The Revolutionary Indio: CH A Pter One

ch a p t e r on e
THE REVOLUTIONARY INDIO

José Carlos Mariátegui’s Indigenismo
I
n a brief essay on José Carlos Mariátegui, the well-known Peruvian
critic Aníbal Quijano characterizes Mariátegui's work from the 1920s
as expressing an “intersubjective universe that is constituted by the pro-
Copyright © 2009. University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved.
cess of Latin American culture of that period, as an alternative to the one

imposed by the Creole oligarchy. It is a question of a distinct rationality,
that even then some proposed to recognize as ‘indoamerican’” ("Prólogo”
x). The rationality that Quijano terms “indoamerican” is part and parcel of
indigenismo. In this citation and elsewhere, such as in his article “Moder-
nity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America,” Quijano argues for an under-
standing of Mariátegui that locates an authentic indigenous worldview in
his work.
As such, Quijano conceptualizes Mariátegui's writings as capable of
making indigenous concerns, and even culture, organic to the deep struc-
tures of an oppositional lettered critique. Quijano bases this view on the
fact that Mariátegui consistently invoked myth in order to communicate
his utopian visions of the Andes. In this way, Quijano argues, Mariátegui
understood that socialism, as it had been articulated in Europe, “was not a
25
Coronado, Jorge. The Andes Imagined : Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pitt-ebooks/detail.action?docID=2038879.
Created from pitt-ebooks on 2021-02-26 08:30:07.
26 ≈ the revolutionary indio
real—rational, that is—proposal for Peruvian society of the time, which

was populated mainly by peasants, indios in fact” (xi). Quijano insists that
Mariátegui's indigenismo, when faced with the inapplicability of rational
socialist thought to the Andes, permeated Marxism with irrational, and
presumably indigenous, underpinnings. For Quijano, then, indigenismo
is capable of genuinely representing more than indigenous strategic inter-
ests; for him, Mariátegui's version captures and transmits what would be
the indio's unique cultural essence: that is, a non-Western, mythic irratio-
nality. With the exception of Quijano's insistence on Mariátegui's volunta-
rism in being able to communicate an indigenous worldview, this notion of
Mariátegui's work being home to both European and indigenous compo-
nents closely resembles Cornejo Polar's premise concerning heterogeneity. I
look upon this notion skeptically by focusing on Mariátegui's articulation
of the indio from the stronghold of the letter. Mariátegui’s characteriza-
tions of the indio, as we shall see, have roots in contemporaneous concepts
of revolution that arise from his deep immersion in the international lan-
guage of social change.
In the early months of 1926, at a house located on Jirón Washington
just beyond the wealthy, balconied mansions and aristocratic elite of Lima’s
centuries-old colonial center, three young Peruvian intellectuals debated
how best to title a journal that, at a crucial moment in Peruvian intellectual
history, actively sought to overturn their society’s traditional hierarchical
organization. It was a portentous task whose outcome would herald a his-
toric turn in Latin American thought. Equally a product of and a reflection
upon an uneven but irrefutable modernization in Latin America, the jour-
nal that sprang from this collaboration radically transformed intellectuals’

conceptions of their own region. Indeed, Amauta (1926–1930)—as it was fi-
nally and significantly named—emerged at a moment of drastic change in
the Andean world. Migration to the city, the instability of traditional class
and racial divisions, and a rushed, chaotic urbanization increasingly char-
acterized the experience of a significant portion of the Andean population.
These transformations paralleled a new phase of relations with the outside
world, relations spurred on by the region’s reinvigorated ties with central
nations—the United States especially—in the form of massive investment,
technological imports (in which motion pictures and the automobile figure
prominently), and the freer circulation of cultural commodities, particu-
larly those from Europe.1
As Luis Alberto Sánchez recounts it, the question of what title the van-
guard publication would bear had actually been a source of debate for some
the revolutionary indio ≈ 27
time (Aquézolo Castro 166). In the weeks prior to the decisive meeting in
Mariátegui’s study, the bland Vanguardia had been favored for the homage
it paid to an international movement, even if it did risk losing itself in a
flurry of Latin American publications inspired by avant-garde activity in
Europe.2 However, by the time that these three young men—Mariátegui,
Sánchez, and the historian Jorge Basadre—met on jirón Washington in or-
der to come to a decision, they brought to the table very definite opinions
regarding the objectives that the journal’s title should reflect. Sánchez re-
members: “One afternoon in José Carlos’s study, José Carlos, Basadre and
I argued about the title of the future journal. The biggest problem was that
the title should be inclusive. Basadre suggested something related to the Re-
publican Era, which is the true melting pot of the races, and Mariátegui de-
fended the idea of autochthony, already taken with the term amauta. Amauta
appeared” (Aquézolo Castro 166, emphasis mine).3
If Basadre favored a term that harkened back to the beginning of the
republic by highlighting the mix of races he associated with that period,
Mariátegui looked to entirely different sources, sources which both pre-
dated the republican epoch and, importantly in Mariátegui’s conception,
postdated it as well. Apparently, the term amauta had been suggested to
Mariátegui weeks earlier by the cajamarquino José Sabogal, a painter well
known for his indigenista motifs. Upon hearing it, Mariátegui had been
completely taken with the Quechua word, which means “poet and teacher.”
As he would explain later, one of the key reasons for choosing this title was
the ambiguous implications of such an outdated term: “The title translates
our affiliation to the Race, it reflects our homage to Incaism. But with this
journal the word Amauta acquires a new meaning. We are going to recreate
it” (“Presentación”).4
For Mariátegui, the choice between a title that would, as Vanguardia
did, locate their project in the increasingly widespread and international
fervor for all things modern, or another that harkened back to the nine-
teenth century, or one that specified not only Peru but especially its indig-
enous population and culture was no choice at all. By 1926, Mariátegui’s
firsthand experience with avant-garde movements in Europe and his close
contact with their Latin American counterparts had already led him to
assume a distanced and critical opinion of those artists and intellectuals
who strictly championed the cause of the new for its own sake. In an article
entitled “Arte, revolución y decadencia” presented in Amauta’s third issue,
he alluded to the primary problem with an aestheticized manifestation of
the vanguard: “We cannot accept as new an art that gives us nothing but a
new technique. That would be to be distracted by the most false of the mo-
ment’s illusions. No aesthetic can reduce artistic production to a technical
problem. The new technique should correspond to a new spirit as well. If
not, the only thing that changes is the adornment, the decoration. And a
revolution does not content itself with formal conquests” (3).5
His argument rests on the refusal to concede that art might be sepa-
rated from the realm of the social, and in particular that its innovations
might not somehow reflect and inflect this same social reality. He was well
aware of diverse and divergent political attitudes at home and abroad, and
he clearly saw the need for a vanguard organ that would not only articu-
late a critically leftist view of Peruvian reality but would also direct high
cultural production toward social ends. Anywhere, but especially in a
place like Peru, Mariátegui reasoned, cultural practices could not be left
to construct themselves in a social vacuum. There can be little doubt that
the “spirit” that Mariátegui mentions is an indigenous one, loaded with the
meaning of social reform.
Unlike Basadre’s suggestion, amauta allowed a historically remote
referent to coexist with a meaning that left itself open to be determined
by indigenismo’s plans for the future. For Mariátegui, amauta described a
project that distanced itself from the remote past at the same time that it
renewed and deployed the forms it found therein. Thus the journal would
take Incan history as a point of departure, but the past would not be its des-
tination. In a move that characterizes Mariátegui’s political positioning of
culture, his choice of this title culls from the ashes of an old civilization the
kindling necessary to ignite a new one. In this sense, his strategy broke with
the modern insofar as it did not rely solely on notions of originality and
on the denial of the past. His usage strives to bring indigenous culture—
although how this is to be defined is as yet unclear—into contact with and
indeed into the center of modernity’s ubiquitous presence in 1920s Lima.
It is important to note the full implications of Mariátegui’s choice of
a word that referred to the Incan past. Critics such as Alberto Tauro have
noted that the term, in Quechua, designated “a wise man who in filling
the role of a teacher to a certain degree socialized his knowledge, in this
way training the functionaries that the empire required. He became a pivot
point of the administration” (10). In his decision, then, Mariátegui heav-
ily emphasized an element of Incan society that no longer existed and in
the same movement slighted present-day indigenous culture. The figure of
the amauta was and is closely associated with imperial Incan society, and
much less so with contemporary indigenous cultures. This disconnect in
Mariátegui’s critique between intellectual discourse on indigeneity and

