THE TEXAS PAN AMERICAN SERIES

1
 seven interpretive essays on
PERUVIAN REALITY
BY JOSÉ CARLOS MARIÁTEGUI
TRANSLATED BY MARJORY URQUIDI
INTRODUCTION BY JORGE BASADRE
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS
AUSTIN

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 The Texas Pan American Series is published with the assistance of a revolving
publication fund established by the Pan American Sulphur Company and other friends of
Latin America in Texas. Publication of this book was also assisted by a grant from the
Rockefeller Foundation through the Latin American translation program of the Association
of American University Presses.
International Standard Book Number 0-292-70115-2
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73-156346
Copyright © 1971 by the University of Texas Press
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-0-292-76265-7 (library e-book)
ISBN 978-0-292-76266-4 (individual e-book)
doi: 10.7560/701151

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 CONTENTS
Introduction by Jorge Basadre
Author’s Note
1. Outline of the Economic Evolution
2. The Problem of the Indian
3. The Problem of Land
4. Public Education
5. The Religious Factor
6. Regionalism and Centralism
7. Literature on Trial
Glossary
Index

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 INTRODUCTION
Until a short time ago, it was believed that José Carlos Mariátegui was
born on June 14, 1895, in Lima. Recently, Guillermo Rouillón uncovered the
fact that he was actually born in Moquegua in 1894.1 His family belonged to
the lower middle class. His father, Francisco Javier Mariátegui, was a minor
employee of the General Court of Accounts; his mother, María Amalia
Lachira, was a mestiza from the countryside near Huacho. Of their four
children, one girl, Amanda, died in infancy, so that José Carlos was left with
a sister, Guillermina, and a brother, Julio César, who later became a
bookseller and publisher. His boyhood was spent in poverty. Perhaps for this
reason (his father disappeared and his mother worked as a seamstress), or
because of his health (always a sickly child, in 1902 he became hopelessly
crippled in one leg), the Mariátegui family moved to the village of Huacho.
There, José Carlos entered a small school, but he never managed to go
beyond a primary education. In 1909, at the age of fourteen, he began to
work as a humble linotypist’s assistant and proofreader for the Lima
newspaper La Prensa.2
Mariátegui at first went unnoticed in the printing room of the
newspaper. He often had to go to the editors’ homes to pick up their
manuscripts. During this period he walked a great deal around the city, in
spite of his lame leg. Sometimes he went by streetcar and was able to use
those trips to read. He also wrote, having begun with the patriotic and
religious poetry he composed at school. Little by little he rose in La Prensa.
For a while he was assigned to classifying telegrams from the provinces,
writing police and fire reports, and other secondary jobs. In 1914 the new
journalist became known. He popularized his pen name, “Juan Croniqueur,”
by writing verses, theater, art, and book reviews, stories, local news items,
and occasional commentaries on national and international events. He also
contributed in 1914 to the journal Mundo Limeño, which was intended for
an aristocratic public. He soon made many friends among his colleagues, of
whom the best known at that time was Abraham Valdelomar. Also in this
group was César Falcón, who was long to accompany Mariátegui in his life
and ideas. All these writers and others of his contemporaries approached
journalism from an aesthetic point of view.
In 1915 Mariátegui became co-director of the journal El Turf. Here he
tried to create a new type of “literature,” not only by means of light and ironic
reports and social news, but also through poems and stories about horses.

5
He stayed with El Turf until 1917. In 1915 and 1916 he also contributed to
the journal Lulu, which was aimed mainly at a public of society girls and
young intellectuals. In 1915 he was one of the initiators and founders of the
Circle of Journalists, the first attempt made in Lima to gather together the
men of his profession as a group.
Mariátegui’s literary personality also found expression in the theater.
January 12, 1916, marked the opening in Lima’s Colón Theater of the scenic
poem Las Tapadas, which he wrote in collaboration with Julio Baudouin
( Julio de la Paz), with music by La Rosa. “Its theme is derived from the
classic Spanish theater, its music is mediocre, it has no value as theater, its
scenery is taken from a puppet show; but it has unquestionable literary
merit,” wrote an independent critic, Alfredo González Prada, in Colónida.
“The polished, elegant, flowing, graceful verse of Juan Croniqueur,” he added,
“is delicately modern in style within a classic ‘savoir-faire.’” Actually, the
author was not trying to revive a classic style, but to imitate the poetic
theater in verse cultivated in Spain in the first two decades of the twentieth
century by Eduardo Marquina and Francisco Villaespesa, which was
characterized by sonorous poetry, high-flown sentiments, and a
pseudohistoric setting.
Las Tapadas (parodied as Las Patadas by Florentino Alcorta in his
newspaper, El Mosquito) was not Mariátegui’s only theatrical venture.
Toward the end of 1916, in collaboration with Abraham Valdelomar, he
finished writing the scenic poem La Mariscala. This work was never
produced and only fragments of it, which appeared in El Tiempo, are known.
Also in 1916, Mariátegui announced his completion of a book of poetry,
Tristeza, which was never published. His sonnets “Los salmos del dolor,”
printed in the literary journal Colónida, were taken from that collection. The
three sonnets were “Plegaria del cansancio,” “Coloquio sentimental,” and
“Insomnio.” In one of them he describes himself as “a child both somewhat
mystic and somewhat sensual.” In another, in reference to an unhappy love
affair, he speaks of “another shadow of sorrow in my life.”3 At that time an
Ecuadorian writing on new Peruvian literature said that Mariátegui was
“pagan and mystic,” more poet than “goldsmith,” more “ideologist” than
“stylist.”4
A new daily newspaper, El Tiempo, published its first numbers in Lima
on July 17, 1916, and it was dedicated to firmly opposing the conservative
government of José Pardo. Some of its writers, among them Mariátegui, had

6
voluntarily left La Prensa, a newspaper supporting the Pardo regime.5 He
was extremely active on El Tiempo between 1916 and 1919. He wrote a daily
section of humorous political comments entitled “Voces,” in which he went
over the events of each day, parliamentary affairs, and current gossip and
rumors, real or imagined. It is very possible that his experience as author of
“Voces” contributed to his skeptical attitude toward Peru’s political life. His
pseudonyms also appeared on other pages of El Tiempo under such sections
as “Lunes Literarios,” where he printed some of his stories about horses. In
“Ecos Sociales,” “Juan Croniqueur” occasionally signed a gallant tale or
commentary alluding to ladies of the aristocracy. Any incident, however
painful or deplorable, could suggest a story to him, as with his “Teoría del
incendio.” In one of his “Cartas a X” he praised Manuel Ugarte for his anti-
imperialism, adding that our race is not one of apostles, that we are too
apathetic, and that although contemporary champions of the Indians are not
drawn and quartered like Tupac Amaru, they are ignored. And when in
February, 1916, a jealous rival shot to death the poet Leonidas Yerovi,
Mariátegui published in El Tiempo his “Oración al espíritu inmortal de
Leonidas Yerovi,” which began with these words: “I, who am your brother in
pain and laughter, in faith and disbelief, in toil and reverie, in apathy and
violence, in love and egotism, in sentiment and intellect, in the human and
the divine, I invoke you, Yerovi, in this hour of anguish.”
When the Pardo Government founded the newspaper El Día in 1917,
Mariátegui tried to create a humorous counterpoint, La Noche, but it lasted
only a short time.
Also in 1917 he received the “Municipalidad de Lima” prize from the
Circle of Journalists for his article “La procesión tradicional,” which appeared
in El Tiempo on April 12 and described Lima’s popular religious procession
in honor of Our Lord of Miracles. Always respectful of religion, he was
inspired by a brief retreat in the monastery of the discalced friars to compose
the sonnet “Elogio de la celda ascética.”
Nevertheless, Mariátegui and other writer friends provoked an uproar
when they went to the cemetery on the night of November 4 to watch Norka
Rouskaya, an Argentine dancer, perform to the strains of Chopin’s “Funeral
March.” The principals of this incident were jailed for a short period.
Mariátegui and his friends, in various Lima newspapers and before congress,
vehemently claimed that they had not meant any irreverence by their action,
that the cemetery had been used for much more reprehensible purposes, that
they were being attacked through ignorance, superstition, or

7
narrowmindedness by critics who were themselves no models of moral
rectitude, and that it had been simply an artistic performance.
But Mariátegui was gradually changing in spirit. On June 22, 1918,
under the influence of Luis Araquistain’s militant journal España, he joined
César Falcón and Felix del Valle to publish in Lima a newspaper devoted to
social criticism, Nuestra Epoca. The serious objectives of Nuestra Epoca made
it very different from La Noche, just as its intention to be more than a literary
journal set it apart from Colónida. The following text appeared in Nuestra
Epoca: “Our colleague José Carlos Mariátegui has completely renounced the
pseudonym Juan Croniqueur by which he is known, and he has decided to
ask forgiveness from God and the Public for the many sins he has committed
while writing under that pen name.”
The first number of Nuestra Epoca included an article signed by
Mariátegui attacking the social composition and the character of the
Peruvian army. This brought down on his head the wrath of a group of
officers, and Nuestra Epoca expired after only two issues.6
A short time later, Mariátegui and Falcón formed part of a group that
tried to organize a committee of socialist propaganda; but they withdrew
from this movement when, under the influence of Luis Ulloa and Carlos del
Barzo, it was agreed to immediately establish a party with this name. The
dissidents believed that this decision was premature and subsequent events
seemed to bear them out, for the party did not last very long.
In January, 1919, the two journalists and another colleague abruptly left
El Tiempo. Apparently they were not in agreement with the newspaper’s
policy in the election of that year. They published a letter announcing the
formation of a new newspaper that “truly represents the ideals, trends, and
orientation that inspire our work.” This promise was fulfilled on May 14,
1919, with La Razón, a small newspaper of four pages. In the presidential
campaign, La Razón showed its independence and its extreme hostility to
the candidacy of Augusto B. Leguía. It became well known as a spokesman
for students, laborers, and the common people. La Razón supported the
demands of business employees and workers when they struck in May of
1919 to protest high food prices. After the leaders of their strike were freed,
the workers held a mass demonstration in honor of Mariátegui on July 8,
1919. He advised them to join together in a stable organization, and that
very night they established the Peruvian Regional Labor Federation. In
addition, a group of students used La Razón to initiate their campaign for

8
university reforms, which led to a strike that same year at the University of
San Marcos.
On July 4, 1919, Augusto B. Leguía became president through a
revolution, and La Razón began to oppose him vigorously. On August 8,
1919, Mariátegui and Falcón announced that their newspaper would no
longer appear. Because of a very strong editorial, the printing house refused
to continue publishing it.7 A little later, so it was said, a high government
official who was a friend of the two journalists presented them with the
choice of going to jail or traveling to Europe at government expense.
Mariátegui and Falcón chose the second alternative and quietly departed on
October 8, 1919, with modest official allowances. Although their trip was
severely criticized, they never eulogized or supported the government. No
traces of them remained in Lima; but between 1920 and 1923, El Tiempo,
then a government newspaper, published “Cartas de Italia” and “Aspectos de
Europa,” signed with the old pseudonyms that Mariátegui himself had
repudiated earlier. Falcón began to appear as a contributor to the Madrid
newspaper El Sol with his famous letters from London. Mariátegui did not
write for any European publications. He was in France, Italy, Germany, and
Switzerland, and also briefly in Austria and Czechoslovakia. He learned to
read and speak fluently Italian and French and to understand German; he
clearly defined his beliefs and loyalties; and in Italy he married Ana Chiappe,
who was an exemplary wife, attending him faithfully through the illness that
ended in his death. “Tolerant of her ideas,” he had their son, Sandro, who
was born in Rome, baptized a Catholic; and on March 23, 1923, he returned
to Lima.
On March 31, Variedades, a Lima journal, interviewed Mariátegui for a
series it was publishing. Mariátegui refused to define art or his concept of life
“because metaphysics is not in style and the world is more interested in the
physicist Einstein than in the metaphysicist Bergson”; and he stated that his
ideal in life “is always to have a high ideal.” In his opinion, journalism, the
daily episodic history of mankind, had been created by the capitalist
civilization as a great material, but not moral, instrument. He confessed that
six or seven years earlier his preferred poets had been Rubén Darío, later
Mallarmé and Apollinaire, then Pascoli, Heine, and Aleksandr Blok, and
that at the moment he preferred Walt Whitman. His favorite prose writers
were Andreyev and Gorki. He considered the theater still too realist and
analytic and hoped it would become impressionist and synthetic. “There
exist, however, signs of evolution. The Russian genius has created the

9
‘grotesque’ and the musical setting. In Berlin, in ‘Der Blaue Vogel,’ I saw ten-
minute musical scenes that had more substance and emotion than many
dramas of three hours.” Eleanora Duse, by then tired and fading, was the
actress who had most impressed him. Among composers he preferred
Beethoven, and his favorite painters were Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro
Botticelli, and Piero della Francesca, together with Degas, Cezanne, and
Matisse and the German expressionist Franz Marc. He judged the
contemporary epoch to be revolutionary, but more destructive than creative.
As the men most representative of the times, he chose Lenin, Einstein, and
Hugo Stinnes, in that order. From the past he admired Christopher
Columbus and from the present “the anonymous hero of factory, mine, and
fields, the unknown soldier of the social revolution.” He enjoyed travel
because he thought of himself as essentially a wanderer, inquisitive and
restless. When asked which of his writings he liked best and was most
satisfied with, he replied that they were still to be written. Regarding the so-
called decadence of the Old World, he said: “Europe’s decadence is this
civilization’s decadence. The future of New York and Buenos Aires is tied up
with the future of London, Berlin, and Paris. The new civilization is being
forged in Europe. America has a secondary role in this stage of human
history.”8
When he stated in the interview that he still had not written his best
work, he only expressed once again his constant wish to repudiate his
“literary adolescence” nourished (as he wrote in his article on Alcides
Spelucín) in a “decadent, modernist, aesthetic, individualist, and skeptical
attitude.” At that time, he referred disparagingly to his “stone age” of
journalism from 1909 to 1919. Actually, that period had two stages: one
purely literary from 1914 to 1917, when he wrote under the pen name “Juan
Croniqueur,” and a second from 1918 to 1919, when he began to be
concerned with social problems.9
In July, 1923, he gave a series of lectures to a working-class public at the
González Prada Popular University on the history of the world crisis.10 In
September of the same year he began to publish stories in Variedades under
the title “Figuras y aspectos de la escena mundial.” The lectures are a better
expression of his social and political philosophy than the stories.
When Haya de la Torre was exiled in 1924, Mariátegui succeeded him
as director of the Popular University and of the journal Claridad, which he
guided through two or three issues.

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 In the same year, Mariátegui’s life was threatened by a serious illness. A
malignant tumor in his left thigh suppurated and had to be drained; as the
disease continued its course, he appeared to be near death. An operation,
with little likelihood of success, was the only alternative. In their biographies
of Mariátegui, both María Wiesse and Armando Bazán relate that his
mother opposed the operation but that his wife dramatically insisted on its
being performed. Mariátegui survived the operation and for several days
thought that his amputated leg, which was the one he had used for walking,
was asleep. He was, therefore, condemned to live immobilized or carried by
others.
After a rapid recovery, he returned to his intellectual activities with
renewed energy. His contributions to Mundial and Variedades later formed
part of his book Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. Despite his
limited means, he was always careful to obtain, especially from France and
Italy, the latest publications, which sometimes could not be found in the
bookstores and libraries of Lima. His home contained not only Marxist
bibliographical information but also the works of independent progressive
authors like Romain Rolland and even of authors like Raymond Radiguet, of
purely literary prestige. He had broken publicly with his aesthetic past;
nonetheless, he appeared to return occasionally to his former predilections.
For example, he revered and found inspiration in the Italian critic Piero
Gobetti, who was not a Marxist and who died prematurely, assassinated by
the Fascists. These paradoxes, unacceptable to the rigid Stalinist doctrine,
abounded in Mariátegui’s reading and literary and artistic criticisms. They
also led him to admire the Peruvian poet of symbolism, José María Eguren,
to esteem writers like Waldo Frank, and to preface his essays on Peruvian
reality with an epigraph in German taken from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Der
Wanderer und sein Schatten.
In September, 1926, he founded the journal Amauta, which he directed
until just before his death in 1930. A typical issue of this journal offered
interesting characteristics. On the one hand there was its indigenous
orientation, beginning with its name and its title page, a prehispanic design
in two colors by José Sabogal. This also accounted for its articles by anti-
Spanish authors like Luis E. Valcárcel, some of its poems, its enthusiasm for
the literary or artistic expressions of American Indians, and its revival of
contemporary popular art, encouraged by Sabogal. On the other hand, it
was easy to see the doctrinaire line, not only in articles by Marx, Lenin, or
Lunacharsky, but also in some by Mariátegui himself (for example, his

11
“Defensa del marxismo”). A similar line was followed by the Peruvian
Marxist writer Ricardo Martínez de la Torre in his interpretations of social
reality, and by César Antonio Ugarte and Abelardo Solís, among others with
different ideas. But this doctrinaire trend was expressed in various ways and
included articles on university reform and progress in education. In addition,
Amauta always or almost always published in its final section the critical
notes by María Wiesse on records and other musical events; and it took
particular interest in modern European and American art, with a few pages
of reproductions of paintings or sculptures. From a literary standpoint, its
young contributors became well-known writers, dealing with a great variety
of subjects. Amauta discovered new values, some as far removed from this
journal’s “affiliation and faith” as Martín Adán and José Diez Canseco. Later
on, it published an increasing number of articles by American and European
figures like Waldo Frank. Of the generation of Peruvian writers then
considered outstanding, only José María Eguren and Enrique López Albujar
were accepted into the pages of Amauta. Number 21 of February–March,
1929, was an homage to the poet of Simbólicas; but in that same issue
appeared articles by Eudocio Ravines on the instruments of finance capital,
César Antonio Ugarte on the Socialist regime of Russia, and Ricardo
Martínez de la Torre on aspects of capitalist stabilization.11
At first, intellectual groups and the general public took little notice of
Mariátegui’s ideology. He had always been considered a journalist and
professional writer. It seemed quite logical that on his return from Europe he
should write for the journals of Lima. Variedades gave wide circulation to his
comments on world politics. At that time, the only other political
commentaries were those of Luis Varela y Orbegoso (“Clovis”) in the
afternoon edition of the newspaper El Comercio; they were pleasant and
clearly written, although bland and superficial, with no attempt at
interpretation and orientation. Mariátegui’s quick mind and his precision
and skill gave his articles an intrinsic value quite apart from their ultimate
purpose, which sometimes was not immediately discernible. Furthermore, by
not intervening in matters that directly affected Leguía’s policies, he avoided
difficulties, at least for a while.
If Mariátegui had defended liberal democracy or the citizen against the
state, he would have annoyed the Leguía government and placed it in a
difficult position; supporters of the dictatorship believed that to fight those
ideas or mention them with scorn or sarcasm was indirectly to help the
regime. Since Maríategui’s Marxist theories—he called them “Socialist”—

12
were not expressed in pedantic doctrinaire terms, but emerged as the tacit
consequence of his analysis of concrete situations, cases, or persons, they
caused no alarm (except later, when the spreading influence of his newpaper
Labor led to his arrest in 1927 and a raid on his house in 1929, without,
however, interfering with his continued publication of Amauta). The Leguía
era was, paradoxically, more favorable to Mariátegui than a truly doctrinaire
regime would have been, because it had no appeal for young intellectuals.
With his book on Peruvian reality, in which he criticized the educational
ideas of Manuel Vicente Villarán, the literary history of José de la Riva-
Agüero, and the value of writers like Felipe Pardo y Aliaga; with his
controversy with Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, living in exile in the United
States; and with his opposition to the election of José Matías Manzanilla as
rector of the university, Mariátegui helped to undermine the prestige of the
intellectual leaders of the civilismo opposition, who had been exiled, silenced,
and humiliated by Leguía. On the other hand, his attitude of political
independence was exemplary, for he never sought to profit from the regime’s
long years of prosperity. Nevertheless, he maintained friendly relations with
some political figures, who were not, in any event, very highly placed in the
Leguía government.
In June, 1927, there seemed to be a change in the course of events. The
government announced its discovery of a “Communist” conspiracy. This
scandal probably grew out of a number of circumstances: a determination to
block the labor union movement of the Workers Congress currently in
session; opposition to the development of a working-class publishing house
sponsored by Mariátegui; and the reaction (presumably spurred by the
United States Embassy) to a strongly anti-imperialist issue of Amauta (this
was at the time of the fighting in Nicaragua). It has also been said that the
decisive factor was the handing over of a letter sent from Haya de la Torre to
Mariátegui concerning the organization of the APRA (Alianza Popular
Revolucionaria Americana) either to the Minister of State or to President
Leguia. Mariátegui was arrested and put into a military hospital, where he
spent six days. Many students and workers were also imprisoned. Amauta
was temporarily shut down, but reopened six months later.
From the military hospital, Mariátegui sent a letter to the Lima
newspapers, which they published.12 He accepted all responsibility for the
ideas he had expressed in various newspaper articles, but rejected accusations
that he was involved in a subversive plot or intrigue. He declared himself to
be a convinced and avowed Marxist and, by that token, far from utopianism,

13
in theory or practice, or absurd conspiracies. “I categorically deny,” he added,
“my presumed connection with the Communist party in Russia or with any
other in Europe or America, and I assert that there is no authentic
document that proves such a connection. In this respect, I would like to
remind you that when the Russian office in London was searched, it was
announced that nothing relative to Peru was found among the addresses of
and information about correspondents in America.” He mentioned the
names of great intellectual figures who, without being Communist, had
applauded the work of Amauta. He acknowledged his opinions, but added
that “under the law, they are not subject to the control, much less the
penalties, of the police and the courts.” “The word ‘revolution,’” he continued,
“has acquired a new meaning that is very different from its traditional
association with conspiracies.”
By the end of 1927, the question being discussed among exile student
groups in various cities in America and Europe and among certain circles in
Lima was: “Is the APRA an alliance or a party?” With the appearance of the
Nationalist Liberation Party, founded in Mexico and directed by Víctor Raúl
Haya de la Torre, this question seemed to be answered. On April 16, 1928,
Mariátegui wrote a letter to the Mexican group in which he expressed his
disagreement with Haya de la Torre. He criticized the transformation of the
APRA from an “alliance” into a “party”; the organization of the nationalist
liberation movement without consulting “the members of the vanguard who
work in Lima and the provinces”; the party’s political literature, reminiscent
of “the old regime”; its recourse to “bluff ” and lies; its failure to use the word
“socialism”; its similarity to Italian fascism. “An ideological movement which,
because of its historical justification, the intelligence and abnegation of its
partisans, and the lofty purpose and nobility of its doctrine, will gain the
support of the better part of the country unless we ourselves ruin it, must
not be permitted to degenerate into a vulgar electoral struggle.”13
Haya de la Torre replied from Mexico on May 20, 1928. He accused
Mariátegui of having fallen into “tropical illusions and absurd
sentimentalism,” of an excess of Europeanism, and of personal hostility
revealing a hidden obsession. “You will see that the APRA is a party, an
alliance, and a movement. What does not exist in Europe can exist in
America. There were no skyscrapers and there are no cannibals in Europe.”
He charged his opponent with being unreasonable and with having let
himself be influenced by the reactionary mentality and pseudo-revolutionary
demagogues of the hysterical continent. He denied that he was an offshoot

14
of Mussolini. He condemned Mariátegui for not having proclaimed the anti-
imperialist revolution, “the only possible and immediate revolution of this
era,” when he addressed the workers of Vitarte. He added, “Be realistic and
try to take your discipline not from revolutionary Europe but from
revolutionary America. You are doing a great deal of damage because of your
lack of calm and your eagerness always to appear European within the
terminology of Europe. In that way, you rupture the APRA. I know that you
are against us, and I am not surprised. Nevertheless, we shall accomplish the
revolution without mentioning socialism, and by distributing land and
fighting imperialism.”14
After receiving this message, Mariátegui broke off his correspondence
with Haya de la Torre. He and his group drafted and sent to all groups
residing abroad a “collective letter” with the following conclusions: 1) The
APRA should be officially and categorically defined as an alliance or
common front and not as a party; 2) We who represent the elements of the
Left in Peru now establish in fact and shall organize formally a Socialist
group or party with a precise affiliation and orientation. Within the
movement, we shall collaborate with the liberal and revolutionary elements
of the middle class that accept our point of view, and we shall work to direct
the masses toward Socialist ideas.15 To commemorate the second
anniversary of Amauta (Number 17 of September) Mariátegui wrote an
editorial entitled “Aniversario y balance,” in which he developed these same
ideas on a high level and without personal allusions.
Bitter quarrels arose in Lima and among the exiles. In the APRA cell in
Paris, a group including Eudocio Ravines, César Vallejo, and Armando
Bazán advocated, in a document dated December 29, 1928, the formation of
a proletarian party as a worker-peasant bloc. This was a much more radical
position than Mariátegui’s. A column called “Curso nuevo del APRA”
appeared in Number 25 of Amauta ( July–August, 1929) with a letter dated
May 1, 1929, from Armando Bazán, secretary of the propaganda committee
of this organization’s cell in Paris. This document announced that the
members of the APRA cell and the Center of Anti-Imperialist Studies of
Paris had decided to dissolve those bodies because “there exists a profound
disagreement among their members concerning the orientation and conduct
of the movement.” At the same time, it invited the comrades to join anti-
imperialist leagues or proletarian revolutionary parties. This attitude
coincided with the strictly class rules established by the Second World

15
Congress of the Anti-Imperialist League held in Frankfort, which Amauta
published in its Number 27 (November–December, 1929).
Luis E. Heysen, the new secretary of the APRA’s Paris section, protested
the Amauta news item in a letter published in the Lima journal La Sierra.
Amauta commented on this letter in its Number 28 ( January, 1930): “The
only too notorious truth is that the APRA never was more than a plan, a
project, an idea for an ‘alliance’ or a ‘common front’ which a few groups of
Peruvian students tried unsuccessfully to organize. . . . Any attempt,
therefore, to take advantage of Latin American credulity with somewhat
pompous letterheads is inopportune.” The text of Heysen’s communication,
for which there was not enough space in that issue, appeared in the following
issue (Number 29, February–March). It was accompanied by a new note
insisting on the need for the proletariat to have an independent program and
action and denying the objective existence of the APRA. “It does exist as a
trend toward confusion and demagoguery, which must be confronted by a
clearly defined proletarian position.” It concluded with: “Amauta is not a
publicity agent for any pretentious performer.” This was the last issue
directed by Mariátegui; two more were then published under the direction of
Ricardo Martínez de la Torre.
Mariátegui, apart from his intellectual work and his political interests,
was directly connected with the Peruvian trade union movement. After the
general strike of May, 1919, the Regional Federation of Peruvian Workers
was established in Lima, as previously mentioned. In April, 1921, the First
Local Congress of Workers met in Lima. It dealt with broad problems such
as the organization and orientation of the proletariat, fighting tactics, the
eight-hour working day, opposition to compulsory arbitration, the right to
strike, solidarity of the organized trade unions, the association of miners, the
Indian, popular culture, and affiliation with international organizations. It
also discussed the following question: “Should organized labor take political
action or not?” After a lively debate, it was agreed to postpone the vote until
the next congress “because the proletariat would be better organized and
oriented, more experienced, and with a greater grasp of the ideologies of
workers everywhere; therefore, fully aware and profoundly convinced of the
cause, it would vote for anarchist communism.” Supporters of anarchist
syndicalism dominated the congress, but they were not sufficiently strong to
carry the confused masses.
The Popular University, founded in 1921, did not try to give doctrinaire
guidance. According to a widely circulated statement, its only dogma was

16
social justice. But Mariátegui, in his lectures on the world crisis, defended
the Russian Revolution and interpreted current events in a way that was
favorable to that revolution.
The First Workers Congress led to the creation of the Local Federation
of Workers in Lima and Callao. During that period, Mariátegui advocated a
syndicalist common front. In 1927, the Federation called a meeting of the
Second Workers Congress. After long and heated discussions, the only
important conclusion reached was that the sole purpose of syndicalism was
the proletarian labor union. Political repression abruptly ended the meetings.
With its leaders imprisoned and the Local Federation of Workers dissolved,
the labor movement entered a serious crisis.
Parallel to the formation of the Socialist party, mentioned further on,
Julio Portocarrero, Avelino Navarro, and others, under the direction of
Mariátegui, worked hard from the end of 1928 to reorganize syndicalism. In
early 1929, a Committee for the General Confederation of Workers of Peru
was set up. On May 17, 1929, a provisional committee began work and was
warmly welcomed by Mariátegui in the June issue of Amauta. The Peruvian
labor movement moved politically from anarchist syndicalism to
communism. A delegation led by Julio Portocarrero participated in the
Communist-oriented Latin American Syndicalist Congress, which took
place in Montevideo in May, 1929.
On the occasion of the Fifth Congress of the Red Syndicalist
International held in Moscow in 1927, Julio Portocarrero journeyed secretly
to that city as a delegate of Peruvian labor unions. On his return, he brought
a message from the Third International urging Peru’s association with that
movement and blaming Haya de la Torre and his adherents for the delay in
the formation of a Communist party in Peru; it offered severe criticism and
called for action.
Persuaded by this message and by his own convictions, and in the light
of his experience with the APRA, Mariátegui and a very select group of
friends decided on September 16, 1928, to set up the first cell of a broadly
based party to be called the Socialist party of Peru and to be directed by
declared Marxists. “The secret cell of seven” was comprised of Mariátegui,
Ricardo Martínez de la Torre, who was an insurance company employee, the
workers Julio Portocarrero, Avelino Navarro, Hinojosa, and Borja, and the
street peddler Bernardo Regman. Later meetings included Luciano Castillo,
Fernando Chávez León, Hugo Pesce, and others. Mariátegui wrote the
program of the new party. The committee received invitations to attend the

17
Congress of the Latin American Syndicalist Central held in Montevideo in
May, 1929, and the first Latin American Communist Conference, which met
in Buenos Aires in June of the same year. It sent five delegates under Julio
Portocarrero to the first meeting and it was represented by Hugo Pesce and
Julio Portocarrero in the second. Mariátegui drafted documents on “The
Problem of Races in Latin America,” “Background and Development of the
Class Struggle,” and “The Imperialist Point of View.” Martínez de la Torre
prepared “A Report on Peru” in collaboration with Julio Portocarrero.16
There is a record of the debates that took place in the Communist
conference in Buenos Aires.17 Here the Peruvian workers were officially
censured for their passive acceptance of the 1929 settlement on Tacna and
Arica. They were told to take action against Leguía and Yankee imperialism
and to militate for the self-determination of those populations, that is, for a
plebiscite under worker and peasant supervision. Mariátegui and his friends
were sharply attacked for their decision to create in Peru a Socialist party
with a reform program which, although directed by a secret group reserved
for initiates, was open to the middle class and the masses. It was argued that
a monolithic Communist party had to be formed immediately. Opinions
were also divided about the problem of races, and the prevailing thesis was
that present boundaries should no longer be considered sacred and that the
Indians should be given the right to self-determination, with the possibility
of establishing Quechua and Aymara republics.
The discussions in Buenos Aires, which influenced the rules adopted by
the organizing committee of the Socialist party, together with personal
frictions (Eudocio Ravines arrived secretly in February, 1930, with specific
instructions), led to the resignation of some of the leaders (March 16, 1930).
After his newspaper, Labor, was closed down in September, 1929, and his
home raided by the police, Mariátegui planned a trip to Buenos Aires, where
he hoped to publish Amauta and several books,18 and to Santiago. This trip,
which was arranged by Samuel Glusberg (who was not a Communist) in
Buenos Aires and by Luis Alberto Sánchez (who was also not a Communist)
in Santiago, indicated a personal attitude independent of any party directive.
Mariátegui never took this trip. He died on April 16, at the age of thirty-five.
He left ready for publication the works Defensa del marxismo19 and El alma
matinal,20 and he had sent to Spain the original manuscript of a book on the
political and ideological evolution of Peru, which was lost.

18
 A few days after Mariátegui’s funeral, a long communication reached
Lima from the Third International, which referred to the debate begun in
Buenos Aires on the necessity of founding a Communist instead of a
Socialist party. The latter, during the illness of Mariátegui, already had
discussed affiliation with the Communist party. On May 20, 1930, the
Peruvian Communist party was born. The only negative vote was cast by
Martínez de la Torre, who defended the beliefs of his friend and teacher.21
The Communist party, therefore, appeared later in Peru than in other
countries: Uruguay (1920), Argentina (1921), Mexico and Chile (1922),
Ecuador and Cuba (1925). Nevertheless, there were already Moscow-trained
national leaders like Eudocio Ravines and a few students, as well as workers,
who traveled secretly. It is interesting to note that, although Mariátegui died
soon after his political line had been sternly criticized, Ravines, Portocarrero,
Armando Bazán, and other convinced and declared Communists of that
time later left the party.
Whether or not Mariátegui was the founder of the Communist party is a
question that is and will continue to be widely debated in Peru. Actually, it is
a pointless controversy. Mariátegui was not basically in disagreement with
the leaders of the Communist International; the nature of his objections was
tactical, immediate, and incidental. Among his last writings, published
shortly before his death, were his reply to a questionnaire about
contemporary problems and his comments on Panait Istrati’s book on the
Soviet Union.22 In the first article, Mariátegui examined once more “the
death of the principles and dogmas that made up the bourgeois Absolute”
and “the loss of bourgeois morale”; in the second, he made clear his
sympathies by trying to disparage Istrati’s censure of Soviet society.
Mariátegui, then, did not change shortly before his death.
It is not certain whether Mariátegui intended to use his trip to Buenos
Aires to intensify his activities as a writer over his activities as a political and
social organizer. The latter had brought him into painful conflict with the
Communist party line of that time and with the interests, plans, and
undertakings of other, more powerful, men.
Mariátegui may be studied on different levels: the human and
biographical, the literary, the ideological, the political, and the social. Often
his interpreters and critics do not cover all these aspects. It is not unusual for
some of his disciples, as well as diverse elements of both the extreme Right
and the extreme Left, to emphasize only one dimension of this man, who did
not hide his affiliation and faith—the social agitator, the organizer, the anti-

19
intellectual Mariátegui who continues and will continue to be involved in
elections, labor unions, and political tracts and controversies. On the other
hand, there is the historical image of another Mariátegui seen from a
perspective that embraces his whole life and not just a part of it, that seeks to
reach the man himself and not merely the ideas or things he loyally
supported, and, finally, that shows him as the promoter of a great cultural
and social renaissance and as a hero in a cripple’s chair. This image appeals to
persons of different positions—liberal, moderate, Socialist—provided they
have a progressive spirit. In the same way, González Prada is not simply one
more author in the anarchist pages of his time, but above all a great literary
figure, a great thinker, and, in spite of all his imprecations against Peru, a
great Peruvian.
There should be a place in these pages for Mariátegui as he appeared in
his house on Washington Street. He received his friends at the end of the
afternoon, for he jealously guarded for his own work or special interviews
the hours other people spent in offices. His visitors found him seated on a
sofa with a blanket covering the lower part of his body. He received them
quietly, with a smile on his delicate lips that was neither conventional nor
affected. His black eyes, gleaming in his wasted, pale brown face,
commanded attention. His features were sharp and his thick, black hair was
always carefully groomed, but with a bohemian lock sometimes falling onto
his forehead. He dressed in a plain, spotlessly clean suit and he invariably
wore a black bow tie. His conversation was free of vanity and expansive
autobiography, rhetoric, and vague banalities. On the contrary, he was
objective in his judgment and always ready to listen and ask questions,
reluctant to discuss himself, and immune to commonplaces. His past
experience as the humorous columnist of “Voces” in El Tiempo and as a
veteran of criollo life behind the scenes was expressed in witty, nimble
remarks on men and events. His room was without decoration except for
books set at random on modest shelves along the walls. His visitors arrived
informally until there would be a group of fifteen or twenty persons. Apart
from many other writers and artists, he saw an increasing number of
students and workers and, in his last years, visitors from abroad.
Mariátegui’s wife occasionally appeared on her return from shopping or the
post office. His children were not exhibited with the relentless complacency
typical of so many homes that want to show off their private life. Following
the foundation of the publishing house and journal Amauta, Julio César
Mariátegui joined the group. There was nothing about these gatherings that

20
was deliberate or compulsory or that would imply a commitment. People
were free to go every day or just once and never return, or to disappear for a
while and then reappear. No attempt was made to proselytize. Current
events were commented on, especially those relating to books, paintings, or
music. There was no sign of the heavy atmosphere, charged with gossip and
backbiting, of political cliques.
The year 1923–1924 marked the beginning of Mariátegui’s intellectual
activities. In spite of his uncertain health, he managed to overcome initial
doubts, distrusts, and hostilities in order to make his ideas known. From
1925 to 1927, his position became more secure as people became more
accustomed to it. In 1925, he published his book La escena contemporánea,
made up of many of his articles for Variedades on the contemporary world.
Toward 1927, he entered his period of political action: he organized and
guided labor unions; he joined the APRA movement and then left it; he
founded the newspaper Labor (1928) in order to be in closer contact with
the workers; and, finally, he tried to form the Socialist party of Peru. In
1928, he published the book Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, in
which he collected articles he had written since 1925 for the journal Mundial
under the heading “Peruanicemos el Perú,” together with other articles from
Amauta.
Mariátegui’s spiritual homeland was not the university but journalism. If
the latter miraculously produced the distinguished author of aesthetic essays,
Valdelomar, it also produced the great social essayist of Peru, who was
almost his contemporary. He himself said: “I have raised myself from
journalism to doctrine.” It is amazing that a man who barely finished primary
school and who began as a linotypist’s assistant, messenger, and proofreader
should later be able to expound “the contemporary scene”; “figures and
aspects of world life”; Marxism; art; Italian, French, Spanish and other
literature of our time; and seven of Peru’s most vital problems.
The official Marxist position on Mariátegui appears to have varied. At
one time he was considered a “populist” and was so qualified somewhat
contemptuously by V. Miroshevsky in an article called “Mariátegui’s Role in
the History of Latin American Social Thought,” published in 1942 (May–
June issue) in the Havana journal Dialéctica. But, in more recent years, an
apparently irresistible movement has arisen to make the author of Seven
Essays the father of Peruvian and even South American communism. A
Soviet edition of that book came out in 1963; and in 1957 S. Semionov and
A. Shalgovski extolled “the role of Mariátegui in the formation of the

21
Communist party in Peru” in the Moscow journal Modern and
Contemporary History.23 It would seem that we are witnessing the birth of a
myth, strengthened by the memory of the premature death, the heroically
endured illness, the stubborn loyalty to ideas, and the brilliant talent that
sometimes approached genius.
The independent critic must here fulfill his mission of serenity, precision,
and high purpose. With his Seven Essays, Mariátegui introduced to Peru a
serious and methodical approach to national affairs that disdained pedantry,
excessive details, and rhetoric. He linked history to the drama of the present
and the imponderables of the future. He pointed out problems that,
unsolved in the past, still weigh on present generations, along with other
problems that have appeared in the latter’s time. He drew attention to
lacerating and pathetic realities that many did not or would not see. He was
exempt from the dislike or contempt of study that fills the soul of every
demagogue, whether of the Right or Left. On attempting a diagnosis of his
own country, which has so much in common with other countries of Andean
America, Mariátegui replaced in those years others who could have done
similar work from the standpoint of different ideologies, but who did not
because they were traveling abroad or because they had dispersed their
energies or dedicated themselves to erudition, light literature, or the many
activities of a political, bureaucratic, or social life.
His observations were often astute and provocative, although at times
one-sided and sketchy. They also suffered from his personal prejudices
(especially evident in the essay on literature), the tendentious nature of his
political sympathies, or simply insufficient information.
He himself stated in his preface: “I am not an impartial, objective critic.
My judgments are nourished by my ideals, my sentiments, my passions. I
have an avowed and resolute ambition: to assist in the creation of Peruvian
socialism. I am far removed from the academic techniques of the university.”
The reader should never forget these frank words.
On the other hand, it requires a great deal of basic preparation to study,
present, and resolve from an invalid’s chair, over a few years, the problem of
the Indian, the problem of land, the problem of public education, the
religious factor, regionalism and centralism, and the process of literature.
This actually was a much more difficult undertaking than to comment on
contemporary European politics or on the literary and other artistic
products of the time, because of the lack or scarcity of specialized studies

22
and, in many cases, because of the need for background materials consisting
of monographs, statistics, surveys, and the like.
But the example and significance of Mariátegui’s work will always
remain, in spite of all the amendments that may be made to it and even
assuming that it becomes outdated in some respects. This work will never
deserve “the silence reserved for superficial, malicious hacks, or the bold
flattery thrust on incompetents in high positions, or the empty words of
praise accorded to second-rate but agreeable writers.” Instead, it will be
worthy of “the keen, harsh analysis” given to work that lives and vibrates in
spite of the passage of time (Seven Essays was written more than forty years
ago), that examines subjects of permanent interest, and that aims at the
public good. No one can deny that Mariátegui initiated social studies in
Peru. No one can help but admire his devotion to culture and social justice
in a hostile and poisoned atmosphere. And if at the beginning he led a
bohemian and even dissolute life, his later discipline—only intensified by his
physical suffering—demonstrates that grandeur derives from the free
selection of a chastened soul and not from the facile exercise of an innate gift.
Mariátegui’s great value lies, not in his prescriptions and formulas, but in
his whole personality, which must be interpreted without making use of the
clichés and conventional adjectives that he disliked so intensely. It should not
be forgotten, moreover, that he died at the age of thirty-five.
Jorge Basadre
Notes
1 Guillermo Rouillón, Bio-bibliografìa de José Carlos Maríategui (Lima: Universidad
Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1963), p. 9.
2 See Alberto Ulloa Sotomayor, “José Carlos Mariátegui,” Nueva Revista Peruana, 1 June

1930.
3 “Los salmos del dolor,” Colónida, 1, no. 3 (March 1916). Reprinted in Edmundo

Cornejo Ubillús, Páginas literarias (Lima: Talleres Cumbre, 1955), pp. 69–71.
4 Medardo Ángel Silva, “Un juicio sobre la actual generatión literaria del Perú,” El

Tiempo (Lima), 27 March 1917.

5 Jorge Basadre, Historia de la República del Perú, VIII, 3812–3813, 3934–3935.
6 Ibid., VIII, 3829–3830, and IX, 4198.
7 On La Razón and its campaigns, see the articles by Humberto del Águila, under the

pseudonym “Rinconete,” in La Prensa (Lima), 25 and 30 August 1949, 1 and 16 October

1949.
8 Variedades, 23 March 1923.
9 The best study thus far of Mariátegui’s “stone age” is Genaro Carnero Checa, La acción

escrita. José Carlos Mariátegui, periodista (Lima: Torres Aguirre, 1964), pp. 51–113.

23
 10 Published as vol. 8 in José Carlos Mariátegui, Obras completas (Lima: Biblioteca

Amauta, 1959).
11 Carnero Checa, La acción escrita, p. 183.
12 El Comercio and La Prensa (Lima), 11 June 1927; reprinted in Carnero Checa, La

acción escrita, pp. 198–199.

13 Published in Ricardo Martínez de la Torre, Apuntes de una interpretation marxista de

historia social del Perú (Lima: Empresa Editora Peruana, 1948), II, 296–298.
14 Ibid., pp. 298–299.
15 Ibid., pp. 299–302.
16 Isibid., pp. 392–519.
17 El movimiento revolucionario latinoamericano. Versiones de la Primer a Conferencia

Comunista Sud Americana (Buenos Aires: La Correspondent Sud Americana, 1929).

18 Samuel Glusberg [“Enrique Espinoza”], Trinchera (Buenos Aires: Babel, 1931), pp.

40–69.
19 Published with Polémica revolucionaria as vol. 5 of Obras completas.
20 Published as vol. 3 of Obras completas.
21 Martínez de la Torre, Apuntes de una interpretation marxista, II, 497–510.
22 Mundial (Lima), 20 March 1930, and Variedades (Lima), 12 March 1930; both are

included in Obras completas, VI, 29–31, 150–153.

