Introduction: A Brief Retrospective—Indigenismo after Arguedas

In the last instance, Arguedas’s work implies a decisive extension of the project of appropriation which grounded the socialist indigenista spirit, overcoming what he perceived as a lingering economism in Mariátegui’s vision. In understanding the Peruvian nation as a complicated nexus organizing not only relations of class, legal status and ethnicity, but profoundly divergent cultural traditions, he correlates the collectivist Indigenous mode of production to a worldview grounded fundamentally in an affirmation of work-for-itself. But despite his attempt to think of sociocultural difference across a complex set of relations and subjective positions, Arguedas’s articulation of the “magical and rational conceptions of the world” still reproduced a Manichean contradiction between Western and Indigenous cultures. In this way, he ultimately conceived of an idealized process of transculturation that would render modernity and tradition compatible, a destiny other than the savagery of modern capitalism, to be seized after the collapse of the latifundio.

The agrarian reform initiated in 1968 by Velasco’s military rule proved ultimately unsuccessful in succeeding the rent-based labor economy imposed historically by the landlord oligarchy, instead exacerbating the disenfranchisement of the rural Indian by the state. As described in Arguedas’s The Foxes, mass migration into the cities implied a tectonic transformation of Peruvian society, through which Indigenous populations became subject to new forms of alienation and exploitation. Government institutions would prove just as inefficient and corruptible when protecting the Indian workers in the cities from the new capitalist oligarchies as they had been when standing in complicity with the rural landlord oligarchy of the latifundio. In response to this historical sequence, we saw how Arguedas’s late work delivered an obscure forecast, in which the promise of a transcultural collective life unravels before an ever more obscure and uncertain future. Accordingly, the image of the “post-Indigenous subject” that mediated strategically between “rational and magical” conceptions of the world no longer promised national integration: the martyrdom of the hero who achieves collective emancipation through transcultural production, expressed in the figure of Rendon Wilka, ceased to be a plausible model for a new subject and for emancipatory action.