contemporaneous indigenous people would remain a constant.
On the other hand, Basadre’s and Sánchez’s impulse toward a title that
would adequately reflect “the republican era, which is the true racial melt-
ing pot” emphasizes their interest in an immediately prior history, the lega-
cies of which were made visible only by the advent of the twentieth century.
Thus the preference of Basadre, the historian from the provinces, speaks
to the flux in racial boundaries and, more often than not, concurrently in-
vokes movements across class lines, a phenomenon he judges began with
independence. Needless to say, Basadre’s observation is made possible as
much by distance from the era of the early republic as it is by the Lima of
the 1920s that he inhabited, a city flooded with migrants of every variety.
Indeed, during Augusto B. Leguía’s eleven-year regime, Lima’s population
almost doubled, from 200,000 in 1919 to 375,000 by the late 1920s (Tamayo
Herrera, El indigenismo limeño 16). During the same years, the colonial cen-
ter of power and wealth became increasingly visible through the contrast
provided by the rings of humbler and less ambitious settlements that slowly
encircled it.6 Although not as extreme, these sorts of changes occurred in
urban centers throughout the country.
In this nation in flux, one of the intelligentsia’s central concerns was
the necessity of creating a national identity that might somehow respond
to the deep transformations modernization left in its wake.7 Modernity
in the Andes is deeply marked by the presence and vigor of identitarian
projects. Launching such a project was, in fact, the agenda at that meet-
ing in Mariátegui’s study on the jirón Washington. For both Basadre and
Mariátegui were attempting nothing less than the complete recasting of the
nation’s sense of itself, albeit in radically different ways. Basadre sought to
fix the flux of the present moment by addressing the nation’s cultural di-
versity, its status as a “melting pot,” while at the same time confirming its
continuity with the century-old republic. Hailing from the recently reinte-
grated city of Tarma, Basadre was clearly invested in a project in keeping
with the nineteenth-century desire to see Peru present itself as unified in
light of relations with its old enemy and occupier, Chile. Modernization
meant transition, and transition, instability; in Basadre’s eyes, it was essen-
tial that Peru continue to define itself as a nation with respect to the found-
ing moment that was independence in order to maintain its literal integrity
and political sovereignty.
Mariátegui, however, saw in the same period of transition and social
flux the opportunity to grasp the reins of history. In the many forms that
modernization took at the time, he intuited a democratization and eco-

nomic development of previously ignored social sectors to be phenomena
powerful enough to shake the very foundations of Peruvian society; his is a
discourse of the future, no matter that it harkens to the past. Accordingly,
for him the 1920s were to be the arena in which two histories—the ancient
indigenous past and Peru’s occidental history since first contact—would
meet. It was Mariátegui’s conviction and objective that a new socialist so-
ciety arise from that combative meeting, and the creation of this society
would drive all of Mariátegui’s articulations of an Andean modernity.
To be sure, few figures have been as important as José Carlos Mariátegui

to the narrative of Latin American history that twentieth-century cultural
and literary critics have labored to construct. In his function as patron of
vanguard cultural practices and vociferous critic of the neocolonialist sta-
tus quo, critics who are strongly invested in models of mixed culture find
an ideal representation of the mestizo’s accomplishments in the twentieth
century.8 According to these readings, Mariátegui, as both man and author,
embodies the earliest and most ambitious manifestation of a figure—the
mestizo—that would ceaselessly propagate itself physically and discur-
sively throughout the century in the numerous countries that make up the
region.
Historically, at least, there can be little dissent on this point, for in fact
the mestizo and the cultural and racial mixture he entails are writ large
across the century’s history. Mariátegui was a mestizo, and as noted by Bas-
adre, Sánchez, and a slew of others at the time and afterward, the class and
race to which he belonged were to rise from their obscure origins at the cen-
tury’s threshold in order to recast the nation in their image. The mixed cul-
tures of Latin America have produced a dazzling array of cultural artifacts,
and indeed, the century’s most dazzling cultural production has readily set
itself to the task of making sense of that mixture’s apparent chaos.9
However, while the historical conditions of modernization, such as
the intense migration and visibility of a mestizo middle class, made pos-
sible Mariátegui the public man and dissenter, and also created the space
in which he was to pronounce his Marxist-inspired discourse on the uses
of literature and the indio, they may have also limited the fecundity of the
ground onto which that discourse was sown. Mariátegui did belong to the
provincial mestizo middle class that vied for political and cultural power in
1920s Lima, but he himself did not imagine that class as a model for the na-
tion. It is one thing to interpret Mariátegui at the emergence of a moment
in history, but quite another to obscure his own unique critique of the pos-
sibility and future of Latin America by limiting his vision to the ambitions
of his class. Fernanda Beigel, in her recent book on Mariátegui’s critical
thought, has been especially insistent on this point (50).
Among the many critics who have positioned Mariátegui as central to
their promotion of a mestizo culture in Latin America, perhaps no other
author more convincingly argues—with a store of knowledge as broad as it
is nuanced—for the incontestability of Latin American cultural mestizaje
than the Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama. Insofar as Rama develops one of
the central and most representative theories of cultural mestizaje in his
elaboration of the concept of transculturation, his work serves as a fine ex-
ample of that theory’s obfuscation of alternate versions of modernity, such
as Mariátegui’s.
In the prelude to the reflections on Andean culture that end his 1982
landmark study, Transculturación narrativa en América Latina, Rama traces
a compelling history of the emergence of the mestizo social subject in mod-
ern Peru. He describes the newly urban mestizo’s play for ascendancy in the
early twentieth century in the following manner:
We will find a worldview animating these works and imparting mean-
ing to them; it was created by a new social stratum that had developed
in provincial towns and cities thanks to education. It allowed them to
ascend from their initial position in the lower levels of the burgeoning
middle classes. They responded to the irresistible convocation put into
effect by the weak, post–WW I process of modernization, which needed
to be more widely and competently implemented. At the same time,

