The Dream of Social Restoration

In a broad sense, indigenismo is a literature about the rural Indian written by the urban mestizo, describing the particularities of their native traditions and critically addressing the history of their subjugation since colonial times. In this general sense, indigenismo is an urban production written with an urban audience in mind, shaped by and responding to the political debates that transpired among city intellectuals and activists. Its origins can be dated back, at least, to Narciso Aréstegui’s 1848 novel El padre Horán, which narrates the abuses of religious and state authorities in the Peruvian republic since the mid-nineteenth century, tracing the origins of the social division between the rural Indian and the mestizo to the cultural clash unleashed by the colonial experience. Toward the turn of the twentieth century, how-ever, indigenismo was more commonly dated to the publication of Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Aves sin Nido in 1889. In this sense, the incipient indigenista literature formed part of a new social realist aesthetic that moved away from the tenets of Ricardo Palma’s costumbrismo, inspired by Manuel González Prada’s endorsement of urban modernization and education to overcome the exploitation of the Indian by coastal and rural oligarchies.

In its more narrow and technical uses, the term “indigenismo” designates different periodizations and genealogies through which intellectuals, artists and activists thematized the situation of the rural Indian in the nation, guided by different philosophical ideals, aesthetic styles and political orien-tations. Since its definition by José Carlos Mariátegui (1928), indigenismo has been understood thus in various ways: as the “cosmopolitan” period in Peruvian history in which the representations of the Indian by the mestizo break with colonial forms and sterile idealizations, acquiring a higher degree of authenticity (Mariátegui); as a literature that depicts processes of “transcul-turation” between Western and pre-Hispanic forms of cultural production (Ángel Rama); as a utopian provincialist archaism guided by a dangerous tendency to fetishize the precolonial Amerindian past, confusing fiction and reality (Vargas Llosa); as a process in which irreducibly heterogeneous social, economic and cultural contexts interact (Cornejo Polar), and so on. This rich polysemy suggests to us that any assessment of indigenismo must be understood relative to the scope and aims that each author assigns to the term, and to its place within a specific methodological framework and narratives guided by both theoretical principles and political ideals.