23 Published in translation in Problemas peruanas, no. 1, 1960.

24
 AUTHOR’S NOTE
I bring together in this book, organized and annotated in seven essays,
the articles that I published in Mundial and Amauta concerning some
essential aspects of Peruvian reality. Like La escena contemporánea, therefore,
this was not conceived of as a book. Better this way. My work has developed
as Nietzsche would have wished, for he did not love authors who strained
after the intentional, deliberate production of a book, but rather those whose
thoughts formed a book spontaneously and without premeditation. Many
projects for books occur to me as I lie awake, but I know beforehand that I
shall carry out only those to which I am summoned by an imperious force.
My thought and my life are one process. And if I hope to have some merit
recognized, it is that—following another of Nietzsche’s precepts—I have
written with my blood.
I intended to include in this collection an essay on the political and
ideological evolution of Peru. But as I advance in it, I realize that I must
develop it separately in another book. I find that the seven essays are already
too long, so much so that they do not permit me to complete other work as I
would like to and ought to; nevertheless, they should be published before my
new study appears. In this way, my reading public will already be familiar
with the materials and ideas of my political and ideological views.
I shall return to these topics as often as shall be indicated by the course
of my research and arguments. Perhaps in each of these essays there is the
outline, the plan, of an independent book. None is finished; they never will
be as long as I live and think and have something to add to what I have
written, lived, and thought.
All this work is but a contribution to Socialist criticism of the problems
and history of Peru. There are many who think that I am tied to European
culture and alien to the facts and issues of my country. Let my book defend
me against this cheap and biased assumption. I have served my best
apprenticeship in Europe and I believe the only salvation for Indo-America
lies in European and Western science and thought. Sarmiento, who is still
one of the creators of argentinidad [Argentine-ness], at one time turned his
eyes toward Europe. He found no better way to be an Argentine.
Once again I repeat that I am not an impartial, objective critic. My
judgments are nourished by my ideals, my sentiments, my passions. I have
an avowed and resolute ambition: to assist in the creation of Peruvian
socialism. I am far removed from the academic techniques of the university.

25
 This is all that I feel honestly bound to tell the reader before be begins
my book.
Lima, 1928
José Carlos Mariátegui

26
 Ich will keinen Autor mehr lesen, dem man anmerkt, er wollte ein Buch machen;
sondern nur jene, deren Gedanken unversehens ein Buch werden.
Nietzsche, Der Wanderer und sein Schatten

27
 1
Outline of the Economic Evolution
The Colonial Economy
THE DEGREE TO WHICH the history of Peru was severed by the
conquest can be seen better on an economic than on any other level. Here
the conquest most clearly appears to be a break in continuity. Until the
conquest, an economy developed in Peru that sprang spontaneously and
freely from the Peruvian soil and people. The most interesting aspect of the
empire of the Incas, which was a grouping of agricultural and sedentary
communities, was its economy. All historical evidence agrees that the Inca
people—industrious, disciplined, pantheist, and simple—lived in material
comfort. With abundant food their population increased. The Malthusian
problem was completely unknown to the empire. Although the collectivist
organization directed by the Incas had weakened the Indians’ individual
initiative, it had instilled in them the habit of a humble and religious
obedience to social duty, which benefitted the economic system. The Incas
derived as much social utility as possible from this trait. They improved the
vast Inca territory by constructing roads, canals, et cetera, and they extended
its borders by conquering nearby tribes. Collective work and common effort
were employed fruitfully for social purposes.
The Spanish conquistadors destroyed this impressive productive
machine without being able to replace it. The indigenous society and the
Inca economy were wholly disrupted and annihilated by the shock of the
conquest. Once the bonds that had united it were broken, the nation
dissolved into scattered communities. Indigenous labor ceased to function as
a concerted and integrated effort. The conquistadors were mainly concerned
with distributing and wrangling over their rich booty. They plundered the
treasures of temples and palaces; they allotted land and men with no thought
of their future use as forces and means of production.
The viceroyalty marks the beginning of the difficult and complex process
of forming a new economy. During this period, Spain tried to organize its
immense colony politically and economically. The Spaniards began to till the
soil and mine the gold and silver. On the ruins and remnants of a socialist
economy, they established the bases of a feudal economy.
But Spain did not send to Peru, nor for that matter to any of its other
possessions, throngs of colonizers. The weakness of the Spanish Empire lay

28
precisely in its character and structure as a military and ecclesiastic rather
than a political and economic power. No large bands of pioneers, like those
who disembarked on the shores of New England, arrived in the Spanish
colonies. Viceroys, courtesans, adventurers, priests, lawyers, and soldiers
were almost the only ones to come to Spanish America. Therefore, no real
colonizing force developed in Peru. The population of Lima was made up of
a small court, a bureaucracy, a few monasteries, officials of the Inquisition,
merchants, domestic servants, and slaves.1 Furthermore, the Spanish pioneer
had no talent for creating working groups. Instead of making use of the
Indian, he seemed to be intent on exterminating him. And the colonizers
could not create a solid and integrated economy by themselves. The very
foundation of colonial organization was defective because it lacked
demographic cement. There were not enough Spaniards and mestizos to
develop the territorial wealth on a large scale. And since Negro slaves were
imported to work on the coastal plantations, the elements and characteristics
of a slave society were mixed into those of a feudal society.
Only the Jesuits, with their systematic positivism, showed in Peru, as in
other countries of America, some aptitude for economic creation. The
latifundia assigned to them prospered and traces of their organization still
survive. Remembering how skillfully the Jesuits in Paraguay made use of the
natives’ natural inclination to communal work, it is not surprising that this
congregation of the sons of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, as Unamuno called
them, created centers of work and production on Peruvian soil, while nobles,
lawyers, and priests enjoyed a luxurious and worldly life in Lima.
Almost the sole interest of the colonizers was the mining of Peruvian
gold and silver. I have referred more than once to the tendency of the
Spaniards to settle in the lowlands and to how they feared and distrusted the
Andes, of which they never really felt themselves masters. Undoubtedly, the
criollo towns that formed in the sierra were the result of mining activities.
The conquest of the sierra would have been even more incomplete had it not
been for the Spaniards’ greed for the precious metals buried deep within the
Andes.
These were the historical bases of the new Peruvian economy, of the
colonial economy, colonial to its roots—a process that is still evolving. Let us
now examine the outlines of a second stage, the stage in which a feudal
economy gradually became a bourgeois economy, but without losing its
colonial character within the world picture.
The Economic Foundations of the Republic

29
 Like the first, the second stage of this economy derives from a political
and military event. The first stage arose from the conquest. The second stage
began with independence. But whereas the conquest was entirely responsible
for the formation of our colonial economy, independence appears to have
been determined and dominated by the latter process.
I have already had occasion, since my first Marxist attempt to ground
Peruvian history in the study of economic events, to concern myself with the
economic aspect of the War of Independence, and my reasoning was as
follows:
The ideas of the French Revolution and of the North American Constitution were
favorably received in South America, where there already existed an emerging bourgeoisie
which, because of its economic needs and interests, could and should have been infected by
the revolutionary spirit of the European bourgeoisie. Spanish America could not have
achieved its independence had it not commanded a heroic generation, sensitive to the
emotional tenor of its time, able and willing to carry out a genuine revolution. From this
point of view, independence takes on the appearance of a romantic adventure. But this does
not contradict my thesis of an economic pattern underlying the revolution of liberation. The
directors, caudillos, and ideologists of this revolution did not precede or transcend the
economic premises and causes of this event. Intellectual and emotional circumstances did
not precede economic circumstances.
Spain’s policy totally obstructed and thwarted the economic
development of its colonies by not permitting them to trade with any other
nation and by reserving to itself the privileges of the mother country to
monopolize all commerce and business carried on in its dominions.
The producing forces of the colonies naturally fought to shake off these
fetters. If the emerging economy of the embryonic nations of America was to
develop, it needed above all to be free of the rigid authority and medieval
mentality of the king of Spain. The student of this period cannot help but
see here that South America’s independence movement was only too
obviously inspired by the interests of the criollo and even the Spanish
population, rather than by the interests of the indigenous population.
From the standpoint of world history, South America’s independence
was determined by the needs of the development of Western or, more
precisely, capitalist civilization. The rise of capitalism had a much more
decisive and profound, if less apparent and recognizable, influence on the
evolution of independence than the philosophy and literature of the
Encyclopedists. The British Empire, fated to become the real and
unsurpassed representative of the interests of capitalist civilization, was
taking shape. In England, center of liberalism and Protestantism, it was
industry and machinery that prepared the way for capitalism, rather than

30
that country’s traditionally cited political philosophy and religious belief.
Therefore, England—with the clear sense of destiny and historic mission
that was to gain it hegemony in capitalist civilization—played a leading role
in South America’s independence. Whereas the prime minister of France,
the nation that some years earlier had given the world a great revolution,
refused to recognize these young South American republics that could
export “not only their products but their revolutionary ideas,”2 Mr. Canning,
faithful interpreter and agent of England’s interests, recognized them and
thereby justified their right to separate from Spain and, in addition, to
organize themselves democratically. And even before Mr. Canning, the
bankers of London—no less timely and effective for being usurers—had
financed the formation of the new republic.
The Spanish Empire sank into oblivion because it did not rest on
military and political foundations and, especially, because it represented an
outdated economy. Spain could supply its colonies only with priests, lawyers,
and nobles. Its colonies craved more practical and modern instruments and,
consequently, turned to England’s industrialists and bankers. Acting as
agents of an empire created by a manufacturing and free trade economy, the
new-style colonizers wanted, in turn, to dominate these markets.
The economic interests of the Spanish colonies and of the capitalist West
coincided exactly, although, as often happens in history, neither of the parties
concerned was aware of this fact.
The new nations, following the same natural impulse that had led them
to independence, dealt with the capital and industry of the West in order to
obtain the elements and relations necessary to expand their economies. They
began to send to the capitalist West the products of their soil and subsoil
and to receive from it cloth, machinery, and a thousand industrial products.
In this way, a continual and increasing trade was established between South
America and Western civilization. The countries on the Atlantic naturally
benefited most from this trade because of their proximity to Europe.
Argentina and Brazil, especially, attracted great quantities of European
capital and immigrants; and the floods from the West left rich and
homogeneous deposits that accelerated the changes by which the economy
and culture of these countries gradually acquired the function and structure
of the European economy and culture. There, liberal, bourgeois democracy
could take root, whereas in the rest of South America it was blocked by
extensive and tenacious remains of feudalism.

31
 In this period, the general historical process in Peru entered a stage that
differentiated and separated it from the historical process of other countries
in South America. Because of geography, some countries would advance
more rapidly than others. The independence that had united them in a
common cause decreed that they should part to follow their individual
destinies. Since European ships could reach Peru’s ports only after a very
long voyage, that country found itself closer geographically to the Orient,
and its trade with Asia became substantial. The Peruvian coast received
contingents of Chinese immigrants who replaced the Negro slaves imported
during the viceroyalty and emancipated partly as a result of the
transformation from a feudal to a more or less bourgeois economy. But trade
with Asia could not contribute effectively to the formation of a new Peruvian
economy. Peru, having emerged from the conquest and confirmed its
independence, required the machinery, techniques, and ideas of the
Europeans, the Westerners.
The Period of Guano and Nitrates
There is a chapter in the evolution of the Peruvian economy that opens
with the discovery of guano and nitrates and closes with the loss of this
wealth. Here is found a full explanation of a series of political phenomena in
our historical process that have been distorted and falsified by a superficial
approach to Peruvian history based on anecdotes and rhetoric. However, my
rapid interpretation does not propose to explore or closely examine these
phenomena, but to point out and define the essential characteristics of the
formation of our economy, in order to make clearer its colonial cast. Let us
consider only the economic facts.
It is interesting that in the story of the republic such coarse and humble
substances as guano and nitrates should have taken over the role that had
been reserved to gold and silver in a more romantic and less positivist era.
Spain wanted and kept Peru as a producer of precious metals. England
preferred Peru as a producer of guano and nitrates. But the motive remained
the same; only the times changed. The attraction of Peru’s gold diminished
with the discovery of gold in California. On the other hand, guano and
nitrates—found almost exclusively in Peru—had been worthless to previous
civilizations but were extremely valuable to an industrial civilization. These
materials, on a remote coast in the South Pacific, were essential to the
development of European or Western industrialism. In addition, unlike
other Peruvian products they were not hampered by the rudimentary and
primitive state of land transport. Whereas gold, silver, copper, and coal

32
mined from the Andes had to be conveyed great distances over rugged
mountain ranges, guano and nitrate deposits lay on the coast within easy
reach of the cargo ships.
These natural resources were so easily exploited that they became the
center of the country’s economic life and occupied a disproportionately large
place in the Peruvian economy. The treasury derived its principal revenue
from their export and the country felt wealthy. The government made lavish
use of its credit, mortgaging its future to English finance.
This is in broad outline the entire history of guano and nitrates from a
purely economic standpoint. The rest, at first glance, belongs to the
historian. But as in all such cases, the economics of the situation is much
more complex and far-reaching than it appears.
Guano and nitrates, first and foremost, generated a lively trade with the
Western world during a period when Peru, in its unfavorable geographical
location, had little hope of attracting the colonizing and civilizing currents
that were sweeping through other Latin American countries. This trade
placed its economy under the control of British capital. Later, as a result of
debts guaranteed by both products, Peru was forced to hand over to England
the administration of its railroads, that is, the very key to the exploitation of
its resources.
The profits earned from the export of guano and nitrates created in Peru,
where property always had preserved its aristocratic and feudal character, the
first solid elements of commercial and banking capital. Those who profited
directly and indirectly from the wealth on the coast began to constitute a
capitalist class. The bourgeoisie that developed in Peru was related in its
origin and structure to the aristocracy, which, though composed chiefly of
the descendants of colonial landholders, had been obliged by its role to adopt
the basic principles of liberal economics and politics. This circumstance,
which will be referred to in later essays, is pertinent to the following
statements: “In the first period of independence, the struggle between
military factions and leaders appeared to be a consequence of the lack of an
integrated bourgeoisie. Peru had lagged behind other Spanish American
countries in defining the elements of a liberal bourgeoisie; to enable the latter
to function, it needed to establish a strong capitalist class. Meanwhile, power
remained in the hands of the military caudillos. The Castilla regime marked
the consolidation of the capitalist class. Government concessions and profits
from guano and nitrates created capitalism and a bourgeoisie which, once
organized into civilismo, soon took over all power.”

33
 Another aspect of this chapter in the economic history of Peru was the
shifting of the economy to the coast. The search for gold and silver had
compelled the Spaniards—against their inclination to settle on the coast—to
maintain advanced posts in the sierra. Mining was the mainspring of the
economic system imposed by Spain and required that the colonial regime be
based in the sierra, an area which previously had supported a genuinely and
typically agrarian society. Guano and nitrates corrected this situation by
strengthening the power of the coast. The new Peru moved to the lowlands,
thereby intensifying its social dualism and conflict, which to this day remain
its greatest historical problem.
The period of guano and nitrates, therefore, cannot be isolated from the
subsequent development of Peru’s economy, because it contains the roots
and elements of the period that follows. One consequence of guano and
nitrates, the War of the Pacific, did not cancel out the other consequences of
their discovery and exploitation. With the loss of these resources came the
tragic realization of the danger of an economic prosperity supported or held
together almost solely by the possession of natural wealth at the mercy of the
greed or aggression of foreign imperialism or vulnerable to the continual
changes in industrial needs arising from scientific invention. Caillaux speaks
with obvious capitalist realism of the economic and industrial instability
produced by scientific progress.3
During the period dominated and characterized by trade in guano and
nitrates, the transformation of Peru’s economy from feudal to bourgeois
received its first powerful stimulus. If, instead of a mediocre metamorphosis
of the ruling class, there had emerged a new class with vigor and purpose,
unquestionably that transformation would have progressed more evenly and
firmly. Peru’s postwar history is evidence of this. Its defeat and loss of nitrate
territory initiated a prolonged decline in productive drive, unfortunately not
compensated for by a liquidation of the past.
The Character of Peru’s Present Economy
The last chapter in the evolution of the Peruvian economy is its postwar
period. This chapter begins with the almost complete collapse of the
country’s productive energy.
Defeat not only meant that the national economy lost its principal
resources, nitrates and guano; it also meant the paralysis of economic
initative, a general depression in production and commerce, the depreciation
of national currency, and the loss of foreign credit. Bleeding and mutilated,
the country suffered from a terrible anemia.

34
 Again, as after independence, military leaders took charge; but they were
spiritually and organically incapable of directing the task of economic
reconstruction. Very soon the capitalist group that had formed during the
period of guano and nitrates resumed its activity and returned to power. The
solution they found for the monetary problem, for example, was typical of
the mentality of latifundistas or large landowners. They were indifferent not
only to the interests of the proletariat but also to those of the bourgeoisie,
the only social groups that would be ruined by the abrupt demonetization of
paper currency.
This measure and the Grace Contract were undoubtedly the most
significant and characteristic actions taken by a landholding plutocracy to
eliminate the economic consequences of the war.
The Grace Contract ratified British domination in Peru by delivering the
state railways to the English bankers who until then had financed the
republic and its extravagances. At the same time, it gave the London financial
market the guarantees necessary to make new investments in Peruvian
business. No immediate results were obtained with the restoration of the
government’s credit; but prudent and safe investments again began to attract
British capital. The Peruvian economy, by means of a practical examination
of its condition as a colonial economy, secured some aid for its convalescence.
With the completion of the railway to Oroya, traffic was opened to the
industrial products of the department of Junín, permitting large-scale
exploitation of its mining wealth.
Piérola fully adapted his economic policy to the same interests. The
democratic caudillo, who for so long had thunderously aroused the masses
against the wealthy, now took pains to carry out a civilismo administration.
His tax system and fiscal measures removed any possible doubts that might
have been raised by his phraseology and metaphysics. This confirms the
principle that the meaning and shape of men, their policy and deeds, are
more clearly revealed on an economic than on a political level.
The fundamental aspects of this chapter, in which our economy,
recuperating from its postwar crisis, slowly organized itself on less lucrative
but more solid bases than those of guano and nitrates, can be outlined by the
following facts:
1. The appearance of modern industry. The establishment of factories,
plants, transport, et cetera, which has transformed life on the coast. The
formation of an industrial proletariat with a growing natural tendency to

35
adopt a class ideology, thereby blocking one of the traditional paths of
caudillo proselytism and changing the terms of the political struggle.
2. The role of finance capital. The emergence of national banks which
finance various industrial and commercial enterprises but which are very
limited in scope because of their subservience to foreign capital and large
agricultural properties; and the establishment of branches of foreign banks
serving the interests of North American and English finance.
3. The shorter distance and increased traffic between Peru and the
United States and Europe. As a result of the opening of the Panama Canal,
Peru’s geographical position has notably improved and its incorporation into
Western civilization has accelerated.
4. The gradual substitution of North American for British ascendancy.
The Panama Canal seems to have brought Peru closer to the United States
than to Europe. The participation of North American capital in the
exploitation of Peru’s copper and petroleum, which have become two of its
most important products, furnishes a broad and enduring base for the
growing influence of the United States. Exports to England, which in 1898
made up 56.7 percent of total exports, by 1923 came only to 33.2 percent. In
the same period, exports to the United States rose from 9.5 percent to 39.7
percent. And this trend was even more striking in imports: whereas in that
twenty-five year period, imports from the United States went up from 10.0
percent to 38.9 percent, those from Great Britain dropped from 44.7 percent
to 19.6 percent.4
5. The development of a capitalist class no longer dominated by the old
aristocracy. Although agricultural property owners retain their power, the
authority of families with viceregal names has declined. The bourgeoisie has
grown stronger.
6. The rubber illusion. In its halcyon days, Peru thought it had found El
Dorado in its tropical forests, which temporarily acquired enormous value in
the economy. They especially caught the imagination of the country and
attracted hordes of “hardy adventurers.” This illusion—tropical in origin and
tone—faded with the fall in the price of rubber.5
7. The excess profits of the European period. The boom in Peruvian
products caused a rapid increase in domestic private wealth. The hegemony
of the coast in the Peruvian economy was reinforced.
8. The policy on borrowing. The reestablishment of Peruvian credit
abroad has enabled the government once again to use loans to carry out its
public works program.6 North America also has replaced Great Britain as

36
creditor. Overflowing with gold, the New York market offers the best terms.
North American bankers study the possibilities of lending capital to Latin
American governments. And they are careful, of course, that such
investments benefit North American industry and commerce.
These would appear to be the principal aspects of the economic
evolution of Peru in its postwar period. This series of comments does not
permit a thorough study of the foregoing statements or propositions. I have
sought only to sketch some of the essential characteristics of the formation
and development of the Peruvian economy.
I shall make a final observation: the elements of three different
economies coexist in Peru today. Underneath the feudal economy inherited
from the colonial period, vestiges of the indigenous communal economy can
still be found in the sierra. On the coast, a bourgeois economy is growing in
feudal soil; it gives every indication of being backward, at least in its mental
outlook.
The Agrarian Economy and the Feudal Latifundium
System
Peru, despite its expanded mining industry, remains an agricultural
country. The great majority of the population is rural, with the Indian, who
is usually and by tradition a farmer, making up four-fifths of the population.
Since 1925, as a result of price declines in sugar and cotton and of
diminishing yields, mining exports have greatly exceeded agricultural. The
rapid rise in exports of petroleum and derivatives from Lp. [libras peruanas]
1,387,778 in 1916 to Lp. 7,421,128 in 1926 has been a significant factor.
But farm production is only partially represented by export products: cotton,
sugar and derivatives, wool, and rubber. Agriculture and livestock supply
domestic consumption, whereas mining products are almost entirely
exported. Imports of food and beverages reached Lp. 4,148,311 in 1925. The
largest item in these imports is wheat, which the country still does not
produce in sufficient quantities. There are no complete statistics on domestic
production and consumption. Estimating a daily per capita consumption of
50 centavos on agricultural and livestock products, more than Lp.
84,000,000 was spent by the population of 4,609,999 counted in 1896. If it
is assumed that there are now 5,000,000 inhabitants, domestic consumption
reaches a total of Lp. 91,250,000. These figures show the enormous
importance of agricultural and livestock production in the country’s
economy.

37
 Mining, on the other hand, employs a small number of workers—28,592
in 1926, according to the Extracto estadístico. The manufacturing industry
also uses little labor.7 Sugar cane haciendas alone employed 22,367 men and
1,173 women in their fields in 1926; cotton haciendas used 40,557 laborers
in 1922–1923, the last period for which there are published statistics; and
rice haciendas used 11,332 laborers in 1924–1925.
Most agricultural and livestock products consumed in the country come
from the valleys and tablelands of the sierra. On the coastal haciendas, food
crops amount to less than the minimum set by a law passed when food
became very expensive because landholders were growing almost nothing but
sugar and cotton in order to take advantage of the soaring prices of these two
products.
The landowning class has not been transformed into a capitalist middle
class, ally of the national economy.8 Mining, commerce, and transport are in
the hands of foreign capital. The latifundistas have been satisfied to serve as
the latter’s intermediaries in the production of sugar and cotton. This
economic system has kept agriculture to a semifeudal organization that
constitutes the heaviest burden on the country’s development.
The survival of feudalism on the coast is reflected in the stagnation and
poverty of urban life. There are few towns and cities on the coast, and the
village as such hardly exists except for the occasional cluster of plots that still
adorns the countryside in the midst of a feudalized agrarian structure.
In Europe, the village is descended from the fief.9 On the Peruvian coast,
the village does not exist because the fief is still preserved virtually intact.
The hacienda with its more or less classic manor house and usually wretched
workers’ compound [ranchería], and the sugar mill with its outbuildings
[colcas], are the typical rural community. This lack of villages and scarcity of
towns prolongs the desert into the cultivated and fertile land of the valley.
Cities, according to a law of economic geography, are formed regularly in
valleys where roads intersect. The rich and broad valleys of the Peruvian
coast, which head the statistics of national production, have not yet
produced a city. At their crossroads or railway stations may be found
scattered towns—torpid, malaria-ridden and feeble, lacking either rural
health or urban attire. And in some cases, as in the Chicama Valley, the
latifundium has begun to suffocate the city. Capitalist enterprise, more than
the castle or the feudal domain, opposed the prerogatives of the city by
competing for its business and robbing it of its function.

38
 Within European feudalism, the elements of growth—the factors of
town life—were, in spite of the rural economy, much greater than within
criollo semifeudalism. The countryside, however secluded, needed the town.
It had, above all, a surplus of food crops to dispose of. Instead, the coastal
hacienda grows cotton or sugar cane for distant markets. Assured of the
transport of these products, it has little interest in relations with its
surroundings. Food crops, when not completely eliminated by the cultivation
of cotton or sugar cane, are raised only for consumption on the hacienda. In
many valleys, the town receives nothing from and possesses nothing in the
countryside. Therefore, it lives in poverty from a few urban trades, from the
men it sends to work at the hacienda, and from its wearisome employment
as a way station for the many thousands of tons of agricultural products that
pass through it annually. The rare stretch of farmland supporting an
independent and industrious community is an oasis in a succession of fiefs
that, defaced by machinery and rails, have lost the stamp of a noble tradition.
In many cases, the hacienda completely closes its doors to outside trade:
only its company stores are allowed to supply its workers. On the one hand,
this practice indicates that the peasant is treated as a thing and not as a
person; on the other, it prevents the town from fulfilling the role that would
maintain it and guarantee its development within the rural economy of the
valleys. The hacienda, by taking over the trade and transport as well as land
and dependent industries, deprives the town of a livelihood and condemns it
to a sordid and meager existence.
The industries and commerce of cities are subject to supervision,
regulations, municipal taxes. Community life and services are sustained by
their activity. The latifundium, however, escapes these rules and levies. It can
compete unfairly with urban industry and commerce and is in a position to
ruin them.
The favorite legal argument for large estates is that they are essential to
the creation of great production centers. Modern agriculture, it is claimed,
requires expensive machinery, huge investments, and expert management.
Small properties cannot meet these needs. Exports of sugar and cotton
safeguard Peru’s balance of payments.
But the crops, the machinery, and the exports that the latifundistas boast
of are far from being their own achievement. Production of cotton and sugar
has flourished thanks to the stimulus of credits obtained for that purpose
and on the basis of appropriated lands and cheap labor. The financial
organization of these crops, which depend for development and profit on the

39
world market, is not the result of either the foresight or the cooperation of
landowners. The latifundium simply has adapted itself to outside incentives.
Foreign capital, in its perennial search for land, labor, and markets, has
financed and directed the work of landowners by lending them money
secured by the latters’ products and properties. Many mortgaged estates
already are being directly administered by exporting firms.
The country’s landowning aristocracy has most clearly shown its
incompetence in the department of La Libertad, where it owned large valley
haciendas. Many years of capitalist development brought the following
results: the concentration of the sugar industry in the region of two huge
sugar mills, Cartavio and Casa Grande, both foreign-owned; the absorption
of domestic business by these two enterprises, especially the second, which
also monopolized import trade; and the commercial decline of the city of
Trujillo and the bankruptcy of most of its import firms.10
The old landowners of La Libertad, with their provincialism and feudal
customs, have not been able to resist the expansion of foreign capital
enterprise, with its scientific methods, discipline, and determination. In
general, all this has been lacking in local landholders, some of whom could
have accomplished as much as the German industrialists if they had had the
same entrepreneurial temperament.
The criollo landowner is handicapped by his Spanish heritage and
education, which keeps him from clearly perceiving and understanding all
that distinguishes capitalism from feudalism. The moral, political, and
psychological elements of capitalism apparently have not found a favorable
climate here.11 The capitalist, or rather the criollo landowner, believes in
income before production. The love of adventure, the drive to create, and the
organizing ability that characterize the authentic capitalist are almost
unknown in Peru.
Capitalist concentration has been preceded by a stage of free
competition. Great modern property does not arise, therefore, from great
feudal property, as the criollo landowner probably imagines; all to the
contrary, it could only emerge after the great feudal property had been
broken up and dissolved. Capitalism is an urban phenomenon; it has the
spirit of the industrial, manufacturing, mercantile town. Therefore, one of its
first acts was the liberation of land and the destruction of the fief. The
development of the city had to be sustained by the free activity of the
peasant.

40
 In Peru, the meaning of republican emancipation has been violated by
entrusting the creation of a capitalist economy to the spirit of the fief—the
antithesis and negation of the spirit of the town.
Notes
1 Commenting on Donoso Cortés, the late Italian critic Piero Gobetti described Spain
as “a race of colonizers, of seekers after gold, known to take slaves in case of hardship.”
Gobetti was mistaken in considering mere conquistadors to be colonizers. But his next
observation merits reflection: “The cult of the bullfight is an aspect of this love of
entertainment and of this Catholicism of spectacle and form; it is natural that an emphasis
on the purely decorative should be the ideal of the man in rags who puts on lordly airs and
cannot follow either the Anglo-Saxon teachings of resolute and stubborn heroism or the
French tradition of subtle skill. The Spanish ideal of an arrogant nobility borders on
indolence and, therefore, finds its proper expression and symbol in the court.”
2 “If Europe is obliged to recognize the de facto governments of America,” said Viscount

Chateaubriand, “its entire policy should be aimed at establishing monarchies instead of

these republics that will send us their principles along with the products of their soil.”
3 J. Caillaux, Whither France? Whither Europe?, trans. H. B. Armstrong (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1923).

4 Extracto estadístico del Perú. From 1924 to 1926, trade with Great Britain fell farther

and farther behind trade with the United States. By 1926, Peru’s imports from Great
Britain had declined to 15.6 percent of total imports and its exports to Great Britain
represented only 28.5 percent. On the other hand, imports from the United States had
reached 46.2 percent, which more than offset the drop in exports to 34.5 percent.
5 See the sixth essay, “Regionalism and Centralism,” footnote no. 4.
6 Peru’s foreign debt, according to the Extracto estadístico of 1926, went up to Lp. [libras

peruanas] 10,341,906 by December 31 of this year. Since then, under the law that
authorizes the president to place government bonds abroad at a price no lower than 86
percent and with interest no higher than 6 per cent, a loan of 50 million dollars has been
floated in New York in order to refinance previous loans contracted with interest at 7-1/2 to
8 percent.
7 The Extracto estadístico del Perú furnishes no data on this, nor does the Estadística

industrial del Perú (1922), of Carlos P. Jiménez give any overall figure.
8 The conditions in which the country’s agricultural life develops are studied in the third

essay, “The Problem of Land.”

9 Lucien Romier writes: “The village is not the result of a grouping together, as is the

town or city; it is produced by the breaking up of an old feudal domain, of an estate, or of

the lay or church property surrounding a bell tower. The unitary origin of the village has
come down to us in such current expressions as ‘the spirit of the bell tower’ and in the
traditional rivalries between parishes. It also explains the striking fact that old roads skirt
villages as though they were private properties rather than go through them.” Explication de
Notre Temps (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1925), pp. 37–38.

41
 10 Alcides Spelucín recently has published in a Lima newspaper a very objective and

thoughtful discussion of the causes and the stages of this crisis. Although his criticism
stresses the invasive action of foreign capital, he concludes by placing the primary
responsibility on local capitalism for its absenteeism and its lack of vision and energy.
11 Capitalism is not just a technique; it is also a spirit. This spirit, which reaches its

height in the Anglo-Saxon countries, is weak, incipient, and rudimentary in Peru.

42
 2
The Problem of the Indian
A New Approach
ANY TREATMENT OF THE PROBLEM of the Indian—written or
verbal—that fails or refuses to recognize it as a socio-economic problem is
but a sterile, theoretical exercise destined to be completely discredited. Good
faith is no justification. Almost all such treatments have served merely to
mask or distort the reality of the problem. The socialist critic exposes and
defines the problem because he looks for its causes in the country’s economy
and not in its administrative, legal, or ecclesiastic machinery, its racial
dualism or pluralism, or its cultural or moral conditions. The problem of the
Indian is rooted in the land tenure system of our economy. Any attempt to
solve it with administrative or police measures, through education or by a
road building program, is superficial and secondary as long as the feudalism
of the gamonales continues to exist.1
Gamonalismo necessarily invalidates any law or regulation for the
protection of the Indian. The hacienda owner, the latifundista, is a feudal
lord. The written law is powerless against his authority, which is supported
by custom and habit. Unpaid labor is illegal, yet unpaid and even forced
labor survive in the latifundium. The judge, the subprefect, the commissary,
the teacher, the tax collector, all are in bondage to the landed estate. The law
cannot prevail against the gamonales. Any official who insisted on applying it
would be abandoned and sacrificed by the central government; here, the
influences of gamonalismo are all-powerful, acting directly or through
parliament with equal effectiveness.
A fresh approach to the problem of the Indian, therefore, ought to be
much more concerned with the consequences of the land tenure system than
with drawing up protective legislation. The new trend was started in 1918 by
Dr. José A. Encinas in his Contribución a una legislación tutelar indígena, and
it has steadily gained strength.2 But by the very nature of his study, Dr.
Encinas could not frame a socio-economic program. Since his proposals
were designed to protect Indian property, they had to be limited to legal
objectives. Outlining an indigenous homestead act, Dr. Encinas
recommended the distribution of state and church lands. Although he did
not mention expropriating the land of the latifundium gamonales, he

43
repeatedly and conclusively denounced the effects of the latifundium system3
and, thereby, to some extent ushered in the present socio-economic approach
to the Indian question.
This approach rejects and disqualifies any thesis that confines the
question to one or another of the following unilateral criteria: administrative,
legal, ethnic, moral, educational, ecclesiastic.
The oldest and most obvious mistake is, unquestionably, that of reducing
the protection of the Indian to an ordinary administrative matter. From the
days of Spanish colonial legislation, wise and detailed ordinances, worked
out after conscientious study, have been quite useless. The republic, since
independence, has been prodigal in its decrees, laws, and provisions intended
to protect the Indian against exaction and abuse. The gamonal of today, like
the encomendero of yesterday, however, has little to fear from administrative
theory; he knows that its practice is altogether different.
The individualistic character of the republic’s legislation has favored the
absorption of Indian property by the latifundium system. The situation of
the Indian, in this respect, was viewed more realistically by Spanish
legislation. But legal reform has no more practical value than administrative
reform when confronted by feudalism intact within the economic structure.
The appropriation of most communal and individual Indian property is an
accomplished fact. The experience of all countries that have evolved from
their feudal stage shows us, on the other hand, that liberal rights have not
been able to operate without the dissolution of feudalism.
The assumption that the Indian problem is ethnic is sustained by the
most outmoded repertory of imperialist ideas. The concept of inferior races
was useful to the white man’s West for purposes of expansion and conquest.
To expect that the Indian will be emancipated through a steady crossing of
the aboriginal race with white immigrants is an anti-sociological naiveté that
could only occur to the primitive mentality of an importer of merino sheep.
The people of Asia, who are in no way superior to the Indians, have not
needed any transfusion of European blood in order to assimilate the most
dynamic and creative aspects of Western culture. The degeneration of the
Peruvian Indian is a cheap invention of sophists who serve feudal interests.
The tendency to consider the Indian problem as a moral one embodies a
liberal, humanitarian, enlightened nineteenth-century attitude that in the
political sphere of the Western world inspires and motivates the “leagues of
human rights.” The anti-slavery conferences and societies in Europe that
have denounced more or less futilely the crimes of the colonizing nations are

44
born of this tendency, which always has trusted too much in its appeals to
the conscience of civilization. González Prada was not immune to this hope
when he wrote that “the condition of the Indian can improve in two ways:
either the heart of the oppressor will be moved to take pity and recognize the
rights of the oppressed, or the spirit of the oppressed will find the valor
needed to turn on the oppressors.”4 The Pro-Indian Association (1900–
1917) represented the same hope, although it owed its real effectiveness to
the concrete and immediate measures taken by its directors in defense of the
Indian. This policy was due in large measure to the practical, typically Saxon
idealism of Dora Mayer,5 and the work of the Association became well
known in Peru and the rest of the world. Humanitarian teachings have not
halted or hampered European imperialism, nor have they reformed its
methods. The struggle against imperialism now relies only on the solidarity
and strength of the liberation movement of the colonial masses. This concept
governs anti-imperialist action in contemporary Europe, action that is
supported by liberals like Albert Einstein and Romain Rolland and,
therefore, cannot be considered exclusively Socialist.
On a moral and intellectual plane, the church took a more energetic or at
least a more authoritative stand centuries ago. This crusade, however,
achieved only very wise laws and provisions. The lot of the Indian remained
substantially the same. González Prada, whose point of view, as we know,
was not strictly Socialist, looked for the explanation of its failure in the
economic essentials: “It could not have happened otherwise; exploitation was
the official order; it was pretended that evils were humanely perpetrated and
injustices committed equitably. To wipe out abuses, it would have been
necessary to abolish land appropriation and forced labor, in brief, to change
the entire colonial regime. Without the toil of the American Indian, the
coffers of the Spanish treasury would have been emptied.”6 In any event,
religious tenets were more likely to succeed than liberal tenets. The former
appealed to a noble and active Spanish Catholicism, whereas the latter tried
to make itself heard by a weak and formalist criollo liberalism.
But today a religious solution is unquestionably the most outdated and
antihistoric of all. Its representatives—unlike their distant, how very distant,
teachers—are not concerned with obtaining a new declaration of the rights
of Indians, with adequate authority and ordinances; the missionary is merely
assigned the role of mediator between the Indian and the gamonal.7 If the
church could not accomplish its task in a medieval era, when its spiritual and
intellectual capacity could be measured by friars like Las Casas, how can it

45
succeed with the elements it commands today? The Seventh-Day Adventists,
in that respect, have taken the lead from the Catholic clergy, whose cloisters
attract fewer and fewer evangelists.
The belief that the Indian problem is one of education does not seem to
be supported by even a strictly and independently pedagogical criterion.
Education is now more than ever aware of social and economic factors. The
modern pedagogue knows perfectly well that education is not just a question
of school and teaching methods. Economic and social circumstances
necessarily condition the work of the teacher. Gamonalismo is fundamentally
opposed to the education of the Indian; it has the same interest in keeping
the Indian ignorant as it has in encouraging him to depend on alcohol.8 The
modern school—assuming that in the present situation it could be
multiplied at the same rate as the rural school-age population—is
incompatible with the feudal latifundium. The mechanics of the Indian’s
servitude would altogether cancel the action of the school if the latter, by a
miracle that is inconceivable within social reality, should manage to preserve
its pedagogical mission under a feudal regime. The most efficient and
grandiose teaching system could not perform these prodigies. School and
teacher are doomed to be debased under the pressure of the feudal regime,
which cannot be reconciled with the most elementary concept of progress
and evolution. When this truth becomes partially understood, the saving
formula is thought to be discovered in boarding schools for Indians. But the
glaring inadequacy of this formula is self-evident in view of the tiny
percentage of the indigenous school population that can be boarded in these
schools.
The pedagogical solution, advocated by many in good faith, has been
discarded officially. Educators, I repeat, can least afford to ignore economic
and social reality. At present, it only exists as a vague and formless suggestion
which no body or doctrine wants to adopt.
The new approach locates the problem of the Indian in the land tenure
system.
Notes
1 Because of the length of this note, it has been placed at the end of the chapter. Ed.
2 González Prada had already said in one of his early speeches as an intellectual agitator
that the real Peru was made up of the millions of Indians living in the Andean valleys. The
most recent edition of Horas de lucha includes a chapter called “Nuestros indios” that shows
him to be the forerunner of a new social conscience: “Nothing changes a man’s psychology
more swiftly and radically than the acquisition of property; once his viscera are purged of
slavery, he grows by leaps and bounds. By simply owning something, a man climbs a few

46
rungs in the social ladder, because classes are divided into groups classified by wealth.
Contrary to the law of aerostatics, what weighs the most goes up the most. To those who say
schools the reply is schools and bread. The Indian question is economic and social, rather
than pedagogic.”
3 “Improving the economic condition of the Indian,” writes Encinas, “is the best way to

raise his social condition. His economic strength and all his activity are found in the land.
To take him away from the land is to alter profoundly and dangerously the ancestral
tendency of his race. In no other place and in no other way can he find a better source of
wealth than in the land.” Contribución a una legislación tutelar indígena, p. 39. Encina says
elsewhere (p. 13): “Legal institutions related to property are derived from economic
necessities. Our civil code is not in harmony with economic principles because it is
individualistic. Unrestricted property rights have created the latifundium to the detriment of
Indian property. Ownership of unproductive land has condemned a race to serfdom and
misery.”
4 González Prada, “Nuestros indios,” in Horas de lucha, 2nd ed.
5 Dora Mayer de Zulen summarizes the character of the Pro-Indian Association in this

way: “In specific and practical terms, the Pro-Indian Association signifies for historians
what Mariátegui assumes to be an experiment in the redemption of the backward and
enslaved indigenous race through an outside protective body that without charge and by
legal means has sought to serve it as a lawyer in its claims against the government.” But, as
appears in the same interesting review of the Association’s work, Dora Mayer believes that it
tried above all to create a sense of responsibility. “One hundred years after the republican
emanciation of Peru, the conscience of the governors, the gamonales, the clergy, and the
educated and semi-educated public continued to disregard its responsibilities to a people
who not only deserved philanthropic deliverance from inhuman treatment, but to whom
Peruvian patriotism owed a debt of national honor, because the Inca race had lost the
respect of its own and other countries.” The best result of the Pro-Indian Association,
however, was, according to Dora Mayer’s faithful testimony, its influence in awakening the
Indian. “What needed to happen was happening; the Indians themselves were learning to
do without the protection of outsiders and to find ways to redress their grievances.”
6 González Prada, Horas de lucha.
7 “Only the missionary,” writes José León y Bueno, one of the leaders of Acción Social de

la Juventud, “can redeem and make restitution to the Indian. Only he can return to Peru its
unity, dignity, and strength by acting as the tireless intermediary between the gamonal and
the resident hacienda laborer and between the latifundista and the communal farmer; by
preventing the arbitrary acts of the governor, who heeds solely the political interests of the
criollo cacique; by explaining in simple terms the objective lessons of nature and interpreting
life in its fatality and liberty; by condemning excesses during celebrations; by cutting off
carnal appetites at their source; and by revealing to the Indian race its lofty mission.” Boletín
de la A.S.J., May, 1928.
8 It is well known that the production—and also the smuggling—of cane alcohol is a

profitable business of the hacendados of the sierra. Even those on the coast exploit this

47
market to some extent. The alcoholism of the peon and the resident laborer is indispensable
to the prosperity of our great agricultural properties.
NOTE 1
In my prologue to Tempestad en los Andes by Valcárcel, an impassioned and militant
champion of the Indian, I have explained my point of view as follows:
“Faith in the renaissance of the Indian is not pinned to the material process of
‘Westernizing’ the Quechua country. The soul of the Indian is not raised by the white man’s
civilization or alphabet but by the myth, the idea, of the Socialist revolution. The hope of
the Indian is absolutely revolutionary. That same myth, that same idea, are the decisive
agents in the awakening of other ancient peoples or races in ruin: the Hindus, the Chinese,
et cetera. Universal history today tends as never before to chart its course with a common
quadrant. Why should the Inca people, who constructed the most highly-developed and
harmonious communistic system, be the only ones unmoved by this worldwide emotion?
The consanguinity of the Indian movement with world revolutionary currents is too evident
to need documentation. I have said already that I reached an understanding and
appreciation of the Indian through socialism. The case of Valcárcel proves the validity of my
personal experience. Valcárcel, a man with a different intellectual background, influenced by
traditionalist tastes and oriented by another type of guidance and studies, politically
resolved his concern for the Indian in socialism. In this book, he tells us that ‘the Indian
proletariat awaits its Lenin.’ A Marxist would not state it differently.
“As long as the vindication of the Indian is kept on a philosophical and cultural plane, it
lacks a concrete historical base. To acquire such a base—that is, to acquire physical reality—
it must be converted into an economic and political vindication. Socialism has taught us
how to present the problem of the Indian in new terms. We have ceased to consider it
abstractly as an ethnic or moral problem and we now recognize it concretely as a social,
economic, and political problem. And, for the first time, we have felt it to be clearly defined.
“Those who have not yet broken free of the limitations of a liberal bourgeois education
take an abstractionist and literary position. They idly discuss the racial aspects of the
problem, disguising its reality under a pseudoidealistic language and forgetting that it is
essentially dominated by politics and, therefore, by economics. They counter revolutionary
dialectics with a confused critical jargon, according to which a political reform or event
cannot solve the Indian problem because its immediate effects would not reach a multitude
of complicated customs and vices that can only be changed through a long and normal
evolutionary process.
“History, fortunately, dispels all doubts and clears up all ambiguities. The conquest was
a political event. Although it abruptly interrupted the autonomous evolution of the
Quechua nation, it did not involve a sudden substitution of the conquerors’ law and customs
for those of the natives. Nevertheless, this political event opened up a new period in every
aspect of their spiritual and material existence. The change in regime altered the life of the
Quechua people to its very foundations. Independence was another political event. It, too,
did not bring about a radical transformation in the economic and social structure of Peru;
but it initiated, notwithstanding, another period of our history. Although it did not
noticeably improve the condition of the Indian, having hardly touched the colonial economic
infrastructure, it did change his legal situation and clear the way for his political and social

48
emancipation. If the republic did not continue along this road, the fault lies entirely with the
class that profited from independence, which was potentially very rich in values and creative
principles.
“The problem of the Indian must no longer be obscured and confused by the perpetual
arguments of the throng of lawyers and writers who are consciously or unconsciously in
league with the latifundistas. The moral and material misery of the Indian is too clearly the
result of the economic and social system that has oppressed him for centuries. This system,
which succeeded colonial feudalism, is gamonalismo. While it rules supreme, there can be no
question of redeeming the Indian.
“The term gamonalismo designates more than just a social and economic category: that
of the latifundistas or large landowners. It signifies a whole phenomenon. Gamonalismo is
represented not only by the gamonales but by a long hierarchy of officials, intermediaries,
agents, parasites, et cetera. The literate Indian who enters the service of gamonalismo turns
into an exploiter of his own race. The central factor of the phenomenon is the hegemony of
the semifeudal landed estate in the policy and mechanism of the government. Therefore, it is
this factor that should be acted upon if the evil is to be attacked at its roots and not merely
observed in its temporary or subsidiary manifestations.
“Gamonalismo or feudalism could have been eliminated by the republic within its liberal
and capitalist principles. But for reasons I have already indicated, those principles have not
effectively and fully directed our historic process. They were sabotaged by the very class
charged with applying them and for more than a century they have been powerless to rescue
the Indian from a servitude that was an integral part of the feudal system. It cannot be
hoped that today, when those principles are in crisis all over the world, they can suddenly
acquire in Peru an unwonted creative vitality.
“Revolutionary and even reformist thought can no longer be liberal; they must be
Socialist. Socialism appears in our history not because of chance, imitation, or fashion, as
some superficial minds would believe, but because it was historically inevitable. On the one
hand, we who profess socialism struggle logically and consistently for the reorganization of
our country on Socialist bases; proving that the economic and political regime that we
oppose has turned into an instrument for colonizing the country on behalf of foreign
imperialist capitalism, we declare that this is a moment in our history when it is impossible
to be really nationalist and revolutionary without being Socialist. On the other hand, there
does not exist and never has existed in Peru a progressive bourgeoisie, endowed with
national feelings, that claims to be liberal and democratic and that derives its policy from the
postulates of its doctrine.”

