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Indigenous Mestizos

The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919â"1991

Duke University Press

Decency in 1920 Urban Cuzco

The Cradle of the Indigenistas

The race that has produced a Leibneitz and a Newton is inferior to none. – PAUL BROCA, 1864

Recibir un título profesional es una dignificación que borra los estigmas de la procedencia. (Receiving a professional degree is a dignity that erases stigmas of origin.) – LUIS E. VALCÁRCEL, 1914

In 1912, when a team of professors and students from the University of Cuzco conducted an unofficial census of their city, they found it difficult to assign the residents an "accurate" racial identity. Among the methodological problems that the director of the census reported was that "the tendency both of the interviewer and of the interviewed, is and will always be to prefer the superior classification. This means that the mestizo will try to be included as white, and many Indians [will choose] to be [considered] mestizos." Since "whites" occupied the apex of the Cuzco racial hierarchy, with Indians at the bottom, the cuzqueño population made efforts to whiten themselves. To avoid misrepresentations in the numerical reports, the census director felt compelled to train the census interviewers to identify the race of the residents. Later he corrected some data that he considered inaccurate (Giesecke, 1913:26). This episode illustrates the conflicts that surrounded racial definitions in Cuzco, conflicts that were already several centuries old at the time of the 1912 census. However, this census was unique because it revealed the efforts of its North American director, Albert Giesecke, to implement a scientifically defined concept of race to rectify what he considered to be the "self-misrepresentations" of the cuzqueño populace.

At the turn of the century, however, it was not only the racial identities of commoners that were at stake. Latin American elites in general at that time were wrestling with the relatively new European scientific definition of race, which placed them in a subordinate position vis-à-vis their European peers. "To a large extent the educated classes of Latin America shared the misgivings of the Europeans. They wished they were white and feared they were not," writes Nancy L. Stepan (1991:45). The cuzqueño elite was in a particularly difficult racial situation. Starting in early nineteenth century, influential Peruvian thinkers, drawing on notions of environmental determinism, produced a picture of Peru in which Indians were anchored to the Andes (the sierra) but were rhetorically absent from the coast, purportedly populated by mestizos and whites (Orlove, 1993b:324). Similarly, they identified the sierra as retrograde, while the coast was associated with progress. The cuzqueño elite status as serranos (highlanders) potentially lumped them with the images of regression associated with the mountains, and subordinated them to the coastal politicians, and more specifically to the limeño elite, who were perceived as the more advanced racial group.

Like other Latin American elites, cuzqueños contested subordinating classifications. At the turn of the century, the racial-geographical debate between the highland and coastal elites was part of a political debate known as regionalismo versus centralismo. Regionalists claimed direct participation in the administration of their regions, and accused limeños – the centralists – of concentrating political functions and economic benefits in Lima. Although regionalism represented provincials (in general), it was the serrano politicians that engaged in the struggle against limeños. In Cuzco elites labeled regionalism as cuzqueñismo. In the mid-1920s regionalism intertwined with indigenismo, to become the modern academic and political doctrine that represented the aspirations of cuzqueño politicians. Indigenistas of diverse tendencies thrived during President Augusto B. Leguía's eleven years' mandate (1919-1930). A modernizing and initially populist ruler, Leguía began his second presidential period by seeking intellectual and political allies for his struggle against the aristocratic regimes that had preceded him and which he identified as retrograde. The president included the regionalist-versus-centralist debate in his political agenda, and he found in indi-genismo a political proposal that was favorable to the claims of and thus appealing to provincial regionalists. A pliable intellectual and political project, indigenismo (and cuzqueñismo, its local version) was also used by the regionalist serrano elite, both pro-and anti-Leguía, to carve their distinctive place as intellectuals on the central political stage of the nation. In an era when intellectual achievements allegedly determined racial hierarchies and status (as suggested in the epigraphs to this chapter), indigenismo, as an originally serrano doctrine, had an important effect: it proved that highland politicians were as capable as their limeño peers, and therefore, racially equal rather than subordinate.

Additionally, indigenismo articulated a historical argument to define mestizos and Indians as moral (rather than biological) racial others, who were different from the brown-skinned elites. This distinguished the elites from Indians and, most important, from "hybrids," a label that cuzqueño indigenistas fastened onto regional mestizos. Mestizos had been identified as blemished characters since colonial times (Gose, 1996; Schwartz and Salomon, forthcoming). Thus, skirting around their own phenotype, cuzqueños joined limeños in contesting European thinkers who scorned brown-skinned South Americans. Yet in defining themselves as nonmestizo, they rejected the limeño proposal that miscegenation was the racial future of the Peruvian nation. At a time when national attention was focused on the centralism-regionalism debate under the academic leadership of Luis E. Valcárcel, cuzqueño indigenismo in the 1920s proposed racial purity as a national aspiration.