however, that class had seen its advance contained by society’s archaic
structure, which opposed the process of modernization. Confronting
it, the provincial mestizo middle class articulates a social and political
critique that uses art and literature as instruments of diffusion and criti-
cal action, thus relying on indigenismo, but in reality expressing its own
mesticismo. (141)
Here, Rama presents what is incontrovertibly an agonic model of history.
For him, the mestizo’s social ascent from the brackish backlands and deso-
late sierras of Latin America takes the form of a long march during which
the mestizo slowly gathered the weapons necessary to battle for his empow-
erment. In Rama’s view, this empowerment is organized around little more
than the mestizo’s desire to incorporate himself into the preexisting social
hierarchy. His political validity as a self-determining agent in history is
bound to the destiny of his class. Thus, Mariátegui the man and public fig-
ure only confirm the mestizo’s single-minded objective to enter the official
nation and, once there, to tailor it in the image of his bipartite heritage. In
this view, the mestizo does not question the preexisting structure of the na-
tion. If anything, he reinvigorates it by adapting himself to its deep system
of values, even if he does change society’s superficial appearance.
The teleological underpinnings—implicit in the entire study but most
clearly revealed in Tranculturación narrativa’s final sections on the Peruvian
writer José María Arguedas—of Rama’s understanding of history largely
dictate this reading of early twentieth-century social upheaval. A veritable
juggernaut of historical interpretation, Transculturación narrativa never
loses sight of its motivations, either in its dexterous comings and goings
across the texts and events of a dozen nations’ cultures or in its numer-
ous incursions into disciplines as diverse as economics, sociology, history,
and literature. Rama’s self-appointed task is to pinpoint the essence of
Latin American culture, what he calls its espíritu or imaginary, as it has
existed over the course of the century. He explains, “What is investigated
in the novels of the transculturators is a kind of fidelity to the spirit which
is reached through the recuperation of the structures peculiar to the Latin
American imaginary, revitalizing these structures in new historical cir-
cumstances and not abandoning them” (123, emphasis mine).
The problem arises from the organizing principle that this quest gen-
erates in Rama’s reading of Latin American cultural history. For Rama,
this culture marches toward the increasingly pure manifestation of the
principles of transculturation that, in his understanding, already animate
it from its inception. Since this is not merely a tendency but rather the logic
which dictates the very purpose of history in the region, ideologies that do
not support it—that were not germane to the installation of the mestizo
and his eventual, active promotion of mixture—become invisible. Thus,
Mariátegui’s ideology of revolution—which, as we shall see, refutes the vi-
ability of the mestizo as an agent of social change—falls beyond the scope
of Rama’s outline of history.
Although he is deeply indebted to a number of Mariátegui’s other
analyses, Rama cannot position Mariátegui as anything other than a pre-
cursor to the great examples of mestizaje in the latter half of the twentieth
century. In Rama’s teleology, Mariátegui prepared the ground for those
who came after by introducing the mestizo into lettered culture, but he was
not himself, in his work and efforts, an example of mestizaje as understood
from the conceptual vantage point of transculturation. In Rama’s account,
the vanguard to which Mariátegui belonged was too concerned with jockey-
ing for power in the city to see beyond its own urban environment. Herein
lie the roots of Rama’s conviction that Mariátegui’s understanding of Latin
American culture, and therefore his proposals to change the continent’s
social reality through an indigenous-based revolution, were not only inad-
equate to the challenge of the day, but actually served to veil class struggle
by presenting its terms in the more apparent vocabulary of race, attached as
this concept was to the differentiation of the indigenous as a biologically de-
termined people. For Rama, Mariátegui’s ascendant middle class vaunts it-
self, in the form of the mestizo, over other sectors of the same society. This
mesticismo, as Rama calls it, seeks nothing other than to propagate itself like
some amorphous monster whose appetite is set on the farthest reaches of
the region itself. As Rama explains,
In that way of choosing some elements and preferring others, what we
register is the optic of a distinct culture, the mestizo’s, and its organizing
filters of reality. Two related factors occupied the primary place in that
reality: the realist and the economic ones, which are found in the texts of
Mariátegui. . . .
. . . The drastic imposition of peculiar interpretative filters of reality
onto other social groups is typical of social cultures of emerging social
groups, whatever their breadth, richness, or poverty. They interpret these
other groups according to these filters and later try to impose them, in
order that others appreciate these values. They thus propose a general
homogenization of the social body according to their own array of values.
In fact, mestizo culture argues for the mestizoization of all of Andean

society, including the indigenous remnants that it exults but to whom it
proposes a profound acculturation under its tutelage. This is the peda-
gogical function that the vanguards take up. (150–52)
For Rama, then, Mariátegui’s social activities betray a crude and over-
simplifying economics. Like the rest of his class, Mariátegui’s objectives are
assumed, in fact, to keep down those whose social situation he would seek to
better. His limited knowledge of indigenous cultures necessarily condemns
him to being eclipsed by those who know, and have experienced, more.
Thus, in Transculturación narrativa, Arguedas and his 1958 novel Los ríos
profundos, written at the crossroads of indigenous and Hispanic cultures,
mark the most developed example of mestizaje’s cultural production on the
march of Latin American culture toward achieving its true essence.10
However, while some members of the Andean vanguard—perhaps
best represented by Jorge Icaza in Ecuador and José Uriel García and Hil-
debrando Castro Pozo in Peru—did, as Rama suggests, actively propose
the inculcation of the indio under mestizo tutelage, certainly not all were
quite as enthusiastic or affirmative about the project of imposing not only
their identities but their histories and experiences as well.11 Many, in fact,
resisted this kind of “mestizoization” and thus contested the emergence of
mestizaje as a blueprint for modernity in the Andes. Mariátegui, the most
complex of the thinkers who threw his hat into the ideological debates of
the 1920s, was no exception. The stakes in reading Mariátegui against the
grain of Rama’s history, then, consist of unearthing how the most promi-
nent indigenista critic of the early twentieth century understood the role
of the indigenous not in the rise of the mestizo, but in the instauration of a
modern Andean utopia.
Born in 1894 in the provincial capital of Moquegua, Mariátegui spent

his childhood in poverty, particularly after the family was abandoned by
Mariátegui’s father. The conditions in which Mariátegui was raised, the
education he was given, and the opportunities that were available to him
were all extremely limited, given that he and his two siblings were barely
able to subsist on the meager pay his mother earned as a seamstress. An
accident at the age of nine left Mariátegui lame in one leg, and the search
for better medical attention, as well as the hope for better wages, led his
mother and her three children to the capital. Once in Lima, the severe eco-
nomic straits the family faced during Mariátegui’s early adolescence forced
him to leave school and begin work in the burgeoning newspaper industry
before he turned thirteen. Having found his place in the newspaper boom,
Mariátegui was, in part, formed by it. He worked his way up through every
possible level in the distribution and production of print journalism.12
Mariátegui’s trajectory from impoverished youth to polished auto-
didact, his forays into theater and criticism under his first masters, the
modernistas, and the exile that would lead him to Marx and paradoxically
reintroduce him to his own country are the subject of numerous studies.13
The scant information that exists regarding his knowledge of the Andes
and the indigenous peoples of its many regions comes from testimonies, in
particular from his various collaborators at Amauta. Emilio Romero, for ex-
ample, tells of regular meetings his mentor slated with him and Luis Valcár-
cel in order to interrogate them systematically on Andean reality. Natives
of the sierra and well versed in indigenous culture, they complied happily.
In interviews, Romero notes both Mariátegui’s desire for knowledge about
the Andes and how the critic meticulously studied his notes on indigenous
cultures (qtd. in Flores Galindo, La agonía de Mariátegui, 48).
Despite the exemplary biography of the early twentieth-century mes-
tizo that Mariátegui’s life traces out—born in the provinces, migrates to
the city, ascends socially not through education but through booming in-
dustry—in Mariátegui’s mature critical work we see few ideas as unpalat-
able to his intellectual sensibilities as that of the mestizo and his culture.
In his 1928 text Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, whose
separate articles had been in circulation as early as 1926, he writes,
Mestizaje, within the economic and social conditions existent among us,
does not only produce a new human and ethnic type but also a new social
type. If the imprecision of the first, due to a motley combination of races,
does not in itself constitute an inferiority and might even announce
the signs of a “cosmic” race in certain happy examples, the imprecision or
hybridity of the social type, through an obscure predominance of negative sedi-
ments, translates into a sordid and morose stagnation. In the mestizo neither
the white’s nor the indio’s tradition is prolonged; they both clash and are
sterilized.14 (313, emphasis mine)
The judgment Mariátegui pronounces deploys a biological metaphor: two
complementary but opposite parents produce a sterile offspring. Mariátegui’s
diagnosis neither jibes with the overwhelming presence of mestizos
and mestizo culture within the vanguard movement (César Vallejo and
Mariátegui himself, to name but two) nor positions him comfortably at
the forefront of a mesticismo bent on empowering itself, as Rama suggests.
What his analysis does do is highlight the incompatibility of two cultures,