49
 3
The Problem of Land
The Agrarian Problem and the Indian Problem
THOSE OF US WHO APPROACH and define the Indian problem
from a Socialist point of view must start out by declaring the complete
obsolescence of the humanitarian and philanthropic points of view which,
like a prolongation of the apostolic battle of Las Casas, continued to
motivate the old pro-Indian campaign. We shall try to establish the basically
economic character of the problem. First, we protest against the instinctive
attempt of the criollo or mestizo to reduce it to an exclusively administrative,
pedagogical, ethnic, or moral problem in order to avoid at all cost
recognizing its economic aspect. Therefore, it would be absurd to accuse us
of being romantic or literary. By identifying it as primarily a socio-economic
problem, we are taking the least romantic and literary position possible. We
are not satisfied to assert the Indian’s right to education, culture, progress,
love, and heaven. We begin by categorically asserting his right to land. This
thoroughly materialistic claim should suffice to distinguish us from the heirs
or imitators of the evangelical fervor of the great Spanish friar, whom, on the
other hand, our materialism does not prevent us from admiring and
esteeming.
The problem of land is obviously too bound up with the Indian problem
to be conveniently mitigated or diminished. Quite the contrary. As for
myself, I shall try to present it in unmistakable and clearcut terms.
The agrarian problem is first and foremost the problem of eliminating
feudalism in Peru, which should have been done by the democratic-
bourgeois regime that followed the War of Independence. But in its one
hundred years as a republic, Peru has not had a genuine bourgeois class, a
true capitalist class. The old feudal class—camouflaged or disguised as a
republican bourgeoisie—has kept its position. The policy of disentailment,
initiated by the War of Independence as a logical consequence of its ideology,
did not lead to the development of small property. The old landholding class
had not lost its surpremacy. The survival of the latifundistas, in practice,
preserved the latifundium. Disentailment struck at the Indian community.
During a century of Republican rule, great agricultural property actually has
grown stronger and expanded, despite the theoretical liberalism of our

50
constitution and the practical necessities of the development of our capitalist
economy.
There are two expressions of feudalism that survive: the latifundium and
servitude. Inseparable and of the same substance, their analysis leads us to
the conclusion that the servitude oppressing the indigenous race cannot be
abolished unless the latifundium is abolished.
When the agrarian problem is presented in these terms, it cannot be
easily distorted. It appears in all its magnitude as a socio-economic, and
therefore a political, problem, to be dealt with by men who move in this
sphere of acts and ideas. And it is useless to try to convert it, for example,
into a technical-agricultural problem for agronomists.
Everyone must know that according to individualist ideology, the liberal
solution to this problem would be the breaking up of the latifundium to
create small property. But there is so much ignorance of the elementary
principles of socialism that it is worthwhile repeating that this formula—the
breaking up of the latifundium in favor of small property—is neither
utopian, nor heretical, nor revolutionary, nor Bolshevik, nor avant-garde, but
orthodox, constitutional, democratic, capitalist, and bourgeois. It is based on
the same liberal body of ideas that produced the constitutional laws of all
democratic-bourgeois states. In the countries of Central and Eastern Europe
—Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Poland, Bulgaria, et cetera—agrarian laws have
been passed limiting land ownership, in principle, to a maximum of five
hundred hectares. Here, the Great War razed the last ramparts of feudalism
with the sanction of the capitalist West, which since then has used precisely
this bloc of anti-Bolshevik countries as a bulwark against Russia.
In keeping with my ideological position, I believe that the moment for
attempting the liberal, individualist method in Peru has already passed.
Aside from reasons of doctrine, I consider that our agrarian problem has a
special character due to an indisputable and concrete factor: the survival of
the Indian “community” and of elements of practical socialism in indigenous
agriculture and life.
If those who hold a democratic-liberal doctrine are truly seeking a
solution to the problem of the Indian that, above all, will free him from
servitude, they can turn to the Czechoslovakian or Rumanian experience
rather than the Mexican example, which they may find dangerous given its
inspiration and process. For them it is still time to advocate a liberal formula.
They would at least ensure that discussion of the agrarian problem by the
new generation would not altogether lack the liberal philosophy that,

51
according to written history, has governed the life of Peru since the
foundation of the republic.
Colonialism—Feudalism
The problem of land sheds light on the Socialist or vanguardist attitude
toward the remains of the viceroyalty. Literary perricholismo does not interest
us except as an indication or reflection of economic colonialism. The colonial
heritage that we want to do away with is not really the one of romantic
damsels screened from sight behind shawls or shutters, but the one of a
feudal system with its gamonalismo, latifundium, and servitude. Colonial
literature—nostalgic evocation of the viceroyalty and its pomp—is for me
only the mediocre product of a spirit engendered and nourished by that
regime. The viceroyalty does not survive in the perricholismo of troubadors
and storytellers. It survives in a feudalism that contains the germs of an
undeclared capitalism. We decry not our Spanish but our feudal legacy.
Spain brought us the Middle Ages: the Inquisition, feudalism, et cetera.
Later it brought us the Counter Reformation: a reactionary spirit, a Jesuit
method, a scholastic casuistry. We have painfully rid ourselves of most of
these afflictions by assimilating Western culture, sometimes obtained
through Spain itself. But we are still burdened with their economic
foundations embedded in the interests of a class whose hegemony was not
destroyed by the War of Independence. The roots of feudalism are intact and
they are responsible for the lag in our capitalist development.
The land tenure system determines the political and administrative
system of the nation. The agrarian problem, which the republic has not yet
been able to solve, dominates all other problems. Democratic and liberal
institutions cannot flourish or operate in a semifeudal economy.
The subordination of the Indian problem to the problem of land is even
more absolute, for special reasons. The indigenous race is a race of farmers.
The Inca people were peasants, normally engaged in agriculture and
shepherding. Their industries and arts were typically domestic and rural.
The principle that life springs from the soil was truer in the Peru of the Incas
than in any other country. The most notable public works and collective
enterprises of Tawantinsuyo were for military, religious or agricultural
purposes. The irrigation canals of the sierra and the coast and the
agricultural terraces of the Andes remain the best evidence of the degree of
economic organization reached by Inca Peru. Its civilization was agrarian in
all its important aspects. Valcárcel, in his study of the economic life of
Tawantinsuyo, writes that “the land, in native tradition, is the common

52
mother; from her womb come not only food but man himself. Land provides
all wealth. The cult of Mama Pacha is on a par with the worship of the sun
and, like the sun, Mother Earth represents no one in particular. Joined in the
aboriginal ideology, these two concepts gave birth to agrarianism, which
combines communal ownership of land and the universal religion of the
sun.”1
Inca communism, which cannot be negated or disparaged for having
developed under the autocratic regime of the Incas, is therefore designated as
agrarian communism. The essential traits of the Inca economy, according to
the careful definition of our historical process by César Ugarte, were the
following:
Collective ownership of farmland by the ayllu or group of related families, although the
property was divided into individual and non-transferable lots; collective ownership of
waters, pasture, and woodlands by the marca or tribe, or the federation of ayllus settled
around a village; cooperative labor; individual allotment of harvests and produce.2
Colonization unquestionably must bear the responsibility for the
disappearance of this economy, together with the culture it nourished, not
because it destroyed autochthonous forms but because it brought no
superior substitutes. The colonial regime disrupted and demolished the Inca
agrarian economy without replacing it with an economy of higher yields.
Under the indigenous aristocracy, the natives made up a nation of ten million
men, with an integrated government that efficiently ruled all its territory;
under a foreign aristocracy, the natives became a scattered and anarchic mass
of a million men reduced to servitude and peonage.
In this respect, demographic data are the most convincing and decisive.
Although the Inca regime may be censured in the name of modern liberal
concepts of liberty and justice, the positive and material historical fact is that
it assured the subsistence and growth of a population that came to ten
million when the conquistadors arrived in Peru, and that this population
after three centuries of Spanish domination had fallen to one million.
Colonization stands condemned not from any abstract, theoretical, or moral
standpoint of justice, but from the practical, concrete, and material
standpoint of utility.
Colonization, failing to organize even a feudal economy in Peru,
introduced elements of a slave economy.
The Policy of Colonization: Depopulation and Slavery
It is easy to explain why the Spanish colonial regime was incapable of
organizing a purely feudal economy in Peru. It is impossible to organize an

53
economy without a clear understanding and sure appreciation, if not of its
principles, at least of its needs. An indigenous, integrated economy develops
alone. It spontaneously determines its own institutions. But a colonial
economy is established on bases that are in part artificial and foreign,
subordinate to the interests of the colonizer. Its normal development
depends on the colonizer’s ability either to adapt himself to local conditions
or to change them.
The Spanish colonizer conspicuously lacked this ability. He had an
exaggerated idea of the economic value of natural wealth and absolutely no
idea of the economic value of man.
With the practice of exterminating the indigenous population and
destroying its institutions, the conquistadors impoverished and bled, more
than they could realize, the fabulous country they had won for the king of
Spain. Later, a nineteenth-century South American statesman, impressed by
the spectacle of a semi-deserted continent, was to prescribe an economic
principle for his epoch: “To govern is to populate.” The Spanish colonizer,
completely alien to this criterion, systematically depopulated Peru.
The persecution and enslavement of the Indian rapidly consumed
resources that had been unbelievably underestimated by the colonizers:
human capital. As the Spaniards found that they daily needed more labor for
the exploitation of the wealth they had conquered, they resorted to the most
antisocial and primitive system of colonization: the importation of slaves.
The colonizer thereby renounced, on the other hand, an undertaking that
the conquistador had thought feasible: the assimilation of the Indian. The
Negro race he imported had to serve, among other things, to reduce the
demographic imbalance between white and Indian.
The greed for precious metals—entirely logical in a century when distant
lands could not send Europe any other product—drove the Spaniards to
engage principally in mining. Therefore, they sought to convert to mining a
people who had been essentially agricultural under the Inca and even before,
and they ended by having to subject the Indian to the harsh law of slavery.
Agricultural labor, under a naturally feudal system, would have made the
Indian a serf bound to the land. Labor in mines and cities was to turn him
into a slave. With the mita, the Spaniards established a system of forced
labor and uprooted the Indian from his soil and his customs.
The importation of Negro slaves, which supplied laborers and domestic
servants to the Spanish population on the coast, where the viceroyal court

54
was located, helped mask its economic and political error from Spain.
Slavery was injected into the regime, corrupting and weakening it.
In his study of the social situation in colonial Peru, Professor Javier
Prado, whose premises I naturally do not share, reached conclusions that
deal with an aspect of precisely this failure of colonization:
The Negro, considered as commercial merchandise and imported to America as a
human labor machine, was to water the earth with the sweat of his brow, but without
making it fruitful. It is the pattern of elimination followed by civilization in the history of all
peoples. The slave is unproductive in his labor, as he was in the Roman Empire and as he
has been in Peru. In the social organism he is a cancer that erodes national sentiments and
ideals. In this way, the slave has disappeared from Peru, leaving behind barren fields and
having taken revenge on the white race by mixing his blood with the latter’s. By this vicious
alliance, he debased the moral and intellectual judgment of those who were first his cruel
masters and later his godfathers, companions, and brothers.3
The colonizer was not guilty of having brought an inferior race—this
was the customary reproach of sociologists of fifty years ago—but of having
brought slaves. Slavery was doomed to fail, both as a means of economic
exploitation and organization of the colony and as a reinforcement of a
regime based only on conquest and force.
Coastal agriculture still has not rid itself of its colonial defects, which
derive largely from the slave system. The coastal latifundista never has asked
for men, but for labor, to till his fields. Therefore, when he ran out of Negro
slaves he found their successors in Chinese coolies. This other encomendero
type of importation, like that of the Negroes, conflicted with the normal
formation of a liberal economy consistent with the political order established
by the War of Independence. César Ugarte recognizes this in his study of the
Peruvian economy when he states flatly that Peru needed “men,” not “labor.”4
The Spanish Colonizer
Colonization’s inability to organize the Peruvian economy on its natural
agricultural bases is explained by the kind of colonizer that came to Peru.
Whereas in North America colonization planted the seeds of the spirit and
economy then growing in Europe and representing the future, the Spaniard
brought to America the effects and methods of an already declining spirit
and economy that belonged to the past. This thesis may seem overly
simplified to those who look only at its economic aspect and who are,
unknowingly, the survivors of old-fashioned scholarly rhetoric. They share
the common weakness of our historians: an incomprehension of economic
reality. For this reason, I was glad to find in José Vasconcelos’ recent book,

55
Indología, an opinion that has the virtue of coming from a philosopher who
cannot be accused of too much Marxism or too little Hispanism.
If there were not so many other causes of both a moral and physical order that amply
explain the apparently reckless spectacle of the enormous progress of the Saxons in the
North and the slow, aimless pace of the Latins in the South, a mere comparison of the two
property systems would suffice to explain this contrast. In the North, there were no kings to
dispose of another’s land as though it were their own. Without any special favors from their
monarchs and in a sort of moral rebellion against the king of England, the colonizers of the
north proceeded to develop a system of private property under which each one paid the
price of his land and occupied only as much as he could cultivate. In place of encomiendas,
there were farms. In place of a military and landed aristocracy descended from a servile and
murderous nobility, there developed a democracy that at first followed only the French
precepts of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The men of the north conquered virgin forest, but
the general who led them to victory against the Indians was not allowed to take possession,
in our tradition, “as far as the eye can see.” The newly won lands were not turned over to the
king for him to give away at his discretion and thereby create a nobility with double morals:
a lackey of the sovereign and an insolent oppressor of the weak masses. In the north, the
republic, which coincided with a great expansionist movement, set aside a large part of the
land and created vast reserves barred to private business. It did not use them to create
duchies or to reward patriotic services, but to promote popular education. In that way, as the
population increased, the rising value of the land paid the rising costs of education. When
new cities arose in the middle of the desert, their lots were not distributed among favorites;
they were put up for public sale, after first being subdivided according to an overall plan for
the new city, with the condition that no one person could purchase many lots at once. This
wise and just social system is the source of North America’s strength. Because we did not act
similarly, we have fallen far behind.5
Feudalism is, as Vasconcelos implies, a blight inflicted upon us by
colonialism. Countries that were able to cure themselves of it after
independence have progressed; those that are still afflicted are backward. We
already have seen how feudalism and slavery are related evils.
The Spaniard did not have the Anglo-Saxon’s conditions of colonization.
The United States is considered to be the creation of the pioneer. Spain, after
the epic of the conquest, sent us practically nothing but nobles, priests, and
adventurers. The conquistadors were of heroic stock; the colonizers were
not. Those who thought the wealth of Peru lay in its precious metals
converted mining into a factor in the liquidation of human resources and the
decline of agriculture by using forced labor. Accusations are even found in
civilismo literature. Javier Prado writes that “the state of agriculture in the
viceroyal period was absolutely deplorable, due to the absurd economic
system maintained by the Spaniards,” and that the system of exploitation was
responsible for depopulating the country.6

56
 The colonizer who worked mines instead of fields had the mentality of a
gold prospector. He was not, consequently, a creator of wealth. An economy,
a society, are the work of those who colonize and bring to life the land, not of
those who extract treasures from its subsoil. The history of the flowering and
decay of many colonial populations in the sierra, determined by the
discovery and abandonment of mines quickly exhausted or discarded, fully
demonstrates this historical law in Peru.
Perhaps the only true colonizers sent to us by Spain were the Jesuit and
Dominican missionaries. Both orders, but especially the Jesuits, created
several interesting production centers in Peru. The Jesuits introduced
religious, political, and economic elements into their enterprise, not to the
same extent, but using the same principles, as in Paraguay, where they
carried out their most famous and extensive experiment.
These religious activities were consistent not only with Jesuit policy all
over Spanish America but with the tradition of monasteries in the Middle
Ages. One of the roles of the monastery in medieval society was economic. In
a warlike and mystic era, they undertook to preserve the techniques of the
arts and crafts, refining and elaborating materials; this later served as a basis
for bourgeois industry. Georges Sorel is one of the modern economists who
best define the role of the monastery in the European economy. In his study
of the Benedictine order as the prototype of the monastery-industrial
enterprise he writes: “At that time, it was very difficult to find capital; for the
monks it was a simple matter. Donations from wealthy families rapidly
furnished them with great quantities of precious metals, thereby facilitating
primitive accumulation of capital. On the other hand, monasteries spent very
little and their rules required them to practice a strict economy that recalls
the frugal habits of the first capitalists. For a long time, monks were in a
position to engage in operations that would increase their fortune.” Sorel
tells us how, ‘after having rendered distinguished services to Europe that are
universally recognized, these institutions swiftly declined,” and how the
Benedictines “stopped being workers gathered together in an almost
capitalist workshop and became bourgeois retired businessmen who thought
only of a life of pleasant leisure in the countryside.”7
This aspect of colonization, like many others of our economy, has not yet
been studied. It has fallen to me, a convinced and declared Marxist, to point
it out. I believe this study is essential to the economic justification of any
measures adopted by future agrarian policy concerning the properties of
monasteries and religious orders, because it will conclusively establish that

57
their right of ownership, along with the real titles on which it rested, has
actually expired.
The “Community” Under the Colonial Regime
The Laws of the Indies protected indigenous property and recognized its
communist organization. Legislation relative to Indian “communities” did
not attack institutions or customs that were not opposed to the religious
spirit and political character of colonization. The agrarian communism of the
ayllu, once the Inca state was destroyed, was not incompatible with either
one. To the contrary. The Jesuits took advantage of indigenous communism
in Peru, in Mexico, and, on a still larger scale, in Paraguay, for purposes of
religious instruction. The medieval regime, in theory and practice, reconciled
feudal property with community property.
Recognition of the “communities” and of their economic customs by the
Laws of the Indies not only shows the realistic wisdom of colonial policy but
is absolutely adjusted to feudal theory and practice. The provisions of the
colonial laws on “communities,” which maintained the latters’ economic
mechanism with no trouble, reformed customs contrary to Catholic doctrine
(trial marriage, et cetera) and tended to convert the “community” into a cog
in the administrative and fiscal machinery. The “community” could and did
exist for the greater glory and profit of king and church.
We know that this legislation was mostly on paper. Indian property
could not be adequately protected because of colonial practices. All evidence
agrees on this. Ugarte makes the following statements:
Neither the farsighted measures of Toledo nor other measures that were tried out on
different occasions prevented a large part of indigenous property from falling legally or
illegally into the hands of Spaniards or criollos. One of the institutions that facilitated this
plunder was the encomienda. By law, the encomendero was in charge of collecting taxes and of
the organization and conversion to Christianity of his tributaries. But in actual fact, he was a
feudal lord, owner of lives and haciendas, for he disposed of Indians as if they were trees in a
forest and, if they died or disappeared, he took possession by one means or another of their
land. In brief, under the colonial agrarian regime, many indigenous agrarian communities
were replaced by individually owned latifundia farmed by Indians within a feudal
organization. These great feudal properties, far from being split up over the years, became
concentrated and consolidated into few holdings, because real estate was subject to
innumerable encumbrances and perpetual assessments that immobilized it, like
primogeniture, religious bequests and payments, and other entailments on the property.8
Feudalism similarly let rural communes continue in Russia, a country
that offers an interesting parallel because in its historical process it is much
closer to these agricultural and semifeudal countries than are the capitalist

58
countries of the West. Eugene Schkaff, in his study of the evolution of the
mir in Russia, writes:
Since landlords were liable for the taxes, they wanted every peasant to have
approximately the same area of land so that each one would contribute with his labor to pay
the taxes; to make sure that these taxes would be paid, they established joint responsibility,
which was extended by the government to the rest of the peasants. Land was redistributed
as the number of serfs varied. Feudalism and absolutism gradually transformed the
communal organization of the peasants into an instrument of exploitation. In this respect,
the emancipation of the serfs brought no change.9
Under the system of landlords, the Russian mir, like the Peruvian
community, was completely denaturalized. The area of land available for
community families became more and more inadequate and its distribution
increasingly faulty. The mir did not guarantee the peasant enough land to
support himself; on the other hand, it guaranteed the landlord a labor supply
for his latifundium. When serfdom was abolished in 1861, the landlords
found a way to replace it by making their peasants’ lots so small that they
could not raise enough food to live on. Russian agriculture thus kept its
feudal character. The latifundium owner turned the reform to his advantage.
He had already realized that it was in his interest to assign lots to his
peasants, provided that they were less than subsistence size. There was no
surer means of shackling the peasant to the land and, at the same time, of
keeping his emigration down to a minimum. The peasant was forced to work
on the landlord’s latifundium not only because of the miserable existence he
wrested from his miniscule plot of land but also because the landlord owned
pastures, woods, mills, water, et cetera.
The coexistence of “community” and latifundium in Peru is, therefore,
fully explained both by the characteristics of the colonial regime and by the
experience of feudal Europe. But the “community,” under this system, was
tolerated rather than protected. It was subject to the despotic law of the
latifundium, and the state could not possibly intervene. The “community”
survived, but in a condition of servitude. Previously, it had been the very
nucleus of the state, which assured it the energy necessary to the welfare of
its members. Colonialism petrified it within the great property that
supported a new state, alien to its destiny.
The liberalism of the laws of the republic, powerless to destroy feudalism
and create capitalism, later denied the “community” the formal protection
that it had been granted by the absolutism of colonial laws.
The War of Independence and Agrarian Property

59
 We shall now examine the problem of land under the republic. In order
to define my points of view about this period as regards the agrarian
question, I must emphasize an opinion that I already have expressed about
the character of the War of Independence in Peru. Independence found Peru
to be backward in the formation of its bourgeoisie. The elements of a
capitalist economy were less developed in our country than in other
countries of America, where the struggle for independence could count on an
emerging bourgeoisie.
If the War of Independence had been a movement of the indigenous
masses or had championed their cause, it would necessarily have had an
agrarian cast. It is already clearly demonstrated that the French Revolution
especially benefited the rural class and depended on it to prevent the return
of the old regime. This phenomenon, furthermore, seems in general to be
true of bourgeois as well as Socialist revolution judging by the more precise
and enduring results of the overthrow of feudalism in Central Europe and
czarist Russia. Although mainly the urban bourgeoisie and proletariat have
directed and carried out both kinds of revolution, the peasant has been the
immediate beneficiary. Particularly in Russia, the rural class has gathered the
first fruits of the Bolshevik revolution, because there was no bourgeois
revolution to destroy feudalism and absolutism and to initiate a liberal
democratic regime.
But achievement of these objectives by a liberal democratic revolution
presupposes two conditions: the existence of a bourgeoisie that knows where
it is going and why; and the existence of a revolutionary spirit in the peasant
class and, above all, of a declaration of the peasants’ right to land, in defiance
of the power of the landowning aristocracy. In Peru these conditions existed
even less than in other countries at the time of the War of Independence.
The revolution had triumphed because the peoples of the continent had been
obliged to join together against Spanish rule and because world political and
economic circumstances were in its favor. The continental nationalism of the
Spanish American revolutionaries and the enforced association of their
destinies combined to bring the most backward abreast of the most advanced
peoples in their march toward capitalism.
In his study of the Argentine and, therefore, of the American revolution,
Echevarría classifies society in the following manner:
American society was divided into three classes with conflicting interests and without
any moral or political bond. The first class was comprised of the lawyers, clergy, and
authorities; the second class was made up of those who became rich through monopolies or
good luck; the third class contained the workers, known as gauchos and compadritos in the

60
Río de la Plata, cholos in Peru, rotos in Chile, and léperos in Mexico. The Indian and African
castes were slaves who lived outside of society. The first class, with the power and privileges
of the hidalgo, produced nothing and enjoyed a life of ease; it was an aristocracy largely
composed of Peninsular Spaniards and included very few criollos. The second class also
lived in comfort, peacefully engaged in industry or commerce; it was the middle class that
sat on the municipal council. The third class was the only one that contributed manual labor
to production and it was made up of artisans and every kind of proletariat. American
descendants of the first two classes who had received some education in America or in Spain
were the ones to raise the banner of the revolution.10
The struggle for independence in many cases united the landholding
nobility and the bourgeois merchants, either because the former had been
indoctrinated with liberal ideas or because it regarded the revolution as only
a liberation movement from the Spanish crown. The peasant population,
which in Peru was Indian, did not participate directly or actively in the war,
and the revolutionary program did not represent its claims.
But this program was inspired by liberal ideology. The revolution could
not exclude principles that supported agrarian reform founded on the
practical necessity and theoretical justice of freeing the land from its feudal
shackles. The republic introduced these principles into its statutes. Peru did
not have a bourgeoisie to apply them in accordance with its economic
interests and its political and legal doctrine. Although the republic—
following the course and dictates of history—was established on liberal and
bourgeois principles, the practical effects of independence on agricultural
property could not help but be limited by the interests of the large
landowners.
Therefore, the disentailment of agricultural property required by the
basic policies of the republic did not attack the latifundium. And if, on the
one hand, the new laws in compensation ordered the distribution of land to
the Indian, on the other hand they attacked the “community” in the name of
liberal precepts.
Thus was inaugurated a regime that, whatever its principles, made the
condition of the Indian to some extent worse instead of better. And this was
not the fault of the ideology that inspired the new policy, which, rightly
applied, would have ended feudal control of land and converted the Indian
into a small landowner.
The new policy formally abolished the mita, the encomienda, et cetera. It
included a series of measures that signified the end of the Indian’s serfdom.
But since it nevertheless left the power and force of feudal property intact, it
invalidated its own measures for protecting the small landowner and farmer.

61
 Although the landholding aristocracy in principle forfeited its privileges,
in fact it maintained its position. It continued to be the dominant class in
Peru. The revolution had not really raised a new class to power. The
professional and business bourgeoisie was too weak to govern. The abolition
of forced labor, therefore, never became more than a theoretical declaration
because it did not touch the latifundium, and servitude is only one of the
aspects of feudalism, not feudalism itself.
The Agrarian Policy of the Republic
During the period of military caudillos that followed the War of
Independence, a liberal policy on agricultural property obviously could not
be developed or even be formulated. The military caudillo was the natural
product of a revolutionary period that had not been able to create a new
governing class. In this situation, power was taken over by the military
leaders of the revolution, who, on the one hand, enjoyed the prestige of their
wartime achievements and, on the other, were in a position to keep
themselves in the government by means of armed force. Of course, the
caudillo could not remain aloof from the influence of class interests or of
opposing historical currents. He was supported by the spineless liberalism
and rhetoric of the urban demos and by the colonial conservatism of the
landowning class. He was sanctioned by the city’s lawmakers and jurists and
by the writers and orators of the latifundium aristocracy. In the contest
between liberal and conservative interests, there was no direct and active
campaign to vindicate the peasant, which would have compelled the liberals
to include the redistribution of agricultural property in their program.
A true statesman, not one of our military bosses of this period, would
have heeded and dealt with this basic problem.
The military caudillo, furthermore, seems organically incapable of so
sweeping a reform, which first and foremost requires an informed legal and
economic mind. His tyranny creates an atmosphere that is hostile to new
legal and economic principles. Vasconcelos makes this observation:
On an economic level, the caudillo is always the main support of the latifundium.
Although he sometimes declares himself to be an enemy of property, there is almost no
caudillo who does not end up as an hacendado. The fact is that military power inevitably
leads to land appropriation, whether by soldier, caudillo, king, or emperor; despotism and
the latifundium go together. This is natural. Economic, like political, rights can only be
preserved and defended within a regime of liberty. Absolutism always means poverty for the
many and opulence and abusive power for the few. Only democracy, with all its defects, has
been able to take us closer to the best achievements of social justice—at least, democracy as
it is before it degenerates into the imperialism of republics that are too wealthy and that are

62
surrounded by decadent peoples. In any event, among us the caudillo and military
government have cooperated in the development of the latifundium. Just a glance at the
property titles of our great landowners would reveal that almost all owe their wealth first to
the Spanish crown and later to concessions and illegal favors granted to the influential
generals of our false republics. Benefits and concessions have been granted over and over
again without any regard for the rights of entire Indian or mestizo populations, who were
helpless to assert their ownership.11
A new legal and economic order must be, in any case, the work of a class
and not of a caudillo. When the class exists, the caudillo acts as its
interpreter and trustee. His policy is no longer determined by his personal
judgment but by a group of collective interests and requirements. Peru
lacked a middle class capable of organizing a strong and efficient state.
Militarism represented an elementary and provisional order that, as soon as
it could be dispensed with, needed to be replaced by a more advanced and
integrated order. It could not understand or even consider the agrarian
problem. Elementary and immediate problems absorbed its limited action.
Castilla was the military caudillo at his best. His shrewd opportunism,
slyness, crudeness, and absolute empiricism prevented him from adopting a
liberal policy until the very end. Castilla realized that the liberals of his time
were a literary group, a coterie, not a class. Therefore, he cautiously avoided
any act that would seriously oppose the interests and principles of the
conservative class. But the merits of his policy lie in his reformist and
progressive leanings. His acts of greatest historic significance—the abolition
of Negro slavery and of forced tribute from the Indians—expressed his
liberal attitude.
Since the enactment of the Civil Code, Peru has entered a period of
gradual organization. It is hardly necessary to point out that the Code
signified, among other things, the decline of militarism. Inspired by the same
principles as the republic’s early decrees on land, it reinforced and continued
the policy of disentailment and redistribution of agricultural property.
Ugarte, taking note of the progress made by national legislation on land,
remarks that the Code “confirmed the legal abolition of the Indian
communities and of the entailments; it introduced new legislation
establishing occupation as one of the means of acquiring ownerless land; in
its rules on inheritance, it tried to favor small property.”12
Francisco García Calderón attributed to the Civil Code effects that it
actually did not have or, at least, that were not as drastic and absolute as he
believed. “The constitution had destroyed privileges and the civil law dividing
up properties ended the unequal division of inheritances. This provision

63
resulted, politically, in the death of the oligarchy, the aristocracy, the
latifundium; socially, in the rise of the bourgeoisie and the mestizo;
economically—by dividing inheritances equally—in the formation of small
properties, previously blocked by the great estates of the nobility.”13
This was undoubtedly the intention of the codifiers of rights in Peru.
However, the Civil Code is merely one of the instruments of liberal policy
and capitalist practice. As Ugarte recognizes, the Peruvian legislation
“proposes to encourage the democratization of rural property, but by the
purely negative means of removing obstacles rather than by giving the
farmers positive protection.”14 Nowhere has the division, that is,
redistribution, of agricultural property been possible without special
expropriation laws that have transferred ownership of the land to the class
that works on it.
Notwithstanding the Code, small property has not flourished in Peru.
To the contrary, the latifundium has been consolidated and extended. And
only the property of the Indian “community” has suffered the consequences
of this twisted liberalism.
Large Property and Political Power
The two factors that kept the independence movement from taking up
the agrarian problem in Peru—the extremely rudimentary state of the urban
bourgeoisie and the extra-social situation, as Echevarría defines it, of the
Indian—later prevented the governments of the republic from developing a
policy aimed in some way at a more equitable distribution of land.
During the period of the military caudillo, it was the latifundia and not
the urban demos that grew stronger. With business and finance in the hands
of foreigners, the emergence of a vigorous urban bourgeoisie was not
economically possible. Spanish education was absolutely incompatible with
the ends and needs of industrialism and capitalism; instead of technicians, it
trained lawyers, writers, priests, et cetera. Unless the latter felt a special
vocation for Jacobinism or demagoguery, they joined the clientele of the
landowning class. In turn, business capital, almost exclusively foreign, had no
choice but to deal and associate with this aristocracy, which, moreover, tacitly
or explicitly continued to dominate political life. In this way, the landholding
aristocracy and its adherents became the beneficiaries of the fiscal policy and
the exploitation of guano and nitrate. In this way, this group was compelled
by its economic role to assume the function of the bourgeoisie in Peru,
although it did not lose its colonial and aristocratic vices and prejudices. And

64
in this way, the urban bourgeoisie—professionals and businessmen—were
finally absorbed by civilismo.
The power of this class—civilistas or neogodos—was to a large measure
derived from ownership of land. In the early years of independence, it was
not exactly a class of capitalists, but a class of landowners. As a landowning
rather than an educated class, it was able to merge its interests with those of
foreign businessmen and creditors and by this token to negotiate with the
state and to traffic in the country’s natural resources. Thanks to the
properties it had received under the viceroyalty, it possessed business capital
under the republic. The privileges of the colony engendered the privileges of
the republic.
Therefore, this class naturally and instinctively held the most
conservative views on land ownership. The continued extra-social condition
of the Indians, on the other hand, meant that there were no peasant masses
ready to fight for their rights.
These have been the principal factors in the preservation and
development of the latifundium. The liberalism of republican legislation was
passive in its attitude toward feudal property and only took action against
communal property. Although it could do nothing to the latifundium, it
could do a great deal of damage to the “community.” When a people are
traditionally communist, dissolving the “community” does not help to create
small properties. A society cannot be transformed artificially, still less a
peasant society deeply atttached to its traditions and its legal institutions.
Individualism has not originated in any country’s constitution or civil code.
It must be formed through a more complicated and spontaneous process.
Destroying the “communities” did not convert the Indians into small
landowners or even into free salaried workers; it delivered their lands to the
gamonales and their clientele and made it easier for the latifundista to chain
the Indian to the latifundium.
It is claimed that the key to the accumulation of agricultural property on
the coast has been the need for an adequate water supply. According to this
argument, irrigated agriculture in valleys formed by shallow rivers has caused
large property to flourish and medium and small property to wither away.
But this is a specious argument, with only a grain of truth. The overrated
technical or material reasons on which it is based have affected the
accumulation of property only since the establishment and development of
large-scale commercial agriculture on the coast. Before coastal agriculture
acquired a capitalist organization, the factor of irrigation was not important

65
enough to determine the accumulation of property. It is true that the scarcity
of irrigation water, because of the difficulties of its widespread distribution,
favors the large landowner. But this is not what has kept property from being
subdivided. The origins of the coastal latifundium go back to the colonial
regime. The depopulation of the coast owing to colonial practices was at the
same time one of the consequences of and one of the reasons for large
property. The labor problem, which has been the only problem of the coastal
landowner, is rooted in the latifundium. Landowners sought to solve it with
the Negro slave in the colonial period and with the Chinese coolie in the
time of the republic. A vain effort. The earth cannot be populated and, above
all, made fruitful with slaves. Thanks to their policy, the great landholders
own all the land possible, but they do not have enough men to till it and
bring it to life. This is the defense of the large property; but it is also its
misfortune and its weakness.
The agrarian situation in the sierra, on the other hand, shows the fallacy
of the above argument. The sierra has no water problem. Abundant rainfall
allows the latifundium owner and the communal farmer to grow the same
crops. Nevertheless, property is also accumulated in the sierra. This
circumstance proves that the question is essentially a socio-political one.
The development of commercial crops for an export agriculture in the
coastal plantations appears to be wholly dependent on the economic
colonization of the Latin American countries by Western capitalism. British
businessmen and bankers became interested in these lands when they saw
the possibility of using them profitably for the production of sugar, first, and
cotton, later. From a very early date, a large part of agricultural property was
mortgaged to foreign firms. Hacendados in debt to foreign businessmen and
lenders served as intermediaries, almost as sharecroppers, for Anglo-Saxon
capitalism in order to guarantee that their fields would be cultivated at
minimum cost by wretched laborers bent double under the whip of colonial
slave drivers.
But on the coast, the latifundium has reached a fairly advanced level of
capitalist technique, although its exploitation still rests on feudal practices
and principles. The yields of cotton and sugar cane are those of the capitalist
system. Enterprises are heavily financed and land is worked with modern
machines and methods. Powerful industrial plants operate to process these
products. Meanwhile, in the sierra, yields are usually not higher for
latifundium lands than for communal lands. And if we use an objective

66
economic standard and judge a production system by its results, this fact
alone hopelessly condemns the land tenure system in the sierra.
The “Community” under the Republic
We have already seen how the formal liberalism of republican legislation
only acted against the Indian “community.” The concept of individual
property has had almost an antisocial function in the republic, because of its
conflict with the existence of the “community.” If the latter had been
dissolved and expropriated by a capitalism in vigorous and independent
growth, it would have been considered a casualty of economic progress. The
Indian would have passed from a mixed system of communism and servitude
to a system of free wages. Although this change would have denaturalized
him somewhat, it would have placed him in a position to organize and
emancipate himself as a class, like the other proletariats of the world.
However, the gradual expropriation and absorption of the “community” by
the latifundium not only plunged him deeper into servitude, but also
destroyed the economic and legal institution that helped safeguard the spirit
and substance of his ancient civilization.15
During the republican period, national writers and legislators have
shown a fairly uniform tendency to condemn the “community” as the residue
of a primitive society or the survival of colonial organization. This attitude
sometimes has been due to the pressures of gamonalismo and sometimes to
the individualist and liberal thought that automatically dominated an overly
literary and emotional culture.
Dr. M. V. Villarán, an able and effective representative of this school of
thought, has written a study that indicates the need to carefully revise its
conclusions concerning the Indian “community.” Dr. Villarán theoretically
maintains his liberal position by advocating the principle of individual
property, but he accepts in practice the defense of the “communities” against
the latifundium by recognizing that they have a function that the state
should protect.
But Hildebrando Castro Pozo’s book Nuestra comunidad indígena
demonstrates that the first integrated and documented defense of the Indian
“community” had to be inspired in socialist thought and be based on a
concrete study of its nature carried out according to the research methods of
modern sociology and economics. In this interesting study, Castro Pozo
approaches the problem of the “community” with a mind free of liberal
prejudices and prepared to evaluate and understand it. He reveals that,
despite the attacks of a liberal formalism serving the interests of a feudal

67
regime, the Indian “community” is still a living organism and that, within the
hostile environment that suffocates and deforms it, it spontaneously shows
unmistakable potentialities for evolution and development.
Castro Pozo maintains that “the ayllu or community has conserved its
natural peculiarity, its character as an almost family institution that
continued to harbor, after the conquest, its main constituents.”16
In this he agrees with Valcárcel, whose statements about the ayllu appear
to some to be too colored by his ideal of an Indian renaissance.
What are the “communities” and how do they operate at present? Castro
Pozo classifies them in the following way:
First—agricultural communities. Second—agricultural and livestock communities.
Third—communities of pasture lands and watering places. Fourth—communities that have
the use of the land. It should be borne in mind that in a country like ours, where a single
institution acquires different characteristics according to the environment in which it has
developed, no one type is actually so distinct and different from the others that it can be
held up as a model. On the contrary, all the types have some characteristics in common. But
since circumstances combine to impose a given kind of life in customs, work systems,
properties, and industries, each group has predominant characteristics that make it
agricultural, livestock, livestock with communal pastures and water, or usufructuary of the
land which unquestionably belonged to the ayllu.17
These differences have developed, not through the natural evolution or
degeneration of the ancient “community,” but as a result of legislation aimed
at the individualization of property and, especially, as a result of the
expropriation of communal lands for the latifundium. They demonstrate,
therefore, the vitality of the Indian “community,” which invariably reacts by
modifying its forms of cooperation and association. The Indian, in spite of
one hundred years of republican legislation, has not become an individualist.
And this is not because he resists progress, as is claimed by his detractors.
Rather, it is because individualism under a feudal system does not find the
necessary conditions to gain strength and develop. On the other hand,
communism has continued to be the Indian’s only defense. Individualism
cannot flourish or even exist effectively outside a system of free competition.
And the Indian has never felt less free than when he has felt alone.
Therefore, in Indian villages where families are grouped together that
have lost the bonds of their ancestral heritage and community work, hardy
and stubborn habits of cooperation and solidarity still survive that are the
empirical expression of a communist spirit. The “community” is the
instrument of this spirit. When expropriation and redistribution seem about
to liquidate the “community,” indigenous socialism always finds a way to

68
reject, resist, or evade this incursion. Communal work and property are
replaced by the cooperation of individuals. As Castro Pozo writes: “Customs
have been reduced to mingas or gatherings of all the ayllu to help some
member of the community with his walls, irrigation ditches, or house. Work
proceeds to the music of harps and violins and the consumption of several
quarts of sugarcane aguardiente, packages of cigarettes, and wads of coca.”
These customs have led the Indians to the practice—incipient and
rudimentary, to be sure—of the collective contract. Instead of individuals
separately offering their services to landowners or contractors, all the able-
bodied men of the cooperative jointly contract to do the work.
The “Community” and the Latifundium
The defense of the “community” does not rest on abstract principles of
justice or sentimental traditionalist considerations, but on concrete and
practical reasons of a social and economic order. In Peru, communal
property does not represent a primitive economy that has gradually been
replaced by a progressive economy founded on individual property. No; the
“communities” have been despoiled of their land for the benefit of the feudal
or semifeudal latifundium, which is constitutionally incapable of technical
progress.18
On the coast, the latifundium has evolved in its crop cultivation from
feudal routine to capitalist technique, while the communist farming of the
Indian “community” has disappeared. But in the sierra the latifundium has
preserved its feudal character intact and has put up a much stronger
resistance than the “community” to the development of a capitalist economy.
In fact, when a “community” is connected by railway to commerce and
central transportation, it spontaneously changes into a cooperative. Castro
Pozo, who, as head of the Section of Indian Affairs of the Ministry of
Development, collected a great deal of information on the life of
“communities,” points to the interesting case of the Muquiyauyo
“community,” which, he says, combines the characteristics of producer,
consumer, and credit cooperative. “As the owner of a magnificent electric
plant on the banks of the Mantaro River, which furnishes light and power to
the small industries of the districts of Jauja, Concepción, Mito, Muqui,
Sincos, Huaripampa, and Muquiyauyo, it has become a communal
institution par excellence. Instead of neglecting its indigenous customs, it has
utilized them to carry out the work of the enterprise. It has purchased heavy
machinery with the money saved on labor done by the cooperative, which

69
even used women and children to help cart building materials, just as in the
mingas that worked on communal construction.”19
The latifundium compares unfavorably with the “community” as an
enterprise for agricultural production. Within the capitalist system, large
property replaces and banishes small agricultural property by its ability to
intensify production through the employment of modern farm methods.
Industrialization of agriculture is accompanied by accumulation of agrarian
property. Large property seems to be justified by the interests of production,
which are identified, at least in theory, with the interests of society. But this
is not the case of the latifundium and, therefore, it does not meet an
economic need. Except for sugarcane plantations—which produce
aguardiente to intoxicate and stupefy the Indian peasant—the latifundium of
the sierra generally grows the same crops as the “community,” and it produces
no more. Lack of agricultural statistics does not permit an exact estimate of
partial differences; but all available data indicate that crop yields of
“communities” are not on the average less than those of latifundia. The only
production statistics for the sierra are in wheat and they support this
conclusion. Castro Pozo, summarizing the data for 1917–1918, writes:
Communal and individual properties harvested an average of 450 and 580 kilos per
hectare, respectively. If it is taken into account that most fertile lands are in the hands of the
large landowners, since the struggle for land in the south has reached the point where the
Indian owner is gotten rid of by force or by murder, and that the ignorance of the communal
farmer induces him to lie about the amount of his harvest in fear of new taxes or
assessments by minor political authorities or their agents, it can readily be inferred that the
higher production figure for individual property is not accurate and that the difference is
negligible. Therefore, the two types of properties are identical in means of production and
cultivation.20
In feudal Russia of the last century, the latifundium showed higher yields
than small property. The figures in hectoliters per hectare were as follows: for
rye, 11.5 against 9.4; for wheat, 11 against 9.1; for oats, 15.4 against 12.7;
for barley, 11.5 against 10.5; and for potatoes, 92.3 against 72.21
As a factor of production, the latifundium of the Peruvian sierra turns
out to be inferior to the execrated latifundium of czarist Russia.
The “community,” on the one hand, is a system of production that keeps
alive in the Indian the moral incentives that stimulate him to do his best
work. Castro Pozo very correctly observes that “the Indian community
preserves two great economic and social principles that up to now neither
the science of sociology nor the empiricism of great industrialists has been
able to solve satisfactorily: to contract workers collectively and to have the

70
work performed in a relaxed and pleasant atmosphere of friendly
competition.”22
By dissolving or abandoning the “community,” the system of the feudal
latifundium has attacked not only an economic institution but also, and
more important, a social institution, one that defends the indigenous
tradition, maintains the function of the rural family, and reflects the popular
legal philosophy so prized by Proudhon and Sorel.23
The Work System—Serf and Wage Earner
In agriculture, the work system is chiefly determined by the property
system. It is not surprising, therefore, that to the same extent that the feudal
latifundium survives in Peru, servitude survives in various forms and under
various names. Agriculture on the coast appears to differ from agriculture in
the sierra less in its work system than in its technique. Coastal agriculture
has evolved rather rapidly toward a capitalist procedure in farming and in the
processing and sale of crops. But it has made little progress in its attitude
and conduct as regards labor. Unless forced to by circumstances, the colonial
latifundium has not renounced its feudal treatment of the worker.
This phenomenon is not altogether explained by the fact that the old
feudal lords have kept their properties and, acting as intermediaries for
foreign capital, have adopted the practice but not the spirit of modern
capitalism. It is also due to the colonial mentality of a landholding class
accustomed to regard labor with the criteria of slave owners and slave
traders. In Europe, the feudal lord to some extent represented the primitive
patriarchal tradition, so that he naturally felt superior to his serfs but not
ethnically or nationally different from them. The aristocratic landowner of
Europe has found it possible to accept a new concept and a new practice in
his relations with the agricultural worker. In colonial America, however, the
white man’s arrogant and deeply rooted belief in the colored man’s inferiority
has stood in the way of this transition.
When not Indian, the agricultural worker of the Peruvian coast has been
the Negro slave and the Chinese coolie, who are, if possible, held in even
greater contempt. The racial prejudices of the medieval aristocrat and the
white colonizer have combined in the coastal latifundista.
Yanaconazgo and indenture are not the only expressions of feudal
methods that still persist in coastal agriculture. The hacienda is run like a
baronial fief. The laws of the state are not applied in the latifundium without
the tacit or formal consent of the large landowners. The authority of political
or administrative officials is in fact subject to the authority of the landowner

71
in his domain. The latter considers his latifundium to be outside the
jurisdiction of the state and he disregards completely the civil rights of the
people who live within his property. He collects excise taxes, grants
monopolies, and imposes sanctions restricting the liberty of the laborers and
their families. Within the hacienda, transportation, business, and even
customs are controlled by the landlord. And frequently the huts that he rents
to the laborers do not differ greatly from the sheds that formerly served as
slave quarters.
The great coastal landowners are not legally entitled to their feudal or
semifeudal rights; but their position of dominance and their vast estates in a
territory without industries and without transportation give them almost
unrestricted power. Through indenture and yanaconazgo, the large
proprietors block the appearance of free-wage contracting, a functional
necessity to a liberal and capitalist economy. Indenture, which prevents the
laborer from disposing of his person and his labor until he satisfies the
obligations he has contracted with the landlord, is unmistakably descended
from the semi-slave traffic in coolies; yanaconazgo is a kind of servitude in
politically and economically backward villages that has prolonged feudalism
into our capitalist age. The Peruvian system of yanaconazgo is identified, for
example, with the Russian system of polovnischestvo, under which crops
sometimes were divided equally between landlord and peasant and
sometimes only a third was given to the latter.24
The coast is so thinly populated that agricultural enterprises constantly
face a labor shortage. Yanaconazgo, by giving the scanty native population a
minimal guarantee of the use of the land, discourages emigration. Indenture
attracts the laborers of the sierra to coastal agriculture by offering them
better pay.
This indicates that, in spite of everything and although perhaps only
superficially or partially,25 the situation of the laborer on the haciendas of
the coast is better than on the haciendas of the sierra, where feudalism has
remained all-powerful. Coastal landowners are compelled to accept, albeit in
a restricted and attenuated form, the system of free labor and wages. The
laborer keeps his freedom to emigrate as well as to refuse his services to the
employer who mistreats him. The proximity of ports and cities and the
accessibility of modern transportation and commerce, furthermore, offer the
laborer the possibility of escaping his rural destiny and of trying to support
himself in another way.

