de la cadena

Marisol De La Cadena makes a historical analysis of the discourses on indigeneity in Cuzco during most of the 20th century. In them she demonstrates how the categorization that define what is indigenous and what is partly indigenous and what is not, are blurry and have changed many times during the period. The changes are explained in relation the production of power in Cuzco, but also in the dynamics between Cuzco and the country, and Lima. Hence he takes a localized perspective but without disregarding broader issues as national dynamics or the weight of international processes.

Her starting question is in relation to a blurry definition of indigenous mestizos which two university students present to her in Lima. The category presented her with the complexity of the social classification, which combines both the production of a racial ideology along with the relevance of cultural markers of ethnicity. The work demonstrates how this are two intertwined processes that cannot be analyzed separately. Even the discourses on racial determination have been strongly denied in the mid 20th century, the type of essentialism it carried were incorporated by culturalist perspectives which reproduced images of ethnic primordiality. This is what she calls a “culturalist definition of race” as the underlying logic of current matrix of subjectivities.
In this way she follows the way hegemonic discourses produced indigeneity, from traditionalist elites to leftist movements, to understand the “silent forms of racism” (p 40).

In her genealogical exploration she first presents the elaborations made by the 1920s elite members indigenistas, indigenists, who develop a reification of indigenous as a glorious past, now in decadency. According to their logic present indigenous are degenerated representatives of this past culture. Thus indigenous were valued as long as they keep a communal life, preserve their culture unchanged, and they had a controlled sexuality restricted to their ethnic group. She then shows how the triumph of liberal indigenists encouraged the incorporation of indigenous to the national project. They did this by promoting their progress through literacy campaigns and the development of particular policies. Indigenous in this period are assigned a subaltern place, as owners of an inferior culture. Race is now not explicitly mentioned but becomes eclipsed by culture. In this period, the category of peasants was introduced, under a perspective of class dominant in the international arena. The neoindianistas in contrast to indigenistas welcomed cholos, this is the sexual openness (of indigenous women having children form white men, never the opposite) that permitted mestizage, as a path to improvement of the race. In the 1960s leftist movement overtook an important critic to racial categories and wanted to promote a struggle in terms of class. The reinvention of an inka tradition was a result of this period. Finally in the 1980s the discourse on class was left behind, being the arena dominated by academic and political discussions.

A point of my interest is the relation between identity and places, De La Cadena developed. She points out the importance of places shaping subjectivities, as indigenous who migrate to the city are automatically considered indigenous mestizos. In this way each category has a spatial correlation. Indigenous location is the rural highlands, the indigenous mestizos, aquire this category by education and life in the city, while mestizos is the general urban population that lost ties with indigenous cultural markers, finally whites are city dwellers, particularly (but not only) form the coast, and members the elites and with a high education. In this regard the processes of migration have been variably understood as degeneration first, and as progress and integration latter. This spatial matrix has a close relation to processes undergoing in the Gran Chaco region in Argentina (see Vivaldi 2005).

For indigenistas this morality was a condesensed in the meaning of decencia, decency. Decent were the indigenous that kept their culture alive and had a controlled sexuality. Decent were educated white men, who could have indigenous lovers without affecting their reputation. Decent white women had control over their sexuality, and were the appropriate wife for white men, that could satisfy their intellectual needs and higher type of love. Indescents were the mestizos who had an uncontrolled sexuality (thus the object of white men’s fantasies) and were un educated and had lots their indigenous traditions. In contrast to decencia the chapter that focus the market mestizo women, the cholas, develops the new category condensing a new type of morality, the respeto, respect.

Being the market women recognized mestizas and city dwellers, the values they defend is not about having correct sexual behaviour, but rather is the self determination and empowerment of being economically independent, accessing to education, defying the constraints of governmental disciplining actions (for example police control in the market). In this way towards the end of the book she show the paradox of how respeto even challenging the negative stigmas of an indigenous identity, by stating their successful experiences in economic and educational spheres, they reproduce the hegemonic terms that classify people according to economic position and degree achieved in the formal education system. Paradoxically this new system of classification reproduces marginality recombining gender, sex, ethnicity, race and geographical position.

The question that remains open is which is the connection between the production of this categories through time and the way they are currently operating in everyday practices. We do have a close approach on the way market women build their particular positioning. Yet the work leads the question of how current production of masculinity and femininity, racial purity and mixing, indigenism, urban/rural relations, take place in everyday interactions of Cuzquenio men and women. Probably her field notes and interviews are full of reference into this direction. To answer this questions and advance into the analysis of this material would probably require a second book.