two worldviews that, according to Mariátegui, share absolutely no common
ground. Instead of epitomizing their inevitable synthesis, the mestizo here
constitutes the symbol of their incompatibility in his inability to forge a
distinct history and culture from the parts he inherits. Rama entirely over-
looks such derisive comments regarding the inadequacy of the mestizo,
scattered throughout Mariátegui’s texts, and these have scarcely been read
in nuanced accounts of Mariátegui’s politics.15
Mariátegui’s insistence on the “social” in tipo social betrays his single-
minded concern for the social possibilities offered by a modernizing Peru.
His denial of the mestizo’s particular tipo social illustrates the critic’s concern
for the location of social types. His lack of education, his prejudices, and
especially the ease with which he was swept into the trajectory of a Western-
style modernization meant that, for Mariátegui, the mestizo was tied to
the task of purging the indio from the nation. From the mestizo’s location
at the core of industrialization, both as laborer and consumer, Mariátegui
concluded he would invariably fall in with a central modernization’s eradi-
cation of the local. Filled with diatribes against the product of racial mix-
ing, Mariátegui’s comments on the mestizo’s type are thus written against
precisely what Rama mistakenly perceived in Mariátegui himself: the easy
accommodation of the newly visible mixed race, and only that race, into the
preexisting hierarchy.
Unquestionably, the idea that cultural practices and social change are
inextricably linked was nothing new to Mariátegui. In the presentation of
Amauta, he writes, “Beyond what distinguishes them, all these spirits con-
tribute that which approximates and joins them: their will to create a new
Peru within the new world.”16 Mariátegui perceived a direct link between
the society that was to come and the intelligentsia that was to lead it, no
matter if through essay, pictorial art, narrative, or poetry. And in fact, as
we shall see, it is in Mariátegui’s own critique of contemporaneous poetry
that he establishes the parameters which inform his refusal of the mestizo
subject and constitute a major step toward a strategically idealized repre-
sentation of the indio.
As the thirty-two-issue run of Amauta demonstrates, Mariátegui was
far more concerned with the need for these intellectuals to think about the
problems Peru presented than with their thinking only within the Peruvian
tradition. He himself was adamant about the need for Peruvians in par-
ticular, and Latin Americans in general, to look toward Europe and its in-
tellectual tradition in order to find possible solutions to the inequalities of
Latin America’s reality. At first glance, Mariátegui’s enthusiasm for recent

European thought seems paradoxical in light of his critical stance toward
neocolonial investment and development. For the critic, however, the dif-
ference was clear: the acceptance of sophisticated critical frameworks was
not necessarily capitulation to a neocolonial relationship with central na-
tions. Indeed, Mariátegui credited European social theories with allowing
him to see the plight of Latin America, at the same time that he insisted
that those theories must also undergo transformations in accordance to lo-
cal reality.
The idea of a committed intellectual and artist, and from it the idea
for a journal that would stand at the forefront of Peru’s cultural and so-
cial reconstruction, came to Mariátegui during the years he spent in ex-
ile in Europe from 1919 to 1923 (Nuñez 26–35). These years are absolutely
pivotal to Mariátegui’s development and understanding of how cultural
practices—in particular cultural organs—function within societies un-

dergoing change, modernization, and renovation. Although relatively little
work has been done on this period of Mariátegui’s life, it is certain that he
had occasion to observe the genesis and development of many European
vanguard publications. In particular, as several historians have conjectured
from his travels in Italy and affiliation with members of the Italian Com-
munist Party, Mariátegui had access to Antonio Gramsci’s Ordine Nuovo,
as well as extensive information on the Russian Revolution, and it is per-
haps here that the Peruvian critic found the blueprint for a similar organ
in Peru.17
But no matter how well Mariátegui understood the need to borrow
from Europe in order to formulate an egalitarian modernity in Peru, he
also perceived with acuity that in the Andes, social renovation and revolu-
tion could not come from the same stratum of society that clamored for
it in the Old World. Early on, he assumed that any attempt to restructure
Peru and free it from the colonial traditions that riddled the republic must
include the indio, and indeed, must be based on his revindication. If this
discovery is the crux of Mariátegui’s and indigenismo’s social thought,
however, it does not initially go beyond a strategic use of the indio within a
Marxist model. In his reflections on the uses of literature, best exemplified
by his writing on poetry, Mariátegui tends to evade the possibility that the
indio himself might have, within his own culture and through the tools it
provides, a valid and useful way of criticizing imperial structures. In this,
Rama’s criticism holds, while Quijano’s insistence on Mariátegui’s voic-
ing of an authentic indigenous worldview seems groundless. Mariátegui
subsumes the indio into his own revolutionary discourse on the Andes, in
which the indio plays a key role. The socially acceptable and valued prac-
tice of literature is thus made to speak the figure of the indigenous while
at the same time silencing the indio’s own voice. In effect, in Mariátegui’s
critique, literature and the indio are absolutely inseparable in the envision-
ing of a local modernity.
Although Mariátegui propagated his agenda on many different fronts,
it was in contemporary artistic production that he found concrete proof
of what he imagined at the core of any Peruvian revolution—the espíritu
indígena—and its disruptive qualities. While the indigenista movement ex-
pressed itself through a variety of cultural practices, including narrative,
dance, and criticism, Mariátegui, schooled by modernismo and its aes-
theticizing conceptions of poetry, found its essence in verse and painting.
He emphatically stated over and over again, “The character of this [indigeni-
sta] tendency is not naturalist or folklorist; rather, it is lyrical, as Andean poetry’s

first attempts and forays prove” (Siete ensayos 305, emphasis in original).18 In
the course of his criticism, he would elaborate on examples of both arts,
but without question perceived the apogee of the movement in the poetry
of César Vallejo.
Two years Mariátegui’s elder, Vallejo continued writing until eight
years after Mariátegui’s death in 1930, yet published only two books of
poetry in his lifetime: Los heraldos negros (1918) and Trilce (1922). Also a
migrant from the Andes, Vallejo’s fate led him in an entirely different direc-
tion than Mariátegui’s. After exiling himself in 1922 in order to avoid arrest
for trumped-up charges stemming from a small-town feud, Vallejo never
returned to Peru. His early writings often address those themes specific
to the experience of the Andean migrant, but his later poetry, while still
concerned with the problems modernity posed, was accordingly more in-
fluenced by his international comings and goings. By the time Mariátegui
began to publish Amauta, Vallejo’s two books of poetry had already been
written and the poet himself was living in Paris.19 Nonetheless, Mariátegui
found in Vallejo’s writings that which he esteemed to be “the dawning of a
new poetry in Peru” [el orto de una nueva poesía en el Perú] (280).
Surprisingly enough, as a literary critic and as an advocate of vanguard-
ist production, Mariátegui was not at all concerned with the formal aspects
of Vallejo’s work. He did not rely on Vallejo’s highly experimental orthog-
raphy and meter to substantiate his assessment of the poet’s importance,
nor did he base his judgments on Vallejo’s departure from the traditional
content of poetry in Latin America before the twentieth century. In fact,
as his commentary on the poet in Siete ensayos makes explicit, Mariátegui’s

evaluation almost entirely ignores Vallejo’s work after Los heraldos negros.
This omission is made all the more strange because even though Vallejo’s
early poetry did depart from tradition in its content, if not necessarily in its
elaboration, the Vallejo who truly shocks, the one so often mentioned as the
founder of a new poetic tradition, is the Vallejo of the highly experimental
Trilce.
That Mariátegui was not interested in Vallejo’s experimentation empha-
sizes his agenda, one that the early Vallejo matched perfectly. Mariátegui, it
seems, overlooked the formal, highly visible qualities of this work in favor of
something far less tangible: the lofty and ambiguous espíritu indígena. Ac-
cordingly he pronounced: “Vallejo is the poet of a breed [estirpe], of a race.
In Vallejo we find, for the first time in our literature, the virginal expression
of indigenous sentiment. . . . His art does not tolerate the equivocal and ar-
tificial dualism of essence and form. Indigenous sentiment in . . . Vallejo is