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 If the agriculture of the coast had been more progressive and capitalist, it
would have sought a logical solution to the labor problem. The more
enlightened landowners would have realized that the latifundium as it now
operates leads to depopulation and that, therefore, the labor problem is one
of its most obvious and inevitable consequences.26
As capitalist technique advances in coastal agriculture, the wage earner
replaces the yanacón. Scientific farming—the use of machinery, fertilizer, et
cetera—is incompatible with routine and primitive agriculture. But the
demographic factor—“the labor problem”—is a serious obstacle to this
process of capitalist development. In the valleys, yanaconazgo and its
variations guarantee the enterprises a minimum of permanent workers.
Furthermore, the family of the native resident laborer or yanacón represents a
source of future workers for the hacendado.
The large landholders themselves have recognized the advisability of
establishing—very gradually and cautiously—colonies of small property
owners. Part of the irrigated land in the Imperial Valley has been set aside
for small farms. The same principle will be applied to other irrigated zones.
An intelligent and experienced landowner recently told me that it was
essential for the large estate to have small farms nearby from which to draw
labor, in order not to have to depend on migrant workers or indenture. The
program of the Agrarian Subdivision Company is part of the official policy
to gradually establish small properties.27
But since this policy systematically avoids expropriation or, more
precisely, large-scale expropriation by the state, for reasons of public interest
or distributive justice, and since its possibilities of development are for the
moment restricted to a few valleys, it is not likely that small property will
promptly and extensively replace yanaconazgo in its demographic function. In
valleys where plantation owners cannot contract a supply of labor from the
sierra on favorable terms, yanaconazgo in its various forms will coexist with
the wage earner for some time.
The forms of sharecropping and tenant farming vary on the coast and in
the sierra according to regions, practice, or crops. They also have different
names. But within their diversity, they can generally be identified with
precapitalist methods of farming observed in other countries of semifeudal
agriculture, for example, czarist Russia. The system of the Russian otrabotki
presented all the ways that exist in Peru of paying rent—by work, money, or
crops. This can be confirmed simply by reading what Schkaff has to say

73
about this system in his documented book on the agrarian question in
Russia:
Between servitude based largely on violence and coercion and free labor based on purely
economic necessity there extends a whole transitional system of extremely varied forms that
combine the features of the barchtchina and the wage earner. It is the otrabototschnai system.
Wages are paid either in money, where services are contracted, or in produce or in land. In
the last case (otrabotki in the strict sense of the word), the landlord lets the peasant use his
land in return for the latter’s work on his estate. . . . Payment for work in the otrabotki system
is always less than the wages of capitalist free contracting. Payment in produce makes
landlords more independent of price fluctuations in the wheat and labor markets. Since
nearby peasants supply them with cheaper labor, they enjoy a real local monopoly. . . . Rent
paid by the peasant takes several forms: in addition to his labor, the peasant is obliged to
give money and produce. If he receives a deciatina of land, he agrees to work a deciatina and a
half of the landlord’s estate, to give ten eggs and one hen. He will also deliver his cattle’s
manure; for everything, including manure, is used for payment. Frequently, the peasant is
even required “to do all that the landlord demands of him,” to transport crops, cut firewood,
and carry loads.28
In the agriculture of the sierra exactly those features of feudal property
and work are found. The free labor system has not developed there. The
planation owner does not care about the productivity of his land, only about
the income he receives from it. He reduces the factors of production to just
two: land and the Indian. Ownership of land permits him to exploit
limitlessly the labor of the Indian. The usury practiced on this labor—
translated into the Indian’s misery—is added to the rent charged for the
land, calculated at the usual rate. The hacendado reserves the best land for
himself and distributes the least fertile among his Indian laborers, who are
obliged to work the former without pay and to live off the produce of the
latter. The Indian pays his rent in work or crops, very rarely in money (since
the Indian’s labor is worth more to the landlord), and most often in mixed
forms. I have before me a study made by Dr. Ponce de León of the University
of Cuzco that gives first-hand documentation of all the varieties of tenant
farming and sharecropping existing in that huge department. It presents a
quite objective picture—in spite of the author’s conclusions about the
privileges of the landlords—of feudal exploitation. Here are some of his
statements:
In the province of Paucartambo, the landlord grants the use of his land to a group of
Indians on the condition that during the entire year they do all the farming needed on the
hacienda lands reserved to the owner. The tenants or yanacones, as they are called in this
province, are obliged to transport the plantation crops to this city on their own animals and
do domestic service in the hacienda itself or more usually in Cuzco, where the landlords
prefer to reside. . . . In Chumbivilcas, there is a similar arrangement. Tenants farm as much

74
land as they can and in exchange must work for the owner as often as he requires. . . . In the
province of Anta, the landlord grants the use of his land on the following conditions: the
tenant furnishes the capital (seeds and fertilizer) and all the labor needed to bring the crop
to harvest, when he divides it equally with the landlord. That is, each one collects fifty
percent of the produce, although the landlord has contributed nothing but the use of his
land, without even fertilizing it. But this is not all. The tenant farmer is required to attend
personally to the work of the landlord, receiving the customary wages of twenty-five centavos
a day.29
A comparison of the foregoing with Schkaff ’s report on Russia
demonstrates that none of the dark aspects of precapitalist property and
work is lacking in the feudal sierra.
The “Colonialism” of Our Coastal Agriculture
The industrialization of agriculture in the coastal valleys under a
capitalist system and technique has reached its present level of development
thanks mainly to British and American investment in our production of
sugar and cotton. Landlords have contributed little in industrial ability and
capital to the expansion of these crops. Financed by powerful export firms,
they grow cotton and sugar cane on their lands.
The best lands of the coastal valleys are planted with cotton and sugar
cane, not exactly because they are suited to these crops, but because only
these crops are important at present to English and American businessmen.
Agricultural credit—absolutely dependent on the interests of these firms
until a national agricultural bank is established—does not promote any
other crop. Food crops intended for the domestic market generally are grown
by small landowners and tenant farmers. Only in the valleys of Lima,
because of the proximity of sizable urban markets, do large estates grow food
crops. Often cotton and sugarcane haciendas do not raise enough food to
supply their own rural populations.
Even the small landowner or tenant farmer may be driven to plant cotton
by these interests that do not take into account the special needs of the
national economy. One of the most evident causes of the rise in food prices
in coastal towns is the displacement of traditional food crops by cotton on
the farmland of the coast.
Commercial aid is given to the farmer almost exclusively for raising
cotton. Loans are reserved, at all levels, for the cotton farmer. The
production of cotton is not governed by any consideration of the national
economy. It is produced for the world market, with no control to safeguard
this economy against possible drops in prices due to periods of industrial
crisis or of overproduction of cotton.

75
 A cattle rancher recently told me that whereas a loan extended on a
cotton crop is limited only by price fluctuations, a loan on a herd or ranch is
entirely ad hoc and uncertain. A cattle rancher on the coast cannot obtain a
substantial bank loan for expanding his business, and unless a farmer can put
up as security either a cotton or sugarcane crop, he is no better off.
If domestic consumption were met by the country’s agricultural output,
this would not be such an artificial situation. But the country still does not
produce all the food that the population needs. Our heaviest imports are in
“foodstuffs”: Lp. [libras peruanas] 3,620,235 in 1924. This figure, within
total imports of eighteen million pounds, reveals one of the problems of our
economy. Although we cannot stop importing foodstuffs, we can eliminate
its leading items, for example, wheat and flour, which reached more than
twelve million soles in 1924.
For some time, the Peruvian economy has clearly and urgently called for
the country to grow enough wheat for the bread of its people. If this had
been accomplished, Peru would no longer have to pay twelve or more million
soles a year to foreign countries for the wheat consumed in its coastal cities.
Why has this problem of our economy not been solved? It is not just
because the state has failed to work out a policy on foodstuffs. Nor, I repeat,
is it because sugar cane and cotton are the best crops for the soil and climate
of the coast. A single valley, a single Andean tableland, if opened up with a
few kilometers of railway or roads, can supply the entire Peruvian population
with more than enough wheat, barley, et cetera. In the early colonial years,
the Spaniards raised wheat on that same coast until the cataclysm that
changed the climatic conditions of the littoral. Subsequently, no scientific
and integrated study was made of the possibility of reestablishing its
cultivation. The diseases that attack wheat grown on the coast went
unchecked by the indolent criollo until recently, when experiments carried
out in the north on the lands of the “Salamanca” demonstrated that there are
varieties of wheat resistant to disease.30
The obstacle to a solution is in the very structure of the Peruvian
economy, which can only move or develop in response to the interests and
needs of markets in London and New York. These markets regard Peru as a
storehouse of raw materials and a customer for their manufactured goods.
Peruvian agriculture, therefore, obtains credit and transport solely for the
products that benefit the great markets. Foreign capital is one day interested
in rubber, another in cotton, another in sugar. When London can obtain a
commodity more cheaply and in sufficient quantity from India or Egypt, it

76
immediately abandons its suppliers in Peru. Our latifundistas, our
landholders, may think that they are independent, but they are actually only
intermediaries or agents of foreign capital.
Final Propositions
To the basic propositions already stated in this story on the agrarian
question in Peru, I should add the following:
1. The nature of agricultural property in Peru is one of the greatest
obstacles to the development of a national capitalism. Large or medium
tenant farmers work a very high percentage of land, which is owned by
landlords who have never managed their own estates. These landlords,
completely ignorant of and remote from agriculture and its problems, live
from their property income without contributing any work or intelligence to
the economic activity of the country. They belong to the category of
aristocrats or rentiers who are unproductive consumers. Through their
inherited property rights they receive an income that may be considered a
feudal privilege. The tenant farmer, on the other hand, is more like the head
of a capitalist enterprise. Under a true capitalist system, this industrialist and
the capital financing him would benefit from his efforts to increase the value
of his business. Control of the land by a class of rentiers imposes on
production the heavy burden of maintaining an income that is not subject to
the vicissitudes of agriculture. The tenant farmer generally is not encouraged
by this system to improve the land and its crops and installations. Fear of a
higher rent when his contract expires keeps his investments to a minimum.
The tenant farmer’s ambition is, of course, to become a property owner; but
by his own industry he makes the property worth more to the landlord. The
lack of agricultural credit in Peru prevents a more intensive capitalist
expropriation of land for this class of industrialists. Capitalist exploitation
and industrialization of land cannot develop fully and freely unless all feudal
privileges are abolished; therefore it has made very little progress in our
country. This problem is just as apparent to a capitalist as to a socialist critic.
Edouard Herriot states a principle that is embodied in the agrarian program
of the French liberal middle class when he says that “land requires the actual
presence.”31 In this respect, the West is certainly less advanced than the East,
since Moslem law establishes, as Charles Gide observes, that “the land
belongs to the one who makes it fertile and productive.”
2. The latifundium system in Peru is also the most serious barrier to
white immigration. For obvious reasons, we hope for the immigration of
peasants from Italy, Central Europe, and the Balkans. The urban population

77
of the West emigrates to a lesser degree and industrial workers know,
moreover, that there is little for them to do in Latin America. The European
peasant does not come to America to work as a laborer except where high
wages would permit him to save a great deal of money; and this is not the
case in Peru. Not even the most wretched farmer in Poland or Rumania
would accept the living conditions of our day laborers on the sugarcane and
cotton haciendas. His ambition is to become a small landowner. To attract
such immigrants, we must offer them land complete with living quarters,
animals, and tools and connected with railroads and markets. A Fascist
official or propagandist who visited Peru about three years ago declared to
local newspapers that our system of large properties was incompatible with a
colonization and immigration program that would attract the Italian
peasant.
3. The subjugation of coastal agriculture to the interests of British and
American capital not only keeps it from organizing and developing according
to the specific needs of the national economy—that is, first of all to feed the
population—but also from trying out and adopting new crops. The largest
undertaking of this kind in recent years, the tobacco plantations in Tumbes,
was made possible only by state aid. This is the best proof that the liberal
laissez-faire policy which has been so sterile in Peru should be replaced by a
social policy of nationalizing our great natural resources.
4. Agricultural property on the coast, despite the prosperity it has
enjoyed, so far has been incapable of attending to the problems of rural
health. Hacendados still have not complied with the modest requirements of
the Office of Public Health concerning malaria. There has been no general
improvement in farm settlements. The rural population of the coast has the
highest rates of mortality and disease in the country (except, of course, for
the extremely unhealthy regions of the jungle). Demographic statistics for
the rural district of Pativilca three years ago showed a higher death rate than
birth rate. Sutton, the engineer in charge of the Olmos project, believes that
irrigation works may offer the most radical solution to the problem of
marshes and swamps. But outside of the project in Huacho to use the
overflow of the Chancay River (it is directed by Antonio Graña, who is also
responsible for an interesting colonization scheme), the project in “Chiclín”
to use ground water, and a few other undertakings in the north, private
capital has done very little to irrigate the Peruvian coast in recent years.
5. In the sierra, agrarian feudalism is unable to create wealth or progress.
With the exception of livestock ranches that export wool and other products,

78
the latifundia in the valleys and tablelands of the sierra produce almost
nothing. Crop yields are negligible and farming methods are primitive. A
local publication once said that in the Peruvian sierra the gamonal appears to
be relatively as poor as the Indian. This argument—which is absolutely
invalid in terms of relativity—far from justifying the gamonal, damns him. In
modern economics, understood as an objective and concrete science, the only
justification for capitalism with its captains of industry and finance is its
function as a creator of wealth. On an economic plane, the feudal lord or
gamonal is the first one responsible for the worthlessness of his land. We
have already seen that, in spite of owning the best lands, his productivity is
no higher than the Indian’s with his primitive farming tools and arid
communal lands. The gamonal as an economic factor is, therefore, completely
disqualified.
6. To explain this situation it is said that the agricultural economy of the
sierra depends entirely on roads and transportation. Those who believe this
undoubtedly do not understand the organic, fundamental difference existing
between a feudal or semifeudal economy and a capitalist economy. They do
not understand that the medieval, patriarchal, feudal landowner is
substantially different from the head of a modern enterprise. Furthermore,
gamonalismo and latifundismo also appear to stand in the way of the
execution of the state’s present road program. The abuses and interests of the
gamonales are altogether opposed to a strict application of the law
conscripting road workers. The Indian instinctively regards it as a weapon of
gamonalismo. Under the Inca regime, duly established work on road
construction was a compulsory public service, entirely compatible with the
principles of modern socialism; under the colonial regime of latifundium and
servitude, the same service turned into the hated mita.
Notes
1 Luis E. Valcárcel, Delayllu al imperio, p. 166.
2 César Antonio Ugarte, Bosquejo de la historia económica del Perú, p. 9.
3 Javier Prado, “Estado social del Perú durante la dominatión española,” in Anales

universitarios del Perú, XXII, 125–126.

4 Ugarte, Historia económica del Perú, p. 64.
5 José Vasconcelos, Indología (Barcelona: Agencia Mundial de Librería, 1927).
6 Prado, “Estado social del Perú,” p. 37.
7 Georges Sorel, Introduction à l’économie moderne (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1911), pp. 120,

130.
8 Ugarte, Historia económica del Perú, p. 24.

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 9 Eugène Schkaff, La question agraire en Russie (Paris: Rousseau, 1922), p. 118.
10 Esteban Echevarría, Antecedentes y primeros pasos de la revolución de mayo.
11 Vasconcelos, “Nacionalismo en la América Latina,” in Amauta, No. 4. This opinion,

which is true as regards relations between the military caudillo and agricultural property in
America, is not as valid for all periods and historical situations. It cannot be subscribed to
without making this specific qualification.
12 Ugarte, Historia económica del Peru, p. 57.
13 Francisco García Calderón, Le Pérou contemporain, pp. 98, 199.
14 Ugarte, Historia económica del Perú, p. 58.
15 Because of the length of this note, it has been placed at the end of the chapter. Ed.
16 Hildebrando Castro Pozo, Nuestra comunidad indígena.
17 Ibid., pp. 16–17.
18 After writing this essay, I find ideas in Haya de la Torre’s book Por la emancipación de

la América Latina that fully coincide with mine on the agrarian question in general and the
Indian community in particular. Since we share the same points of view, we necessarily reach
the same conclusions.
19 Castro Pozo, Nuestra comunidad indígena, pp. 66–67.
20 Ibid., p. 434.
21 Schkaff, La question agraire en Russie, p. 188.
22 Castro Pozo, Nuestra comunidad indígena, p. 47. The author has some very interesting

comments to make about the spiritual elements of the community economy. “The vigor,
industry and enthusiasm with which the communal farmer reaps and sheaves wheat or rye,
quipicha (quipichar: to carry on one’s shoulders. A widespread indigenous custom. The
porters and stevedores of the coast shoulder their loads), and rapidly proceeds to the
threshing floor, joking with his companion or with the man tugging on his shirt from
behind, present a profound and decisive contrast to the indolence, indifference, apathy, and
apparent fatigue with which the yanacones do the same or similar work. The former mental
and physical state is so evidently more desirable than the latter that it raises the question of
how the work process is affected by its results and concrete purpose.”
23 Sorel, who has examined carefully the ideas of Proudhon and Le Play on the role of

the family in the structure and spirit of society, has made a penetrating study of “the spiritual
part of the economic environment.” If anything has been missing in Marx it has been an
adequate legal spirit, although this aspect of production did not escape the dialectician of
Tréves. “It is known,” he writes in his Introduction à l’économie moderne, “that the family
customs of the Saxon plain made a deep impression on Le Play when he started his travels
and that they decisively influenced his thought. I have wondered if Marx was not thinking of
these ancient customs when he accused capitalism of turning the proletarian into a man
without a family.” Returning to the comments of Castro Pozo, I want to recall another of
Sorel’s ideas. “Work depends to a very large measure on the feelings that the workers have
about their task.”
24 Schkaff, La question agraire en Russie, p. 135.

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 25 It must not be forgotten that the laborers of the sierra suffer in the hot and unhealthy

coastal climate; they soon contract malaria, which weakens them and predisposes them to
tuberculosis. Nor should it be forgotten that the Indian is deeply attached to his home and
his mountains. On the coast he feels an exile, a mitimae.
26 This topic makes clear how closely our agrarian problem is related to our

demographic problem. The concentration of land in the hands of the gamonales is a cancer in
national demography. Only when it has been extirpated can Peru progress and really adopt
the South American principle: “To govern is to populate.”
27 The government’s project to create small agricultural property is based on liberal

economic and capitalist theory. Its application on the coast, subject to the expropriation of
estates and the irrigation of uncultivated land, can offer fairly broad possibilities of
settlement. In the sierra, its effects would be much more limited and doubtful. Like all
attempts to distribute land in the history of our republic, it disregards the social value of the
“community” and is overly solicitous of the latifundista, who jealously protects his own
interests. In regions where there is still no monetary economy, lots should not have to be
paid for in cash or in twenty annual installments. In these cases, payment should be
specified in kind instead of money. The state’s system of acquiring estates to be distributed
among the Indians shows its extreme concern for the latifundista, who is given the
opportunity to sell unproductive or rundown estates for a profit.
28 Schkaff, La question agraire en Russie, pp. 133, 134, 135.
29 Francisco Ponce de León, Sistema de arrendamiento de terrenos de cultivo en el

departamento del Cuzco y el problema de la tierra.

30 The Commission for the Promotion of Wheat Farming has announced the success of

its experiments in different parts of the coast. It has obtained substantial yields from the
rust-immune “Kappli Emmer” variety, even in semi-arid areas.
31 Edouard Herriot, Créer (Paris: Payot, 1919).

NOTE 15
If the historical evidence of Inca communism is not sufficiently convincing, the
“community”—the specific organ of that communism—should dispel any doubt. The
“despotism” of the Incas, however, has offended the scruples of some of our present-day
liberals. I want to restate here the defense that I made of Inca communism and refute the
most recent liberal thesis, presented by Augusto Aguirre Morales in his novel El pueblo del
sol.
Modern communism is different from Inca communism. This is the first thing that must
be learned and understood by the scholar who delves into Tawantinsuyo. The two
communisms are products of different human experiences. They belong to different
historical epochs. They were evolved by dissimilar civilizations. The Inca civilization was
agrarian; the civilization of Marx and Sorel is industrial. In the former, man submitted to
nature; in the latter, nature sometimes submits to man. It is therefore absurd to compare the
forms and institutions of the two communisms. All that can be compared is their essential
and material likeness, within the essential and material difference of time and space. And
this comparison requires a certain degree of historical relativism. Otherwise, one is sure to

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commit the error made by Víctor Andrés Belaúnde when he attempted a comparison of this
kind.
The chroniclers of the conquest and of the colonial period viewed the indigenous
panorama with medieval eyes. Their testimony cannot be accepted at face value.
Their judgments were strictly in keeping with their Spanish and Catholic points of view.
But Aguirre Morales is also the victim of fallacious reasoning. His position in the study of
the Inca empire is not a relativist one. Aguirre considers and examines the empire with
liberal and individualist prejudices. And he believes that under the Incas, the people were
enslaved and miserable because they lacked liberty.
Individual liberty is an aspect of the complex liberal philosophy. A realistic critic would
define it as the legal basis of capitalist civilization. (Without free will, there would be no free
trade, free competition, or free enterprise.) An idealistic critic would define it as a gain made
by the human spirit in modern times. In no case did this liberty fit into Inca life. The man of
Tawantinsuyo felt absolutely no need of individual liberty—any more than he felt the need
of a free press. A free press may be important to Aguirre Morales and to me, but the Indian
could be happy without it. The Indian’s life and spirit were not tormented by intellectual
anxieties or creative pursuits. Nor were they concerned with the need to do business, make
contracts, or engage in trade. Therefore what use would this liberty invented by our
civilization be to the Indian? If the spirit of liberty was revealed to the Quechua, it was
undoubtedly in a formula or rather in an emotion unlike the liberal, Jacobin, and
individualist formula of liberty. The revelation of liberty, like the revelation of God, varies
with age, country, and climate. To believe that the abstract idea of liberty is of the same
substance as the concrete image of a liberty with a Phrygian cap—daughter of Protestantism
and the French Revolution—is to be trapped by an illusion that may be due to a mere, but
not disinterested, philosophical astigmatism of the bourgeoisie and of democracy.
Aguirre’s denial of the communist nature of the Inca society rests altogether on a
mistaken belief. Aguirre assumes that autocracy and communism are irreconcilable. The
Inca system, he says, was despotic and theocratic and, therefore, not communist. Although
autocracy and communism are now incompatible, they were not so in primitive societies.
Today, a new order cannot abjure any of the moral gains of modern society. Contemporary
socialism—other historical periods have had other kinds of socialism under different names
—is the antithesis of liberalism; but it is born from its womb and is nourished on its
experiences. It does not disdain the intellectual achievements of liberalism, only its
limitations. It appreciates and understands everything that is positive in the liberal ideal; it
condemns and attacks what is negative and selfish in it.
The Inca regime was unquestionably theocratic and despotic. But these are traits
common to all regimes of antiquity. Every monarchy in history has been supported by the
religious faith of its people. Temporal and spiritual power have been but recently divorced;
and it is more a separation of bodies than a divorce. Up to William of Hohenzollern,
monarchs have invoked their divine right.
It is not possible to speak abstractly of tyranny. Tyranny is a concrete fact. It is real to
the extent that it represses the will of the people and oppresses and stifles their life force.
Often in ancient times an absolutist and theocratic regime has embodied and represented
that will and force. This appears to have been the case in the Inca empire. I do not believe in
the supernatural powers of the Incas. But their political ability is as self-evident as is their

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construction of an empire with human materials and moral elements amassed over the
centuries. The ayllu—the community—was the nucleus of the empire. The Incas unified and
created the empire, but they did not create its nucleus. The legal state organized by the Incas
undoubtedly reproduced the natural pre-existing state. The Incas did not disrupt anything.
Their work should be praised, not scorned and disparaged, as the expression and
consequence of thousands of years and myriad elements.
The work of the people must not be depreciated, much less denied. Aguirre, an
individualistic writer, does not care about the history of the masses. His romantic gaze looks
only for a hero. The remains of Inca civilization unanimously refute the charges of Aguirre
Morales. The author of El pueblo del sol cites as evidence the thousands of huacos he has seen.
Those huacos testify that Inca art was a popular art; and the best document left by the Inca
civilization is surely its art. The stylized, synthesized ceramics of the Indians cannot have
been produced by a crude or savage people.
James George Frazer—very remote spiritually and physically from the chroniclers of the
colony—writes: “Nor, to remount the stream of history to its sources, is it an accident that
all the first great strides towards civilisation have been made under despotic and theocratic
governments, like those of Egypt, Babylon, and Peru, where the supreme ruler claimed and
received the servile allegiance of his subjects in the double character of King and a god. It is
hardly too much to say that at this early epoch despotism is the best friend of humanity and,
paradoxical as it may sound, of liberty. For after all there is more liberty in the best sense—
liberty to think our own thoughts and to fashion our own destinies—under the most
absolute despotism, the most grinding tyranny, than under the apparent freedom of savage
life, where the individual’s lot is cast from the cradle to the grave in the iron mould of
hereditary custom.” The Golden Bough, abridged edition (London: Macmillan & Co., 1954),
p. 48.
Aguirre Morales says that there was no theft in Inca society simply because of lack of
imagination for wrongdoing. But this clever literary comment does not destroy a social
reality that proves precisely what Aguirre insists on denying: Inca communism. The French
economist Charles Gide states that Proudhon’s famous phrase is less exact than the
following one: “Theft is property.” In Inca society there was no theft because there was no
property or, if you like, because there was a socialist organization of property.
We dispute and, if necessary, reject the testimony of colonial chroniclers. But Aguirre
seeks support for his theory precisely in their medieval interpretation of the form and
distribution of the land and its products.
The fruits of the earth cannot be hoarded. It is not credible, therefore, that two-thirds of
the crops were taken over for the consumption of the officials and priests of the empire. It is
much more likely that the crops supposedly reserved for the nobility were actually put into a
state storehouse for social welfare, a typically and singularly socialist provision.

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 4
Public Education
The Colonial Heritage and French and North American
Influence
EDUCATION IN PERU has been subject to three successive
influences: the Spanish influence or, more precisely, legacy; the French; and
the North American. However, the initial Spanish influence has dominated.
The other two have barely penetrated the Spanish framework and have not
altered it basically.
The history of public education in Peru is divided into three periods
according to these influences.1 The periods are not precisely defined. This is
a common defect in Peru, where even men are seldom clearly and
unmistakably outlined and everything is a little blurred and confused.
A combination of foreign elements, unadapted to local conditions, is
superimposed on public education, as on other aspects of national life. Peru,
fruit of the conquest, is not a country that assimilates the ideas of men of
other nations and imbues them with its sentiments and customs, thereby
enriching without deforming its national spirit. It is a country in which
Indians and foreign conquerors live side by side but do not mingle with or
even understand one another. The republic feels and declares its loyalty to
the viceroyalty and, like the viceroyalty, it belongs more to the colonizers
than to the rulers. The feelings and interests of four-fifths of the population
play almost no role in the formation of the national identity and institutions.
Peruvian education, therefore, has a colonial rather than a national
character. When the state refers to the Indians in its educational programs, it
treats them as an inferior race; in this respect, the republic is no different
from the viceroyalty.
Spain willed us, on the other hand, an aristocratic attitude and an
ecclesiastical and literary concept of education, which closed the university to
mestizos and made culture a class privilege. The purpose of teaching was to
prepare priests and scholars, and the common people had no right to
instruction.
The independence movement, nourished on Jacobin ideology,
temporarily brought about the adoption of egalitarian principles. However,
this verbal equality, meant only for the criollo, ignored the Indian. The

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republic, moreover, was born in poverty and could not afford the luxury of a
broad educational system.
Condorcet’s lofty concept did not figure among the ideals borrowed from
the Revolution by our liberal leaders. In practice, independence perpetuated
the colonial mentality in education as in everything else. After the fervor of
liberal oratory and sentiment had died down, class privilege reasserted itself.
The government of 1831 declared that education was to be free, a measure
that was never carried out. The government was actually concerned not with
the need to educate the people but, in its own words, with “the notorious
depletion of private fortunes that had reduced countless fathers to the bitter
situation of not being able to give their sons a good education, thereby
ruining the future of many talented youths.”2
The literary and rhetorical orientation was just as marked. Felipe
Barreda y Laos cites as typical academic centers during the early days of the
republic: Trinity College of Huancayo; the School of Philosophy and Latin
Studies of Huamachuco; and the Schools of Philosophy, Theology, and
Jurisprudence of the College of Moquegua.3
The liberals, the old landholding aristocracy, and the new urban middle
class all studied together in the humanities. They liked to think of
universities and colleges as factories producing writers and lawyers. The
liberals enjoyed rhetoric as much as the conservatives. No one was interested
in a practical orientation encouraging work in commerce or industry, still less
in a democratic orientation making culture accessible to all.
The Spanish heritage was not only psychological and intellectual but
above all economic and social. Education continued to be a privilege because
the privileges of wealth and class continued. The aristocratic and literary
concept of education was typical of a feudal system and economy. Not having
abolished feudalism in Peru, independence would not abolish its ideas about
education.4
Dr. Manuel Vicente Villarán, who stands for democratic-bourgeois
beliefs in the Peruvian educational system, deplores this legacy. Twenty-five
years ago he stated in a speech on the liberal professions:
There are a thousand economic and social reasons why Peru should be like the United
States, a country of farmers, settlers, miners, tradesmen, and laborers. But the vagaries of
history and the will of man have converted this country into a literary center, homeland of
intellectuals and breeder of bureaucrats. Let us look at society and examine any family: with
luck, we might find one of its members in agriculture, business, industry, or shipping; but
we shall certainly find a lawyer or physician, a military officer or government employee, a
judge or a politician, a professor or a scholar, a journalist or a poet. We are infected with the

85
sickness of the old, decadent countries, with their preoccupation with speaking and writing
instead of acting, with “moving words instead of things,” an illness that is a sign of indolence
and weakness. Almost all of us look with horror on the active professions that require
energy and the will to succeed, because we do not want to fight, suffer, take risks, and make
our own way to prosperity and independence. How few of us decide to bury ourselves on a
mountain, live in the puna, sail the seas, explore the rivers, irrigate the fields, work the
mines. We are even frightened of the risks and responsibilities connected with
manufacturing and commerce, while at the same time we are encouraged by society to join
the swelling multitude of people who want at any price the tranquility, security, the semi-
idleness of public employment and the literary professions. Every father hopes that his son
will be a lawyer, scholar, office employee, writer, or teacher. Knowledge is triumphant, the
spoken and written word is in its glory, and if this evil is not corrected, Peru will become like
China, the promised land of bureaucrats and scholars.5
A study of the history of capitalist civilization makes clear the causes of
the social situation in Peru as described by Dr. Villarán in the above
paragraph.
Spain is a country that has never emerged from the Middle Ages and
joined the march of capitalism. Whereas in Central and Eastern Europe the
last bastions of feudalism were demolished by the World War, in Spain they
have been maintained by the monarchy. Spanish history reveals that this
country has never had a liberal-bourgeois revolution with a victorious third
estate. Capitalism more and more appears to be closely related to liberalism
and Protestantism. This is an empirical observation based on experience,
rather than a principle or theory. The countries that have most highly
developed capitalism—industrialism and mechanization—are the Anglo-
Saxons.6 Of all the Latin countries, Spain is the one that has been least able
to adapt to capitalism and liberalism. The famous Spanish decadence, which
has been romantically attributed to the most varied and exotic origins,
consists simply of this inability to adapt, to Europeanize, to assimilate into a
democratic, bourgeois, and capitalist society. The colonies founded by Spain
in America were bound to suffer from the same weakness. It is perfectly clear
that the colonies of England, a nation destined to be supreme in the
capitalist age, received the spiritual and material energies of a society at its
zenith, whereas the colonies of Spain, a nation chained to the aristocratic
age, received the sickness of a decadent society.
The medieval Spaniard came to America as a conquistador, not a
colonizer. When Spain stopped sending conquistadors, it began sending
viceroys, priests, and lawyers.
It is now believed that Spain experienced its bourgeois revolution in
America. Its liberal bourgeois class, suppressed at home, organized itself in

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the colonies. The countries most benefited by the historical process launched
by this revolution were those which had the strongest elements of a liberal,
bourgeois society and economy. In Peru, the viceroyalty had constructed on
the scattered remains of the Inca economy and society an aristocratic and
feudal regime that reproduced the regime of the decaying metropolitan
country with all its evils and without its roots.
The responsibility for the social situation denounced in 1900 by Dr.
Villarán belongs to the Spanish heritage. Dr. Villarán admitted as much in
his speech, although he could not show much intellectual independence
because of his affiliation with civilismo, the class represented by his party and
heir to all the privileges of the viceroyalty:
America was not a colony to be settled and developed but to be exploited. The
Spaniards came in search of easy wealth, ready and waiting, the kind of wealth that attracts
the adventurer, the nobleman, the soldier, and the sovereign. In any event, the Indians were
there to do the work. They were numerous, docile, industrious, and used to the land and the
climate. The servile Indian produced the idle and wasteful rich. Still worse, labor was
associated with servitude, because the worker was nothing but a servant. All labor came to
be instinctively regarded as dishonorable. This instinct has been handed down to us by our
grandparents as part of ourselves. By race and by birth we despise work and we yearn for
wealth without effort, for a life of indolence, parties, and luxury.7
The United States was created by the pioneer, the puritan, the Jew, all
men of strong will who directed their energies toward utilitarian and
practical ends. Peru received a race that in its homeland could only be
indolent, feckless, dreamy, and completely unfit for industrial and capitalist
enterprises. The descendants of this race have inherited its defects.
The argument that the Spanish race could not liberate itself from the
Middle Ages and adapt to a liberal and capitalist century is corroborated by a
scientific interpretation of history.8 We, who have always tended to an
undiscriminating idealism in our approach to history, now have a realistic
critic, César A. Ugarte. In his Bosquejo de la historia económica del Perú he
states:
What forces did the new race bring to Peru? The Spaniard of the sixteenth century was
not psychologically equipped to undertake the economic development of a hostile, harsh,
unexplored land. A warrior who had recently emerged from eight centuries of the
reconquest of Spain into the political unification of his country, he lacked the virtues of
diligence and thrift. His noble prejudices and bureaucratic predilections turned him against
agriculture and industry, which he considered to be occupations of slaves and commoners.
Most of the conquistadors and explorers of the sixteenth century were destitute, but they
were not interested in finding a free and bountiful land out of which they could carve a
prosperous future; they were driven only by greed for easy and fabulous wealth and the
possibility of attaining power and glory. The few cultured and worthwhile men who

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accompanied this mass of ignorant adventurers were inspired by religious faith and
proselytizing zeal.9
In my opinion, a religious spirit was not an obstacle to the economic
organization of the colonies. The devout puritans of New England applied
precisely this spiritual drive to their economic enterprises. Spanish
colonization did not suffer from an excess of religion.10
The republic, which inherited the institutions and methods of its public
education from the feudal and aristocratic viceroyalty, used France as a
model as soon as its budding capitalist economy and class induced the
government to become interested in reforming its educational system.
The French influence only added its defects to the original ones of the
Spanish heritage. Instead of correcting the literary and rhetorical concepts of
education handed down to the republic by the viceroyalty, it simply
intensified and complicated them.
Capitalist civilization did not develop as fully in France as it did in
England, Germany, and the United States, partly because of the failings of
the French educational system. That nation, from which we have
anachronistically copied so much, still has not solved such basic problems as
a uniform primary-school system and technical training.
Carefully studying this question in Créer, Herriot makes the following
statements. “Consciously or not, we have remained faithful to that taste for
universal culture which our fathers thought was the best way to refine the
spirit. The Frenchman loves the general idea without always knowing what it
stands for. Our press and our speeches are nourished on generalities.”11 “In
the middle of the twentieth century, we still do not have a national program
for education. Every political regime inflicted on us has imposed its theories
on education. Looked at in perspective, their efforts have been disastrous.”12
Further on, after recalling that Renan blamed part of the misfortunes of
1870 on a public education closed to all progress and thereby stifling the
spirit of France, Herriot adds: “The men of 1848 had planned for our
country a program of instruction that has never been carried out or even
understood. Our teacher, Constantin Pecqueur, deplored the fact that public
education was still not organized socially and that the privileges of birth
should be extended into the education of children.”13
Herriot, whose democratic principles cannot be questioned, supports his
thesis with declarations of the Compagnons de l’Université Nouvelle and
other advocates of a radical reform in education. According to his outline of
the history of public education in France, the Revolution had broad and

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modern theories on education. “With remarkable decisiveness, Condorcet
demanded for all citizens all the possibilities of instruction, free at all levels,
the triple development of body, mind, and morals.” But after Condorcet
came Napoleon.
The work of 1808 [Herriot writes] is the antithesis of the efforts of 1792. From then on,
the two opposing principles were in constant conflict. We find them both underlying our
institutions, which to this day are badly coordinated. Napoleon’s primary interest in
secondary education was to train his bureaucrats and government officials. We believe that
he was largely responsible for the prolonged ignorance of our people during the nineteenth
century. The men of 1793 had other hopes. Even in the colleges and lycées, there was
nothing to awaken intellectual freedom; even in the university, there was no place for the
independent study of science or letters. The Third Republic has been able to free the
universities from this bondage and return to the sectarian aims of the Normal School, the
Conservatory of Arts and Trades, and the Institute. But it has not been able to break away
completely from the narrow concept tending to isolate the university from the rest of the
nation. It has perpetuated the exaggerated concern for academic degrees and respect for
procedures that made Jesuit education so strong and, at the same time, so dangerous a
force.14
This, according to a democratic and liberal statesman of the French
middle class, is the situation of education in the nation from which for so
many years we have misguidedly imported methods and texts. Our mistake
derives from the viceroyal aristocracy which, disguised as the republican
bourgeoisie, has maintained in the republic the privileges and principles of a
colonial society. This class wanted its children to have, if not the severely
dogmatic education of the mother country, at least the elegantly conservative
education of the Jesuit colleges that existed in France during the Restoration.
Dr. Villarán, proponent of a North American orientation, writing in
1908 on foreign influences in education, pointed out the error of using
France as a model. “With all its admirable intellectual qualities,” he said,
“that country still has not been able to become sufficiently modern,
democratic, and united in its system and methods of education. Leading
French writers are the first to recognize this.”15 Dr. Villarán cited the
opinion of Taine as an indisputable authority for the intellectual civilistas
whom he was addressing.
French influence has not yet disappeared. There are still too many traces
of it in the programs and, above all, in the spirit of secondary and university
education. But with the recent reforms based on North American models, its
period has ended. Therefore, an accounting can be made of this influence,
which we already know represents an enormous liability. It is responsible for
the predominance of the liberal professions. Unable to prepare a competent

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ruling class, education in Peru, from a strictly historical point of view, suffers
from its failure to meet the needs of the developing national economy and
from its indifference to the indigenous element. This is the same defect that
we find throughout almost the entire political process of the republic.
When in 1895 the Piérola administration began to reorganize the
economy of the country along the lines of civilismo, it also revised the system
and methods of education. The creation of a capitalist economy had been
interrupted by the War of ’79 and its aftermath; now public education had to
be adapted to the needs of this developing economy.
Primary education, which had been turned over to the municipalities by
an impoverished government, again became the responsibility of the state.
With the foundation of a Teachers’ Normal School, it was taken out of the
hands of criollo dilettantes and made truly public, that is, for the people.
Technical education was assured by the reestablishment of the School of
Arts and Trades.
This period of public education was characterized by its progressive
orientation toward the Anglo-Saxon model. Although the 1902 reform of
secondary education was a first step in this direction, it was a false step
because it was limited to a single phase of education. The civilismo regime of
Piérola neither knew how nor was able to conduct a sound educational
policy. Its intellectuals, educated in garrulous and swollen verbosity or in
lymphatic and academic erudition, had the mediocre mentality of law clerks.
Its leaders or directors, when they rose above the mental level of traffickers in
coolie labor or dealers in sugar cane, were hopelessly attached to their
outdated aristocratic prejudices.
Since 1900 Dr. Villarán has been advocating a reform consistent with
the burgeoning capitalist development of the country. His speech of that year
on the liberal professions was the first effective protest against the literary
and aristocratic approach to education that had been passed on to the
republic by the viceroyalty. In the name of a frankly materialist or capitalist
concept of progress, his speech condemned the vaporous and archaic foreign
idealism that until then had prevailed in public education—limited to the
education of “decent” young men. He concluded with the statement that it
was “urgent to reorganize our educational system to produce fewer degree-
holders and scholars and more men useful and productive to society.” He
added that “the great nations of Europe today are remodeling their
educational programs, largely along North American lines, because they
understand that this century requires men of enterprise rather than men of