In a country where hybridity (defined from a European viewpoint) was only too obvious, cuzqueño purists backed their position with a conceptual formula that combined European idealism and romanticism – specifically, vague allusions to "language" and "culture" as delineating the "soul of peoples" (Young, 1995) – with theories of racial degeneration. Although their academic alchemy concerning race was rooted in Peru, it was facilitated by the worldwide intellectual tendency to use inchoate definitions of race (Goldberg, 1993; Poole, 1997). As in other places, in Cuzco "race" was primarily a strong sentiment, with political undertones, motivated by a desire for distinctions (Gilroy, 1987; Stolcke, 1993; B. Williams, 1989). In Cuzco itself, discourses of decencia underpinned the local, academic definition of race. As I argue in this chapter, decency was a sexualized moral class discourse that defined the racial identities of the region. By stressing moral/sexual purity it distinguished gente de-cente from gente del pueblo (Indians and mestizos), notwithstanding their phenotypic similarities. Decencia allowed brown-skinned elites to appear in the censuses as blancos and underlay descriptions of individuals "having Indian features without being an Indian" (Valcárcel, 1981:68). Gente del pueblo certainly contested decency, but this is an issue I shall treat in later Chapters. In this chapter I limit my interpretation to the elites.

Cuzqueño Decency

A Moral Definition of Race

Decency was a flexible norm of conduct for daily life, one that allowed a belief in the preeminence of ascribed status to coexist with an acceptance of the liberal definition of social equality. Decency, which was a reformulation of colonial codes of honor, was primarily considered as an "innate high morality." However, since the most basic liberal ideas were premised on the possibility of social mobility, Cuzco liberal intellectuals contended that high moral standards were not only present at birth but could be acquired by individuals if they received appropriate training. Education, as one intellectual put it, "imprints upon the individual's psyche the concept of the moral and the immoral, of justice and injustice, of what is licit and illicit, determining the orientations of the feelings" (Mariscal, 1918:12). And an influential politician proposed, "Educative disciplines can combat and modify inherited tendencies because education is the true hygiene that purifies the soul" (Luna, 1919:25).

As the conduit of Education and morality, the biological family was a central component of decency. "The family is the first social element which notably modifies an individual's inherent tendencies, inclining him to good or evil, depending on the parental habits displayed at home" (Luna, 1919:31). The expression "Individuals acquire education and morality in the cradle," a common saying among cuzqueño gente decente, echoed the elite sentiment that moral propriety and class origins were coterminous. Because of this emphasis on "the family" – defined as the blood-related nucleus of parents and offspring – decency did not replace ascribed status (Stolcke, 1993). Yet, by stressing the power of education to gradually amend the lack of morality, "cradle ascription" intersected with later achievement, thus allowing modernizing politicians to combine their need for social distinctions with liberal notions of equality.

Implicitly – yet not necessarily – associated with whiteness, decency was a class discourse the elite used to distinguish racial categories culturally and morally in a society where phenotype was useless to define social boundaries. Putative lineages of gente decente were those in which moral purity – or cradle education, as the elites referred to it – had been inherited through generations. The accrued impeccability of moral standards among the gente decente resonated with the concept of pureza de sangre – purity of blood (Gose, 1996; Schwartz and Salomon, forthcoming) – which referred to the religious purity that distinguished Christian family lineages from those with Jewish or Muslim ancestors. Latin American regimes, like other colonial administrations, wielded moral purity as a powerful signifier for the production of difference (Callaway, 1993:32). In Cuzco, pureza de sangre outlived the colonial period, and the morality that religious purity had entailed became a racialized modern principle acquired through (cradle) education instead of being a status ascribed at birth. As a modern principle based on a cultural feature it could supersede somatic hybridity and "purify" elites' spirit and thus their race. Conversely, the moral impurity of the gente del pueblo (the antithesis of gente decente) indicated their racial impurity and even degeneration, which allegedly resulted from lack of education and was passed down through the generations. As one intellectual wrote, "The son of the people [el hijo del pueblo] will direct its steps to the path of evil" (Luna, 1919:31). Another added, "The child of a poor individual [who] lacks the restraint of education ... easily slides into the path of perversion" (Mariscal, 1918:12). Mestizos were identified as a dangerous class, an identity that in colonial times was deemed the opposite of castizo, a Spanish idiom designating a chaste individual (Schwartz and Salomon, forthcoming).