something that flowers in the verses themselves, changing their structure”
(280).20 Here, Mariátegui insists that Vallejo’s work represents only one,
and no other, social subject. The language of purity—“virginal,” “flower,”
“breed”—goes a long way toward conveying Mariátegui’s thinking about
both poetry and the indio. More importantly, it also suggests the inher-
ent association between the two in the critic’s thinking. If Mariátegui is
certain that Vallejo’s work manifests the expression of a single race, he pays
no less attention to the construction of that race as organic and natural. For
Mariátegui, it is not Vallejo’s task or accomplishment to simply elaborate
upon indigenous themes and realities or portray them accurately, naturally,
or organically. The crux of the critic’s interpretation lies in his deep convic-
tion that Vallejo’s poetry is the equivalent of the indigenous essence, that
the “Andean poetry” which Vallejo represents is itself organically bound to
the indio in its genesis, for there can be no “dualism of essense and form.”
Strangely enough, no aporia exists between indigenous alterity and its ex-
pression in a Western cultural practice.
This naturalizing of Vallejo’s poetry—for purity and nature func-
tion synonymously in Mariátegui’s lexicon—represents the first step
in Mariátegui’s steady usurpation of it from any literary tradition, from
any history, and from any agency that is not directly linked to the indio.
Mariátegui is very conscious that Vallejo writes in a specific tradition and
language, and that inevitably his work will be interpreted as a development
in occidental forms of poetry. By no means does he fail to recognize Los
heraldos negros’ indebtedness to Western tradition. He does so, however,
only to immediately reclaim the book for another culture, one that cannot
be sullied by such a history, literary or otherwise. Mariátegui writes, “Clas-
sified within world literature, this book belongs in part (thanks to its title,
The Black Heralds) to the symbolist period. But symbolism does not pertain
to any one epoch. The indio . . . tends to express himself in symbols and
images. . . . In his art, Vallejo’s procedure corresponds to a state of mind”
(280).21
Note Mariátegui’s procedure. Through a series of discrete assertions, he
strings a line of reasoning from A to Z: symbolism has no specific history;
it is especially germane to the espíritu indígena; the indio expresses himself
in symbols; the creation of Vallejo’s art is a matter of the indigenous soul.
In the writings of a Marxist and a student of history such as Mariátegui,
this kind of tenacious dehistoricization and decontextualization can be ex-
plained only by his deep-seated need to separate the indigenous and the
poetry made here to equal it from any “contamination” by cultures linked

to imperialism. This misreading is particularly glaring given Vallejo’s elab-
oration of his poetry between the hermeneutic spaces of the Andes and the
cosmopolitan city. Whatever the perspective, it is very difficult to assign the
values of purity or homogeneity to the poet’s work.
The banishment of all other representational possibilities from Vallejo’s
poetry adheres to Mariátegui’s aversion to hybrid culture. Having cleansed
the poetry of its mestizo elements, Mariátegui proceeds to slowly abolish
not only traces of the poet’s culture but also of his authorship. Mariátegui
asserts, “The Quechua word and the vernacular turn of phrase are not ar-
tificially inserted into his language; in him, they are a spontaneous prod-
uct, a part of him, an organic element. It could be said that Vallejo does
not choose his words. His autochthonism is not deliberate. Vallejo does not
bury himself in tradition or cloister himself in history in order to extract
lost emotions from dark substrata. His poetry and his language emanate
from his flesh and his soul. His message is within him. Perhaps without
his knowledge or desire, indigenous sentiment operates in his art” (282).22
Mariátegui writes as if Vallejo were guided by a force that he cannot recog-
nize, but which constitutes the core of his writing. For reasons Mariátegui
does not explain, Vallejo’s (indigenous) soul and body, not his intellect, are
responsible for his verse. If the poet does not, as Mariátegui says, choose
his own words, then the critic has occasion to ascribe them to something
greater than individual sentiment or experience.
At root, the operation that takes place here is a double obfuscation.
On the one hand, the critic “hears” the voice of the indio in highly lettered
poetry written by a mestizo and thus does not have the need to perceive
an indigenous voice emanating from indigenous culture. On the other, the
indio’s essence becomes the message of Vallejo’s poetry, and so experiences
not bound to the indigenous—such as the mestizo’s—cannot be detected.
The radical delegitimization of authorship is in equal parts a denial of
the mestizo’s expression of his negotiations between the Andes and Lima
and a sedimenting of the indio’s right to claim a place in the nation. At this
juncture, Mariátegui does not relate that spirit to anything other than the
peculiar idea that the indio waits for revolution. As Rama notes, Mariátegui
here makes no specific references to the indio’s language or own culture. For
it is the spirit of revolution, and not necessarily of the indio’s culture, that
Mariátegui pursues. This pursuit will animate the indigenista polemic of
the following year, as we will see in the next chapter. That spirit has less
to do with the indigenous than it does with Mariátegui’s conviction that
in Peru, it is the indio who will stand in place of an urbanized proletariat

and spark socialist revolution. In one of Mariátegui’s typical maneuvers of
displacement, Vallejo the mestizo, a mere medium, is taken over by this
indigenous-cum-revolutionary soul. Undoubtedly, this displacement is fa-
cilitated by the fact of Vallejo’s biography. Of highland origins, he is thus
more easily made to represent, metonymically, Mariátegui’s racialized con-
cept of the region.23
The most telling moment in Mariátegui’s analysis of Vallejo’s work
comes when he cites the poet’s verses to illustrate the absence of mestizo
culture in works traditionally read as exemplars of a mestizo discourse.
Among the many poems that he cites, “Idilio muerto,” from Los heraldos
negros, provides at the very least an interesting testament to how Mariátegui
reads. He excerpts only the first two couplets:
Qué estará haciendo esta hora mi andina y dulce Rita
de junco y capulí;
ahora que me asfixia Bizancio, y que dormita
la sangre, como flojo cognac, dentro de mí.
[What is my Andean and sweet Rita, in reeds and berries,

doing at this hour;
now that Byzantium asphyxiates me, and my blood
grows drowsy, like weary cognac, within me.]
(qtd. in Mariátegui, Siete ensayos, 282)
In introducing these lines, Mariátegui pronounces “Nostalgia of exile;
nostalgia of absence” [Nostalgia de exilio; nostalgia de ausencia] and im-

mediately ascribes this nostalgia to the indigenous soul (282). To be sure,
Vallejo’s work does articulate a profound longing for times and places lost
to the speaker, but it is Mariátegui’s wholesale evasion of these signs on the
text’s surface that allows him to locate this sentiment in anything other
than the historical experience of the migrant speaker. The short couplets are
loaded with the distances modernization held in store for the migrant mes-
tizo: the cultural abyss between junco y capulí and cognac, the arduous jour-
ney between the Lima-like Byzantium and the Andes, and the anguished
longing of the migrant for the love he left behind. The couplets evoke the
estrangement of one world from the other, and the speaker’s estrangement
from both. In resemanticizing nostalgia as the defining quality in indig-
enous identity, Mariátegui converts absence into presence and thus avoids
the rifts that constitute the migrant mestizo’s experience of modernity.
For the constellation of motives that we have seen, Mariátegui attempts