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letters and also because they are all to some extent engaged in extending
their trade, their culture, and their race throughout the world. Following the
example of the great nations of Europe, we should also correct our mistakes
and educate practical, industrious, and energetic men, the ones the country
needs in order to become wealthy and by the same token powerful.”16
The reform of 1920 marked the victory of the orientation advocated by
Dr. Villarán and, therefore, the predominance of North American influence.
On the one hand, the Organic Law of Education, which took effect that year,
originated in a proposal drawn up by a committee headed by Villarán. On
the other hand, its final text was revised by Dr. Bard, chief of the North
American mission contracted by the government to reorganize public
education and for some time charged with applying the principles of this law.
The importation of North American methods cannot be attributed to
weariness with Latin bombast, but rather to the spiritual drive that affirmed
the development of a capitalist economy. Politically, the historical process
meant the fall of a feudal oligarchy because of its inability to become
capitalist. In the sphere of education, it meant an educational reform
inspired by the example of the most prosperous and highly industrialized
nation.
Therefore, the 1920 reform is consistent with the country’s historical
evolution. But, like the political movement which it paralleled and to which
it was linked, the educational movement was sabotaged by the continued and
widespread existence of a feudal regime. It is not possible to democratize the
education of a country without democratizing its economy and its political
superstructure.
A country cannot conscientiously fulfill its historical destiny unless it
carries out its own educational reform, using foreign experts only as
consultants. For this reason, the North American mission was a failure and
the new Organic Law remained more a program of theory than of action.
There is a hopeless gap between the main provisions of the Organic Law
and the practice of education. In a study that is not intended to be either
negative or polemical, Dr. Bouroncle reviews the troubled history of this
reform and notes several of its failures and amendments.
A superficial analysis [he writes] of the present legal situation of education reveals that
many of its provisions and regulations have not had and never can have practical application.
In the first place, the National Bureau of Education and the National Council of Education
have been modified on the basis of legislative authorization; and the regional bureaus, which
were the executive bodies with the highest technical and administrative competence, have
been eliminated. The bureaus and offices have been changed and the study programs of

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primary and secondary education have had to be revised; examinations and degrees for
teachers have had to be completely reformed. No work has been done on the division of
schools into the different categories envisaged by the law or on the complicated classification
of secondary schools that was proposed by the regulation on secondary education. The
National Examining Board has been replaced by an Office of Examinations and Studies and
the whole system has been modified. Higher education, which was dealt with in greatest
detail, has only partially complied with the provisions of the law. The University of
Technical Schools failed in its early stages and the Advanced Schools of Agriculture,
Pedagogical Science, Industrial Arts, and Commerce have not been created. The study
program for the University of San Marcos [also called the University of Lima] has not been
fully implemented and the University Student Center, for which special personnel was
contracted, has not even been founded. If we examine the present regulations for primary
and secondary education, we shall likewise see an endless number of provisions that have
been amended or that have not been applied. In Peru, few laws have been modified as
rapidly and broadly as that of education, which today has more amendments and unapplied
provisions than effective regulations.17
This is the thoughtful criticism of a sympathetic official. There is no lack
of other statements, even one that declares the 1920 reform a failure because
primary education still does not receive ten percent of the fiscal revenue as
stipulated by law.18 Furthermore, this statement is implicit in the revision of
the Organic Law by the National Committee on Education.
Those of us whose ideology is revolutionary must declare that the failure
of the 1920 reform was not due to overly ambitious or idealistic provisions.
In many ways, the reform is limited in its objectives and conservative in its
scope. It does nothing to diminish the privileges of rank and fortune. It does
not open higher education to selected students from primary schools,
because it does not provide for such a selection. It creates a dual school
system according to whether or not the student will continue to secondary
school, thereby restricting working-class children to a primary education in
schools that do not prepare them to pursue a professional career. It
perpetuates the private primary school, which from childhood rigidly
separates the social classes. It establishes only free primary instruction,
without even maintaining the principle that entrance into secondary school,
which the government offered to a small percentage under its old system of
scholarships, is expressly reserved for the best students. As regards
scholarships, the terms of the Organic Law are very vague and in practice
only students already in secondary schools are eligible for government
support. Article 254 says: “By law, exemption from fees for tuition and
residence may be awarded to needy youths who are outstanding in ability,
morals, and dedication to study. These scholarships will be granted by the

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regional director on the recommendation of the faculty of the respective
secondary school.19
In the light of its many limitations, the 1920 reform cannot be
considered the democratic-bourgeois reform proposed by Dr. Villarán.
University Reform
IDEOLOGY AND PROTEST
The student movement, which began in Córdoba with student demands
for university reform, signals the birth of a new generation of Latin
Americans. The documents on university reform in Latin America that were
collected by Gabriel del Mazo at the request of the University Federation of
Buenos Aires testify to the spiritual unity of this movement.21 University
unrest, whether in Argentina, Chile, or Peru, is caused by the same forces.
Almost always sparked by a minor incident, it is spread and directed by a
mood, a current of ideas called—not without risk of error—the “new spirit.”
Therefore, the desire for reform is found to have identical characteristics in
all Latin American universities. Students throughout Latin America,
although moved to protest by local problems, seem to speak the same
language.
This movement is also closely connected with the postwar wave of
messianic hopes, revolutionary sentiments, and mystic fervor which
especially affected the university youth of Latin America. Convinced that the
world had entered a new era, youth yearned to play a heroic role and to
perform deeds that would go down in history. As is natural, the prevailing
socioeconomic system, with its evils and shortcomings, acted as a powerful
stimulus to their desire for reform. The world crisis made it urgent for the
Latin American people to examine and resolve their problems of
organization and growth. Logically, the new generation felt these problems
with an intensity and passion unknown to previous generations. Whereas
the latter, in keeping with the tempo of the past, had been evolutionary—at
times completely passive—the new generation was instinctively
revolutionary.
At the beginning, the ideology of the student movement was neither
homogeneous nor autonomous. It was overly influenced by the Wilsonian
philosophy. The liberal and pacifist sentiments made popular by Wilson in
1918–1919 circulated as good revolutionary currency among Latin
American youth. This is easily explained. In Europe, too, not only the
bourgeois Left but the old Socialist reformers accepted as new the liberal
ideas so eloquently expounded by the North American president.

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 Only through closer cooperation with labor unions, through battle with
the conservative forces, and through criticism of the interests and principles
of the established order could the university vanguard define its ideology.
This is the belief of the spokesmen for the new student generation, after
examining the origins and consequences of the reform movement.
Everyone agrees that the objectives of this movement, which hardly has a
program, are not related exclusively to the university. Because of its
increasing concern with improvement of the working classes and with
reduction of the old economic privileges, it can only be understood as one of
the aspects of a profound Latin American renovation. Palacios, taking into
account all the recent consequences of the struggle, states that “as long as the
present regime continues, the reform will not touch the hidden roots of the
educational problem.” He adds:
It will have achieved its purpose if it rids the universities of professors who think of
themselves as bureaucrats; if it gives—as in other countries—to all who are competent the
possibility of becoming professors, without being excluded because of their social, political,
or philosophical beliefs; if it neutralizes, at least somewhat, chauvinism and encourages
teachers to do research and accept responsibility. At best, the reform, correctly understood
and applied, can help prevent the university from becoming, as is the rule in most countries,
as it was even in Russia—whose intellectuals, although superior to those of any other
country, betrayed the Revolution—a stronghold of reaction. The reform can do this by
making an effort to attain the highest aspirations of the century.22
As might be expected, interpretations of the significance of the
movement do not exactly agree. But, with the exception of the reactionaries,
who are interested in limiting the reform to the university and to education,
all those who are sincerely inspired by true ideals define it as the affirmation
of the “new spirit,” understood as the revolutionary spirit.
As a philosopher, Ripa Alberdi considers that this affirmation is a
victory of the idealism of the first two decades of this century over the
positivism of the nineteenth century. “The renaissance of the Argentine
spirit,” he said, “operates through the younger generation, which, while
crossing the fields of philosophy, has felt the wing of liberty brush its
forehead.” But Ripa Alberdi himself realized that the purpose of the reform
was to enable the university to carry out “that social function which is the
very reason for its existence.”23
Julio V. González, who has collected his writings on the university
movement into two volumes, reaches more precise conclusions:
The university reform acknowledges the appearance of a new generation with no ties
binding it to the preceding generation and with its own feelings, ideals, and mission in life.
This is not a simple, isolated fact: it is related in cause and effect to recent events in our

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country which, in turn, are the consequence of world events. It would be a mistake
bordering on the ridiculous to think of university reform as a problem of lecture halls and,
even then, to assume that its importance lay in its effects in cultural circles alone. Such a
mistake would inevitably lead to a solution of the problem that has nothing to do with
actual circumstances. In other words: the university reform is part of the material and moral
development of our society since the war.24
González goes on to list the World War, the Russian Revolution, and
the rise of the Radical party as decisive factors in the reform in Argentina.
José Luis Lanuza points to another factor: the evolution of the middle
class. The majority of the students belong to some level of this class.
However, one of the social and economic results of the war is the
proletarization of the middle class. Lanuza argues that
a collective student movement of such broad social implications as the university reform
would not have been possible before the World War. It became evident that methods of
study would have to be modernized and that the university had not kept up with the
development of universal thought since the time of Alberdi, when our country began to
industrialize. But at that time, the university middle class was content to be a select group.
To its misfortune, its privileges diminished with the growth of industry, class distinctions
became more marked, and the proletarization of the intellectual followed. Teachers,
journalists, and tradesmen organized into unions. Students could not escape the general
movement.25
Mariano Hurtado de Mendoza agrees substantially with the observation
by Lanuza:
The university reform is first and foremost a social phenomenon that results from
another, more general, and far-reaching social phenomenon related to our country’s level of
economic development. It would therefore be a mistake to study the reform, in terms of the
university, as a problem of modernizing its administration; or, in terms of education, as an
attempt to apply new research methods in the pursuit of culture. We would also be wrong to
think of it only as a current of new ideas produced by the World War and the Russian
Revolution, or as the work of the new generation that appears “with no ties binding it to the
preceding generation and with its own feelings, ideals, and mission in life.
And later on he adds:
The university reform is no more than a consequence of the proletarization of the
middle class which inevitably occurs when a capitalist society reaches a certain stage of
economic development. This means that in our society the proletarization of the middle
class is taking place and that the university, which is composed almost entirely of this class,
has been the first to be affected because it was the prototype of the capitalist institution.26
In any case, the reform generally has inspired the formation of groups of
students who demonstrate their sympathy with the proletariat by spreading
progressive social ideas and studying Marxist theories. Popular universities,
very different in concept from earlier timid attempts at university extension
courses, have sprung up all over Latin America as a visible adjunct to the

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student movement. Throughout Latin America the university has produced
students of economics and sociology who have used their knowledge to help
the working class, giving the latter, in some countries, an intellectual
guidance that it formerly lacked. Finally, the most enthusiastic propagandists
and supporters of the political union of Latin America are for the most part
former leaders of the university reform who thereby conserve their
continentalism, another badge of the “new generation.”
A comparison of this movement with that of the universities of China
and Japan proves that it has historical justification. In Japan, the university
has been the principal classroom of socialism. In China, for obvious reasons,
it has been even more active in the creation of a national conscience. Chinese
students are in the vanguard of a revolutionary nationalism which has given
that immense Asiatic nation a new soul and organization and assigned to it a
role of influence in world affairs. The most authoritative Western observers
agree on this point.
But I shall not enter into a study of all the consequences of the university
reform and of its relationship with the great problems of the political
evolution of Latin America. Having established the solidarity of the student
movement with the general historical movement of these peoples, we shall
try to define its characteristics.
What are the basic objectives or demands of the reform?
In 1921, the International Congress of Students held in Mexico
proposed: (1) student participation in university government; (2) open
courses and optional attendance. Chilean students supported the following
principles: (1) autonomy of the university, understood to be an institution
composed of students, professors, and graduates; (2) reform of the teaching
system by means of open courses and optional attendance, so that when two
professors teach the same subject, student attendance will testify to the
better teacher; (3) revision of study methods and content; and (4) university
extension courses to effectively link the university and society. In 1923,
students of Cuba expressed their demands as follows: (1) a really democratic
university; (2) a real pedagogical and scientific modernization; (3) an
educational system really for the people. In their 1924 program, the students
of Colombia advocated that the university be organized to ensure its
independence, the participation of students in its government, and the
adoption of new study methods. “Not only lectures,” this program says, “but
also seminars and special courses should be offered, and journals should be
published. Professors should have assistants and the teaching profession
should offer security and be open to all who are qualified to occupy a chair in

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the university.” The vanguard students of the University of Lima, loyal to the
principles proclaimed in 1919 and 1923, presented in 1926 the following
platform: defense of university autonomy; participation of students in the
administration and in the orientation of their respective universities or
special schools; the right of students to vote in the election of the university
rector; modernization of teaching methods; student voice in the
establishment of courses; incorporation into the university of values outside
the university; social content in culture; popular universities. The principles
upheld by the Argentine students probably are better known because of their
extensive influence on the student movement of America since its first
declaration at the University of Córdoba. Furthermore, they are largely the
same principles that were announced by the other Latin American
universities.
This rapid review makes it clear that the main proposals of university
reform are, first, student participation in university government and, second,
open courses alongside the regular courses and with identical standing, to be
given by competent teachers.
The meaning and origin of these two demands help us to understand
what the reform stands for.
UNIVERSITY POLICY AND TEACHING IN
LATIN AMERICA
The economic and political system created by the colonial aristocracy—
which in some Spanish American countries still exists, although it is steadily
and irreversibly declining—has long kept the Latin American university
under the tutelage of these oligarchies and their supporters. Because
university education has turned into a privilege of wealth, if not of position,
or at least of a social class absolutely bound to the interests of either wealth
or position, the university has tended to become an academic bureaucracy.
Even the temporary influence of some outstanding personality could not save
it from this fate.
The purpose of the university was chiefly to provide lawyers and other
professionals for the ruling class. The rudimentary development and limited
scope of public instruction closed the doors of higher education to the poor.
Even primary education did not reach, and still does not reach, more than a
fraction of the people. The university, controlled intellectually and materially
by a class that in general lacked any creative drive, could not aspire to the
formation and selection of skills. Its bureaucratization inevitably led to
spiritual and scientific impoverishment.

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 This was not a phenomenon peculiar to Peru. We have had it longer
because of the survival of our semifeudal economic structure. But even
among countries like Argentina, which have led the way in industrialization
and democracy, the university has been the last to join the march of progress
and change. The history of the University of Buenos Aires before the reform
is summarized by Dr. Florentino V. Sanguinetti as follows:
Early in Argentine history, it promoted culture on a modest scale and formed urban
centers which gave the masses an awareness of political unity and institutional order.
Although its technical level was low, it was adequate to the needs of the country and to apply
the slowly acquired knowledge of the civilian sector. After our country became a nation, the
aristocratic and conservative university created a new social type: the professional. These
men were the patricians of the second republic, gradually replacing the rural caciques in the
managing of businesses, but they were not intellectually qualified to participate actively in
the educational system or to guide the energies bursting from the wealth of pampas and
tropics. During the last fifty years, our farming and ranching nobility has been excluded first
from the economic field by the technically more skilled and progressive immigrant and then
from the political field by the emergence of the middle-class parties. In search of an area
where they could still wield influence, they took over the university, which soon became the
vehicle of class privilege—where a succession of lifetime directors held the most important
posts and where teachers, recruited by hereditary levy, imposed a veritable academic
servitude of narrow-mindedness and conservatism.27
The reform movement had to attack, first of all, this conservative
stratification of the university. The arbitrarily imposed courses, the
incompetent professors, and the exclusion of independent and progressive
minds from the faculty were simply consequences of the oligarchical system
of education. These evils could be attacked only through student
participation in the government of the university and through the
establishment of open courses and optional attendance so that students
could eliminate the bad professors by demonstrating their preference for the
classes given by better qualified teachers.
Through the history of the reform, the conservative oligarchy invariably
has followed two courses of action. First, it has been united in its support of
the incompetent, unpopular professor, whenever the interest of a family of its
group was involved. Second, it has been no less stubborn in its resistance to
any new, non-university, or simply independent teaching values. The two
basic demands of the reform are, therefore, unquestionably dialectical,
because they do not grow out of purely doctrinaire concepts but out of
specific student action.
The majority of the teachers were unbending in their opposition to the
important principles of the university reform, the first of which had been

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declared at the Student Congress of Montevideo and, thanks to favorable
political circumstances, was officially recognized in both Argentina and
Peru. When these circumstances changed, the conservative elements in
education began a counter-movement, which in Peru has already wiped out
almost all the gains of the reform and which in Argentina has stirred up
recent student demonstrations against reactionary trends.
But the ideals of the reform cannot be attained without honest
acceptance of the two principles discussed here. The vote of the students,
even if used only as a moral check on teaching policy, is the sole dynamic and
progressive elements in a university which otherwise would be hopelessly
dominated by reactionary forces. Without this premise, the second principle
of the reform, open courses, cannot be carried out. Moreover, the “hereditary
levy” so accurately described by Dr. Sanguinetti becomes the method of
recruiting new professors. And scientific progress loses its main stimulus,
because nothing lowers the level of teaching and of science as much as an
oligarchical bureaucracy.
THE UNIVERSITY OF LIMA
In Peru, for several reasons, the university has been the stronghold of the
colonial spirit. The first reason is that under the republic the old colonial
aristocracy continued in power.
But this fact has been brought to light only since the new generation,
having freed itself of the colonialist mentality or civilista historiography, has
been able to judge Peruvian reality objectively. The breakdown of the old
class was foretold in 1919 by the “secessionist” character of the change in
government.
When Dr. V. A. Belaúnde described the university as “the link between
republic and colony” and praised it as the unique and essential organ of
historical continuity, he seemed to think that he had made a valuable
discovery. Until then, the ruling class had maintained the intellectual illusion
of a republic different from and independent of the colony, although its real
feelings were betrayed by its instinctive nostalgia for the viceroyal period.
The university, which according to a cliché was the national alma mater, had
always been officially defined as the highest seat of the principles and ideals
of the republic.
Except for a moment of liberalism under Gálvez y Lorente, who
reestablished and carried on the ideology of Rodríguez de Mendoza, the
university had remained faithful to its scholarly, conservative, and Spanish
tradition. The divorce between the work of the university and national reality

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—which although commented on sorrowfully by Belaúnde, did not prevent
him from praising the university as the unique and sacred embodiment of
the country’s historical continuity—is entirely due to the divorce, little
recognized but nonetheless true, between the old ruling class and the
Peruvian people. Belaúnde wrote: “An unhappy fate has decreed that our
university should serve professional interests and a certain scientific
snobbism; but it has not been an instrument of education nor has it created a
national conscience. A rapid review of the history of the university from its
founding to the present makes tragically clear that it is out of contact with
our national reality, with the life of our society, with the needs and
aspirations of our country.”28 Belaúnde could say no more. Bound by
education and temperament to the feudal class, and a member of the party
that was led by one of its most authentic representatives, he had to be
content to disagree, without going into his reasons. He even had to offer as
explanation an “unhappy fate.”
The truth is that the colony survived in the university because it also
survived—in spite of independence and a liberal government—in the social
and economic structure of the country, thereby slowing down its historical
evolution and weakening its vitality. The university did not play a progressive
and creative role in Peruvian life. It was not only isolated from but also
opposed to the country’s requirements and expectations. The colonial
landholders, who rose to power in the republic during the turbulent period
of military caudillos, are the least nationalist, the least Peruvian, of the
factors in the history of independent Peru. This alone has determined the
“unhappy fate” of the university.
After Gálvez y Lorente and until the student movement of 1919, the
university was heavily influenced by the spirit of the colony. In 1894, Dr.
Javier Prado spoke on “the social condition of Peru under Spanish rule” and
tried to give an objective and balanced criticism of colonialism. This speech
could have initiated measures to bring the university closer to our history
and people. But Dr. Prado was closely associated with interests and beliefs
with which this movement inevitably would have conflicted. He therefore
preferred to head a mediocre program of positivism which, in the name of
Taine, attempted to justify civilismo by endowing it with a superficially
modern political doctrine and which did not even succeed in orienting the
university away from its literary preoccupations toward the scientific
disciplines that it still lacks. In 1900, Dr. M. V. Villarán delivered a
significant speech on the liberal professions in Peru in which he charged the

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colonialism of the university with being responsible for the aristocratic
prejudices that nourished and perpetuated a surplus of lawyers and men of
letters. But this rebuke, like all the other sporadic outbursts of civilismo,
barely ruffled the waters of this placid intellectual pond.
The generation arbitrarily known as “futurist” should have been,
chronologically, the one to begin a reform of the methods and spirit of the
university. To this group belonged the students, later professors, who
represented Peru in the Student Congress of Montevideo and who organized
the University Center, in which they laid the foundations of a solidarity that
would have made possible a definition of the procedures and objectives of the
reform. But under the direction of Riva Agüero, who acted as spokesman for
the colonialist spirit in his writings on Peruvian literature, that university
generation was given a conservative and traditional orientation.
Furthermore, because of its origins and ties, it appeared to be the generation
designated to react against the literary movement of González Prado and to
reestablish the intellectual hegemony of civilismo, which was threatened by
the popularity of Radical literature, especially in the provinces.
REFORM AND REACTION
The Peruvian student movement of 1919 received its ideological
stimulus from the triumphant rebellion of the students of Córdoba and from
the eloquent exhortations of Professor Alfredo L. Palacios. But it originated
chiefly as a student uprising against certain obviously unqualified professors.
A minority of the students extended and elevated the objectives of this
unrest, transforming what had started out as only a repudiation of bad
professors and an archaic system into a repudiation of the old spirit of the
university. The movement was supported by students who conformed to
civilista ideas but who followed the proponents of the reform as much
because they thought they were participating in a relatively innocuous school
rumpus as because they also objected to the obvious incompetence of the
professors.
This shows that if the teaching oligarchy had shown any interest in
maintaining its intellectual prestige and had promptly carried out a
minimum of the scandalously overdue improvements and modernizations in
the educational system, it would easily have kept its position intact for a few
more years.
The crisis that it dealt with so ineptly was brought on by the protracted
and flagrant discrepancy between the academic level of the professor and the
general advance of our culture in more than one field. This lag was

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particularly striking in literature and the arts. The “futurist” generation had
reacted against the romantic “radical” generation outside the university by
trying to reinforce the spiritual power of the university and concentrate in its
classrooms all the forces directing national culture. They did not, however,
have the knowledge, the desire, or the power to replace the old, backward,
and incompetent faculty of the most vulnerable department, which was the
School of Literature.
The glaring contrast between the teaching of literature in this
department and the country’s heightened literary awareness and production
could no longer be ignored once the new generation broke with the
conservatism of our paradoxical “futurists” and launched a renaissance in
national literature. Young people attending the literature courses had
acquired outside the university an aesthetic discrimination that enabled
them to judge how outdated and inept some of their professors were.
Whereas these students, reading on their own, had left “modernism” behind,
the university faculty was still in the grip of the criteria and precepts that
prevailed in Spain in the early 1800’s. Because of its historical and literary
orientation, the group that headed the 1919 movement in San Marcos was
more severe in its criticism and more categorical in its condemnation of the
professors it accused of being backward and anachronistic.
The reform spread from the School of Literature to the other
departments where vested interests and the oligarchical system maintained
unqualified professors. But the first breach was made in the School of
Literature; only some time later was the struggle directed against “bad
methods” rather than “bad professors.”
The students began their offensive by drawing up a list of criticisms
which they carefully tried to keep impartial and dispassionate. At this time,
the evaluation was made on the basis of academic competence, without any
ideological judgments.
When the rector and the council declared their support of the professors
under attack, the movement intensified. The student insurgents, realizing
that the oligarchical character of teaching and the bureaucratization and
stagnation of teaching were two aspects of the same problem, expanded their
protests and made them more detailed.
The first national congress of students, which met in Cuzco in March
1920, revealed that the reform movement still lacked a well directed and
defined program. The most important act of this congress was the creation of
popular universities in order to link revolutionary students with the
proletariat and to broaden the scope of student protest.

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 Later, in 1921, during the conflict between university and government,
student behavior was profoundly disoriented. Furthermore, reactionary
professors, who attempted to smuggle in colonialist superstitions and
nostalgias under the guise of an opportunistic and democratic oratory, found
an enthusiastic audience among university youth, most of whom persisted in
revering their old masters.
It was, nonetheless, evident that the defeat suffered by traditional
civilismo had contributed to the triumphs achieved in 1919 by student
protest. In that year, the decree of September 20 established open courses
and student representation on the university council, and by means of Laws
4002 and 4004 the government declared vacant the chairs occupied by the
blacklisted professors.
Once the university reopened—after a recess which strengthened the
bonds between teachers and part of the students—the gains of the reform
largely vanished because of the new organization. On the other hand, the
students were more deeply imbued with the “new spirit” and were less
confused ideologically than before the closing.
The reopening of the university in 1922 under the rectorate of Dr. M. V.
Villarán signified that the government and professors had reached an
agreement to end the conflict which had forced the university to close the
preceding year. The basis of this agreement was the Organic Law of Teaching
promulgated in 1920 by the Executive under authorization from Congress in
October 1919, when the latter passed Law 4004 sanctioning the principle of
student participation in the government of the university. This law granted
the university an autonomy that satisfied the teachers who, for obvious
reasons, were more inclined than before to accept a compromise. The
government, equally anxious to find a solution, managed to circumvent all
difficulties and ratified the law in its entirety.
As is natural, the agreement endangered the gains of the students by
solving, even if only temporarily, the situation that had sustained their
struggle. In fact, soon there was a badly disguised attempt to gradually
nullify the reforms of 1919. Some professors restored the attendance system.
But now the students were alerted to such an attempt, and they were
inspired first by the Student Congress of Mexico and then by the fervent
message of the youth of the south delivered by Haya de la Torre.
On taking office, the new rector, in a spirit of moderation and fairness,
had declared himself to be sympathetic to the reform and even critical of the
law’s provisions replacing the free association of students with the highly

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authoritarian and bureaucratic “university student center.” In line with these
declarations, he recognized the wisdom of working with a consensus of the
students and of avoiding any arbitrary or reactionary action that could
arouse student hostility.
With the recalcitrant conservative professors brought under control, Dr.
Villarán’s term of office marked a period of collaboration between faculty and
students. The rector made himself popular by his support of Zulen’s
intelligent library reforms and by his frequent consultations with the
students, whose opinions and ideas he respected. Dr. Gastañeta, dean of the
School of Medicine, by following a similar policy, won the students’
enthusiastic cooperation. And the work of some of the young professors
helped improve relations between faculty and students.
This policy, however, prevented a renewal of the reform movement. On
the one hand, the professors were careful to adhere to a progressive program
or at least to avoid action that might be interpreted as reactionary. On the
other hand, the students were in a mood to collaborate and many were
convinced that this was the only way to guarantee the autonomy and even
the survival of the university.
On May 23 the working class and the student vanguard demonstrated
how closely they had become allied socially and ideologically. On that date,
in exceptionally favorable circumstances, the new generation played a
historical role when it advanced from student unrest to collective and social
protest. This event sparked a revolutionary current that swept through the
university halls, strengthening the left wing of the Student Federation,
reorganized soon after, and, above all, reviving and invigorating student
discussion.
But the reform, apart from abolishing compulsory attendance, actually
gained for the student no more than a theoretical control of the orientation
or, more precisely, the administration of education. The principle of student
representation on the university council was formally recognized; but the
students, who used the assembly to express their opinions on any problem,
neglected to designate permanent delegates and preferred to influence the
council through spontaneous action and student plebiscites.
Although student leaders were extremely aggressive and dynamic, they
did not use the assembly, where there was more uproar than discussion, to
demand and obtain new teaching methods. They may have been distracted
by the struggle against reactionary forces within and outside the university or
they may not have been sufficiently aware of the problems of education. In

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any event, they were satisfied to accept token efforts or vague promises that
melted away once they relaxed their vigilance in the classrooms.
Therefore, the university reform made little progress as an educational
reform, despite the new Organic Law and the more sympathetic attitude of
some of the professors. The comments of Alfredo Palacios on a similar phase
of the reform in Argentina can be applied to our university.
In its first stage, university reform consisted only of student participation in the
university government and of optional attendance. It had failed to achieve its most
important objectives: modernized teaching methods and intensified studies. These were very
difficult to accomplish in the School of Law, which was petrified in its old procedures of
pure theory and pure abstraction. There was no teaching by observation and experience. It
was always believed that from this school would emerge the social elite who would become
the governing class: the financier, the diplomat, the writer, the politician. What emerged, to
the contrary, were youthful materialists, knowing nothing about everything, but versed in all
the tricks needed to embrangle a litigation and employed to perpetrate the injustices of daily
life. Students listened to lectures without showing any curiosity or any interest in research;
without laboratories to spur their enthusiasm, to test their character, to discipline their will,
and to exercise their intellect.29
Because our university did not have directors like Dr. Palacios, capable of
understanding the reform required in the educational system and of
dedicating passion and optimism to the task of realizing it, our reform
movement never went beyond the stage to which it was carried by student
activity.
The years 1924–1927 were adverse to the movement to reform the
university in Peru. The expulsion of twenty-six students from the University
of Trujillo was a prelude to an offensive by the reactionaries. Soon after, all
the conservative forces in the University of Lima were mobilized against the
provisions laid down in 1919 and 1923. The repressive measures taken by
the government against the student leaders of San Marcos freed the
professors from the watchful presence of most of those who had kept the
reform spirit alive among the students. With the deaths of the two young
teachers Zulen and Borja y Garcia, almost no professors remained to
champion reform. After the departure of Dr. Villarán, his policy of
cooperation with students was abandoned. Left vacant, the rectorate fell into
the paralysis and sterility typical of an interim administration.
This combination of unfavorable circumstances inevitably produced a
resurgence of the conservative and oligarchical spirit. As the forces of
progress and reform weakened, teachers went back to the old system and
representatives of the civilista mentality regained absolute control. The
expedient of a provisional administration, constantly extended, temporarily

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masked the reestablishment of conservatism in positions from which it had
been dislodged by the reform movement.
There was a noticeable concentration of left-wing students in the 1920
election of delegates. The platform presented by this group, which
dominated the new federation, reaffirmed all the basic principles of the
reform.30 But once again repression came to the aid of conservative interests.
A characteristic of this period of reaction was the support given to the
university’s conservative elements by the same forces which, riding the
historical wave that swept away traditional civilismo, had been decisive in the
triumph of the reform in 1919.
These are not, however, the only factors in the crisis of the university
movement. Youth is not exempt from responsibility. Their rebellious
behavior usually has been the result of their susceptibility to superficial
enthusiasms. This is actually a failing common to all Spanish America. In a
recent article, Vasconcelos writes: “The principal weakness of our race is its
instability. We are incapable of sustained effort and, for that same reason, we
cannot develop a plan or execute a project.” He goes on to say: “In general,
one should beware of enthusiasts. ‘Enthusiastic’ is the most dangerous
adjective in our vocabulary. With that noble epithet, we have learned to cover
up our national weakness: we start out well and promise much; we fail to
finish or make good.”31
Erratic and unstable though he is, the student does more damage to the
movement because he is vague and imprecise about its program and
character. The objectives of the reform are not sufficiently defined nor are
they fully understood. Discussion and study proceed slowly. Reaction cannot
conquer youth intellectually and spiritually; its victories are only conditional.
The reform, on the other hand, continues to act on student spirit and,
despite momentary lapses, keeps alive the ardor that fired youth in the days
of 1919–1923.
If the reform movement is in a precarious situation in Lima, it
nevertheless flourishes in the University of Cuzco, where the most
distinguished faculty members accept and approve the principles maintained
by the students. Proof of this is the project to reorganize the University of
Cuzco, which was drawn up during its recess by a committee appointed by
the government for this purpose.
This project, signed by Professors Fortunato L. Herrera, José Gabriel
Cosío, Luis E. Valcárcel, J. Uriel García, Leandro Pareja, Alberto Araníbar
P., and J. S. García Rodríguez, undoubtedly is the most important official

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document produced to date on university reform in Peru. It represents the
first time university teachers have spoken on this problem at so high a level,
as well as a break with tradition and with official routine. The plan envisages
the transformation of Cuzco into a great cultural center capable of
supervising and directing the social and economic development of the Andes
region. Its statutes incorporate the cardinal principles of the university
reform in Spanish America.
The committee includes among its “basic proposals”: open courses to
complement those taught by regular professors; elimination of the final
examination as the deciding grade; full-time professors; participation of
students and alumni in the election of university authorities; student
representation on the university council and on every faculty;
democratization of teaching.32
The report also emphasizes the necessity of organizing the university in
such a way as to give it a broad practical application and a complete scientific
orientation. The University of Cuzco hopes to become a true center of
scientific research, wholly dedicated to the betterment of society.
In order to understand the growing conflict between the principles of
university reform, as they have been formulated and subscribed to by student
assemblies in various Spanish American countries, and the situation of the
University of Lima, these principles may be compared with the
corresponding aspects of teaching and administration in the latter university.
Participation of students in the government of the university. Reactionary
forces are determined to reestablish the old, rigid concept of discipline,
understood as absolute deference to the judgment and authority of the
teaching staff. The Council of Deans, or the rector on its behalf, frequently
refuses to give students permission to hold meetings. For the first time, it is
possible to deny the right of students to use the university for discussion.
Student delegates who are not acceptable to the faculty are not recognized.
The last committee of the Student Federation could not begin work or even
make up its membership because it lacked approval of the council. The crisis
of the federation thus depends on a factor beyond the students’ control.
Student opinion has lost not only its influence in the council but even the
possibility of expressing itself freely and in an orderly fashion. In these
conditions, student representation in the government of the university would
be a farce.
Modernization of teaching methods. With the exception of innovations
introduced by one or two professors, the old methods reign supreme. A

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short time ago, a high official of the Department of Education, Dr. Luis E.
Galván, demanded in an article: “What does our university do for scientific
research?”33 In spite of his feelings of loyalty to San Marcos, Dr. Galván was
obliged to give a totally negative answer. Changes in methods and studies
have been minimal and left to the initiative of a few responsible professors.
Courses continue to be given orally and dogmatically. Reforms that were
begun in the 1922–1924 period have been suspended or have been bungled,
as in the case of Zulen’s projected reorganization of library methods.
Reform of the teaching system. Open courses still have not been properly
tried out and conditions do not favor their introduction. The oligarchy in
control of education is opposed to open courses. Academic chairs continue
to be filled by means of the “hereditary levy” denounced by Dr. Sanguinetti
of the old University of Buenos Aires.
All the formal gains of 1919 are therefore nullified. Despite the mild
purge brought about by the students at that time, the percentage of
incompetent teachers is certainly no lower now. The School of Literature,
where the reform was initiated, shows almost no improvement in teaching
methods and curricula.
The provisions of the reform, as established by the Organic Law of 1920,
are still largely unimplemented, and the University Council apparently has
no intention of carrying out the program outlined in that law.34
Nor has any progress been made in creating full-time teachers. The
university professor is typically a dilettante for whom teaching is a very
secondary activity. To a large extent, this is actually an economic problem.
University teaching will remain in the hands of dilettantes until professors
capable of dedicating themselves exclusively to research and study can be
offered a decent salary. But even within its present economic resources, the
university should begin to find a solution; for, as long as scientific research
and specialization are not encouraged, this problem will not be solved
automatically by a share of the university budget.
The crisis at San Marcos is reproduced on a smaller scale in the
provincial universities. The reactionary assault began in the most inadequate
and weakest of them all, the University of Trujillo. An institution that expels
twenty-six of its students, when its enrollment is perilously low, reveals how
deeply committed it is to the reactionary spirit. I am told that, in order not
to appear deserted, this university sends out its staff every year to recruit
students. Using local pride as an argument, the professors try to persuade
fathers not to send their sons to the University of Lima. If, in spite of its

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scarcity of students, the University of Trujillo was prepared to lose twenty-
six, the extent of conservative intransigence can easily be imagined.
The University of Arequipa traditionally has been resistant to
modernization. The conservative atmosphere of the city shields it from any
outside influence that might disturb its repose. The reformist element, which
in recent years has given hopeful signs of growth and activity, is still in the
minority. Only the University of Cuzco is making serious efforts to
transform itself. I have already referred to the reorganization scheme
presented to the government by its leading professors; it is obviously the
most advanced project for university reform in Peru.
The concept of reform, meanwhile, is daily gathering strength and
substance. The problem of education is defined by the student leaders of La
Plata in the following terms:
(1) Education is only one aspect of the social problem; for that reason, it cannot be
solved separately. (2) The culture of all societies is the ideological expression of the interests
of the class in power. The culture of society at present is therefore the ideological expression
of the interests of the capitalist class. (3) The last imperialist war, by upsetting the bourgeois
economy, has produced a crisis in the corresponding culture. (4) Only the advent of a
socialist culture can put an end to this crisis.35
Whereas the new generation’s message, which began as a confused
announcement from Córdoba in 1918, reaches its clearest and most
significant revolutionary expression in Argentina, the signs of reaction
multiply on our university scene. The university reform is constantly
threatened by the determination of the teaching oligarchy to regain full
control.
Conflicting Ideologies
In the stage of practical trials and theoretical digressions that slowly led
to the importation of North American systems and methods, Dr. Deustua
represented the reaction of the old aristocratic spirit, more or less dressed up
in modern idealism. Dr. Villarán used the language of liberalism to present
the program of bourgeois and, therefore, liberal civilismo. Dr. Deustua, in the
modern guise of a university professor and philosopher, embodied the
mentality of feudal civilismo, of the viceroyal landholder. (There had to be a
reason why one sector of the party was called “historical civilismo”).
The real meaning of the controversy between Deustua and Villarán
escaped the reporters and public of that period. The so-called popular
parties were incapable of taking a position in the debate. The Piérola party
was reduced to railing against government taxes and loans—which by no
means constituted all the economic policy of civilismo—and to proclaiming

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periodically that it stood for liberty, order, fatherland, citizenship, et cetera.
The self-styled liberals were no different from the piérolistas, to whom they
were linked in a sporadic, masonic anticlericalism and a vague, romantic,
federalist vindication. (The ideological poverty and intellectual vulgarity of
this opposition, clinging to the stale glory of its caudillo, permitted civilismo
to monopolize discussion of one of the most weighty national problems.)
Only now is it historically possible to understand the meaning of that
university debate, in which Francisco García Calderón, in his usual prudent
and somewhat skeptical fashion, tried to play an eclectic and conciliatory
role.
The ideological position of Dr. Deustua, in the discussion of public
education, was decorated with all the rhetoric needed to impress our shallow
intellectuals. In his metaphysical dissertations on education, Dr. Deustua
represented himself as a defender of idealism against the positivism of his
cautious and complaisant opponents. And the latter, instead of baring the
antidemocratic and antisocial spirit behind his philosophical facade,
preferred to declare their respect for his high ideals.
It would have been easy to demonstrate that the ideas of Dr. Deustua on
education were based not on contemporary idealism but on the old
aristocratic mentality of the great landholders. But no one undertook to
reveal the true nature of Dr. Deustua’s resistance to a reasonably democratic
reform in education. University oratory was mystified by the abstruse
doctrine of the reactionary civilista professor. The debate, furthermore, was
conducted exclusively within the civilismo party, which was divided between
feudalism and capitalism, with the latter spirit deformed and weakened by
the former.
In order to identify the thought of Dr. Deustua and to perceive its
medieval and aristocratic foundation, we need to study the prejudices and
superstitions that sustain it. Dr. Deustua’s ideas are contrary not only to the
principles of modern education but to the essence of capitalism itself. His
concept of work, for example, is in open conflict with the concept that for
some time has governed human progress. In one of his philosophical studies
of education, Dr. Deustua is just as disdainful of work as those who formerly
considered that the only noble and worthwhile occupations were the military
and the literary.
Values and work, virtue and self-interest [he wrote], are essential to the formation of
character. But they play very different roles in that process, just as they play different roles in
the process of education. Freedom is a value that educates; education consists in the
realization of values. Work does not educate; it enriches and instructs; with practice it

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confers skill. But it is motivated by self-interest, which enslaves the soul. Even if work is
inspired by a vocation, which brings to it happiness and joy, that motive is as egoistic as the
others. Freedom does not spring from self-interest, but from moral and aesthetic values.
Even in science, which in a way educates by disciplining the mind either through the orderly
exercise of deduction or through the intuitive action of induction, the so-called value of logic
does not bring to work the freedom that is the essence of the human personality. Work can
contribute to spiritual expansion through the material wealth it produces. But that
expansion may be and usually is a sign of blind egoism. And so it does not signify real
freedom, freedom within, moral and aesthetic freedom, the freedom that is the goal and
content of education.36
This concept of work, although advanced by Dr. Deustua only a little
over a decade ago, is absolutely medieval and aristocratic. Western
civilization is based entirely on work. Society strives to organize itself as a
society of workers and producers. Therefore, work cannot be thought of as
servitude; it must be given stature and dignity.
The dignity of work should not be interpreted as an egoistic sentiment
peculiar to Western civilization. Scientific research enlightens us as much as
spiritual intuition. Man’s destiny is to create. Work is creative, liberating.
Man fulfills himself in work.
Man’s enslavement by the machine and the destruction of his crafts by
industrialization have distorted the meaning and purpose of work. From
John Ruskin to Rabindranath Tagore, reformers have denounced capitalism
for its brutalizing use of the machine. Work has become odious because
mechanization and especially Taylorism have degraded it by robbing it of
creativity.
Pierre Hamp, in his epic writings on labor—la peine des hommes—has
given this exact description: “The grandeur of man consists in doing his work
well. Love of work, in spite of society, is the health of society. Man always
takes pride in the skill of his hands, even when using them for the lowliest
labor. If, like the idle rich, all men scorned labor, and if all men worked only
because they were forced to, without any pleasure, slothfulness and
corruption would destroy a desperate people.”37
This is the principle that should be adopted by a society that is heir to
the spirit and tradition of the Inca society, in which idleness was a crime, and
work, performed with devotion, the highest virtue. The archaic thought of
Dr. Deustua, rejected by even our fearful and confused bourgeoisie, descends
directly from the viceroyal society, which a moderate civilista like Dr. Javier
Prado described as a flabby society dedicated to sensual pleasures.

