de la cadena review 2002

8/3/2019 De La Cadena Review 2002

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Review: [untitled]Author(s): Cecilia Mndez-GastelumendiSource: Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 335-338Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3656632

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REVIEWS 335than 70 million lb. in the 182os to less than 20omillion by the 186os, asland and slave labor shifted from coffee to sugar agriculture. Perez tellsthis story of transformation well, paying considerable attention to re-gional differences and local effects. If a "sugar revolution" did, in fact,occur in Cuba, it was facilitated by the effects of the great hurricanes ofthe mid-I840s, which intensified regional differences and promoted anew agricultural balance between the island's mainstays, sugar, coffee,and tobacco.This transformation had important social ramifications as well. Theslave trade to Cuba declined in the I840s under British pressure, andslave rebellions and rumors of them, like the "La escalera" plot of 1844,made planters particularlynervous. But the market for sugar was boom-ing. After 1846, when slaves were in short supply, ruined coffee plantersfound their slaves in great demand on the sugar estates. At the sametime, sugarplanters also began to experiment with new sources of labor,like Chinese "coolie" workers. The nature and complexion of ruralCuba had been altered as a result of the economic transformation.Perez draws on his command of Cuban historiography and a lim-ited set of archival materials for his main theme. He also provides somediscussion of how the storms of the I840s affected poorer Cubans andhow the Spanish colonial regime failed to meet the challenge of disaster,as well as a cursory survey of Cuban literature and popular culture forother traces of the hurricanes' influence. But more remains to be done.For example, a history of Cuban science has yet to be written. It wouldinclude figures like Andres Poey, the early Cuban scientist and meteo-rologist, or Benito Vifias, the Spanish Jesuit, who directed Cuba's firstweather observatory and contributed to the theory and scientific obser-vation of hurricanes. Other interesting matters to be explored are theeconomic impact of the storms in the longuedur&end their political im-pact on the Spanish colonial, republican, and socialist regimes. Perezprovides an excellent bibliographical discussion that will help others topursue these and other related topics. But Perez set a more limited goalfor himself in this book, and he has done an excellent job of reaching it.Stuart B. SchwartzYale University

IndigenousMestizos: The Politicsof Race and Culture n Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991. By Marisol de la Cadena (Durham, Duke University Press, ooo2000)408 pp. $64.95 cloth $21.95 paperThrough a combination of historical and ethnographical materials, de laCadena analyzes perceptions of race in twentieth-century urbanCuzco-in particular, those associated with the notions of "indianness"and mestizaje.Her main objective is to debunk what she considers to bethe "dominant" or "elitist" notion of mestizaje n Peru by expoundingwhat she characterizes as the subaltern perspective. The book is divided


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336 | CECILIA ME'NDEZ-GASTELUMENDIinto two clearly differentiated sections. The first one (chapters I to 3)presents the "elite's" perceptions of race, largely on the basis of writtensources (including municipal records, newspapers, and intellectual pro-duction), and the second one (chapters 3 to 6) discusses the "subalterns'"views, based on ethnographical information and interviews that the au-thor conducted in the city of Cuzco during sixteen months betweenI991 and 1992.De la Cadena argues that dominant notions of mestizaje n Peru arerooted in a dichotomous view of the country, where "indianness" is as-sociated with a primitive and ruralcondition, poverty, and illiteracy, and"non-indianness" with a coastal lifestyle, urban manners, economic suc-cess, and education. Within this scheme, mestizos are defined culturally(rather than biologically) as those Indians who, upon migrating to thecity, acquire urban ways, become literate, and progressively give up theirlanguage and traditions-that is, stop being Indians. Mestizaje, thus con-ceived, presupposes "cultural passage": from rural to urban, fromQuechua to Spanish, from illiterate to literate, from poverty toaffluence, from Indian to non-Indian. De la Cadena claims that thesenotions are well exemplified in modern times by the writings of novelistMario VargasLlosa, and that they were already entrenched in the think-ing of indigenistasof the early 192os and 1930s, the neoindianistas f the1940s, and the Marxists of the I960s to I980s. Although in accord withthe class language that they embraced, Marxists dropped allusions torace-replacing the term Indianwith peasant-they did not eradicate the"culturally fundamentalist" notions that indigenistas had attached to In-dians (which Marxists transferred to peasants) and that conceived ofthem as minors who could not speak for themselves and needed to berepresented.De la Cadena's discussion of elites' perceptions of race is enlighten-ing as an intellectual history and constitutes a political critique of con-temporary racist practices and discourses in Peru. Her treatment ofgamonalismo(a form of peasant exploitation by petty hacendados orgamonales)and its representations, and her discussion of the various "pro-Indian" agendas and their limitations, will be of special interest to schol-ars interested in political discourses and representations of race in earlytwentieth-century Latin America. Her overall idea that racism can beperpetuated with cultural rather than racial allusions, is especially force-ful in a country where phenotype differences between poor peasantsandAndean elites are often nonexistent. An effective euphemism for Indian,de la Cadena tells us, is "ignorant."Her discussion of the "subaltern"perspective is, however, less per-suasive. De la Cadena's subalterns are relatively well-off ruralmigrants inthe city of Cuzco (among them, market women, dancers, and universitystudents) who espoused urban ways and improved their educational andeconomic standardsbut, unlike Vargas Llosa's mestizos, neither rejecttheir "Indian condition" nor give up their "indigenous culture," whichthey conversely "celebrate." To prove this claim, de la Cadena describes