to write over—and thus condemn to oblivion—a key event in twentieth-
century Andean history: the growing visibility and importance of mes
tizos. In thus effacing a possible mestizo culture, he (and herein lie the
stakes of his erasure) struggles to cast off a hybridity that banishes alter-
ity. The usefulness of Mariátegui’s criticism for future generations lies in
his identification of this mixed culture, symbolized in the mestizo, as an
analogue of capitalist culture itself. As he intuits, the nature—and dan-
ger—of capitalism in the Andes is its absorption of all social and economic
practices into a global market, where their critical usefulness becomes null
and void, since they no longer exist outside the system but have become
its very material. Thus Mariátegui irrevocably identifies the urban mes-
tizo and his culture with an acquiescence to the logic of capital, because
he is at once the agent and by-product of capitalism’s integration of Peru
into the global economy.24 Faced with the reality of rapid modernization
in the 1920s, Mariátegui searches its underbelly in order to find the dis-
parate groups, economies, and cultures that modernity brings into close
cohabitation. The potential conflict between the two opposed entities that
are the indigenous spirit and criollo, capitalist collaboration come to frame
Mariátegui’s articulation of revolution. Indeed, Mariátegui’s propositions
for a modern Andean society rely on the impossibility of fusing the two.
The only possible interaction between the sierra and the capital, between
indio and the gamonal or landowner, is limited to oppression in the past and
to revolution in the future.
It was clear to Mariátegui that Peru contained at least two different
cultures: the millenarian, though debased, culture of the Incas and that of
the Hispanic colonizers. Equally apparent was the idea that the mestizo had
none. Whether he knew it or not—and again, here it must be noted that
among the most “cultured” thinkers of the period we find mestizos such as
Mariátegui himself and Vallejo—his denial of a mestizo culture likely hob-
bled the real reach of his revolutionary vision. For, unlike previous moments
of revolt and uprising in the Andes, in the rapidly modernizing city of Lima
it would have been increasingly difficult for the working masses of mestizos
to identify and support a revolution based on an indigenous culture that
day by day, in the privatized experience of modernity, seemed further and
further away in the mountains. As the historian Alberto Flores Galindo has
shown, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revolts, it was quite com-
mon for disenfranchised rural or small-town mestizos to align themselves
with the indigenous population in struggle against the hegemonic whites.

Many such mestizos even went so far as to claim only their indigenous heri-
tage (Buscando 95–135). This tendency was not pronounced in the twentieth
century, and certainly not in the city.25 Importantly, Mariátegui would ad-
dress this blind spot in his theory through the agility of his practice, par-
ticularly in his organization of the working-class paper Labor. Within his
literary criticism, however, Mariátegui stuck to his racialized conjectures
on the inherent qualities of both the indio and the mestizo.
In his celebrated “El proceso de la literatura,” the concluding essay in
the Siete ensayos, Mariátegui dedicates a long section, “Las corrientes de
hoy: El indigenismo,” to the role of indigenista literature in modern Peru.
The very terms of Mariátegui’s conceptualization of the indigenous peoples
guide his choice of poetry as the vehicle par excellence through which the
indigenous spirit enters and disrupts that other society which opposes it.
Insofar as Mariátegui continues to conceive of literature, and in particular
poetry, as a space for the expression of pure emotion—and it would have
been considered as such at least from romanticism’s theorizations—the
lyric becomes the appropriate space where the indio may express himself, or
better yet, be expressed. This is because, in the terms in which Mariátegui
conceives of the indio, he is essentially and fundamentally ahistorical, a
timeless entity, undifferentiated by the ebb and flow of history. In the most
profound sense, because the indio represents the absolute, he has no histori-
cal dimension and is thus perfectly communicated in that least narratival
of arts, lyrical poetry.
To this end, Mariátegui’s language in describing the indigenous peo-
ples is highly illustrative:

Almost the only thing that survives from the Tawantinsuyo is the indio.
The civilization has perished, but the race has not. After four centuries,
the biological material of the Tawantinsuyo reveals itself as indestructible
and, in part, immutable.
Man’s metamorphosis in the modern period is record-breaking. But
this is a phenomenon peculiar to occidental civilization, which is, above
all, dynamic. It is no coincidence that this society has happened upon the
investigation of time’s relativity. . . . But there are moments when it seems
history comes to a halt. And a same social form endures, petrified, for
many centuries. The hypothesis, therefore, that the indio has spiritually
changed little in four centuries is not far-flung. . . . The dark profundity
of his soul has suffered almost no change. In the jagged highlands, in the
distant canyons where the law of the white man has not reached, the indio
follows his ancestral law.26 (307, emphasis mine)
More than any other factor—for it envelops all of them—difference
constitutes the key ingredient that the indigenous brings to the table. The
indigenous is clearly the antithesis, and the antidote, to “Western civiliza-
tion.” The flip side of Mariátegui’s description of the indio thus tells the
story of what is wrong with that civilization: if the indio is timeless, the
West is transitory, fickle in spirit, dominated by the unjust “law of the white
man,” and utterly unnatural. It is, in the end, the notoriously difficult ter-
rain of the Andean landscape that lends the indio his isolation from the
West and its history, and that defines the longevity of his culture. It is no
coincidence that Mariátegui’s theories regarding the indio’s lasting alterity
line up with historical explanations for the region’s feudalism: the difficulty
of penetrating the arid mountains has repeatedly been offered as the reason
for the area’s economic backwardness. So, in the Andes as elsewhere, mod-
ernization and nature have often been conceptualized as antithetical.
Nonetheless, within Mariátegui’s telluric imaginary, the image of An-
dean nature and the indio himself are inseparable. As we will see in the
chapter on the poet Carlos Oquendo de Amat, this is the case broadly across
literary practices. The fact that Mariátegui can extend the opposition of
capitalist modernization and the natural world to the indio is fortuitous,
for through the substitution that makes the indio stand in for nature, the
indio becomes capitalism’s opponent. The indio is thus made the repository
of those elements—tradition, nature, a communal ethos—that are most

oppositional and most threatening to an effacing neocolonial ideology.
It is not incidental that the ancestral law which the indio so zealously
guards is that of the ayllu, a traditional social unit from Inca times often
compared to a commune. Still in existence to this day, this principal ex-
ample of indigenous social structures offered Mariátegui a direct, and to
his eyes undeniable, link to the Marxist vision of a classless society. In fact,
this interpretation of the ayllu was standard in the period’s anthropologi-
cal discourse.27 Mariátegui eschewed all other deployments of Inca culture.
In the factions of indigenismo that nostalgically turned to pre-Columbian
times (some, such as Luis Valcárcel, going so far as to advocate an Inca-style
monarchy for contemporary Peru), he perceived the danger of an exoticism
that simply avoided the social problems of the twentieth century in favor
of an idealized past. The ayllu, on the other hand, symbolized for him a
social goal that was impervious to death and decay and that, like Marx’s
urban proletariat, would redeem Andean man and his society. The condi-
tions to which the indio had been subjected over the previous four centu-
ries only reinforced his belief: sealed in the tomb of a peripheral existence,
the indio—completely antithetical to the mestizo—had remained loyal to
a particular form of social organization. That this form was synonymous
with socialism’s ideal paradoxically allowed Mariátegui to claim classless
utopia as both the patrimony of the indios and of the period’s revolutionary
movements, wherever they might be. The suggestion of this shared pur-
pose, which did not overtly claim hegemony for either Marxist thought or
indigenous culture, lies just beneath the surface of Mariátegui’s conten-
tious characterization of indio and mestizo.
The agonic relationship is indeed the very form of Mariátegui’s dialec-
tics, which sought to bring these two cultures together in order to emerge
whole on the other side of revolution with the communism of the one and
the modernization/technologification of the other. But first indigenous cul-
ture must be a discrete entity as such, and at a moment in history when dis-
courses on the indio were only slowly gaining broader legitimacy and were
very often related to specific political interest groups, Mariátegui seizes
upon high lettered culture as the vehicle for legitimating the indio—his
indio—in the eyes of the nation.28 He focuses on poetry as a way to lend the
indigenous population, whose culture was largely unknown in the Peruvian
public sphere, a space in the national imagination. So Mariátegui promotes
a critical and strategic use of culture, though only in its lettered, European
forms. The assignment of the indio’s voice to the high cultural sphere of
poetry allows Mariátegui to declare the indigenous as already a part of the

modern nation; in fact, it allows him to claim the most vanguard cultural
production as indigenous.
The vision of an Andean Marxist revolution that Mariátegui predicted

must arise from the confrontation of a protean global capitalism and the
indigenous masses—this was, in fact, his final projection of modernity in
the Andes—rested on complex characterizations of the latter. Both a direct
outgrowth and reelaboration of the monolithic presentation of the indio in
his poetic commentary, Mariátegui’s later work was no doubt influenced by
his time spent as an activist and organizer of urban denizens, some of them
indios migrated from the highlands. In the years before his early death at
the age of thirty-five, his limited contact with these kinds of workers seems
to have intensified the critic’s belief that indigenous discourses contained
a valuable contribution to a critique of neocolonial relations between the