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 It is not just his concept of work that reveals the aristocratic and
reactionary sentiment of Dr. Deustua and defines his ideological position in
the debate on public education. Above all, his basic concept of teaching
identifies his inspiration as feudalism.
Dr. Deustua was concerned almost exclusively with the education of the
upper and ruling classes. For him, the whole problem of teaching was to
educate the elite, which naturally was an elite of inherited privileges.
Therefore, he cared only about university teaching.
No attitude could be more opposed to the modern approach to
education. Dr. Villarán, from an orthodox, bourgeois standpoint, held up
the example of the United States to Dr. Deustua. He reminded him that
“there, primary school was the introduction to and the historical antecedent
of the secondary school; and that college was the precursor of the
university.”38 Today we could hold up to him, as an example closer to home,
Mexico, a country where, as Pedro Henríquez Ureña says, culture is not
understood in terms of the nineteenth century.
No thought is given to the culture prevailing in the era of capitalism disguised as
liberalism, the culture of a select group of dilettantes, an enclosed garden where artificial
flowers are grown, an ivory tower where dead science is kept in museums. Mexico thinks of
a social culture, offered and really given to all, based on work. To learn is not only to learn to
know but also to learn to do. There should be no superior culture because it would be false
and ephemeral where there is no popular culture.39
Need I say that I entirely agree with this concept, which is in open
conflict with the thesis of Dr. Deustua.
Dr. Deustua placed the problem of education on a purely philosophical
plane. Experience shows that on this plane, where reality and history are
disregarded, the problem cannot be solved or understood. Dr. Deustua is
indifferent to the relationship between education and the national economy.
In fact, in this respect he is an absolute idealist in his lack of comprehension.
His argument, therefore, besides being antidemocratic and antisocial, is
antihistorical. The problem of education cannot be understood in our time if
it is not considered as an economic and social problem. The mistake of many
reformers has been their abstract and idealistic methods and their exclusively
pedagogical approach. Their proposals have ignored the close bond between
economics and education, and they have tried to change the latter with no
knowledge of the laws of the former. For that reason, they have not
succeeded in reforming anything except to the extent permitted by the
scorned or simply neglected socioeconomic laws. The controversy between
classicists and modernists in education has been just as subject to the rate of

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capitalist development as the debate between conservatives and liberals in
politics. The program and systems of public education in this era that now
draws to a close have depended on the interests of the bourgeois economy.
The realistic or modern approach has been imposed by the needs of
industrialism. Industrialism is the phenomenon peculiar to this civilization
which, under its influence, demands that schools produce more technicians
than ideologists, more engineers than orators.
The unscientific and uneconomic approach in the discussion of teaching
claims to represent a higher idealism. But it is actually the metaphysics of
reactionaries, opposed and alien to the stream of history, and it therefore
lacks any value as a force in human progress and reform. The lawyers and
writers who come from the halls of the humanities, prepared by a rhetorical
and pseudo-idealistic education, have always been far more immoral than the
technicians who come from the faculties and institutes of science. Whereas
the practical and theoretical or aesthetic activities of the latter have followed
the path of economics and civilization, the practical and theoretical or
aesthetic activities of the former, under the influence of the basest
conservative interests and sentiments, have frequently blocked that path.
Furthermore, the value of science as a stimulus to philosophical speculation
cannot be disregarded or underestimated. The intellectual climate of this
civilization owes much more to science than to the humanities.
Economics is specifically associated with education in the work of
educators like Pestalozzi and Froebel, who have undertaken to reform the
school system, bearing in mind that modern society tends to be a society of
producers. The trade school represents a new concept of teaching, a principle
peculiar to a civilization of workers. Although adopted and put into
operation by the capitalist state, it has been limited to the primary schools,
where it is presented as a class in “manual training.” In Russia, the trade
school is in the forefront of educational policy. In Germany it has been
encouraged mainly by the rise of the Social Democrats during the
revolutionary period.
Thus, the most significant reform has erupted in primary schools,
whereas secondary schools and universities, dominated by the conservatism
of their rectors, are still hostile to any attempt at reform and are indifferent
to economic reality.
A modern concept of the school places manual and intellectual work at
the same level, an equation that is not acceptable to the vanity of the
aristocratic humanists. Contrary to the pretensions of these men of letters,

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the trade school is the authentic product of a civilization created by work
and for work.
In the course of this essay I have not attempted to do more than outline
the ideological and political basis of public education in Peru. I have omitted
its technical aspect, which, besides not being within my competence, is
subject to theoretical principles and to political and economic requirements.
I have stated, for example, that our Spanish and colonial heritage
consisted not of a pedagogical method but of an economic and social regime.
French influence later entered the picture, to the approval of those who
regarded France as the Jacobin and republican fatherland as well as of those
who admired the Restoration. North American influence finally prevailed as
a result of our capitalist development together with the importation of
American capital, technicians, and ideas.
In the last period of the conflict of ideologies and influences there can be
distinguished the contrast between a growing capitalist affirmation and an
obstinate feudalist and aristocratic reaction, the former advocating a practical
approach in education and the latter defending a pseudo-idealistic
orientation.
The emergence of a socialist movement and of a class conscience in the
urban proletariat introduces a new factor in the debate that substantially
modifies its terms. The creation of the popular universities “González
Prada,” the support by university youth of the principle of the socialization
of culture, the impact of the new educational philosophy on teachers,
conclusively interrupt the erudite and academic dialogue between the liberal-
bourgeois spirit and the aristocratic-landholder spirit.40
The accounts of the first century of the republic are closed, with an
enormous liability in the field of public education. The problem of Indian
illiteracy has hardly been touched. To date the government has failed to
establish schools throughout the republic. The disproportion between
resources and the size of the undertaking is huge. There are not enough
teachers for the implementation of the modest program of popular education
authorized in the budget and given the present number of graduates from
normal schools, there is little possibility of solving this problem in the near
future. A primary school teacher in Peru is still harassed by the most
overbearing and stupid gamonalismo and bossism. He has no assurance of
even a relative economic security. When a representative complains to
Congress, which has come to regard the teacher as a servile instrument to

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round up votes, this complaint carries more weight in official circles than the
record of the services of an honorable and dedicated teacher.
The problem of Indian illiteracy goes beyond the pedagogical sphere. It
becomes increasingly evident that to teach a man to read and write is not to
educate him. Primary school does not redeem the Indian morally and
socially. The first real step toward his redemption must be to free him from
serfdom.41
This is the thesis maintained by the authors of reform in Peru. Among
their leaders are many young educators whose points of view are already far
removed from those held a quarter of a century ago by Dr. Villarán when he
was so ineffectual in his mild but categorical opposition to colonial ideology,
as we have seen in our examination of the origin and development of the
reform of 1920.
Notes
1 The participation of Belgian, German, French, Italian, English, and other foreign
educators in the development of our public education has been episodic and contingent, and
does not imply an orientation of our educational policy.
2 Circular by the Minister Matías León, dated 19 April 1831.
3 “Las reformas de la instrucción pública,” a speech delivered at the beginning of the

academic year 1919 and published in the Revista Universitaria, 1919.

4 See the essays on the national economy and the land problem in this book.
5 Manuel Vicente Villarán, Estudios sobre educatión nacional, pp. 8–9.
6 It is interesting and significant that French reactionaries call France a bourgeois rather

than a capitalist nation.

7 Villarán, Estudios sobre educatión nacional, p. 27.
8 Spain is the country of the Counter Reformation and therefore the antiliberal and

antimodern state par excellence.

9 César Antonio Ugarte, Bosquejo de la historia económica del Perú.
10 See the essay on the religious factor in this book.
11 Edouard Herriot, Créer (Paris: Payot, 1919), p. 95.
12 Ibid., p. 125.
13 Ibid., p. 127.
14 Ibid., pp. 120, 123–124.
15 Villarán, Estudios sobre educación nacional, p. 74.
16 Ibid., p. 33.
17 Dr. Bouroncle, “Cien años de política educational,” La Prensa (Lima), 9 December

1924.
18 In 1926 the budget expenditures were Lp. [Libras peruanas] 10,158,960 with Lp.

1,000,184 for education but only Lp. 859,807 for primary education.

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 19 Ley Orgánica de 1920. Edición oficial, p. 84. [There is no footnote no. 20 in the

original. Ed.]
21 La reforma universitaria, 6 vols. (Buenos Aires: Publicaciones del Círculo Médico

Argentino y Centro de Estudiantes de Medicina, 1926–1927).

22 Ibid., I, 55.
23 Ibid., p. 44.
24 Ibid., pp. 58, 86.
25 Ibid., p. 125.
26 Ibid., p. 130.
27 Ibid., pp. 140–141.
28 Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, La vida universitaria, p. 3.
29 Alfredo L. Palacios, La nueva universidad.
30 Amauta, no. 3 (November 1926).
31 Repertorio Americano, vol. 15 (1927), p. 145.
32 Revista Universitaria del Cuzco, no. 55 (1927).
33 Amauta, no. 7 (March 1927).
34 After this book went to the printer, the government, with the express authorization of

the legislature, announced a new statute on university teaching that goes into effect in the
academic year 1928, which therefore will begin late. This reform concerns almost exclusively
the organization of university teaching, placed under the authority of a superior council
presided over by the Minister of Education. The character, the concept, of that teaching has
not been altered: it could only be altered within an integral educational reform that made
university teaching the highest level of professional instruction, reserving it to the most
capable and selecting them independently of economic privilege. The reform, which is above
all administrative, tends in spirit to follow the principles of the 1920 law, although at some
points it adopts different means. The speech by the president of the republic inaugurating
the academic year assigned to the reform the mission of accommodating university teaching
to the practical needs of the nation in this century of industrialism, and, by way of
underlining this statement, explicitly condemned the orientation of those who favor an
abstract, classical culture exempt from utilitarian preoccupations. But the rectorate, in the
university’s new era (which seems so much like the old one), has been conferred upon Dr.
Deustua, who, if he is a concientious scholar and university man, is also the most
conspicuous of those who support the very tendency on which the president’s speech passes
summary judgment. This contradiction could not be easily explained in any of the countries
where ideological and doctrinal consistency is habitual. But Peru, we know, is not one of
those countries. The statute—there is not room for a general discussion of it in this brief
note—establishes the means for creating university careers, specialized teaching positions.
In this sense it is a legal instrument for a technical transformation of teaching. The efficacy
of this instrument depends on how it is used.
35 Sagitaria (La Plata), no. 2, 1925.
36 “A propósito de un cuestionairo sobre la reforma de la ley de instrucción.” Collection

of articles published by M. A. Dávila, 1914, p. 56. See also La cultura superior en Italia

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(Lima: E. Rosay, 1912), pp. 145 ff.
37 F. Lefevre, Une heure avec, 2nd series, p. 172.
38 Villarán, Estudios sobre educatión nacional, p. 52.
39 Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Utopia de América.
40 The renovative orientation of the normalists is expressed in publications that have

appeared in Lima and the provinces in recent years: La Revista Peruana de Educación, Lima,
1926; Revista del Maestro and Revista de Educación, Tarma; Ideario Pedagógico, Arequipa;
and El Educador Andino, Puno.
41 The Minister of Education, Dr. Oliveira, in a speech to the congress in 1927,

recognized the connection between the problem of indigenous education and the land
problem, accepting a reality that had invariably been evaded by his predecessors in that post.

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 5
The Religious Factor
The Religion of Tawantinsuyo
WE HAVE DEFINITELY LEFT BEHIND the days of anticlerical
prejudice, when the “free-thinking” critic happily discarded all dogmas and
churches in favor of the dogma and church of the atheist’s free-thinking
orthodoxy. The concept of religion has become broader and deeper, going far
beyond a church and a sacrament. It now finds in religion’s institutions and
sentiments a significance very different from that which was attributed to it
by those fervent radicals who identified religion with “obscurantism.”
The revolutionary critic no longer disputes with religion and the church
the services they have rendered to humanity or their place in history. We are
therefore not surprised when a modern and perceptive writer like Waldo
Frank explains the North American phenomenon by carefully tracing its
religious origin and factors. According to him, the United States was created
by the pioneer, the Puritan, and the Jew. The pioneer descends from and is
the fulfillment of the Puritan, because the Puritan protest was rooted in his
will for power. “The Puritan had begun by desiring power in England. This
desire had turned him deviously into austere ways. He had soon learned the
sweets of austerity. Now he became aware of the power over himself, over
others, over physical conditions which the austere life brought with it. A
virgin and hostile continent demanded whatever energy he could bring to
bear upon it. A frugal, self-denying life released that energy far better than
could another.”1
The Anglo-Saxon colonizer did not find in North America an advanced
culture or a powerful population; Christianity therefore did not proselytize.
The Spaniard was not only different as a colonizer but also had a different
mission. In Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Central America the missionary
was supposed to convert a large population with its own, deep-seated
religious practices and institutions.
Because of this circumstance, the religious factor in these countries is
more complex. The Catholic religion was superimposed on indigenous rites,
only partially absorbing them. Any study of religious feeling in Spanish
America therefore must begin with the cults found by the conquistadors.
This is not an easy task. The chroniclers of the colonial period could only
consider these concepts and practices as a group of barbaric superstitions.

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Their accounts distort and blur the image of native cults. One of the most
unusual Mexican rituals, which shows that in Mexico the idea of
transubstantiation was known and applied, was for the Spaniard simply a
demoniac artifice.
But no matter how little agreement there is today about Peruvian
mythology, available information enables us to place it in the religious
evolution of humanity.
The Inca religion lacked the spiritual power to resist conversion. Some
historians deduce from philological and archeological evidence that the Inca
mythology was related to the Hindu. But their belief rests on similarities of
form, not on really spiritual or religious similarities. The basic characteristics
of the Inca religion are its collective theocracy and its materialism. These
characteristics differentiate it from the essentially spiritual Hindu religion.
Without sharing the conclusion of Valcárcel that the man of Tawantinsuyo
had virtually no idea of a “beyond,” or behaved as though he had none, we
cannot be oblivious to the tenuous and sketchy nature of his metaphysics.
The Quechua religion was a moral code rather than a metaphysical concept,
which brings us much closer to China than to India. State and church were
absolutely inseparable; religion and politics recognized the same principles
and the same authority. Religion functioned in terms of society. From this
point of view, the Inca religion opposed the religions of the Far East in the
same way that the latter, as pointed out by James George Frazer, opposed the
Graeco-Roman civilization.
Greek and Roman society [writes Frazer] was built on the conception of the
subordination of the individual to the community, of the citizen to the state; it set the safety
of the commonwealth, as the supreme aim of conduct, above the safety of the individual
whether in this world or in the world to come. Trained from infancy in this unselfish ideal,
the citizens devoted their lives to the public service and were ready to lay them down for the
common good; or if they shrank from the supreme sacrifice, it never occurred to them that
they acted otherwise than basely in preferring their personal existence to the interests of
their country. All this was changed by the spread of Oriental religions which inculcated the
communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the only objects worth living
for, objects in comparison with which the prosperity and even the existence of the state sank
into insignificance.2
Because of its identification with the social and political regime, the Inca
religion could not outlive the Inca state. It had temporal rather than spiritual
ends and cared more about the kingdom of earth than the kingdom of
heaven. It was a social, not an individual, discipline. The blow that felled the
pagan gods destroyed the theocracy. What survived of this religion in the

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Indian soul could not be a metaphysical concept, but agrarian rituals,
incantations, and pantheism.3
All the accounts we have of the Inca ceremonies and myths make clear
that the Quechua religion was much more than a state religion (in the sense
that we know it today). The church was a social and political institution; it
was the state itself. Religion was subordinate to the social and political
interests of the empire. This aspect of the Inca religion is demonstrated in
the treatment given by the Incas to the religious symbols of the people they
conquered. The Inca church was more concerned with subjugating their gods
than in persecuting or condemning them. The temple of the sun thus became
the temple of a kind of federal religion or mythology.
The Quechua was neither proselytizer nor inquisitor. He used his efforts
to unify the empire and, for this purpose, he was interested in abolishing
cruel rituals and barbaric practices, not in the propagation of a new and
unique faith. For the Incas it was more a matter of elevating than of replacing
the religious habits of the people annexed to their empire.
The religion of Tawantinsuyo, furthermore, did not violate any of the
feelings or customs of the Indians. It was not composed of complicated
abstractions, but of simple allegories. All its roots were nourished on the
instincts and customs of a nation made up of agrarian tribes that had a
healthy, rural pantheism and that were more inclined to cooperate than to
wage war. The Inca myths rested on the primitive religious habits of the
Indians, without opposing them except to the extent that the latter was
considered obviously inferior to the Inca culture or dangerous to the social
and political regime of Tawantinsuyo. The tribes of the empire believed, not
in a religion or a dogma, but simply in the divinity of the Incas.
Therefore, the natural elements of the religion of the ancient Peruvians
—animism, magic, totems, and tabus—are more interesting to investigate
than the mysteries and symbols of their metaphysics and very rudimentary
mythology. This investigation should yield sure conclusions about the moral
and religious evolution of the Indian.
Abstract speculation on the Inca gods has frequently led the student to
deduce from the correlation or affinity of certain symbols and names a
probable relationship of the Quechua race with races that are spiritually and
intellectually different. On the other hand, a study of the primary factors of
this religion establishes the universality or near universality of innumerable
magical rituals and beliefs and, therefore, the risk of looking in this field for
proof of hypothetical common origins. In recent years, the comparative study

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of religions has made enormous strides that preclude use of the old premises
for decisions about the singularity or significance of a cult. James George
Frazer, who is responsible for so much of this progress, maintains that
among all people the age of magic has preceded the age of religion; and he
shows that groups of people totally unknown to one another have applied in
a similar or identical fashion the Laws of “Similarity” and of “Contact or
Contagion.”4
The Inca gods reigned over a multitude of minor deities who were
destined to outlive them because they had been rooted in the soil and soul of
the Indian long before the empire. The Indian’s “animism” peopled the
territory of Tawantinsuyo with local spirits and gods whose worship offered
more resistance to Christian conversion than the Inca worship of the sun or
of the god Kon. “Totemism,” of the same substance as the ayllu and the tribe,
which were more enduring than the empire, took refuge not only in tradition
but in the very blood of the Indian. Magic, identified as a primitive art to
cure the sick, had its own needs and vital impulses and was so deeply
ingrained that it could survive for a long time under any religious belief.
These natural or primitive elements of worship fitted in perfectly with
the character of the Inca monarchy and state. Moreover, these elements
required the divinity of the Incas and of their government. The Inca
theocracy is explained in all its details by the social condition of the Indian.
There is no need to look for an easy explanation in the occult arts of the
Incas. (This point of view assumes the existence of an oppressed mass to be
overawed and humbled.) Frazer, who has made a masterful study of the
magic origins of royalty, analyzes and classifies the various types of king-
priests and human gods, more or less close to our Incas:
Among the American Indians [he writes, referring particularly to this case] the furthest
advance towards civilization was made under the monarchical and theocratic governments
of Mexico and Peru; but we know too little of the early history of these countries to say
whether the predecessors of their deified kings were medicinemen or not. Perhaps a trace of
such a succession may be detected in the oath which the Mexican kings, when they mounted
the throne, swore that they would make the sun to shine, the clouds to give rain, the rivers to
flow, and the earth to bring forth fruits in abundance. Certainly, in aboriginal America the
sorcerer or medicine-man, surrounded by a halo of mystery and an atmosphere of awe, was a
personage of great influence and importance, and he may well have developed into a chief or
king in many tribes, though positive evidence of such a development appears to be lacking.
Although the author of The Golden Bough is overly cautious because of
lack of historical material, he still reaches this conclusion: “In South America
also the magicians or medicine-men seem to have been on the highroad to

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chieftainship or kingship.” In a later chapter, he further defines his
impression:
From our survey of the religious position occupied by the king in rude societies we may
infer that the claim to divine and supernatural powers put forward by the monarchs of great
historical empires like those of Egypt, Mexico, and Peru, was not the simple outcome of
inflated vanity or the empty expression of a grovelling adulation; it was merely a survival and
extension of the old savage apotheosis of living kings. Thus, for example, as children of the
Sun the Incas of Peru were revered like gods; they could do no wrong, and no one dreamed
of offending against the person, honour, or property of the monarch or of any of the royal
race. Hence, too, the Incas did not, like most people, look on sickness as an evil. They
considered it a messenger sent from their father the Sun to call them to come and rest with
him in heaven.5
The Inca people knew no separation between religion and politics,
between church and state. All their institutions, like all their beliefs,
conformed strictly to their agricultural economy and to their sedentary
spirit. Their theocracy rested on the ordinary and the empirical, not on the
magical skills of a prophet or on his doctrine. Religion was the state.
Vasconcelos, who tends to depreciate the native cultures of America,
thinks that without a supreme law they were condemned to disappear
because of their innate inferiority. These cultures, no doubt, had not
altogether emerged intellectually from the age of magic. We know that the
Inca culture was the work of a race more gifted in artistic creation than in
intellectual speculation. For that reason, it has left us a magnificent popular
art, if no Rig-Veda or Zend-avesta, which makes their social and political
organization all the more remarkable. Religion, as only one aspect of this
organization, could not survive it.
The Catholic Conquest
I have already said that the conquest was the last crusade and that the
conquistadors were the last representatives of Spanish grandeur. As a
crusade, the conquest was essentially a military and religious enterprise. It
was carried out jointly by soldiers and missionaries. The triumvirate of the
conquest of Peru would have been incomplete without Hernando de Luque,
who acted as scholar and advisor of the company. Luque was the deputy of
the church and of the faith. His presence protected the rights of the dogma
and gave the expedition a doctrine. In Cajamarca, the faith of the conquest
was invested in Father Valverde. Although the execution of Atahualpa was
brought about solely by the crude political maneuverings of Pizarro, it was
dressed up with religious reasons and made to appear as the first sentence
passed by the Inquisition in Peru.

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 After the tragedy of Cajamarca, the missionary continued to dictate his
law to the conquest. Spiritual power inspired and directed temporal power.
On the ruins of the empire, in which church and state had been one, a new
theocracy was built. In this theocracy, the latifundium, an economic
mandate, was born of the encomienda, an administrative, spiritual, and
religious mandate. The friars took solemn possession of the Inca temples.
Perhaps a certain Thomist predestination decreed that the Dominicans,
masters in the scholarly art of reconciling Christianity with pagan tradition,
should install themselves in the temple of the sun.6
Although the colonizer of Saxon America was the Puritan pioneer, the
colonizer of Spanish America was not like the conquistador, the knight of
the crusades. The reason is obvious: the Puritan represented a movement in
ascent, the Protestant Reformation; the knight of the crusades personified an
era that had ended, the Catholic Middle Ages. England continued to send
Puritans to its colonies long after Spain had no more crusaders to send
overseas. The species was extinct. The spiritual energies of Spain—aroused
precisely by its reaction against the Reformation—produced an
extraordinary religious renaissance, destined to waste its magnificent
potential in a reaffirmation of intransigent orthodoxy: the Counter
Reformation. “The true Spanish Reformation,” writes Unamuno, “was the
mystic Reformation. Unconcerned with the Protestant Reformation,
mysticism was, nevertheless, Spain’s strongest bulwark against it. Through
the medium of the Spanish reform, Saint Teresa probably was as effective as
Saint Ignatius of Loyola in the Counter Reformation.”7
The conquest used up the last of the crusaders. And the crusade of the
conquest, in most cases, was not a true crusade but a prolongation of its
spirit. The noble was no longer interested in heroic deeds. The extent and
wealth of Spanish possessions guaranteed him a courtier’s life of opulence.
The crusader of the conquest, when a nobleman, was poor; otherwise, he
was a commoner.
Having come from Spain to occupy land for their king—whom the
missionaries acknowledged first of all as a trustee of the Roman Catholic
Church—the conquistadors appeared to be driven at times by a vague
presentiment that they would be succeeded by lesser men. A confused and
obscure instinct fomented their rebellion against the mother country, the
same instinct that may have given Cortés the courage to burn his ships. The
rebellion of Gonzalo Pizarro was kindled by a tragic ambition, a desperate
and impotent nostalgia. With his defeat, the work and the race of the

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conquistators was finished. Conquest ended; colonization began. And if the
conquest was a military and religious expedition, colonization was nothing
but a political and ecclesiastical enterprise. It was begun by a man of the
Church, Don Pedro de la Gasca. The priest replaced the missionary. The
viceroyalty, dedicated to sensual pleasure and idleness, was to bring to Peru
an educated nobility and learned men, people belonging to another Spain,
the Spain of the Inquisition and of decadence.
During the colonial period, in spite of the Inquisition and the Counter
Reformation, the civilizing process was largely religious and ecclesiastic.
Education and culture were concentrated in the hands of the church. The
friars contributed to the viceroyal organization, not only by converting
heathens and persecuting heresy, but also by teaching arts and crafts and by
establishing crops and factories. At a time when the City of the Viceroys was
only a few rustic manor houses, the friars founded here the first university of
the Americas. Together with their dogmas and rites, they imported seeds,
vines, domestic animals, and tools. They studied the customs of the natives,
recorded their traditions, and collected the first material on their history.
Thanks to their ability to adapt and assimilate, Jesuits and Dominicans, but
especially Jesuits, mastered many secrets of Indian history and spirit. And
the Indians, exploited in the mines, the factories, and encomiendas, found
their stoutest defenders in monasteries and even in parish priests. Fray
Bartolomé de las Casas, who exemplified the best qualities of missionary and
apostle, had predecessors and disciples.
Catholicism, with its sumptuous mass and its sorrowful devotion, was
perhaps the only religion able to attact a population that could not easily rise
to a spiritual, abstract religion. It was also aided by its astonishing ability to
accommodate to any historical epoch or setting. The work of absorbing old
myths and appropriating pagan dates, which had begun many centuries
earlier in the West, was continued in Peru. Lake Titicaca, apparently the
birthplace of the Inca theocracy, is the site of the most famous shrine of the
Virgin.
The intelligent and scholarly writer Emilio Romero has interesting
comments on the substitution of Catholic rites and images for Inca gods:
The Indians thrilled with emotion before the majesty of the Catholic ceremony. They
saw the image of the sun in the shimmering brocade of the chasuble and cope and they saw
the violet tones of the rainbow woven into the fine silk threads of the rochet. Perhaps they
saw the quipus symbolized in the purple tassels of the abbot and the knotted cords of the
Franciscan friar. . . . This explains the pagan fervor with which the multitude of Cuzco
Indians fearfully trembled before the presence of “Our Lord of Earthquakes.” This was the

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tangible image of their memories and their adorations, and far removed from the intent of
the friars. Religious festivals vibrated with Indian paganism expressed in offerings taken to
the churches of animals from their flocks and of the first fruits of their harvest. Later they
themselves erected their ornate altars of Corpus Christi laden with mirrors framed in chased
silver, raised their grotesque saints, and laid the products of their fields at the feet of the
altars. Before the saints they nostalgically drank the same jora that they had used for their
libations in honor of Cápac Raymi. Finally, shrieking in prayer, which for the Spanish
priests were cries of penitence and for the Indians cries of terror, they danced the boisterous
cachampas and the gymnastic kashuas before the fixed and glassy smile of the saints.8
The external trappings of Catholicism captivated the Indian, who
accepted conversion and the catechism with the same ease and lack of
comprehension. For a people who had never differentiated between the
spiritual and temporal, political control incorporated ecclesiastic control. The
missionaries did not instill a faith; they instilled a system of worship and a
liturgy, wisely adapting them to Indian customs. Native paganism subsisted
under Catholic worship.
Catholicism did not reserve this method exclusively for the
Tawantinsuyo; historically, it has always taken on the coloring of its
environment. The Roman Catholic Church is legitimate heir to the Roman
Empire in its policy of colonization and assimilation of the people it
subjugates. An investigation of the important dates of the Gregorian
calendar has revealed amazing substitutions. Analyzing them, Frazer writes:
Taken altogether, the coincidences of the Christian with the heathen festivals are too
close and too numerous to be accidental. They mark the compromise which the Church in
the hour of its triumph was compelled to make with its vanquished yet still dangerous rivals.
The inflexible Protestantism of the primitive missionaries, with their fiery denunciations of
heathendom, had been exchanged for the supple policy, the easy tolerance, the
comprehensive charity of shrewd ecclesiastics, who clearly perceived that if Christianity was
to conquer the world it could do so only by relaxing the too rigid principles of its Founder,
by widening a little the narrow gate which leads to salvation. In this respect an instructive
parallel might be drawn between the history of Christianity and the history of Buddhism.9
Originally, this compromise spread from Catholicism to all Christianity.
But it appears to be a special virtue or skill of the Roman Catholic Church,
not only because it is a compromise in form only (Catholicism has been
inflexible in the spheres of dogma and theology), but because in the
conversion of Americans and other peoples, only the Roman Catholic
Church continued to use it systematically and effectively. From this
standpoint, the Inquisition was strictly an internal affair: its aim was the
repression of heresy within the Catholic religion, not the persecution of
heathens.

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 But adaptability is, at the same time, the strength and weakness of the
Roman Catholic Church. The religious spirit is only tempered in combat, in
suffering. “Christianity, or rather Christendom,” says Unamuno, “as
announced by Saint Paul, was not a doctrine, although it expressed itself
dialectically. It was a way of life, it was struggle, it was agony. The doctrine
was the Gospel, the Glad Tidings. Christianity, Christendom, was a
preparation for death and resurrection, for life eternal.”10 By passively
accepting the catechism without understanding it, the Indian spiritually
weakened Catholicism in Peru. The missionary did not have to protect the
purity of the dogma; his mission was to serve as a moral guide, an
ecclesiastical shepherd for a rustic and simple flock, untouched by spiritual
concerns.
In religion as in politics, the heroic times of the conquest were followed
by the viceroyal period, which was administrative and bureaucratic.
Francisco García Calderón pronounced this judgment on the era as a whole:
“If the conquest was a mighty endeavor, the colonial period was a prolonged
moral debilitation.”11 The first stage, symbolized by the missionary,
corresponds spiritually to the flowering of mysticism in Spain. Unamuno
says that Spain used up on mysticism and the Counter Reformation the
spiritual energies that other nations expended on the Reformation.
Unamuno defines Spanish mystics as follows:
They reject science as futile and seek knowledge for a pragmatic purpose, in order to love
and work for and rejoice in God, not for the sake of knowledge alone. Whether or not they
are aware of it, they are anti-intellectuals, and this distinguishes them from theologists like
Eckhart. They favor voluntarism. What they look for is total and integral knowledge, a
wisdom in which knowledge, feeling, and love unite and even merge as far as possible. We
love truth because it is beautiful and, according to Father Avila, because we love truth we
believe. Truth, goodness, and beauty blend and crystallize in this material wisdom.
Mysticism naturally culminated in a woman, because woman’s mind is less analytical than
man’s and her psychic powers are more closely attuned or perhaps less differentiated.12
We know that in Spain the spiritual blaze that kindled the Counter
Reformation also illuminated the soul of Saint Teresa, Saint Ignatius, and
other great mystics; but it later died down and ended tragically in the flames
of the Inquisition. In Spain it flared up again in the struggle against heresy
and the Reformation and for a while it cast an incandescent glow. Here, with
Catholic rites easily superimposed on the pagan sentiment of the Indians,
Catholicism lost its moral force. “A great saint like Rosa of Lima,” observes
García Calderón, “has little of the personality and creative drive of Saint
Teresa, the great Spanish saint.”13

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 On the coast and especially in Lima, another element arrived to sap the
spiritual strength of Catholicism. The Negro slave brought to Catholic rites
his fetishistic sensualism and his dark superstition. The Indian, a healthy
pantheist and materialist, had reached the ethical level of a mighty theocracy;
the Negro, on the other hand, exuded from every pore the primitivism of his
African tribe. Javier Prado remarks: “Among Negroes the Christian religion
was turned into a superstitious, immoral cult. Completely inebriated by
heavy drinking and inflamed by the carnality and licentiousness typical of
their race, first African and then criollo Negroes would join the popular
celebrations of ‘devils and giants’ and ‘Moors and Christians.’ Dancing with
obscene movements and savage cries, they frequently would accompany
religious processions to general applause.”14
The clergy wasted most of its energies in internal quarrels or in the
pursuit of heresy, as well as in constant and active rivalry with the
representatives of temporal power. Professor Prado believes that even the
apostolic fervor of Las Casas intensified this rivalry. But, at least in this case,
ecclesiastic zeal served a noble and just cause that would not again find such
stubborn defenders until long after the country’s political independence.
Although Spanish Catholicism was able to impose itself on Indian
paganism thanks to the singular appeal of its ceremonial pomp and majesty,
as a concept of life and a spiritual discipline it was not qualified to create
elements of work and wealth in its colonies. As I have observed in my essay
on the Peruvian economy, this was the greatest weakness of Spanish
colonization. But it would be arbitrary and exaggerated to assume from the
entrenched medievalism that delayed Spain’s evolution toward capitalism
that Catholicism was solely responsible, when in other Latin countries it had
been able to adjust intelligently to the principles of a capitalist economy. The
religious orders, especially the Jesuits, operated in economic terrain more
skillfully than the civil administration and its officials. Spanish nobility
scorned work and commerce; the bourgeoisie, still immature, was infected by
aristocratic values.
In general, the experience of the West furnishes concrete evidence of the
close association of capitalism and Protestantism. Protestantism appears in
history as the spiritual yeast of the capitalist process. The Protestant
Reformation contained the essence, the seed, of the liberal state.
Protestantism as a religious movement and liberalism as a political trend
were related to the development of the factors of a capitalist economy. Facts
support this argument. Capitalism and industrialism have flourished

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nowhere else as they have in the Protestant countries. The capitalist
economy has reached its peak in England, the United States, and Germany.
Within these countries, people of Catholic faith have instinctively clung to
their rustic tastes and habits. (Catholic Bavaria is also rural.) No Catholic
country has reached a high level of industrialization.
France, which should not be judged by the cosmopolitan financial
market of Paris or by the Comité des Forges, is more agricultural than
industrial. Italy, although population pressure has propelled it along the road
to industry and created the capitalist centers of Milan, Turin, and Genoa,
maintains its agrarian tendency. Mussolini often eulogizes rural and
provincial Italy and in one of his most recent speeches he condemns excessive
urbanism and industrialism for holding back population growth.
The country most steeped in Catholic tradition, Spain, which expelled
the Jew, presents the most backward and feeble capitalist structure. To make
matters worse, its underdeveloped industry and finance have not been
compensated for by a prosperous agriculture, perhaps because the Spanish
nobleman clings to his preconceptions about aristocratic professions whereas
the Italian landholder has inherited a deep love of the soil from his Roman
ancestors. In Spain, only a career in the church takes precedence over the
choice between a military or a literary career.
The first stage in the emancipation of the bourgeoisie is, according to
Engels, the Protestant Reformation. “Calvin’s creed,” writes the celebrated
author of Anti-Duhring, “was fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his
time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact
that in the commercial world of competition, success or failure does depend,
not upon a man’s activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances
uncontrollable by him.”15 The rebellion of the most advanced and ambitious
middle class against Rome led to the institution of national churches
intended to avoid all conflict between temporal and spiritual, between
church and state. Free inquiry contained the embryo of all the principles of
the bourgeois economy: free competition, free enterprise, et cetera.
Individualism, essential to the development of a society based on these
principles, was encouraged by Protestant ethics and practice.
Marx has explained several aspects of the relations between
Protestantism and capitalism, and he makes this particularly penetrating
observation:
The monetary system is essentially Catholic, the credit system essentially Protestant. . . .
It is Faith that makes blessed. Faith in money-value as the imminent spirit of commodities,
faith in the prevailing mode of production and its predestined order, faith in the individual

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agents of production as mere personifications of self-expanding capital. But the credit
system does not emancipate itself from the basis of the monetary system any more than
Protestantism emancipates itself from the foundations of Catholicism.16
Not only the dialectics of historical materialism attest to the connection
between the two great phenomena. Today, in an era of reaction, both
intellectual and political, Ramiro de Maetzu, a Spanish writer, discusses his
countrymen’s lack of economic sense. He interprets the moral factors of
North American capitalism in this way:
North Americans owe their sense of power to Calvinism, which believes that God, from
the beginning of time, has chosen some men for salvation and others for everlasting
damnation; that salvation is known in each man’s fulfillment of his duties in his work, from
which it is deduced that the prosperity attendant on fulfillment of these duties is a sign of
the possession of divine grace and, therefore, must be preserved at all cost, which implies
moralization of the manner of spending money. This theological doctrine is now only
history. The people of the United States continue to progress, but like a stone hurled by an
arm that no longer exists to renew the projectile’s force after it has spent its momentum.”17
Neoscholastics insist on disputing or minimizing the influence of the
Reformation on capitalist development, claiming that Thomism already had
laid down the principles of bourgeois economics.18 Sorel has acknowledged
the services rendered to Western civilization by Saint Thomas in his realistic
approach to the dogma in science. He has especially stressed the Thomist
concept that “human law cannot change the legal nature of things, which is
derived from their economic content.”19 But if Saint Thomas brought
Catholicism to this level of understanding economics, the Reformation
forged the moral weapons of the bourgeois revolution, opening the way to
capitalism. The neoscholastic concept can be easily explained. Neothomism
is bourgeois but not capitalist. Just as socialism is not the same thing as the
proletariat, capitalism is not the same thing as the bourgeoisie. Capitalism is
the order, the civilization, the spirit born of the bourgeoisie, which existed
long before and only later gave its name to an entire historical era.
During his period of pragmatism, Papini declared that religion could
choose one of two roads: to possess or to renounce.20 From the outset,
Protestantism firmly chose the first. Waldo Frank correctly points to the will
to power in the mystic drive of Puritanism. He tells us how “the discipline of
the church became a means of marshaling men against the material
difficulties of unsubdued America; how the denial of the senses released
greater energy for the hunt of power and wealth; and how the senses,
mortified by ascetic precepts—which so well fitted the crude conditions of
the country—had their revenge in an unleashed search for riches.” Under

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these religious principles the North American university provided youth
with a culture “all of whose meanings ran with the sense of the sanctity of
property and the morality of ‘success.’”21
Catholicism, on the other hand, straddled the two possibilities of
possession and renunciation. Its will to power was expressed in military
expeditions and above all in politics. It did not inspire any great economic
venture. Spanish America, furthermore, did not offer to Catholicism an
atmosphere conducive to asceticism. Instead of mortification, the senses
found only pleasure, indolence, and self-indulgence on this continent.
Bringing the gospel to Spanish America must not be judged as a
religious undertaking, but as the ecclesiastic enterprise it has been almost
since the beginning of Christianity. Only a powerful ecclesiastic
organization, able to mobilize militias of battle-hardened missionaries and
priests, was capable of colonizing people in faraway and exotic lands for the
Christian faith. Protestantism was never effective in spreading its doctrine,
as a logical consequence of its individualism, which was designed to reduce
the ecclesiastic framework of religion to a minimum. Its propagation in
Europe was invariably due to political and economic reasons: the Catholic
Church’s conflicts with states and monarchs inclined to rebel against papal
power and join the wave of secessionism; the growth of the bourgeoisie,
which found in Protestantism a more convenient system and which resented
Rome’s support of feudal privileges. When Protestantism has undertaken to
proselytize, it has wisely adopted a method that combines preaching with
social service.
In North America the Anglo-Saxon colonizer did not worry about
converting the natives. He had to settle an almost virgin land and all his
energies were absorbed by his harsh struggle to conquer nature. Here we see
the inherent difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Spanish conquests. In
its origin and process, the former was a completely individualist adventure
that compelled the men who participated in it to live under great stress.
(Individualism, pragmatism, and activism are still the mainsprings of North
American development.)
Anglo-Saxon colonization did not need an ecclesiastical organization.
Puritan individualism made each pioneer his own minister. The New
England pioneer needed only his Bible (Unamuno calls Protestantism “the
tyranny of the word”). North America was colonized with great economy of
man’s forces. Colonization did not use missionaries, priests, theologians, or
monasteries; they were not required for the simple, crude possession of the

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land. A territory, rather than a culture and people, had to be conquered.
Some might say that theirs was not an economy but a poverty, and they
would be right provided that they recognized that from this poverty emerged
the power and wealth of the United States.
The destiny of Spanish and Catholic colonization was much broader, its
mission more difficult. In these lands, the conquistadors found people, cities,
cultures; on the soil, roads and footprints that their passage could not erase.
Proselytization had its heroic stage, when Spain sent us missionaries who
still burned with the mystic fire and militant spirit of the crusaders.
(“Together with the soldiers,” I read in Julien Luchaire, “disembarked a
multitude of Catholic monks and priests, chosen from the best.”)22 But once
the Indian’s rustic paganism had yielded to Catholic opulence, the conqueror
was lulled by the slavery and exploitation of Indian and Negro, and by the
abundance and wealth. The clergy was no longer a heroic and impassioned
militia but a pampered bureaucracy; well paid and well regarded.
Then came [writes Dr. M. V. Villarán] the second age in the history of colonial
priesthood: the age of a placid life in magnificent monasteries, the age of sinecures, of
profitable parishes, of social influence, of political control, of luxurious celebrations, which
inevitably resulted in the abuse and corruption of customs. At that time, priesthood was the
best career. It was an honorable and lucrative profession and those who devoted themselves
to it lived like princes and dwelled in palaces. They were the idols of the worthy colonists,
who loved them, respected them, feared them, made gifts to them, and willed them their
properties. The monasteries were large and there was room for all. Bishoprics and other
high church offices, canonries, curacies, chaplaincies, university chairs, private chapels,
benefices of every kind abounded. The inhabitants were fervently pious and they lavishly
provided for the upkeep of the ministers of the altar. Therefore, ‘every second son of good
family entered the priesthood.’”23
This church was no longer even that of the Counter Reformation and the
Inquisition. The Holy Office had almost no heresies to persecute in Peru. It
directed its action against citizens in bad repute with the clergy; against the
superstitions and vices that furtively flourished in an atmosphere of
sensuality and idolatry, heavy with the dregs of magic; and above all, against
whatever it suspected might undermine or diminish its power. In this last
respect, the Inquisition behaved more like a political than a religious
institution. “The Holy Office,” says Luchaire, “was powerful, but because the
king wanted it to be. Its mission was to persecute political rebels as well as
religious innovators. The weapon was in the hands of the king, not of the
pope, and the king wielded it as much in his own as in the church’s
interest.”24

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 Ecclesiastical science, furthermore, instead of keeping us abreast of the
intellectual currents of the time, separated us from them. The philosophy of
scholasticism was kept alive and creative in Spain as long as it was warmed
by the ardor of the mystics. But afterwards it congealed into pedantry and
casuistry and turned into a stiff parchment of erudition and a creaky,
rhetorical orthodoxy of Spanish theology. In ciuilista writings there is no lack
of criticism of this phase of ecclesiastical work in Peru. “What science did
the clergy offer?” asks Javier Prado in his thoughtful study. And he replies:
A vulgar theology, a formalist dogmatism, a confused and tiresome mixture of
Aristotelian doctrine with the sophistry of scholasticism. Whenever the church has not
been able to supply true scientific knowledge, it has resorted to distracting and wearying the
mind with gymnastics of words and phrases and with an empty, extravagant, futile method.
Here in Peru, speeches were read in Latin, which was not understood, and they were,
nevertheless, discussed in the same language; here were scholars who, like Pico della
Mirandola, had formulas to solve all scientific propositions; here the divine and human were
decided by means of religious or scholarly authority, even though the most complete
ignorance reigned not only about the natural sciences but also about philosophy and even
about the teachings of Bossuet and Pascal.25
The struggle for independence, which opened a new road and promised a
new dawn to the best spirits, revealed that religion, in the sense of mysticism
and passion, was still to be found in a few criollo and Indian priests who in
Peru, as in Mexico, furnished the liberal revolution with some of its first
champions and great orators.
Independence and the Church
The War of Independence did not touch ecclesiastical privileges any
more than it did feudal privileges. The upper clergy, conservative and
traditional, was naturally loyal to the king and mother country. But like the
landed aristocracy, it accepted the republic as soon as it realized that the
latter was impotent against the colonial structure. The revolution in Spanish
America was conducted by romantic and Napoleonic caudillos and given its
theories by dogmatic and formalist orators. Although it was nourished on
the principles and sentiments of the French Revolution, it neither inherited
nor experienced the religious problem of France.
In France, as in other countries that did not undergo the Reformation,
the bourgeois and liberal revolution could not be accomplished without
Jacobinism and anti-clericalism. The battle against feudalism in these
countries encountered an uneasy alliance between the Catholic Church and
the feudal system. As much because of the conservative influence of its high
officials as because of its doctrinal and emotional resistance to everything it

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saw in liberal thought of Protestant individualism and nationalism, the
church foolishly bound up its fate with that of monarchical and aristocratic
reaction.
But in Spanish America, especially in the countries where the revolution
spent a long time in its political formulation (independence and the
republic), the continuation of feudal privileges was accompanied logically by
the continuation of ecclesiastical privileges. For this reason, when Mexico
attacked the former in its revolution, it immediately found itself in conflict
with the latter. In Mexico, because a large part of the property was in the
hands of the church, ecclesiastical privileges were not only politically but
materially identified with feudal privileges.
Peru had a liberal and patriotic clergy from the first days of its
revolution. In a few isolated cases, civil liberalism was inflexibly Jacobin, and,
in even fewer cases, anti-religious. Most of our liberals came from the
Masonic lodges that were so active in preparing for independence, so they
almost all professed the deism that made Freemasonry in these Latin
countries a kind of spiritual and political substitute for the Reformation.
In France itself, the Revolution maintained good relations with
Christianity even during the Jacobin period. Aulard wisely observes that in
France the anti-religious or anti-Christian movement arose from
circumstantial rather than doctrinal causes. “Of all the events,” he says, “that
wrought the frame of mind which resulted in the attempt to dethrone
Christianity, the insurrection of La Vendée, by its clerical form, was the
chief, the most influential. I might almost say that without La Vendée there
would have been no worship of Reason.”26 Aulard refers to the deism of
Robespierre, who argued that “atheism is aristocratic,” whereas “the idea of a
great Being who watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant
crime is entirely democratic.” The worship of the goddess Reason only kept
its vital impulse as long as it was a cult of the fatherland threatened and
plotted against by foreign reaction with the approval of papal power.
Moreover, “the cult of Reason,” Aulard added, “was almost always deist and
not materialist or atheist.”27
The French Revolution resulted in separation of church and state; and
later Napoleon used the concordat to subordinate the church to the state.
But the Restoration periods jeopardized his work by renewing the conflict
between clergy and laymen, in which Lucien Romier claims to see a resumé
of the history of the republic. Romier starts out from the premise that
feudalism was already conquered when the Revolution broke out. Under the

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monarchy, according to Romier—and here he is joined by all reactionary
writers—the bourgeoisie had already assumed control.
Victory over the nobility was already achieved. The kings had put feudalism to death.
An aristocracy remained which had no force of its own and which owed all its privileges and
titles to the central authority. It was a body of gallooned officials with more or less
hereditary functions, the fragile remains of a power that was toppled by the first republican
wave. After easily carrying out this destruction, the republic had only to maintain an
accomplished fact without exerting any particular effort. On the other hand, the monarchy
had failed with the church. In spite of the secular domestication of the higher church
officials, in spite of a conflict with the Curia that was revived with every reign, in spite of
many threats of rupture, the struggle against Roman authority had not given the state any
more control over religion than in the times of Philip the Handsome. Therefore, it is against
the church and the ultramontane clergy that the republic directed its main activities for a
century.28
The situation was very different in the Spanish colonies of South
America. In Peru in particular, the revolution found feudalism intact. The
clashes between civil and ecclesiastical power had no doctrinal basis. They
reflected a domestic quarrel, a latent power struggle typical of countries
where colonization felt it had a religious mission and where spiritual
authority tended to prevail over temporal. From the outset, the republican
constitution proclaimed Catholicism as the national religion. Locked within
Spanish tradition, these countries lacked the elements of a Protestant
Reformation. The worship of Reason would have been still more alien to a
people who engaged in little intellectual activity or philosophical speculation.
The reasons for a secular state that existed in other historical latitudes did
not exist in Peru. Nurtured on Spanish Catholicism, the Peruvian state was
bound to be semifeudal and Catholic.
The republic continued the policy of Spain in this as in other spheres.
García Calderón says:
By means of religious foundations, the tithing system, and ecclesiastical benefices, a civil
constitution was established for the church, following the French example. In this sense, the
revolution was traditionalist. From the time of the first absolute monarchs, the Spanish
kings had the right to intervene and protect the church; in their hands, the defense of
Catholicism turned into a civil and legislative action. The church was a social force, but the
weakness of its hierarchy impaired its political ambitions. It could not, as in England, enter
into a constitutional agreement and freely define its frontiers. The king protected the
Inquisition and was more Catholic than the pope; in his role as guardian, he prevented
conflicts and he proved to be sovereign and unique.29
In this statement, García Calderón points out the basic contradiction
existing within Latin American countries that have not separated church and
state. If its Catholicism is alive and active, the Catholic state cannot practice

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a secular policy which, taken to its logical conclusion, would end in a
theocracy. From this point of view, the thought of ultramontane
conservatives like García Moreno appears to be more consistent than that of
the moderate liberals who are determined to reconcile the state’s official
Catholicism with a liberal and national secular policy.
Peruvian liberalism, ineffective and formalist on the economic and
political levels, could not be less so on the religious. It is not true, as some
claim, that clerical and ecclesiastical influence fought to prevent Jacobin
radicalism. The personal attitude of Vigil, an impassioned free thinker
sprung from the ranks of the church, does not really belong to our liberalism,
which never tried to secularize any more than it tried to defeudalize the
state. Jorge Guillermo Leguía writes authoritatively on José Gálvez, the most
representative and responsible of the liberal leaders:
His ideology revolved around two precepts: equality and morality. Therefore, it is wrong
to assume from his criticism of the ecclesiastical tithes that he is a Jacobin. Gálvez never
denied the church and its dogmas. He respected and believed in them. The abbess was
misguided who, when told on May 2 of the tragic explosion of the Torre de la Merced,
exclaimed: “What a good use of gunpowder!” A deputy could hardly be anticlerical who
invoked the Trinity in the introduction to the constitution. When Gálvez stripped the
church of an income that incarnated the survival of feudalism, his purpose was not anti-
clerical but an economic and democratic reform. Nor was he, as is commonly believed, the
author of that proposal, which had been initiated by Vigil.30
Forced by its role as a governing class, the landed aristocracy adopted
bourgeois ideas and attitudes and partially assimilated the remains of
liberalism. The rise of the civilista party was indicative of its liberal evolution
and growing capitalist awareness. This movement was rejected by the
ecclesiastical element, which coincided more, and not only in the publication
of a newspaper, with conservative and plebiscitary Pierolism. In this period
of our history, as I mention elsewhere, the aristocracy took on a liberal air;
the demos, in reaction, although they protested against the business clique,
acquired a conservative and clerical tone. The civilista hierarchy included
some moderate liberals who tried to guide the state toward capitalism,
breaking as much as possible with feudal tradition. But the feudal class’s
domination of civilismo, together with the lag in our political development
caused by the war, prevented these civilista lawyers and jurists from making
any progress. Before the power of clergy and church, civilismo generally
responded with a passive pragmatism and conservative positivism which,
with a few individual exceptions, characterized its mentality.