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REVIEWS 337their fiestas, religious rituals, and dances in the city and its outskirts,where Quechua is spoken, bearing the imprint of various rurallife tradi-tions. De la Cadena emphasizes the "hybridity" of these practices in herattempt to show that these migrants-whom she calls "grassroot intel-lectuals"-have flexible identities and are not necessarily torn between(either "rural" or "urban") dilemmas.This claim is a most acceptable one, though it may come as no sur-prise to investigators who have been describing in analogous terms thecultural expressions of migrant populations in metropolitan Lima duringthe last few decades, or historians who have been following the routesand lives of Andean muleteers, petty merchants, peasants, and minersthroughout the colonial period (and much before the notion of"hybridity" became fashionable in English-speaking academic circles).What is more difficult to accept, however, is de la Cadena's claim thatthese hybrid cultural expressions (to which she in a contradictory fashionsometimes refers as "de-indianization") represent an "empowered" and"dignified" form of "indigenous identity" that contests the dominantconstruct of Indianness as a degraded condition. As is clear in these mi-grants' own accounts (and she surely is aware) they not only make everypossible effort to distance themselves from any identification as Indians;they also reproduce long-standing discriminatory practices againstmonolingual Quechua speakers and the extremely poor.De la Cadena, in short, succeeds more in conveying the prevalenceof discriminatory patterns that stigmatize indianness than in expoundingthe ways in which they are challenged. Her claim that "subalterns"chal-lenge "hegemonic notions of mestizaje" s, moreover, obfuscated by herown correct assessmentthat mestizaje n Peru never became a state policyor hegemonic ideology (as it did, for instance, in Mexico), precisely be-cause of the lack of agreement on its political meaning among the differ-ent factions that advocated it (Hispanists, the APRA party, theCommunist Party and neoindianists). Rather than a hegemonic notionof mestizaje,what seems at stake in this book are hegemonic constructsabout Indians.A final problem with de la Cadena's rendering of the "subaltern"perspective is that she never gives a clear sense of what she actuallymeans by "indigenous ethnicity" other than stereotyped and recurrentallusions to Quechua, ponchos, chuyos, and apus (that is, Andean lan-guage, dress, and deities) that her "indigenous mestizos" proudly dis-played. This diffuseness may be related to the fact that, unlike the viewsof the elites, the subaltern views are not historicized in this book, thusremaining more prone to idealization, or to less critical examination.Except for some extremely intriguing pieces of evidence on theTawantinsuyu movement-a unique, yet defeated, project to vindicatea nondegraded Indian identity, which, de la Cadena maintains, was fo-mented by self-proclaimed Quechua-speaking Indians in the 1920S (andon which the author, unfortunately, does not elaborate)-"subalternvoices" are largely missing in her historical section. As for theCuzquefios in her ethnography, the issue is less a loosely defined "indig-


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de la cadena review 2002

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