Andes and central nations.29 Mariátegui responded to this possibility by
emphasizing what he understood to be the fundamentals of that worldview.
This emphasis, though it insisted upon its direct authorization by a con-
temporaneous indigeneity, interestingly bore no mark of an understanding
of indigenous culture “from within,” as José María Arguedas would later
describe his own work.
As we saw in the introductory comments to this chapter, critics such as
Aníbal Quijano have praised Mariátegui for putting forth a concept of in-
digenous people that characterized them as prerational. As we have pointed
out, Mariátegui did deploy the representation of the indio in order to make
his call to revolution one that polarized his social reality. However, it should
not be lost on us that Quijano’s reading of Mariátegui rests upon the mak-
ing equivalent of an indigenous worldview with the pre- or antirational. For
Quijano, the condition of indigenous alterity necessarily indicates that the
indio’s worldview will not be rational. That is, prerationality becomes a per-
sistent marker of the indigenous in this reading.
At this point, we need to take a closer look not at the origins of this
conceptualization in Quijano, but in Mariátegui’s own work. Ample evi-
dence suggests that the notion of indios as revolutionary subjects, and
thus the idea of their diametrical opposition to the European and hispan-
ophilic society of the coast, permeated the air of early twentieth-century
Lima (Leibner; Flores Galindo, Agonía 39–54). As early as 1917, Mariátegui
himself reported on the indigenous uprisings in southern Peru, although
the twenty-three-year-old journalist was clearly not certain how to inter-
pret the events.30 Indeed, as both Dan Chapin Hazen and Augusto Ramos
Zambrano have shown in their works, the southern Andes saw the intensi-
fication of a complex “indigenous problem” in the early twentieth century.
Mariátegui refers to these uprisings constantly in his early articles, and
Flores Galindo has rightly pointed out that the critic’s political coming to
consciousness was spurred on by the avalanche of indigenous revolts in the
early twentieth century and by their effects on all areas of national life (Bus-
cando un Inca; La agonía de Mariátegui 41).
Moreover, a recently published testimony has provided tantalizing
evidence regarding Mariátegui’s social contact with indigenous people.
Although previous documents indicated that he relied mostly on the intel-
lectuals in his circle and studies for information on the indigenous popula-
tion, the autobiography of Mariano Larico Yujra indicates Mariátegui had
at least a professional relationship with several indios who worked for him.
These relationships, however, must not be idealized as moments of unmud-
died communication and cultural exchange between intellectual and indio.
Tellingly, Yo fui canillita de José Carlos Mariátegui recounts episodes wherein
Ezequiel Urviola, the agitator whom the founder of Amauta esteemed so
highly, explains his beliefs in utopia and revolution, often using Quechua
to express his views. These episodes are important because Urviola was not,
in fact, an indigenous person, but rather a mestizo indigenista from the
southern highland state of Puno who donned indigenous clothing in or-
der to agitate in the capital, as Ramos Zambrano points out in his brief
biographical sketch (Urviola 23–28). Mariátegui’s relationship with Urviola
demonstrates how very mediated through representations and representa-
tives of the indigenous Mariátegui’s imagined contact with the indio was.
Mariátegui himself testifies to his conversations with Urviola (Aquézolo
Castro 136). Larico Yujra reports that Urviola taught “all the History of the
Incas, . . . what Ama sua, Ama kella, Ama llulla [sic] was [the Incan code of
conduct, meaning ‘Do not steal, Do not lie, Do not be lazy’] , . . . and to sing
The Internationale” (Ayala 140). Could Urviola, well trained in anarchism
and Marxism by the time Mariátegui met him, have been an inspiration for
the critic to understand that indigenous messianic myth and Marxism were
fundamentally equal and parallel? It seems that, for Mariátegui, the exem-
plary coexistence of distinct visions in Urviola’s enunciation would have
been critical to the development of similar perspectives in his own thought.
In a sense, Urviola performs that which would later become Mariátegui’s
critique.
If Mariátegui did indeed take Urviola to be a genuine representative

of the indigenous race who had come down from the mountain as a repre-
sentative of his people, and if Mariátegui’s belief in a revolutionary spirit
was not anchored in direct experience of the indigenous but rather in news
reports in the Lima press, then it seems that his elevation of the indio, and
especially of his communication of the indigenous animating espíritu, must
be reconsidered. As Mariátegui himself would state repeatedly, his path to
the indio and to an understanding of the latter’s role in an authentically
Andean future was precisely through the “European ideas” of Marx. We
must add that the path he followed seems also to have led to an indigenous
body that was in fact composed of other, local texts. Somehow, the indios
that were present in his very daily activities lay beyond the cast of his own
cosmopolitan culture. For as the prologue to Luis Valcárcel’s Tempestad en
los Andes, one of the central works in the indigenista movement, demon-
strates, Mariátegui’s insistence on social change through revolution came
to be defined by a profound commitment to indigenous culture not as it
existed, but as it had been written up by other intellectuals.
In comparison to his other pronouncements on the indigenous spirit
from the realm of literary criticism, Mariátegui’s prologue to Tempestad em-
ploys a similar, but graver, register and, most importantly, situates itself in
an explicit constellation of historical events. In this prologue, the elements
of Mariátegui’s justification of a specifically Andean revolution are not gra-
tuitous rhetoric: terms such as “indigenous resurgence,” [resurgimiento indí-
gena], “global agitation” [la emoción mundial], “civilization and the alphabet,”
[civilización y el alfabeto], “process of material ‘Westernization,’” [proceso de
‘occidentalización’], and “of the Quechua land” [material de la tierra Keswa]
all correspond to events and concepts that influenced and shaped, nega-
tively or positively, Mariátegui’s own understanding of possible futures in
the Andes. I emphasize Mariátegui’s peculiar understandings because he
was by no means an orthodox Marxist. Thus, Mariátegui’s consideration of
indigenous uprisings (resurgimiento indígena), the October Revolution and
the movements it encouraged (la emoción mundial), modernization and its
bearing on Peru (civilización y alfabeto, proceso de “occidentalización” material)
disavow a facile imposition of a foreign revolutionary telos (say, the Com-
intern’s) onto Latin American reality, as would be the case for many other
Marxists of his time.31
These historical markers indicate the lettered audience for which
Mariátegui produces the revolutionary indio. He is highly invested in creat-
ing a model wherein the indigenous worldview encapsulates Marxist revo-

lutionary theory in its movement toward a classless society. Significantly,
Mariátegui’s articulation of this model makes no gesture to indigenous
culture “from within” but rather to other sources:
The highlands awaken gestating hope. A race unanimous in resignation
and renunciation no longer inhabits it. A strange gust of wind blows
through the highland village and fields. The “new indios” appear: here
the teacher, the agitator, there the farmhand, the shepherd, they who are
no longer the same ones as before. . . . The “new indio” is not an abstract
or mythic being whose existence is guaranteed only by the prophet’s
faith. We sense that he is living, real, active, and in the final stages of
this “highland film,” which is how the author himself [Valcárcel] defines
his book. What distinguishes the “new indio” is not education but spirit.
(The alphabet does not redeem the indio). The “new indio” waits. He
has a goal. That is his secret and his strength. Everything else in him is
superfluous . . . today the highland is pregnant with spartacuses.
The “new indio” explains and illustrates the true character of the in-
digenismo which has in Valcárcel one of its most passionate evangelists.
The faith in the indigenous resurgence does not come from a process of
material “Westernization” of the Quechua land. It is neither civilization
nor the white man’s alphabet that lifts the indio’s soul; myth and the idea
of a socialist revolution do. Indigenous hope is absolutely revolutionary.
The same myth, the same idea, are the decisive agents in the awaken-
ing of other ancient peoples, of other ancient races presently in a state of
collapse: Hindus, Chinese, etc. Universal history today tends as never
before to be organized by the same idea.32 (Aquézolo Castro 135–36)
Language similar to that Mariátegui used earlier in characterizing
Vallejo’s “indigenista” poetry pervades the prologue. Characterizations like
“grávida” (gestating), “preñada” (pregnant), and “ráfaga” (gust of wind) indi-
cate limiting associations of the indigenous to stereotypical visions of the
feminine and the natural. In her book on gender and modernity in the Bo-
livia, Marcia Stephenson has demonstrated the pervasiveness of these as-
sociations in Andean modernity.33 Over and above Mariátegui’s discussion
of Vallejo, the preface also includes key terms, such as “new indio,” which
clearly indicate that he is thinking of José Uriel García’s eponymous theory.
García published his El nuevo indio in 1930, but its articles had been in circu-
lation since at least 1927.34 García believed that the nuevo indio was, in fact,
a new Andean social subject that would take advantage of modernization