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 The first really effective anti-clerical activity was the Radical movement,
which undertook to denounce and condemn the three elements of Peruvian
politics in the recent past: civilismo, Pierolism, and militarism. Directed by
men of a more literary than philosophical temperament, it devoted its
energies to this battle, which did produce, especially in the provinces, a
certain increase in religious indifference. This was no gain, because it had no
effect whatsoever on the socio-economic structure in which the anathemized
system was deeply rooted. The Radical or “González-Pradist” protest lacked
effectiveness because it offered no social and economic program. Its two chief
slogans, anti-centralism and anti-clericalism, were by themselves no threat to
feudal privileges. Only the movement of Arequipa, recently vindicated by
Miguel Angel Urquieta,31 tried to enter social and economic terrains,
although this effort did not go beyond the drafting of a program.
In the South American countries where liberal thought has freely
followed its course, inserted into a normal capitalist and democratic
evolution, it has been recognized—although only as an intellectual exercise
—that Protestantism and a national church are logical requirements for a
liberal, modern state.
But capitalism has lost its revolutionary spirit and so this thesis has been
overtaken by events.32 Socialism, according to the conclusions of historical
materialism, not to be confused with philosophical materialism, considers
that ecclesiastical forms and religious doctrines are produced and sustained
by the socioeconomic structure. Therefore, it is concerned with changing the
latter and not the former. Socialism regards mere anti-clerical activity as a
liberal bourgeois pastime. In Europe, anti-clericalism is characteristic of
countries where the Protestant Reformation has not unified civil and
religious conscience and where political nationalism and Roman
universalism live in either open or latent conflict, which compromise can
moderate but not halt or resolve.
Protestantism does not penetrate Latin America as a spiritual and
religious power, but through its social services (Y.M.C.A., Methodist
missions in the sierra, et cetera). This and other signs indicate that it has
exhausted its possibilities for normal expansion. Furthermore, it suffers from
Latin America’s anti-imperialism, which suspects the Protestant missions of
being strategic outposts of British or North American capitalism.
Rationalist thought of the nineteenth century sought to explain religion
in terms of philosophy. More realistically, pragmatism has accorded to
religion the place from which rationalism conceitedly thought to dislodge it.

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As Sorel predicted, the historical experience of recent years has proven that
present revolutionary and social myths can occupy man’s conscience just as
fully as the old religious myths.
Notes
1 Waldo Frank, Our America (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), p. 63.
2 James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged edition (London: Macmillan & Co.,
1954), p. 357.
3 In an article published in no. 15 of Amauta, Antero Peralta disputes the generally

accepted idea that the Indian is pantheist. Peralta maintains that the Indian’s pantheism is
unlike any pantheistic system of philosophy. We would like to point out to Peralta, whose
research into the elements and characteristics of indigenous religion attests to his scholarly
aptitude and vocation, that he places arbitrary limitations on the use of the word
“pantheism.” I believe that I have made clear that I attribute to the Indian of Tawantinsuyo a
pantheistic sentiment and not a pantheistic philosophy.
4 Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 11.
5 Ibid., pp. 103–104.
6 The most zealous custodians of Latin tradition and Roman order—more pagan than

Christian—take refuge in St. Thomas as in the strongest citadel of Catholic thought.

7 Miguel Unamuno, La mística española.
8 Emilio Romero, “El Cuzco católico,” Amauta, No. 10, December 1927.
9 Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 361.
10 Unamuno, The Agony of Christianity, trans. K. F. Reinhardt (New York: Ungar, i960),

p. 28.
11 Francisco García Calderón, Le Pérou contemporain.
12 Unamuno, La mística española.
13 García Calderón, Le Pérou contemporain.
14 Javier Prado, Estado social del Perú durante la dominatión española.
15 Frederick Engels, Socialism Utopian and Scientific, trans. E. Aveling (New York: Labor

News Co., 1901), pp. xxiii–xxiv.

16 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. Ill, trans. E. Untermann (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1909), p.

696.
17 Ramiro de Maeztu, “Rodó y el poder” in Repertorio Americano, Vol.VIII, No. 6,

1926.
18 René Johannet, Eloge du bourgeois français.
19 Georges Sorel, Introduction à l’économie moderne (Paris: Marcel Riviére, 1911), p. 289.
20 Giovanni Papini, Pragmatism.
21 Frank, Our America, p. 25.
22 Julien Luchaire, L’Eglise et le seizième siècle.
23 M. V. Villarán, Estudios sobre educatión national, pp. 10, 11.
24 Luchaire, L’Eglise et le seizième siècle.

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 25 Prado, Estado social del Perú.
26 Alphonse Aulard, Christianity and the French Revolution, trans. Lady Frazer (London:
Ernest Benn, 1927), p. 98.
27 Ibid., pp. 111 and 113.
28 Lucien Romier, Explication de notre temps (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1925), PP. 119–

121.
29 García Calderón, Le Pérou contemporain.
30 Jorge Guillermo Leguía, “La convencion de 1856 y don José Gálvez,” Revista de

Ciencias Jurídicas y Societies, no. 1, p. 36.

31 See the article “González Prada y Urquieta” in Amauta, no. 5.
32 Julio Navarro Monzo, leader of the Y.M.C.A. and proponent of a new reformation,

acknowledges in his book El problema religioso en la culturalatinoamericana that, “inasmuch

as the Latin countries unfortunately remained outside of the Reformation of the seventeenth
century, it is now too late to think of converting them to Protestantism.”

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 6
Regionalism and Centralism
Basic Premises
HOW IS THE QUESTION of regionalism presented in our time? In
some departments, especially in the south, there is an obvious regionalist
sentiment. But regionalist aspirations are not defined in explicit and vigorous
protests. In Peru, regionalism is a vague feeling of unrest and dissatisfaction,
rather than a movement or a program.
This can be explained by our economic and social situation and by our
historical development. The question of regionalism can no longer be
approached in terms of the radical or Jacobin ideology of the nineteenth
century.
I believe that our study of regionalism should start from the following
premises:
(1) The dispute between federalists and centralists is as anachronistic as
the controversy between conservatives and liberals. In theory and practice
the battle has moved from an exclusively political to a social and economic
terrain. The new generation is no longer interested in the form, the
administrative mechanism, of our regime, but in its substance, the economic
structure.
(2) Federalism does not appear in our history as a popular cause, but
rather as a justification of gamonalismo and its clientele. The mass of Indians
do not participate in it and its converts are limited to the bourgeoisie of the
old colonial cities.
(3) Centralism is supported by regional bossism and gamonalismo,
prepared on occasion to say or feel that they are federalist. Federalism
recruits its followers among the caciques or gamonales in disfavor with the
central power.
(4) One of the defects of our political organization is its centralism; the
solution, however, does not lie in a federalism rooted and inspired in
feudalism. Our political and economic organization needs to be completely
revised and transformed.
(5) It is difficult to define the limits of regions historically existing in
Peru as such. The departments originated in the artificial intendencias of the
viceroyalty. They therefore have no tradition or reality derived from the
Peruvian people and their history.

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 The idea of federalism has no deep roots in our history. The only
ideological conflict, the only doctrinal difference in the first half-century of
the republic, was that of Conservatives and Liberals. It did not reflect
opposition between the capital and the regions but antagonism between
large landholders, descended from colonial feudalism and aristocracy, and
the mestizo demos of the city, heirs to the rhetorical liberalism of
independence. This struggle spread, naturally, to the administrative system.
By eliminating municipalities, the conservative constitution of Huancayo
expressed the conservative position on self-government. But neither
Conservatives nor Liberals of that time considered administrative
centralization or decentralization to be a cardinal issue. Later, when the old
landholders and aristocrats, allied with merchants made wealthy by contracts
and business deals with the government, turned into a capitalist class, they
recognized that the Liberal program was more suited to their interests and
requirements than the aristocratic. Conservatives and Liberals, without
distinction, declared themselves favorable or opposed to decentralization. In
this new period, conservatism and liberalism, which were now not even given
those names, no longer corresponded to class interests. In that curious
period, the wealthy became somewhat liberal and the masses became
somewhat conservative.
But, in any case, the civilista caudillo Manuel Pardo designed a
decentralization policy with the creation of departmental councils in 1873.
Years later, the Democratic caudillo Nicolás de Piérola, a politician and
statesman of conservative mentality and spirit, although his demagoguery
would appear to indicate the contrary, wrote in the “declaration of principles”
of his party the following statement: “Our diversity of race, language, climate,
and terrain, no less than the distances between our population centers,
demand that a federal system be established as a means of satisfying our
needs of today and tomorrow; but in conditions that take into account the
experience of countries similar to ours with this system, as well as the
peculiarities of Peru.”1
After 1895, declarations against centralism multiplied. The Liberal party
of Augusto Durand came out in favor of a federal system. The Radical party
lost no opportunity to attack and criticise centralism. And suddenly there
appeared, as if by magic, a Federal party. Centralism was then defended
solely by the civilistas, who in 1873 had demonstrated their willingness to
practice a policy of decentralization.

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 But all this was theoretical speculation. Actually, the parties were not
anxious to abolish centralism. Sincere Federalists were not only few in
number and scattered among the different parties, but they exercised no real
influence on opinion. They did not represent a popular cause. Piérola and
the Democratic party had governed for several years. Durand and his friends
had shared the honors and responsibilities of power with the Democrats for
some time. Neither group had used the occasion to deal with the problem of
changing the administrative system or of reforming the constitution.
After the decease of the unstable Federal party and the spontaneous
dissolution of González-Pradist radicalism, the Liberal party continued to
wave the banner of federalism. Durand realized that the federalist idea,
which the Democratic party had exhausted in a platonic and cautiously
written declaration, could serve to strengthen the Liberal party in the
provinces by attracting forces hostile to the central authority. Under or rather
against the government of José Pardo, he published a federalist manifesto.
But his subsequent policy clearly revealed that the Liberal party,
notwithstanding its profession of federalist faith, only brandished the idea of
federation for propaganda purposes. The Liberals formed part of the cabinet
and of the majority in congress during Pardo’s second administration. And
they did not show, either as cabinet ministers or as members of congress, any
intention of renewing the federalist battle.
Billinghurst, perhaps with a more passionate conviction than other
politicians who used this platform, also wanted decentralization. Unlike the
Democrats and the Liberals, he cannot be reproached for forgetting his
principle when in power; his experience in the government was too brief. But
it must be stated objectively that Billinghurst took presidential office as an
enemy of centralism and that this was of no benefit to the campaign against
centralism.
At first glance some may infer from this rapid review of the attitude on
centralism taken by Peru’s political parties that from the date of the
Democratic party’s declaration of principles to Dr. Durand’s federalist
manifesto there has been an effective federalist movement in Peru. But
appearances are deceiving. This review really proves that the federalist idea
has aroused neither energetic resistance nor ardent support. A worthless
slogan, it could not alone signify the program of a movement or a party.
This is not to ratify or recommend in any way bureaucratic centralism.
But it is evidence that the diffuse regionalism of southern Peru has not yet
materialized into an active federalist affirmation.

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 Regionalism and Gamonalismo
Any keen observer of our historical development, whatever his point of
view, must be struck by the fact that Peruvian thought is at present
concerned less with politics—and in this case “politics” has the broad
connotation of “old-time politics” or “bourgeois politics”—than with social
and economic issues. The “problem of the Indian” and the “agrarian question”
are much more interesting to modern Peruvians than the “principle of
authority,” “universal suffrage,” the “reign of intelligence,” and other subjects
discussed by Liberals and Conservatives. This is not because the political
mentality of previous generations was more abstract, more philosophical,
more universal, and that, to the contrary, the mentality of today’s generation
may be, and is, more realistic, more Peruvian. It is because the controversy
between Liberals and Conservatives was derived on both sides from the
interests and aspirations of a single social class. The proletariat lacked any
program or ideology of its own. Liberals and Conservatives looked down on
the Indian as an inferior, different class. They either tried to ignore the
problem of the Indian or they did their best to reduce it to a philanthropical
and humanitarian problem.
Today, with the appearance of a new ideology that expresses the interests
and aspirations of the masses, who gradually have acquired a class
consciousness, a national movement has arisen that sympathizes with the lot
of the Indian and makes the solution of his problem basic to a program for
the reform and reconstruction of Peru. The problem of the Indian has ceased
to be, as in the time of the discussions between Liberals and Conservatives, a
secondary or subordinate theme and has become a paramount issue.
The foregoing demonstrates that, contrary to what superficial, self-styled
nationalists suppose and suggest, the spirit of this generation has conceived a
program that is a thousand times more nationalist than that which in the
past was nourished only on aristocratic sentiments and superstitions or on
Jacobin concepts and formulas. A spirit that considers the problem of the
Indian to be of supreme importance is simultaneously very humane and very
nationalist, very idealist and very realist. And its timeliness is proven by the
identical approaches of both those who support it from within and those
who judge it from without. Eugenio d’Ors is a Spanish professor who is
extravagantly admired by Peruvians who associate nationalism with
conservatism. On the occasion of Bolivia’s centennial, he has written:
In some American countries especially, I see very clearly what the justification of
independence should be according to the law of Good Works. I see what should be the
work, the task, the mission in your country. Bolivia, like Peru and Mexico, has a great local

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problem, which at the same time signifies a great universal problem. It has the problem of
the Indian, of his situation in the national culture. What to do with this race? There have
traditionally been two contrasting methods. The Saxon method has been to drive it back,
decimate it, and slowly to exterminate it. The Spanish method, on the contrary, tried to
approach it, redeem it, and mix with it. I do not want to say now which of these methods is
preferable. What has to be established in all fairness is the obligation to work with one or
the other method. It is morally impossible to follow a line of conduct that simply evades the
problem and tolerates the existence of a teeming mass of Indians beside the white
population, without worrying about its situation except to exploit it—selfishly, greedily,
cruelly—for the most wretched and back-breaking labor.2
This is not the moment to argue with Eugenio d’Ors about his contrast
of the presumed humanitarianism of the Spanish method with the
relentlessly destructive will of the Saxon method. Probably the author
identified the Spanish method with the noble spirit of Father de las Casas
and not with the policy of the conquest and the viceroyalty, which was
impregnated with prejudice against not only the Indian but even the mestizo.
I just want to point out that the opinion of Eugenio d’Ors is a recent
testimony of the way in which both the enlightened combatants and the
intelligent spectators of our historical drama agree in their interpretation of
the message of the times.
Assuming that “the problem of the Indian” and the “agrarian question”
take priority over any problem relative to the mechanism of the regime if not
to the structure of the state, it is absolutely impossible to consider the
question of regionalism or, more precisely, of administrative decentralization
from standpoints not subordinate to the need to solve in a radical and
organic way the first two problems. A decentralization that is not directed
toward this goal is not even worth discussion.
And decentralization in itself, simply as a political and administrative
reform, would not signify any progress toward solution of the “problem of
the Indian” and the “problem of land,” which fundamentally are one and the
same. On the contrary, decentralization carried out for no other reason than
to authorize a degree of autonomy to the regions or departments would
increase the power of gamonalismo against any solution in the interest of the
Indian masses. To become convinced of this, it is enough to ask oneself what
caste, what class, what category opposes the redemption of the Indian. There
is only one, categorical, answer: gamonalismo, feudalism, bossism. Therefore,
is there any doubt that the more autonomous a regional administration of
gamonales and caciques, the more they would sabotage and resist any
effective attempt to redress the wrongs done to the Indian?

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 There can be no illusions. The decent groups in the cities will never
prevail against gamonalismo in regional administration. The experience of
more than a century has taught us what to expect of the possibility that in
the near future a democratic system will function in Peru that will fulfill, at
least on paper, the Jacobin principle of “popular sovereignty.” The rural
masses, or the Indian communities in any case, would remain outside
suffrage and its results. Therefore, even if only because the absent are never
right—les absents ont toujours tort—the organisms and authorities that
would be created “through election,” but without their vote, would have
neither the ability nor the knowledge to do them justice. Who would be so
naive as to imagine that, within the present economic and political situation,
the regions would be governed by “universal suffrage”?
Both the system of “departmental councils” of President Manuel Pardo
and the federal republic proclaimed in the manifesto of Augusto Durand and
other proponents of federation have not represented nor could they
represent anything but the ambition of gamonalismo. In practice, the
“departmental councils” would transfer to the caciques of the departments a
series of powers independent of central authority. The federal republic would
have performed more or less the same function and had the same effect.
The regions and provinces are absolutely right to condemn centralism, its
methods, and its institutions. They are also right to denounce an
organization that concentrates the administration of the republic in the
capital. But they are completely wrong when, deceived by a mirage, they
believe that decentralization will suffice to solve their basic problems.
Gamonalismo is an accessory to and responsible for all the evils of the central
regime. Therefore, if decentralization only serves to place regional
administration and the local regime directly under control of the gamonales,
the substitution of one system for the other does not correct or promise to
correct any deep-seated injustice.
Luis E. Valcárcel endeavors to demonstrate the survival of “Incaism
without the Inca.” Here is a subject that is far more significant than the
outdated topics of political studies in the past. It also confirms my statement
that contemporary concerns are not exclusively political, but principally
economic and social. Valcárcel probes the question of the Indian and his
land, and seeks the solution not in gamonalismo but in the ayllu.
The Region in the Republic
We come to one of the serious problems of regionalism: the definition of
regions. I find that our regionalists of the old school have never approached

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the problem realistically, which indicates the abstract and superficial nature
of their arguments. No intelligent regionalist would claim that the
boundaries of regions coincide with our political organization, that is, that
“regions” are “departments.” Department is a political term that does not
designate a reality, much less an economic and historical unit. The
department is primarily a convention that only satisfies a functional need or
criterion of centralism. I cannot conceive of a regionalism that abstractly
condemns a centralist regime without objecting concretely to its peculiar
territorial division. Regionalism logically is translated into federalism. In any
case, it is expressed in a specific plan for decentralization. No true
regionalism is satisfied with municipal autonomy. As Herriot says in the
chapter of his book Créer that he devotes to administration, “regionalism
superimposes on the department and the commune a new organ, the
region.”3
But it is not a new organ except in its political and administrative
function. A region is not created by a government statute. Its biology is more
complicated and it can trace its origin farther back than the nation itself. In
order to claim autonomy from the latter, it must already exist as a region. No
one can doubt the right of Provence, Alsace-Lorraine, and Bretagne to feel
and call themselves regions; not to mention Spain, where the national unit is
less stable, and Italy, where it is less old. In Spain and Italy, the regions are
clearly differentiated by tradition, character, people, and even language.
According to its physical geography, Peru is divided into three regions:
the coast, the sierra, and the montaña. (In Peru only nature is well defined.)
And this division is not altogether physical. It is related to all our social and
economic reality. Sociologically and economically, the montaña or, better, the
tropical forest, is still not significant; it can be thought of as a colonial
possession of the Peruvian state. The coast and the sierra, on the other hand,
are the two regions in which it is possible actually to distinguish the
differences in terrain and people.4 The sierra is Indian; the coast is Spanish
or mestizo (in this case, the adjectives “Indian” and “Spanish” acquire a very
broad meaning). I repeat here what I wrote in an article about a book by
Valcárcel:
The dualism in Peruvian history and the Peruvian soul is expressed in our time as a
conflict between the historical development on the coast and the Indian sentiment that
survives in the sierra and that is deeply rooted in nature. Modern Peru is a product of the
coast and modern Peruvianism was formed in the lowlands. Neither the Spaniard nor the
criollo could conquer the Andes. In the Andes the Spaniard was always a pioneer or a

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missionary, which are also the roles of the criollo until the Andes extinguishes the
conquistador in him and little by little creates an Indian.5
The Indian race and language, displaced from the coast by the Spaniard
and his language, have fearfully taken refuge in the sierra. Therefore, in the
sierra are combined all the elements of a region, if not of a nationality. The
Peru of the coast, heir of Spain and the conquest, controls the Peru of the
sierra from Lima; but it is not demographically and spiritually strong enough
to absorb it. Peruvian unity is still to be accomplished. It is not a question of
the communication and cooperation of former small states or free cities
within the boundaries of a single nation. In Peru the problem of unity goes
much deeper. Instead of a pluralism of local or regional traditions, what has
to be solved is a dualism of race, language, and sentiment, born of the
invasion and conquest of indigenous Peru by a foreign race that has not
managed to merge with the Indian race, or eliminate it, or absorb it.
The regionalist movement in the cities or districts where it is most active,
if it does not reflect simply the dissatisfaction of gamonalismo, is obviously
although unconsciously promoted by this contrast between coast and sierra.
When this is its motivation, it indicates a conflict not between capital and
province but between the Spanish Peru of the coast and the Indian Peru of
the sierra.
The above definition of regions does not advance us in our examination
of decentralization. On the contrary, this goal is lost to view in order to fix on
a much greater goal. The sierra and the coast are two regions geographically
and sociologically; but they cannot be two regions politically and
administratively. Distances within the Andes are greater than distances from
the sierra to the coast. The natural movement of the Peruvian economy is
trans-Andean and demands that roads of penetration be given preference
over longitudinal roads. Development of centers of production in the sierra
depend on an outlet to the sea. Any positive program of decentralization has
to be inspired chiefly by the needs and directions of the national economy.
The historical purpose of decentralization is to encourage not secession but
union, not to separate and divide regions but to assure and perfect their
unity within a more functional and less forced association. Regionalism does
not mean separatism.
One of the facts that forcefully supports this belief is the sincere and
profound sentiment of regionalism in the south, specifically in the
departments of Cuzco, Arequipa, Puno, and Apurímac. These departments
constitute our most clear-cut and integrated region. Trade and other
relations between them keep alive an old unity inherited from the Inca

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civilization. In the south, the “region” rests solidly on its historical
foundations with the Andes as its bastions.
The south is basically of the sierra. Here, where the coast shrinks to a
slender strip of land, coastal and mestizo Peru has not been able to establish
itself. The Andes advance to the sea, converting the coast into a narrow
cornice dotted with ports and coves and forcing the cities into the sierra. The
south has been able to maintain its sierra, if not its Indian, character in spite
of the conquest, the viceroyalty, and the republic.
To the north the coast widens and becomes economically and
demographically dominant. Trujillo, Chiclayo, and Piura are cities with a
Spanish spirit and flavor. Commerce between these cities and Lima is easy
and frequent, but what really links them to the capital is their common
tradition and sentiment. A map of Peru explains Peruvian regionalism better
than any complicated, abstract theory.
The centralist regime divides the national territory into departments; but
it accepts and at times employs a more general classification that assigns the
departments to three groups: North, Center, and South. The Peru-Bolivia
Confederation of Santa Cruz split Peru into two halves, a division basically
no more arbitrary and artificial than the boundaries set by the centralist
republic. Departments and provinces that have no contact with one another
are grouped under the labels North, South, and Center. The term “region”
appears to be mainly a convention.
However, neither state nor parties have ever been able to define Peruvian
regions in any other way. The Democratic party, to whose theoretical
federalism I have already referred, practiced its federalist principle within its
own system by placing a central committee over regional committees for
North, South, and Center. (This might be called a federalism for internal
consumption.) When the constitutional reform of 1919 instituted regional
congresses, it set up the same division.
But this delimitation of departments conforms solely to a centralist
criterion. Regionalists cannot adopt it without appearing to base their
regionalism on premises and concepts peculiar to the metropolitan
mentality. All attempts at decentralization have suffered from precisely this
original defect.
Centralist Decentralization
Decentralization, no matter what form it has taken in the history of the
republic, has always represented an absolutely centralist concept and design.
Parties and caudillos have occasionally adopted, for reasons of convenience,

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the idea of decentralization; but when they have tried to apply it, they have
not had the knowledge or the ability to break away from centralist practice.
This centralist tendency is easily explained. Regionalist aspirations do
not constitute a concrete program or propose a definite method of
decentralization and autonomy because they express a feudalist sentiment
instead of a popular cause. The gamonales were concerned only with
increasing their feudal power. Regionalism was incapable of drawing up its
own program. In most cases it only managed to mouth the word “federation.”
Therefore, the decentralization program turned out to be a product typical of
the capital.
On a theoretical plane, the capital has never defended the centralist
system with too much ardor or eloquence; on a practical plane, it has
skillfully conserved its privileges intact. It has had little difficulty in making a
few concessions in theory to the idea of an administrative decentralization,
but the solutions sought to this problem have been moulded by centralist
standards and interests.
The first effective attempt to decentralize was the experiment of
departmental councils instituted by the 1873 law of the municipalities. (The
federalist experiment of Santa Cruz is not included in this study, not so
much because it was shortlived, as because it was a supranational concept
imposed by a statesman whose ideal was the union of Peru and Bolivia.)
The departmental councils of 1873 were centralist not only in form but
in inspiration. The model for the new institution originated in France,
citadel of centralism. Our legislators tried to adapt to Peru a system enacted
by the Third Republic, which was manifestly anchored to the centralist
principles of the Consulate and the Empire.
The reform of 1873 was a typically centralist decentralization. It did not
satisfy any of the specific grievances of regional sentiment. Furthermore, by
strengthening the artificial political division of the republic into departments
or districts according to the needs of the centralist regime, it opposed or
discouraged all effective regionalism.
In his study of local government, Carlos Concha states that “the
organization given to these bodies, modeled on the French law of 1871, did
not conform to the political culture of the period.”6 This is a civilista
judgment on a civilista reform. The departmental councils failed because they
were in no way related to the historical reality of Peru. They were designed
to transfer from central authority to regional gamonalismo part of the
former’s responsibilities—primary and secondary education, the

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administration of justice, and law enforcement. Regional gamonalismo was as
little interested in assuming these responsibilities as it was capable of
discharging them. Furthermore, the operation and mechanism of the system
were too complicated. The councils were like small parliaments chosen by
the electoral colleges of each department and representing the provincial
municipalities. The caciques would have liked a less unwieldy machine,
something simpler in composition and easier to manage. Such annoying
obligations as public education were not their concern, but the central
government’s. The departmental council did not rest on either the people—
above all the peasants, who took no part in the game of politics—or on the
feudal lords and their clientele; it was, therefore, a completely artificial
institution.
The War of 1879 ended the experiment, but the departmental councils
had already failed. In their few years of existence they had demonstrated that
they could not fulfill their mission. After the war, when the administration
was reorganized, the law of 1873 was forgotten.
The law of 1886, which created the departmental juntas, was oriented in
the same way, only this time centralism took less trouble to give it the
appearance of decentralization. The juntas operated until 1893 under the
presidency of the prefects and, in general, they were entirely subordinate to
the central government.
This apparent decentralization did not propose to gradually give
administrative autonomy to the departments nor did it establish juntas in
order to attend to regional aspirations. Its purpose was to reduce or
eliminate the central government’s responsibility in the distribution of funds
available for education and road construction. All administration continued
to be strictly centralized. The only administrative independence granted the
departments was the independence of their poverty. Without recourse to the
central government, every department was supposed to maintain its own
schools and roads out of its income from excise taxes. The departmental
juntas were used to allocate the budget for education and public works
among the various departments.
That this was their real purpose is proven by the way in which the
departmental juntas declined and disappeared. As its finances recovered
from the consequences of the War of 1879, the central government began to
reclaim the functions it had entrusted to the departmental juntas. It took
over public education completely and extended its authority in proportion to
the expansion of its overall budget. Departmental revenues became so

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insignificant compared to national revenues that centralism was further
reinforced. The departmental juntas were finally left with only a few
supervisory and bureaucratic activities, at which time they were abolished.
The constitutional reform of 1919 had to give some kind of token
recognition to regionalist sentiment. The most important of its
decentralizing measures, municipal autonomy, has yet to be implemented.
The principle of municipal autonomy has been incorporated into the
national constitution, but the mechanism and structure of local government
have not been touched, except in a negative way; the government appoints
municipal authorities.
On the other hand, no time was lost in organizing regional congresses.
These parliaments of North, Center, and South are offshoots of the national
parliament; they incubate for the same period, in the same electoral climate;
they are born of the same womb, on the same day; their legislative mission is
subsidiary and complementary; and by now their own parents are certainly
convinced that they are useless. In any event, six years of experience show
them to be an absurd parody of decentralization.
Actually, there was no need to wait for proof of their ineffectiveness.
Regionalism wants an administrative, not a legislative, decentralization. It is
not possible to conceive of a regional diet or parliament without a
corresponding executive body. To create more legislatures is not to
decentralize. The regional congresses have not even served to relieve the
pressures on the national congress. Many local issues continue to be debated
in both congresses. The problem, in short, remains unchanged.
The New Regionalism
I have examined the theory and practice of past regionalism. I must now
express my own points of view on decentralization and define the terms in
which, in my opinion, this problem is presented to the new generation.
First of all, it is necessary to make clear the alliance or agreement
between regional gamonalismo and the centralist government. Gamonalismo
could declare itself more or less federalist and anti-centralist as long as it was
negotiating this alliance. But ever since it agreed to become the centralist
government’s most useful agent, it has renounced any program that would
displease its allies in the capital.
It is time to announce the end of the old opposition between centralists
and federalists of the ruling class, an opposition which, as I have observed in
the course of my study, never was very dramatic. Theoretical opposition has
turned into a practical understanding. Only the gamonales in disfavor with

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the central government are disposed to take a regionalist attitude, which, of
course, they are prepared to abandon as soon as their political fortune
improves.
Government form is no longer our paramount concern. We live in an era
when economics only too obviously dominates and absorbs politics. In every
country in the world, discussion of the economic bases of the state now takes
precedence over reform of its administrative machinery.
The remains of Spanish feudalism are more deeply and firmly embedded
in the sierra than in the rest of the republic. If Peru is to progress, it is
imperative that this feudalism, which represents a survival of the colonial
period, be liquidated. The redemption and salvation of the Indian, here are
the program and goal of Peruvian reform. The new generation wants Peru to
stand on its natural biological foundations. It feels in duty bound to create a
more Peruvian, more autochthonous Peru. There can be no doubt that the
historical and logical enemies of this program are the heirs to the conquest,
the descendants of the colony, that is, the gamonales.
It is necessary to absolutely repudiate and to utterly discourage a
regionalism that originates in feudal sentiments and interests and therefore
aims at increasing the power of gamonalismo. Peru has to choose between the
gamonal and the Indian; it has no other alternative. In the face of this
dilemma, all questions of the system’s structure become secondary. The new
generation’s primary concern is that Peru proclaim itself against the gamonal
and for the Indian.
As a consequence of the ideas and events that daily confront us with this
dilemma, regionalism begins to separate into two distinct and toally different
tendencies. In other words, it begins to shape into a new regionalism. This
regionalism is no mere protest against the centralist regime. It is an
expression of the sierra conscience and of the Andean sentiment. The new
regionalists are, above all, pro-Indian and they cannot be confused with the
old-style anticentralists. Valcárcel sees the roots of Inca society intact under
the flimsy layer of colonialism. His work belongs to Cuzco, to the Indian, to
the Quechua, not to a region. It is nourished on Indian sentiment and
autochthonous tradition.
For these regionalists the primary problem is the problem of the Indian
and of land. And here they are in agreement with the new generation in the
capital. Today it is no longer possible to speak of the contrast between capital
and regions, but of the conflict between two mentalities, between two
ideologies, one that declines and the other that ascends, both spread

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throughout sierra and coast, province and city. Those of our youth who
continue to speak the vaguely federalist language of the past are mistaken. It
will fall to the new generation to build Peruvian unity on a solid foundation
of social justice.
Acceptance of these principles and goals does away with the possibility
of any dissension arising out of regionalist or centralist self-interest. To
condemn centralism is to condemn gamonalismo and the two condemnations
are motivated by the same hope and the same ideal.
Municipal autonomy, “self-government,” and administrative
decentralization cannot be discussed alone but only from the standpoint of a
radical reform. They must be considered and judged in the light of their
relationship to the social problem. No reform that strengthens the gamonal
against the Indian, no matter how much it appears to satisfy regionalist
sentiment, can be a good and just reform. Any formal triumph of
decentralization and autonomy is subordinate to the cause of the Indian,
which must be defended and given first place in the revolutionary program of
the vanguard.
The Problem of the Capital
Regionalists have often expressed their feelings against centralism by
denouncing Lima. But here, as elsewhere, they have never gone beyond
flowery speeches. They have made no serious and thoughtful effort to put the
capital on trial, although they would have had more than sufficient evidence
for holding such a trial.
This task, undoubtedly superior to the objectives and motives of
gamonalista regionalism, can and should be undertaken by the new
regionalism. Meanwhile, I shall complete my explanation of the old topic
“regionalism and centralism” by posing the problem of the capital. How far is
Lima’s privileged position justified by national history and geography? Here
is a question that needs to be cleared up. Lima’s hegemony rests on less solid
ground than mere mental intertia would lead us to believe. It belongs to a
period of national historical development and is subject to age and
termination.
The spectacle of the development of Lima in recent years moves our
impressionable limeños to deliriously optimistic predictions about the future
of the capital. The new suburbs and the asphalt avenues down which
automobiles race at sixty or seventy kilometers per hour easily persuade a
limeño—under his skin-deep and cheerful skepticism—that Lima is not far
behind Buenos Aires and Río de Janeiro.

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 All their predictions are based on the physical impression of the growth
of the urban area. They see only the opening of new surburbs and point out
that, given its rate of urbanization, Lima will soon be connected with
Miraflores and Magdalena. “Urban developments” actually now cover, on
paper, a city of at least one million inhabitants.
But by itself the rate of urbanization proves nothing. Without a recent
census, we cannot calculate the population increase of Lima from 1920 to
date. The 1920 census set Lima’s population at 228,740.7 Although the
percentage of growth in the last eight years is not known, available data
indicate that neither increase in births nor increase in immigration have been
very high. Therefore, it is only too apparent that Lima has expanded much
more in area than in population. Urbanization proceeds on its own.
The limeño’s optimism concerning the future of the capital is nourished
largely by his confidence that Lima will indefinitely enjoy the advantages of a
centralist government, assuring its place as the center of power, pleasure,
fashion, et cetera. The development of a city, however, does not depend on
political and administrative privileges; it depends on economic privileges.
Therefore, the issue is whether or not the natural development of the
Peruvian economy guarantees that Lima will continue to play the role
necessary for its predicted or, rather, hoped-for future.
Let us rapidly examine the biological laws of cities and see how favorable
they are to Lima. The essential factors in a city are the geographic factor, the
economic factor, and the political factor. Of these three factors, Lima
maintains its supremacy only in the political.
Lucien Romier writes on the development of French cities: “Whereas
secondary cities grow out of local changes, large cities are formed by national
and international connections and movements; their fortune is bound up in a
network of vaster activities; and their destiny crosses administrative and even
territorial borders to follow the general trade routes.”8
In Peru, these national and international connections and movements
are not concentrated in the capital. Lima is not geographically the center of
the Peruvian economy. It is not, above all, the outlet for Peru’s commercial
traffic.
In an article on “the capital of esprit,” published in an Italian journal,
César Falcón makes some wise remarks on this subject. Falcón states that the
reasons for the impressive growth of Buenos Aires are basically economic
and geographic. Buenos Aires is the port and market for Argentina’s
agriculture and livestock. It is the crossroads of Argentine trade.9 Lima, on

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the other hand, can be only one of the outlets for Peruvian products. The
products of North and South have to use other ports on the long Peruvian
coastline.
All this evidence is incontrovertible. In customs statistics, Callao will
long remain the leading port. But the growing exploitation of land and its
resources will not be principally to the advantage of Callao. It will promote
the expansion of several other ports. For example, Talara has become in a
few years the second port of the republic in volume of exports and imports.10
The direct benefits of the oil industry are lost to the capital. This industry
exports and imports without using either the capital or its port as
intermediary. Other industries that emerge in the sierra or on the coast will
follow the same course.
A glance at the map of any nation whose capital is a large city of
international importance will show, first of all, that the capital is the focal
point of the country’s railways and highways. A great capital in our time is a
great railway center and its function as an axis is most clearly marked on a
railway map.
Although political privilege partly determines the organization of a
country’s railway grid, the primary factor is still an economic one. All
production centers naturally and logically connect with the capital, the most
important station, the richest market. The economic factor coincides with
the geographic factor. The capital is not a product of chance. It has been
formed thanks to a series of circumstances that have favored its hegemony;
but none of these circumstances would have operated if its location had not
been suitable.
The political factor does not suffice. It is said that without the papal seat,
Rome would have died in the Middle Ages. This may or may not be true. In
any event, it is just as true that Rome was chosen to receive the papal seat
because it was the capital of the greatest empire in the world. The history of
the Terza Roma precisely demonstrates that political privilege is not enough.
Notwithstanding the magnetic force of the Vatican and the Quirinal, the
seat of the church and the seat of the government, Rome has not prospered
at the same rate as Milan. (The Risorgimento optimism about the future of
Rome ended in the failure told about in the novel by Emile Zola. The
business enterprises that enthusiastically rushed into construction of an
enormous subdivision were ruined. Their undertaking was premature.) The
economic development of northern Italy has assured the predominance of

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Milan, which owes its growth to its position in the traffic of this industrial
and commercial Italy.
Any great modern capital has had a complex formation, deeply rooted in
tradition. Lima, however, has had a somewhat arbitrary beginning. Founded
by a conquistador, a foreigner, Lima appears to have originated as the
military tent of a commander from some distant land. Lima did not compete
with other cities to win its title as capital. The creature of an aristocratic age,
Lima was born into nobility and was baptized City of Kings. It was created
by the colonizer or, rather, the conquistador, not by the native. Then the
viceroyalty consecrated it as the seat of Spanish power in South America.
Finally, the War of Independence—an uprising of the criollo and Spanish
population, not of the Indian population—proclaimed it the capital of the
republic. The Peru-Bolivia Confederation temporarily threatened its
hegemony. But this state, when it reestablished the dominion of the Andes
and the sierra, looked too far south for its axis, in an instinctive,
subconscious effort to restore the Tawantinsuyo. And, for this among other
reasons, it fell. Lima, armed with political power, reclaimed its privileges as
capital.
The work of the Central Railroad in this period was not only on behalf
of the mineral wealth of Junín but, above all, on behalf of Lima. Peru, heir of
the conquest, had to leave the dwelling place of the conquistador, the seat of
the viceroyalty and the republic, in order to fulfill its mission of scaling the
Andes. Later, after the Andes had been spanned by rail and the montaña lay
beyond, a railroad was similarly envisaged to connect Iquitos with Lima. The
time was 1895 and the president was the man who in his declaration of
principles a few years earlier had professed his federalist faith. More mindful
of Lima than of eastern Peru, he approved the route from Pichis, thereby
once again behaving as a typical centralist.
To date the Central Railroad is one of Lima’s greatest sources of
economic power. The minerals of the department of Junín which, thanks to
this railway, are exported through Callao were our leading mineral export.
Although they are now second to the petroleum in the North, this does not
indicate any decline in the Center’s mining activities. The central railway also
brings down the products of Huánuco, Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and
Chanchamayo. The railroad to Pachitea, the railroad to Ayacucho and
Cuzco, and in general the overall design of the state’s railway program
combine to make it the trunk of our transportation system.

