alteration of the original order, by an inappropriate cultural environment, and furthered by a deficient education...
Vol. 34 • May 2001 • No. 6