and thus leave the useless “indio viejo” behind.
Additionally, the prologue serves as a fine example of how thoroughly
Luis Valcárcel, whose book Mariátegui is introducing, inflects Mariátegui’s
discourse. Valcárcel’s Tempestad was nothing if not messianic in reference
to the indio. Accordingly, Mariátegui uses a language built around resur-
rection and regeneration. The terms rebirth, resurgence, resurrection, resusci-
tate, and revive crop up at key moments in his description of the indios. As
anthropologists and folklorists have shown and well-disseminated myths
such as that of the Inkarrí demonstrate, resurrection plays a critical role
in Andean understandings of the conquest and its aftermath.35 However, I
have found little evidence that Mariátegui was familiar with these myths,
other than through their overblown representations in lettered production
as described above.
The temptation to read José Carlos Mariátegui as a syncretic thinker

has dominated his reception in Latin America. Undoubtedly, his insis-
tence of the representation of so-called indigenous utopian beliefs and his
employment of Marxist critique contribute to a perception of his work as
an intermingling of the two. Such a strategy was geared, much like Mariá
tegui’s literary commentary, to position Mariátegui’s indigenismo as an
authentic representative of the indigenous and their culture. In this sense,
his vision of modernity in Peru relied upon the authority that the institu-
tion of literature granted him. Literature’s intense representativity, as Julio
Ramos has called it, lies at the core of this and other Andean traditions of
indigenismo in modernity.
It has been said to exhaustion that Mariátegui articulated an effective
Marxism because he filtered it though Latin America reality.36 Indeed, his
application of Marxist analysis to the feudal and modern sectors of Peru’s
economy in Siete ensayos and elsewhere, for example, fully reflects his at-
tempt at extending contemporaneous Marxism’s scope. But this is only part
of the story. Mariátegui’s writings inside and beyond the literary sphere saw
a development in his thinking that began to make his interpretive perspec-
tive more powerful by identifying local synonyms for Marxism. Among
the indigenistas, Mariátegui stands out because the movement did not lead
him, as it did so many of his fellow intellectuals who became interested in
the indio, to deny the validity of foreign theoretical models. He often and
rightly berated calls for an exclusive hermeneutics, authorized solely by the
fact of its localness. However, the cohabitation of both European critical
thought and the indio in his texts must not lead us to assert that Mariá
tegui’s calls for revolution somehow were an example of the egalitarian so-
ciety of which they dreamed. The representation of the indio, in the end,
cannot be taken to be identical with the indigenous peoples themselves.
My insistence on this point is particularly acute in the face of inter-
pretations that assign Mariátegui to an interstitial space between Marxist
revolutionary thought and Andean indigenous worldviews, such as Walter
Mignolo’s recent commentary on the Andean critic within the notion of
“border thinking.” Relying heavily on the privilege that an interstitial posi-
tion—the operative example is the border—provides to those who stand at
it, this paradigm posits a harmonic point where one tradition can dialogue
unproblematically with the other, as if, in this instance, the sheer alterity of
the Andean worldview did not make its compatibility with Marxist theory
immediately questionable. In his best-known critical works, Mariátegui as-
sociated the two by graphing the logic of the latter upon the former. Mig
nolo, in contrast, sees Mariátegui’s acquisition of European theoretical

tools as a “transcendence of territorial thinking.” In this model, the critic
who stands at the limits of different traditions is able to escape the particu-
lar optics imparted by particular cultures. In fact, his position outside of
them brings forth a new worldview, that of the border—precisely the type
of intermediary option that Mariátegui eschewed (140–41). There is little
transcendence, however, in Mariátegui’s perception of communist ideals
in Andean indigenous peoples. Rather, it is an especially deft configuration
of a subaltern culture by an urban, coastal Andean intellectual and thus is
very much part of local, lettered attitudes.
Mariátegui’s final words in the preface to Tempestad offer a compact
illustration of the complexities in his efforts to approximate the two tradi-
tions. He calls the book “the passionate prophecy that announces a new
Peru. And it does not matter at all that for some it is the facts that create the proph-
ecy and for others the prophecy that creates the facts” (Aquézolo Castro, empha-
sis mine).37 More than just a conciliatory gesture toward groups beyond the
cast of Marxism, Mariátegui’s insistence on the equality of history (the
facts) and myth (prophecy) seems to deauthorize the strict Marxist logic
of revolution at the same time that it welcomes an indigenous worldview
into the logic of the former. As Aníbal Quijano has asserted in his study of
Mariátegui’s work, myth as a mode of thinking “lay at the most profound
level . . . of [Mariátegui] the man” (Reencuentro 78). However, we must re-
member that the critic is referring to Valcárcel’s text as a prophecy and in so
doing is reiterating, quite forcefully, the preeminent position of the letter in
Andean society. Especially when he positions lettered culture in a tutelary
position to indigenous history, Mariátegui demonstrates the profound dif-

ficulty that indigenismo and its visions of modernity have in escaping the
long history of unequal power dynamics that structures Andean society.

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ch a p t e r on e

THE REVOLUTIONARY INDIO

cess of Latin American culture of that period, as an alternative to the one

real—rational, that is—proposal for Peruvian society of the time, which

nal that sprang from this collaboration radically transformed intellectuals’

Mariátegui’s critique between intellectual discourse on indigeneity and

modernization took at the time, he intuited a democratization and eco-

To be sure, few figures have been as important as José Carlos Mariátegui

to be more widely and competently implemented. At the same time,

In fact, mestizo culture argues for the mestizoization of all of Andean

Born in 1894 in the provincial capital of Moquegua, Mariátegui spent

What his analysis does do is highlight the incompatibility of two cultures,

Latin America’s reality. At first glance, Mariátegui’s enthusiasm for recent

practices—in particular cultural organs—function within societies un-

sta] tendency is not naturalist or folklorist; rather, it is lyrical, as Andean poetry’s

as his commentary on the poet in Siete ensayos makes explicit, Mariátegui’s

tificial dualism of essence and form. Indigenous sentiment in . . . Vallejo is

poetry made here to equal it from any “contamination” by cultures linked

in Peru, it is the indio who will stand in place of an urbanized proletariat

[What is my Andean and sweet Rita, in reeds and berries,

nostalgia of absence” [Nostalgia de exilio; nostalgia de ausencia] and im-

For the constellation of motives that we have seen, Mariátegui attempts

with the indigenous population in struggle against the hegemonic whites.

ples is highly illustrative:

of those elements—tradition, nature, a communal ethos—that are most

poetry allows Mariátegui to declare the indigenous as already a part of the

The vision of an Andean Marxist revolution that Mariátegui predicted

a valuable contribution to a critique of neocolonial relations between the

If Mariátegui did indeed take Urviola to be a genuine representative

ing a model wherein the indigenous worldview encapsulates Marxist revo-

a new Andean social subject that would take advantage of modernization

The temptation to read José Carlos Mariátegui as a syncretic thinker

nolo, in contrast, sees Mariátegui’s acquisition of European theoretical

position to indigenous history, Mariátegui demonstrates the profound dif-

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