Grounded in inherited morality and education, decency also allowed elites to formulate liberal conceptions of social hierarchies while minimizing the relevance of wealth to identify social cleavages. This fostered the continuity of colonial cultural features and the reproduction of a status quo that honored the economically decayed elite, those whom the local crème de la crème called familias pobres, pero decentes (poor but decent families) and discriminated against the working classes, the mestizos, among which were economically thriving families. Unfit to be wealthy because they had not been cleansed by education, prosperous subordinates were considered gente del pueblo, obviously mestizos, and implicitly associated with "the poor" regardless of their actual economic standing. Reflecting the beliefs of his times, Valcárcel wrote, "A professional title cleanses stigmas of origin" (1914). The flip side of this phrase was that well-off common folk who lacked the symbolic capital that a university degree represented did not have access to the social status that their high income could have otherwise granted them.

By means of decency, the dominant classes of cuzqueño postcolonial modernity kept up selected colonial discourses through which the old status quo endured. Thus, although income was an ingredient of decency, it was not definitive. According to a document dated 1906, the top economic group of the city was composed of fewer than twenty families. Within this upper echelon (comprising foreign merchants, hacendados, and non-cuzqueño Peruvian merchants and moneylenders), the declared annual income ranged from about six hundred to one thousand soles. These were considered the "most decent" group within cuzqueño society. However, decency and income did not coincide for the group at the next economic level, where individuals declared an average annual income of three hundred soles. Within this group there were men and women who held both the most prestigious and the most despised occupations. Among the latter were a middleman for local produce (rescatista) and a cattle slaughterer (manadero) who claimed four hundred soles as their annual income, while three tailors and a leather worker (talabartero) reported three hundred. This income was greater or equal to that of the most eminent lawyers, whose annual declared income ranged between two and three hundred soles. Other professionals such as physicians, engineers, and notaries, reported a similar annual income. Although the economic distance between these middle-income professional families and their working-Class counterparts was trivial or nil, social distance did exist. Constructed upon the notion of decency, it created a chasm within this economic group: even if a slaughterer earned more money than a lawyer, the lawyer was considered more decent.

Underlying this distinction was a lingering colonial stratification of occupations according to their purported cleanliness and degree of physical effort. "The harsh law of work [la ruda ley del trabajo] impoverishes and consumes the creature," was how this principle was given its modern expression by a physician in the 1930s.6 The more strenuous the occupation, the lower the status of the individual. Manaderos (cattle slaughterers) and market women occupied the lowest end of the spectrum; the elites deemed them the most immoral members of broken families, although economically they represented powerful working-class cuzqueños. Chicheras were another "unclean" group; gente decente linked them to single motherhood and prostitution.

At the other end of the spectrum, intellectual achievements defined a male individual'scultura (culture) and allowed for differentiation among gente decente. Luis E. Valcárcel, an influential indigenista, distinguished two cuzqueño hacendado families with the remark "The Lunas were ... a bold and adventurous family; they were bold and pugnacious.... The Pachecos were refined people, some of them even became university professors" (1981:29). "Refined" (refinado) was the adjective used to refer to someone considered culto, having culture. Diametrically opposed to ignorance, and yet more significant, to coarseness and immorality, having culture implied being erudite, having delicate manners, and behaving according to the principles prescribed by the Catholic religion. "The more ignorant a man is, the more he approximates the animal, in that the savage instincts manifest themselves through bloody and violent acts" (Luna, 1919:2). Instead, culture domesticated the instincts, and was the reason why gente decente allegedly "did not abuse" their inferiors, but on the contrary treated them properly. Since to be decent was equivalent to being just, decency defined the boundaries beyond which the realm of injustice and illegitimacy began. It demarcated the limits beyond which, as Fèlix Cosio wrote in the early 1900s, "transgressions against the legitimate expectations of the subordinate" began (1916:5).

The quotidian idiom of gente decente formally translated in legal language as personas perfectas (perfect persons). A judicial notion used to calibrate the degree of responsibility of an individual for legal purposes, the perfect person combined physical as well as moral characteristics. Perfect persons were "those that have reached a greater physical as well as psychic development, those who have completed their total evolution, [thus] possessing the culture required to promote social happiness" (Vega Centeno, 1925:9–12; see also Cosio, 1916:22–5). Because the gente decente had developed their discernment, the elites considered their authority as legitimate, and the punishment they inflicted on their subordinates as necessary and just.

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Excerpted from Indigenous Mestizos by Marisol De La Cadena. Copyright © 2000 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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