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 But the future of this railway is threatened. The Central Railroad climbs
the Andes at one of the steepest points. Because of its very high operation
costs, freight charges are expensive. Therefore, the railway that is planned for
construction from Huacho to Oyón will become to some extent a rival of
this line. The new railway, which will transform Huacho into a first-ranking
port, will carry a substantial part of the production of the Center to the
coast. But in any case, a railroad into the sierra, even if it is the principal one,
is not enough to assure Lima a dominant position in the transportation
system of the country.
Although centralism may continue for a long time, Lima can never
become the nucleus of the network of roads and railways. The nature of the
territory forbids it. In order to develop their resources, the sierra and
montaña require roads into the interior, that is, roads that will provide
various outlets along the coast for their products. Maritime transport will
not for some time need coastal roads. Lengthwise roads will be inter-
Andean. A coastal-plain city like Lima cannot be the central station in this
complicated network, which inevitably will look for cheaper and closer ports.
Industry is one of the primary factors in the formation of modern cities.
London, New York, Berlin, and Paris owe their size chiefly to industry.
Industrialism is a phenomenon characteristic of western civilization. A great
city is basically a market and a factory. Industry has created first the force of
the middle class and then the force of the working class. As many economists
have observed, industry today does not follow consumption; it precedes and
overflows the market. It is not satisfied with meeting demand; it sometimes
creates it. Industrialism appears to be all-powerful. And although mankind,
weary of machines and other devices, occasionally declares itself willing to
return to nature, there is still no sign that machines and manufacturing will
disappear. Russia, the motherland of a burgeoning socialist civilization,
works feverishly to develop its industry. Lenin dreamed of the day his entire
country would have electric power. In short, whether a civilization is rising
or ebbing, industry remains mighty. Neither the bourgeoisie nor the
proletariat can conceive of a civilization that is not based on industry. There
are some who predict the decay of the city, but there is no one who predicts
the decline of industry.
No one denies the power of industry. If Lima combined the conditions
necessary for a great industrial power, it would undoubtedly become a great
city. But the possibilities of industry in Lima are limited. This is not only
because they are limited all over Peru—a country which for some time will

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have to remain a producer of primary materials—but also because the
formation of great industrial centers is also governed by laws, as often as not
the same laws that govern the formation of cities. Industry springs up in
capitals because, among other reasons, the latter are at the heart of the
country’s transportation system. A centralized network of highways and
railroads is as indispensable to industry as it is to trade. We have already
seen in preceding essays that the physical geography of Peru runs counter to
centralization.
Industry is also attracted to a city because certain raw materials are
produced in the vicinity. This law operates especially for heavy industry like
smelting. The great iron and steel mills arise near mines that can supply
them. The location of coal and iron deposits determines this aspect of the
economic geography of the West.
And in these days of worldwide electric power, a third factor that attracts
industry to a site is the proximity of hydraulic resources. “White coal” can
work the same miracles as black coal to create industry and cities. Lima has
none of these factors; its surroundings do not attract industry.
It should be mentioned that the industrial possibilities based on natural
resources—raw materials, hydraulic power—would not have much
immediate value. Because of its disadvantageous position in terms of
geography, human resources, and technology, Peru cannot dream of
becoming a manufacturing country in the near future. For many years it will
have to continue its role in the world economy as exporter of primary
products, foodstuffs, et cetera. Another disadvantage is its present condition
as a country with a colonial economy subject to the trade and financial
interests of the industrial countries of the West.
Today there is no indication that Peru’s emerging industrial activities are
concentrating in Lima. The textile industry, for example, is widely scattered;
although Lima has the most factories, a high percentage is in the provinces.
It is probable that the manufacture of wool cloth, as can be seen already, will
develop in the ranching regions where there is also a supply of cheap native
labor due to lower living costs.
Finance and the banking system are another factor in a great city. The
recent experience of Vienna has shown the value of this element in the life of
a capital. After the war, Vienna was impoverished by the dissolution of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was reduced from the capital of a mighty
nation to the capital of a tiny state. Its commerce and industry, drained and
weakened, were prostrate. It no longer could lure tourists with the promise
of pleasure and luxury. In the middle of this crisis, Vienna was saved from

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final disaster by its situation as a financial market. The Balkanization of
Central Europe, which ruined it commercially and industrially, benefited it
financially. Vienna, because of its geographical location in Europe, was
uniquely qualified to be an important center of international finance.
International bankers were the profiteers of the bankruptcy of the Austrian
economy. The darkened, empty halls of Vienna’s cabarets and cafes were
turned into banking and foreign exchange offices. Here is another object
lesson that a great financial market must be at the crossroads of international
traffic.
The political capital may be distinct from the economic capital. I have
already mentioned the contrast between Milan and Rome in the history of
democratic and liberal Italy. The United States avoided this problem with a
solution which may be very wise, but which is especially adapted to the
federal structure of that country. Washington, the political and
administrative capital, is aloof from all conflicts and competition between
New York, Chicago, San Francisco, et cetera.
The fate of the capital depends on significant political changes, as is
demonstrated in the history of Europe and of America itself. A political
order has never been able to establish itself in a seat hostile to its spirit. The
Europeanization policy of Peter the Great moved the Russian court from
Moscow to Petrograd. Perhaps a presentiment of its mission in the East
made the Bolshevik revolution feel more secure, in spite of its Western
ideology, in the Kremlin in Moscow.
The Spanish conquest in Peru ended the power of Cuzco, capital of the
Inca empire.11 Lima was the capital of the colony. It was also the capital of
the independence, although liberty was first proclaimed from Tacna, Cuzco,
and Trujillo. It is the capital today, but will it be the capital tomorrow? This
is not an irrelevant question in terms of a bold search into the future. The
answer depends on whether first place in Peru’s social and political reform is
given to the rural Indian masses or to the coastal proletariat. The future of
Lima, in any case, is inseparable from the mission of Lima, or even the will
of Lima.
Notes
1 Declaratiónde principios del partido demócrata (Lima, 1897), p. 14.
2 Eugenio d’Ors, in a letter written on the occasion of the centennial of Bolivian
independence, published in Repertorio Americano.
3 Edouard Herriot, Créer (Paris: Payot, 1919), vol. II, p. 191.

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 4 Miguelina Acosta tells me that the value of the montaña in the Peruvian economy

cannot be measured by recent data. These years are exceptional in that they mark a period of
depression. Exports from the montaña today are negligible in Peru’s trade statistics, but they
were very significant until the World War. Loreto is now in the situation of a region that has
suffered a disaster.
This is an accurate observation. The importance of Loreto cannot be appreciated by
looking only at the present. The production of the montaña played a leading role in our
economy until a few years ago. During the period when rubber appeared to be of immense
value, the montaña began to be thought of as El Dorado. About twenty years ago, Francisco
García Calderón wrote in Le Pérou contemporain that rubber was the wealth of the future.
Everyone shared this illusion.
In reality, the fortune of rubber was aleatory, depending on temporary circumstances.
We did not realize this at the time because we are easily carried away by a Panglossian
optimism when we tire of our superficially frivolous skepticism. Logically, rubber could not
be put in the same category as a mineral resource produced almost exclusively by our
country.
The depression in Loreto is not the result of a temporary industrial crisis. Miguelina
Acosta knows very well that industrial activity is only beginning in the montaña. Rubber was
a forest resource that was exploited, actually devastated, because it was located in an area
accessible to transportation.
The economic past of Loreto does not, therefore, invalidate the substance of my
statement. When I write that the montaña still lacks economic importance, I refer to the
present; and I compare its importance to that of the sierra and the coast. It is a relative
judgment.
I use the same standard of comparison to judge the sociological significance of the
montaña. I recognize two fundamental elements, two main forces, in Peruvian society. I do
not deny the existence of other elements, but I believe them to be secondary.
I prefer not to be satisfied with this explanation. I want to give fair consideration to
Miguelina Acosta’s observations and her basic argument that too little is known about the
sociology of the montaña. The Peruvian of the coast, like the Peruvian of the sierra, is
unaware of the Peruvian of the montaña. In the montaña, or more exactly in the department
of Loreto, there are people with customs and traditions almost unrelated to the customs and
traditions of the people of the coast and the sierra. Loreto has evolved differently in our
sociology and history; its biological layers are not the same.
In this respect, it is impossible not to agree with Dr. Acosta Cárdenas, who is the person
most qualified to explain Peruvian reality with a thorough study of the sociology of Loreto.
Discussion of regionalism must regard Loreto as a region, because Loreto is the montaña.
The regionalism of Loreto more than once has risen up in protest. Although it has not
produced theory, it has produced action, which means that it has to be taken into account.
5 José Carlos Mariátegui, “De la vida incaica,” Mundial, September 1925.
6 Carlos Concha, El régimen local, p. 135.
7 Extracto estadistico del Perú (1926), p. 2.
8 Lucien Romier, Explication de notre temps (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1925), p. 50.

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 9 César Falcón, Le vie d’Italia dell’America Latina (1925).
10 According to Extracto estadistico del Perú, the port of Talara follows Callao, with the
value of imports at Lp. 2,453,719 and of exports at Lp. 6,171,983.
11 In his book Por la emancipatión de América Latina (pp. 90–91) Haya de la Torre

contrasts and compares the colonial histories of Mexico and Peru. “In Mexico,” he writes,
“the races have mixed together and the new capital was built in the same place as the old.
Mexico City and all of the country’s large cities are located in the heart of the country, in the
mountains, on the high plateaus that are crowned with volcanoes. The tropical coast serves
for communication with the sea. The conquistador in Mexico fused with the Indian, became
one with him in the very heart of his sierras, and forged a race which, though not absolutely
a race in the strict sense of the word, is one nevertheless because of the homogeneity of its
customs, the tendency toward a complete mingling of blood, and the continuity, without
violent solutions, of the national ambience. That never happened in Peru. Indigenous,
mountain Peru, the real Peru, lay beyond the western Andes. The old national cities—
Cuzco, Cajamarca, et cetera—were disregarded. New and Spanish cities were built on the
tropical coast where it never rains, where there are no changes of temperature, where that
sensual, Andalusian atmosphere of our gay and submissive capital could develop.” It is
significant that these observations—more strongly worded than almost all of the usual
complaints and boasts by Lima’s critics—come from a native of Trujillo, that is, of one of
“those new and Spanish cities” whose predominance he considers responsible for many
things he detests. This and many other signs of the present revising of attitudes should be
pondered by those who say that the revolutionary and regenerative spirit is exclusively of the
sierra.

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 7
Literature on Trial
Testimony of a Witness
THE WORD “TRIAL” in this case is used in its legal sense. I do not
propose to present a discourse on Peruvian literature, but only to testify in
what I consider to be an open trial. It seems to me that so far in this trial the
witnesses have been almost entirely for the defense and that it is time to call
some witnesses for the prosecution. My testimony is admittedly partisan.
Any critic, any witness, has a responsibility that he must consciously or
unconsciously discharge. Despite dark suspicions to the contrary, I am
positive and constructive by temperament and I condemn the iconoclastic
and destructive bohemian as unethical; but my responsibility to the past
compels me to vote against the defendant. I do not exempt myself from
discharging it nor do I apologize for its partiality.
Piero Gobetti, with whom I feel great spiritual affinity, writes in one of
his essays: “True realism is devoted to the forces that produce results and it
has no use for results intellectually admired a priori. The realist knows that
history is reform and that the process of reform is not limited to a diplomacy
of the initiated but is carried out by individuals who operate as
revolutionaries by setting different standards.”1
I do not pretend to be an impartial or agnostic critic, which in any event
I do not believe is possible. Any critic is influenced by philosophical,
political, and moral concerns. Croce has proved that even the impressionistic
and hedonistic criticism of Jules Lemaitre, which is supposed to be free of
philosophical content, is related, no less than the criticism of Sainte Beuve,
to the thought and philosophy of its times.2
Man’s spirit is indivisible and it must be so to achieve plenitude and
harmony. I declare without hesitation that I bring to literary exegesis all my
political passions and ideas, although in view of the way this word has been
misused, I should add that my politics are philosophy and religion.
This does not mean that I judge literature and art without reference to
aesthetics, but that in the depths of my consciousness the aesthetic concept
is so intimately linked to my political and religious ideas that, although it
does not lose its identity, it cannot operate independently or differently.
Riva Agüero judged literature with the criterion of a civilista. His essay
on “the nature of literature in independent Peru”3 is unmistakably colored,

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not only by political beliefs, but also by the sentiments of a class system. It is
at the same time a piece of literary historiography and a political apologia.
The class system of the colonial encomendero underlies his opinions,
which invariably are expressed in terms of Hispanism, colonialism, and
social privilege. Riva Agüero departs from his political and social
preoccupations only to the degree that he adopts the standards of a professor
or a scholar, and then the departure is merely apparent, because never does
his spirit move more securely in the academic and conservative sphere. Nor
does Riva Agüero bother to conceal his political prejudices when his literary
evaluations are mixed with anti-historical observations about the presumed
error of the founders of independence in their choice of a republic over a
monarchy or when he violently attacks the tendency to form parties around
principles in opposition to the traditional oligarchical parties, on the grounds
that such opposition would incite sectarian conflict and arouse social
enmities.
Riva Agüero could not openly admit to the political bias of his exegesis:
first, because it is only long after the time of his writing that we have learned
to dispense with many obvious and useless deceptions; second, because, as a
member of the aristocratic encomendero class, he was obliged to profess the
principles and institutions of another class, the liberal bourgeoisie. Even
though it felt itself to be monarchist, Hispanist, and traditionalist, that
aristocracy had to reconcile its reactionary sentiment with the practice of a
republican and capitalist policy and with respect for a democratic and
bourgeois constitution.
With the end of uncontested civilista authority in the intellectual life of
Peru, the scale of values established by Riva Agüero, together with all
affiliated and related writings, has undergone revision.4 I confront his
unacknowledged civilista and colonialist bias with my avowed revolutionary
and socialist sympathies. I do not claim to be a temperate and impartial
judge; I declare myself a passionate and belligerent adversary. Arbitrations
and compromises take place in history, provided that the opponents engage
in long, drawn-out disputes.
The Literature of the Colony
Language is the raw material that unites literature. The Spanish, Italian,
and French literatures began with the first ballads and tales, artistic works of
enduring value written in those languages. Directly derived from Latin and
still not entirely differentiated from it, they were for a long time considered
dialects. The national literature of the Latin peoples was born, historically,

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with the national language, which was the first element to delineate the
general limits of a literature.
In the history of the West, the flowering of national literatures coincided
with the political affirmation of the nation. It formed part of the movement
which, through the Reformation and the Renaissance, created the ideological
and spiritual factors of the liberal revolution and the capitalist order. The
unity of European culture, maintained during the Middle Ages by Latin and
by papal authority, was shattered by the nationalist movement, which
individualized literature. “Nationalism” in literary historiography is therefore
purely political in its origins and extraneous to the aesthetic concept of art. It
was most vigorously defined in Germany, where the writings of the Schlegel
brothers profoundly influenced literary criticism and historiography. In his
justly celebrated Storia della letteratura italiana—praised by Brunetière as a
“history of Italian literature which I constantly quote and which is never read
in France”—Francesco de Sanctis characterizes the criticism of the 1800’s as
“the cult of nationality, which so impresses modern critics and for which
Schlegel exalts Calderón, a very nationalistic Spaniard, and disparages
Metastasio, who was not in the least Italian.”5
National literature in Peru, like Peruvian nationality itself, cannot
renounce its Spanish ties. It is a literature written, thought, and felt in
Spanish, although in many instances and to varying degrees the language is
subject to indigenous influence in intonation and even in syntax and
pronunciation. Indian civilization did not have a written language and
therefore it did not acquire a literature; or rather, literature remained in the
realm of ballads, legends, and choreography. Quechua writing and grammar
are the work of the Spaniard, and Quechua literature belonged entirely to
bilingual men of letters like El Lunarejo until the appearance of Inocencio
Mamani, the young author of Tucuipac Manashcan.6 The Spanish language,
more or less Americanized, is the literary language and intellectual tool of
Peru’s still undefined nationality.
In literary historiography, the concept of a national literature is neither
timeless nor very precise. No systematization can keep up with changing
events. The nation itself is an abstraction, an allegory, a myth that does not
correspond to a reality that can be scientifically defined. Commenting on
Hebrew literature as an exception, De Sanctis states: “The idea of a national
literature is an illusion. Its people would have to be as isolated as the Chinese
are supposed to be (although the English have also penetrated China). The
imagination and style now known as orientalism are not peculiarly of the

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Orient but of all the East and of all barbaric, primitive literatures. Greek
poetry has Asiatic elements, Latin poetry has Greek, and Italian poetry has
both Greek and Latin.”7
The Quechua-Spanish dualism in Peru, still unresolved, prevents our
national literature from being studied with the methods used for literatures
that were created and developed without the intervention of the conquest.
Peru is different from other countries of America where dualism is absent or
does not constitute a problem. The individuality of Argentine literature, for
example, expresses a strongly defined national personality.
The first stage of Peruvian literature could not escape its Spanish origin,
not because it was written in the Spanish language, but because it was
conceived with Spanish spirit and sentiment. Here, I see no discrepancy.
Gálvez, high priest of the cult of the viceroyalty in literature, recognized as a
critic that “the colonial period produced servile and inferior imitators of
Spanish literature and especially of Góngora, from whom they took only the
bombastic and the bad. They had no understanding of or feeling for the
Peruvian scene, except Garcilaso [de la Vega, el Inca], who was moved by its
natural beauty, and Caviedes, who in his acute observations of certain
aspects of national life and in his criollo malice should be considered the
forefather of Segura, Pardo, Palma, and Paz Soldán.”8
The two exceptions, the first much more than the second, are
indisputable. Garcilaso was a solitary figure in the literature of the colony.
He was the meeting ground of two cultures and two eras. But he was more
Inca than conquistador, more Quechua than Spaniard. It is this
circumstance, also exceptional, that accounts for his originality and
greatness.
Garcilaso was born of the first fruitful embrace of conquistador and
Indian woman. He was historically the first Peruvian, if by “Peruvianness”
we mean a social formation determined by the Spanish conquest and
colonization. The name and work of Garcilaso fill an entire period of
Peruvian literature. The first Peruvian, he nonetheless remained Spanish.
From a historical-aesthetic standpoint his work belongs to the Spanish epic.
It cannot be separated from Spain’s most heroic undertaking: the discovery
and conquest of America.
The early period of Peruvian literature was colonial and Spanish even in
style and subject matter. All literature normally begins with the lyric,9 as did
the oral literature of the Peruvian Indian. The conquest transplanted to Peru,
together with the Spanish language, an advanced literature that continued to

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evolve in the colony. The Spaniard had already developed the narrative from
epic poem to novel. The novel is typical of the literary phase that begins with
the Reformation and the Renaissance. It is basically the history of the
individual in a bourgeois society and, from this point of view, Ortega y
Gasset is not far wrong when he refers to the decline of the novel. The novel
will be reborn, no doubt, as realistic art in the proletarian society. For the
moment, however, the proletarian tale, as an expression of revolutionary
deeds, is more epic than novel.
The medieval epic, which was disappearing from Europe at the time of
the conquest, was revived in Peru. The conquistador could feel and describe
the conquest in epic writing. The work of Garcilaso falls between epic and
history. The epic, as De Sanctis remarks belongs to the heroic days.10 After
Garcilaso, the hopelessly mediocre literature of the colony offers no original
epic creation. Although the writers of the colony generally repeated or
continued the themes of Spanish authors, they lagged behind because of
distance. The titles in colonial literature betray the pedantry and outdated
classicism of the authors. It is a list that collects and copies, when it does not
plagiarize. The only personal voice is that of Caviedes, who expressed the
limeño bent for mockery and mischief. El Lunarejo, despite his Indian blood,
was above all an admirer of Góngora. This attitude is typical of an old
literature which, having exhausted its renaissance, becomes baroque and
overly cultivated. The Apologético en favor de Góngora therefore follows the
tradition of Spanish literature.
The Survival of Colonialism
Our literature did not cease being Spanish when the republic was
founded. For many years it continued to be, if not Spanish, colonial—a tardy
echo of the classicism and then of the romanticism of the mother country.
Because of the special character of Peruvian literature, it cannot be
studied within the framework of classicism, romanticism, and modernism;
nor of ancient, medieval, and modern; nor of popular and literary poetry, et
cetera. I shall not use the Marxist classification of literature as feudal or
aristocratic, bourgeois or proletarian. In order not to strengthen the
impression that I have organized my case along political or class lines, I shall
base it on aesthetic history and criticism. This will serve as a method of
explanation rather than as a theory that a priori judges and interprets works
and their authors.
A modern literary, not sociological, theory divides the literature of a
country into three periods: colonial, cosmopolitan, and national. In the first

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period, the country, in a literary sense, is a colony dependent on its
metropolis. In the second period, it simultaneously assimilates elements of
various foreign literatures. In the third period, it shapes and expresses its
own personality and feelings. Although this theory of literature does not go
any farther, it is broad enough for our purposes.
The colonial cycle is clearly defined in Peruvian literature. Our literature
is colonial not only because of its dependence on Spain but especially
because of its subservience to the spiritual and material remnants of the
colony. Felipe Pardo, arbitrarily designated by Gálvez as one of the
precursors of literary Peruvianness, repudiated the republic and its
institutions not simply out of aristocratic feelings but more out of royalist
feelings. All his satire, second rate at best, reflects the mentality of a
magistrate or encomendero who resents a revolution that, at least in theory,
declares the mestizo and Indian to be his equals. His jeers are inspired by his
class consciousness. Pardo y Aliaga does not speak as a Peruvian. He speaks
as a man who feels Spanish in a country conquered by Spain for the
descendants of its captains and educated class.
This same spirit, to a lesser degree but with the same results,
characterizes almost all our literature until the colónida generation which,
rebelling against the past and its values, declares its allegiance to González
Prada and Eguren, the two most liberal writers in Spanish literature.
What kept this nostalgia for the colony alive so long in our literature? It
was not the individual writer’s attachment to the past. The reason must be
sought in a world more complex than that usually glanced at by the critic.
The literature of a country is maintained by its economic and political
substratum. In a country dominated by the descendants of encomenderos and
magistrates of the viceroyalty, nothing could have been more natural than
serenades under balconies. The mediocre writers of a republic that
considered itself heir to the conquest could only labor to embellish the
viceroyal heraldry. A few superior intellects—forerunners of future events in
any country—were able to elude the fate imposed by history on the lackeys
of the latifundium.
Without roots, our colonial literature was meager, sickly, and weak. Life,
says Wilson, comes from the land. Art is nourished on the sap of tradition,
history, and people. In Peru, literature did not grow out of the indigenous
tradition, history, and people. It was created by the importation of Spanish
literature and sustained by imitation of that literature. An unhealthy
umbilical cord has kept it tied to the mother country.

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 For this reason, during the colonization we had nothing but baroque and
pedantic clerics and magistrates whose great-grandchildren became the
romantic troubadours of the republic.
Colonial literature, despite an occasional pale evocation of the empire,
lacked any aptitude or imagination for reconstructing the Inca past. Its
historiographer, Riva Agüero, precluded from criticizing this incapacity,
hastens to justify it and cites in his support a writer of the metropolis. “The
events of the Inca empire,” he writes, “according to a famous literary critic
(Menéndez y Pelayo), can be of no more interest to us than are the tales of
the Turdetanos and the Sarpetanos to the Spaniards.” He ends his essay with
these words:
There is a theory, which I find limited and unproductive, that literature can be
Americanized by going back to before the conquest and bringing to life the Quechua and
Inca civilizations with the ideas and feelings of the natives. Menéndez y Pelayo, Rubio, and
Juan Valera all agree that this is not to Americanize but to romanticize. Those civilizations
and semi-civilizations are dead and extinct. There is no way to revive their tradition because
they left no literature. For criollos of Spanish blood they are foreign and strange and nothing
links us to them; they are just as foreign and strange to the mestizos and Indians who have
been Europeanized by education. Garcilaso de la Vega is unique among the latter.
The mentality of Riva Agüero is typical of the descendants of the
conquest, the heirs to the colony, for whom the views of the scholars of the
Corte were articles of faith. In his opinion, “there is much more material to
be found in the Spanish expeditions of the sixteenth century and in the
adventures of the conquest.”11
Even when the republic reached maturity, our writers never thought of
Peru as anything but a Spanish colony. Their domesticated imagination sent
them to Spain in search of models and even themes. The Elegía a la muerte de
Alfonso XII, for example, was written by Luis Benjamín Cisneros, who was,
nonetheless, within the graceless and heavy romantic style, one of the most
liberal spirits of the 1800’s.
The Peruvian writer has almost never felt any ties with the common
people. Even had he so desired, he was not capable of interpreting the
arduous task of forming a new Peru. The new Peru was vague; only the Inca
empire and the colony were clearly defined, and he chose the colony. And
between this fledgling Peruvian literature and the Inca empire and the Indian
came the conquest, isolating them from each other.
After Spain destroyed the Inca civilization, the conquistador established
a new state that excluded and oppressed the Indian. With the native race
enslaved, Peruvian literature had to become more criollo and coastal as it

167
became less Spanish. For this reason, no vigorous literature could emerge in
Peru. The mixture of invader and Indian did not produce a homogeneous
type in Peru. To the Spanish and Quechua blood was added a torrent of
African blood and later, with the importation of coolie labor, a little Asiatic
blood. In addition, the tepid, bland climate of the lowland where these
diverse ethnic elements were blended could not be expected to produce a
strong personality.
It was inevitable that our motley ethnic composition should affect our
literary process. Literature could not develop in Peru as it did in Argentina,
where the fusion of European and Indian produced the gaucho. The latter
has permeated Argentine literature and made it the most individualistic in
Spanish America. The best Argentine writers have found their themes and
characters in folklore. Santos Vega, Martín Fierro, Anastasio el Pollo were
all folk heroes long before they became literary creations. Even today,
Argentine literature, which is open to the most modern and cosmopolitan
influences, reaffirms its gaucho heritage. Poets in the vanguard of the new
generation proclaim their descendance from the gaucho Martín Fierro and
from his bizarre family of folksingers. Jorge Luis Borges, saturated in
westernism and modernism, frequently adopts the accent of the countryside.
In independent Peru, writers like Listas and Hermosillas and their
disciples almost invariably disdained the common people. Their fantasy of
provincial nobility was impressed only by the Spanish, the viceroyal. But
Spain was far away. Although the viceroyalty survived in the feudal regime
established by the conquistadors, it belonged to the past. All the literature of
these authors, therefore, appears to be flimsy and weak, dangling in the
present. It is a literature of undeclared emigrants, nostalgic relics.
The few writers with vitality in this weary procession of wornout
dignitaries of rhetoric are the ones who somehow portrayed the people.
When it ignores the authentic, living Peru, Peruvian literature is a heavy,
indigestible miscellany of Spanish literature. The “ay” of the Indian and the
pirouette of the zambo are the only notes of animation and veracity in this
flaccid literature. The fabric of Tradiciones sparkles with the thread of Lima’s
gossipy lower class, which is one of the vital forces in traditionalist prose.
Melgar, scorned by scholars, will outlive Althaus, Pardo, and Salaverry,
because his melancholy songs will always give the people a glimpse of their
sentimental tradition and genuine literary past.
Ricardo Palma, Lima, and the Colony

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 Colonialism—nostalgic evocation of the viceroyalty—seeks to
appropriate the figure of Ricardo Palma. This servile, mawkish literature
claims to be of the same substance as Tradiciones. The “futurist” generation,
which I have often described as the most backward of our generations, has
dedicated most of its eloquence to assuming the glory of Palma. Here, for
once, it has maneuvered adroitly and Palma officially appears as the foremost
representative of colonialism. But a serious examination of the work of
Palma, comparing it with the political and social process of Peru and with
the inspiration of the colonialist genre, reveals that this appropriation is
completely artificial. To classify the writing of Palma as colonialist literature
is to diminish if not to distort it. Tradiciones cannot be identified with a
literature that, in a tone and spirit peculiar to the academic clientele of the
feudal class, reverently exalts the colony and its events.
Felipe Pardo and José Antonio de Lavalle, both avowed conservatives, are
unctuous in their recollections of the colony. Ricardo Palma, on the other
hand, reconstructs it with rollicking realism and an irreverent and satiric
imagination. Whereas the interpretation of Palma is rough and lively, that of
the prose and poetry writers of the serenade under the balconies of the vice-
royalty, so pleasing to the ears of the people of the ancien régime, is devout
and lyrical. The two versions do not resemble each other either in substance
or in approach.
The reason for their very different fates lies basically in a difference in
quality, but also in a difference in spirit. Quality is always spirit. The heavy,
academic work of Lavalle and other colonialists is forgotten because it
cannot be popular; the work of Palma lives on because it can be and is
popular.
The spirit of Tradiciones is evidenced throughout the book. Riva Agüero,
true to the interests of his group and class, identifies it with colonialism in
his study of the literature of independent Peru. He recognizes that Palma,
“belonging to the generation that broke with the mannerisms of the writers
of the colony,” was an author who was “a liberal and a son of the republic.”
But deep down, Riva Agüero is disturbed by the irreverent and unorthodox
spirit of Palma.
Riva Agüero tries to subdue this feeling, but it emerges more than once
in his study. He states that when Palma “speaks of the church, the Jesuits, the
nobility, he smiles and he makes the reader smile.” He hastens to add that it
is “a delicate smile that does not wound.” He says that he will not be the one
to reproach Palma for his Voltairean attitude. But he ends by confessing his

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true feelings: “Sometimes the jests of Palma, no matter how kindly and
gentle, destroy his historical sensibilities. We observe that, in freeing himself
of the traditional pretensions, he has become unsympathetic and indifferent
to his material.”12
If a commentator and historiographer of Peruvian literature who
manages to praise Palma and at the same time to defend the colony explicitly
differentiates Palma from Pardo and Lavalle, how has it been possible to
create and maintain the error of lumping them together? The explanation is
easy. This error originated in the personal disagreement between Palma and
González Prada and it has been perpetuated by the conflicting attitudes of
the “Palmistas” and the “Pradistas.” Haya de la Torre, in a letter on
“Peruvian Mercutio” to the magazine Sagitario of La Plata, makes the
following comment: “Between Palma, who mocked, and Prada, who lashed,
the sons of that doubly censured past and social class preferred the razor
edge to the whip.”13 Haya goes on to make a point that is extremely well
taken on the historical and political meaning of Tradiciones:
Personally, I believe that Palma was interested in but not attached to traditions. Palma
sank his pen into the past in order to shake it on high and laugh at it. No institution or man
of the colony or even of the republic escaped the unerring aim of the irony, the sarcasm, and,
always, the ridicule of his witty criticism. It is well-known that Palma was the literary enemy
of the Catholic clergy and that his Tradiciones was abhorred by monks and nuns. By a
curious paradox, Palma found himself surrounded, adulated, and nullified by a troupe of
distinguished intellectuals, Catholics, wealthy heirs, and highly placed admirers.14
It should not be wondered at that this penetrating analysis of the
meaning and affiliation of Tradiciones comes from a writer who has never
practiced literary criticism. Mere literary erudition does not suffice for a
profound interpretation of the spirit of literature. Political acumen and
historical perspective are more important. The professional critic considers
literature by itself without relating it to politics, economics, the totality of
life. Therefore, his investigation does not reach the essence of literary events
by exploring their beginnings and subconscious.
A history of Peruvian literature that takes into account its social and
political roots will end the convention against which today only a vanguard
protests. It will then be seen that Palma is closer to González Prada than has
appeared until now.15
The Tradiciones of Palma is politically and socially democratic; Palma
interprets the common people. His ridicule, which reflects the mocking
discontent of the criollo demos, undermines the prestige of the viceroyalty

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and its aristocracy. The satire of Tradiciones does not probe very deeply nor
does it hit very hard. Precisely for this reason it is identified with the sugar-
coated humor of the bland, sensual demos. Lima could not produce any
other kind of literature and Tradiciones exhausts and sometimes exceeds its
possibilities.
If the revolution of independence in Peru had been the undertaking of a
relatively solid bourgeoisie, republican literature would have adopted another
tone. The new ruling class would have expressed itself simultaneously in the
work of its statesmen and in the words, style, and attitute of its poets,
novelists, and critics. But in Peru the advent of the republic did not herald
the advent of a new ruling class.
The revolution was continental in scope and barely Peruvian. There was
only a handful of Peruvian liberals, Jacobins, and revolutionaries. The best
blood and the greatest energy were expended in battles and in times of
struggle. Because the republic was based on the army of the revolution, we
had a stormy interim of military rule during which a revolutionary class
could not consolidate itself and the conservative class automatically emerged
again. The encomenderos and landholders, who during the revolution wavered
between being patriots and being royalists, openly took charge of the
republic. The colonial and monarchical aristocracy transformed itself
officially into a republican bourgeoisie. Although the socio-economic system
of the colony superficially adapted itself to the institutions created by the
revolution, it was saturated in the colonial spirit. Underneath a coldly formal
liberalism, this class yearned for the lost viceroyalty.
The criollo or, rather, demos of Lima was neither consistent nor original.
From time to time he was aroused by the clarion call of some budding
caudillo; but once the spasm had passed, he fell once again into voluptuous
somnolence. All his impatience and rebelliousness were converted into a
joke, an impertinent remark, or an epigram, which found their literary
expression in the biting satire of Tradiciones.
Palma belongs to a middle-class elite which, by a complex combination
of historical circumstances, was not permitted to turn into a bourgeoisie.
Like this composite, larval class, Palma nursed a latent resentment against
the oldtime, reactionary aristocracy. The satire of Tradiciones frequently sinks
its sharp teeth into the men of the republic. But in contrast to the
reactionary satire of Felipe Pardo y Aliaga, it does not attack the republic
itself. Palma, together with the demos in Lima, is conquered by the anti-

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oligarchical oratory of Piérola. And, above all, he remains faithful to the
liberal ideology of independence.
Colónialism or civilismo, using Riva Agüero and other intellectuals as its
spokesmen, takes over Palma, not only because this appropriation presents
no threat to its policies, but mainly because of the hopeless mediocrity of its
own literary personnel. Critics from this class know that it is useless to try to
inflate the work of Felipe Pardo or José Antonio Lavalle. The civilista
literature has produced nothing but small, dry exercises in classicism or
graceless, vulgar attempts at romanticism. Therefore, it needs to acquire
Palma in order to display, rightfully or not, an authentic prestige.
But I should make clear that colonialism is not solely responsible for this
error. It is partly due—as I have already said—to “González-Pradism.” In an
essay on the literature of Peru by Federico More, I find the following
judgment on the author of Tradiciones: “Ricardo Palma, representative,
exponent, and sentinel of colonialism, tells historical anecdotes and has a
repertory of amusing stories. He writes with an eye to the Royal Academy
and, in order to recount the nonsense and gossipy remarks of the little
marchionesses with their kinky hair and thick lips, he tries to use the
Spanish of the Golden Age.”16 More claims that only the “coarse snicker” of
Palma will remain.
For some people this judgment is no more than a reflection of the
notorious rancor of More, whose loves are not taken seriously but whose
enmities cannot be discounted. For two reasons his views should be given
consideration: first, the special belligerence with which More supports
González Prada; second, the thoughtfulness of the essay that contains these
sentences.
In this essay More makes a conscientious effort to analyze the spirit of
national literature. His argument, although not totally acceptable, deserves
to be carefully examined. More starts from a premise that is shared by every
profound criticism: “Literature,” he writes, “is only the translation of a
political and social state.” The judgment on Palma, in brief, belongs to a
study containing valuable ideas, not to an impoverished after-dinner
dissertation. And this compels us to take notice of it and to comment on it.
But, while doing so, the essential lines of More’s argument should be pointed
out.
More looks for the elements of race and land in Peruvian literature. He
studies its colors and outline, but he disregards its complementary tints and
contours. This is a method that a pamphleteer, not a critic, would use.

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Whereas his argument gains emphasis, it loses flexibility, and it gives us a
very static image of Peruvian literature.
Although his conclusions are not always correct, they are based on true
concepts. More is aware of Peruvian dualism. He avers that in Peru “one is
either colonial or Inca.” Having written over and over again that Peru is son
of the conquest and creation of the coast, I must agree with More regarding
the origin and process of the conflict between Incaism and colonialism. Like
More, I am inclined to think that that conflict, that antagonism, is and will
be for many years the decisive factor, sociologically and politically, in
Peruvian life.
Peruvian dualism is reflected and expressed in literature.
Literature [More writes] presents a divided Peru, as is logical. A basic fact emerges: the
Andean is rural, the limeño is urban. And the same is true of the two literatures. For those
who act under the influence of Lima, everything has an Ibero-African flavor, everything is
romantic and sensual. For those of us who act under the influence of Cuzco, the most
beautiful and profound part of life is realized in mountains and valleys where everything has
an indecipherable subjectivity and is touched with drama. The limeño is susceptible to color,
the serrano to music. The heirs to the colony regard love as a challenge. The children of the
fallen race hear in love a choir that transmits the voice of destiny.
But this literature of the sierra which More describes so vehemently,
contrasting it with colonial or Lima literature, has only just begun to exist. It
has no history and almost no tradition. The two outstanding writers of the
republic, Palma and González Prada, belong to Lima. I am a great admirer,
as will be seen further on, of Abelardo Gamarra; but I think that More tends
to overestimate him, although in one passage of his study he concedes that
“Gamarra, unfortunately, was not a fully rounded, many-sided artist, clear
and sparkling, the complete man of letters that is needed.”
More himself recognizes that the “Andean regions, Incaism, still have no
great writer to synthesize in thundering, coruscating pages the anxieties,
temper, and moods of the Inca soul.” He thereby confirms the thesis that
until Palma and González Prada, Peruvian literature is colonial or Spanish.
The literature of the sierra, with which More compares it, did not acquire a
personality of its own before Palma and González Prada. Lima imposed its
models on the provinces. Worse yet, the provinces came to Lima for their
models. The polemic prose of provincial regionalism and radicalism descends
from González Prada, whom More justifiably reproaches for his love of
rhetoric.
More believes that Gamarra represents an integral Peru and that he
opens a new chapter in our literature. In my opinion, the new chapter begins

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with González Prada, who marks the transition from pure Hispanism to the
beginning of a Europeanism that will have decisive consequences.
But Ricardo Palma, whom More mistakenly designates as
“representative, exponent, and sentinel of colonialism,” is also, despite his
limitations, of this integral Peru that begins to take shape in us. Palma
interprets the criollo, the mestizo, and the middle-class elite of a republican
Lima which, even if it is the one that acclaims Piérola—who is more of
Arequipa than of Lima in temperament and style—is no less the one that in
our time criticizes its own tradition, rejects its colonial lineage, denounces its
centralism, supports the claims of the Indian, and extends both hands to the
rebels of the provinces.
More sees only colonial Lima—conservative, somnolent, frivolous.
“There is no ideological or emotional issue,” he says, “that has produced a
reaction in Lima. Neither modernism in literature, nor Marxism in politics,
nor symbolism in music, nor expressionism in painting has stirred the sons
of this sedative city. Voluptuousness is the tomb of an inquiring mind.” But
this is not correct. Lima, where the first nucleus of industrialism has been
established, is the Lima where, in perfect accord with the historic
development of the nation, the first resounding word of Marxism has been
pronounced. More, somewhat disconcerted by his country, may not know
this, but he can sense it. In Buenos Aires and La Plata there are many who
are qualified to inform him of the protests of a vanguard that represents a
new national spirit in Lima, as in Cuzco, Trujillo, and Jauja.
The accusations against colonialism, or limeñismo as More prefers to call
it, have originated in Lima. Here in the capital we are putting the capital on
trial—in open battle with what Luis Alberto Sánchez calls perricholismo and
with a passion and severity that Sánchez himself finds alarming.17 In Lima
some of us had evolved from the aesthetic values of D’Annunzio, imported
by Valdelomar, to the social criticism of the journal España. Ten years ago we
founded Nuestra Epoca, in which, without reservation and without
compromising with any group or caudillo, we called to account the old
politics.18 In Lima some student spokesmen for the new spirit created the
popular universities five years ago and inscribed the name of González Prada
on their banner.
Henríquez Ureña says that there are two Americas: one good and one
bad. The same can be said of Lima. Lima has no roots in an autochthonous
past. Lima is daughter of the conquest. But from the moment that it
intellectually and spiritually becomes less Spanish in order to become a little

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cosmopolitan, from the moment it shows concern for contemporary ideas
and issues, Lima no longer appears exclusively as the home of colonialism
and Hispanism. The new Peruvianness will be created, using the Indian as
its historic cement. Its axis will probably rest on Andean stone rather than
on the clay of the coast. But Lima, restless and reformist, wants to
participate in this creative work.
González Prada
In our literature, González Prada heralds the transition from the colonial
to the cosmopolitan period. Ventura García Calderón describes him to be
“the least Peruvian” of our writers. But we have already seen that until
González Prada, the Peruvian element in this literature is still not Peruvian,
but only colonial. The author of Páginas libres appears as an author whose
spirit is Western and whose culture is European. But within a Peruvianness
that is not yet distinct and positive, why should he be considered the least
Peruvian of the writers who interpret it? Because he is the least Spanish?
Because he is not colonial? The reason turns out to be paradoxical. Because
he is the least Spanish and because he is not colonial, his writing announces
the possibility of a Peruvian literature. It represents liberation from the
mother country and the final rupture with the viceroyalty.
This Parnassian, this Hellenist, marmorean and pagan, is historically
and spiritually much more Peruvian than all those in our literary process
who, before and after him, collected and repeated Spanish literature. In this
generation there surely does not exist a single heart that feels that the bad-
tempered and nostalgic disciple of Lista is more Peruvian than the
pamphleteering iconoclast who attacked the past that commanded the
loyalties of the former together with hack writers of the same stamp and
ancestry.
González Prada did not interpret this country; he did not examine its
problems; he did not bequeath a program to the generation that followed.
Nonetheless, he represents an instant, the first lucid instant, in the
conscience of Peru. Federico More calls him a forerunner of the new Peru, of
the integral Peru. But in this respect, Prada has been more than a
forerunner. The devious and rhetorical prose of Páginas libres contains the
seed of the new national spirit. In his famous speech at the Politeama in
1888, González Prada says: “The real Peru does not consist of the criollos
and foreigners who live in the strip of land between the Pacific and the
Andes; the nation is formed by the multitudes of Indians scattered along the
eastern stretch of the Cordillera.19

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 Despite his grandiloquent style, González Prada never scorned the
common people. On the contrary, he always championed their humble cause.
He warned his followers against the futility and sterility of a literature for the
elite. “Plato,” he reminded them in a lecture at the Ateneo,” said that the
populace was an excellent language teacher. Languages are invigorated and
refreshed in the fount of popular speech, much more than in the dead rules
of the grammarians and in the prehistoric exhumations of the erudite.
Original words, graphic expressions, daring constructions spring from the
songs and sayings of the common people. In the same way that infusorians
change continents, the masses transform languages.” “The true poet,” he
stated in another part of the same speech, “resembles a tree growing on a
mountain top: with its branches, which are the imagination, it reaches
toward the clouds; with its roots, which are the feelings, it clings to the
earth.” And in his notes on language, he repeated the same thought in other
words:
Masterpieces are noted for their accessibility; they are not the heritage of a chosen few
but of all men of good sense. Homer and Cervantes are democratic geniuses: a child
understands them. The talents that claim to be aristocratic and incomprehensible to the
multitude use abstruse form to conceal emptiness. If Herodotus had written like Gracián, if
Pindar had composed like Góngora, would they have been listened to and applauded at the
Olympic games? Look at the great writers who shook men’s souls in the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries, especially Voltaire, whose prose was as natural as breathing, as clear as
distilled alcohol.20
At the same time, González Prada condemned colonialism. In the
Ateneo conference, after making clear the consequences of silly, senile
imitation of Spanish literature, he openly advocated breaking this bond. “Let
us leave behind our childish ways and look to other literatures for new
elements and inspirations. We prefer the free and democratic spirit of this
century to the conservative spirit of monarchical nations. Let us study the
masterpieces of Spanish authors and enrich their melodious language; but let
us always remember that intellectual dependence on Spain will prolong our
infancy.”21
In the writing of González Prada our literature begins to have contact
with other literatures. González Prada represents in particular the French
influence. But in general he has the merit of having opened the way to
various foreign influences. His poetry and prose show an intimate knowledge
of Italian literature. His prose often rails against academicians and purists
and unorthodoxly delights in neologisms and gallicisms. His verse found
new moulds and exotic rhythms in other literatures.

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 Clearly perceiving the hidden although not unknown link between
conservative ideology and academic literature, González Prada attacked the
one and denounced the other. Now that we are aware of the close
relationship between the serenades to the viceroyalty in literature and the
domination of the feudal class in economics and politics, this aspect of his
thought acquires new significance.
As González Prada declares, all literature attitudes, consciously or
unconsciously, reflect political feelings and bias. Literature is not
independent of other categories of history. Who does not recognize, for
example, the political purpose behind the ostensibly literary definition of
González Prada as the “least Peruvian of our writers”? To deny Peruvianness
to his personality is simply a way of denying the validity of his protest in
Peru. It is a disguised attempt to disqualify his rebellion. The same label of
exoticism is used today against the ideas of the vanguard.
Since the death of Prada, those who were not able to undermine his
influence or his example have changed tactics. They have tried to distort and
diminish his figure by praising him and claiming to be his heirs and disciples.
González Prada has run the risk of becoming an official academic figure.
Fortunately, the new generation has been on guard against this strategem.
Youth distinguishes between what is topical and temporary in the
writing of González Prada and what is timeless and eternal. They know that
in Prada it is the spirit, not the letter, that matters. The false González-
Pradists repeat the letter; the genuine ones repeat the spirit.
A study of González Prada belongs to literary criticism rather than to
political reporting. The fact that his work has greater political than literary
significance does not contradict or conflict with the fact that, first and
foremost, his work in itself was more literary than political.
Everyone considers González Prada a man of words, not of action. But
this is not what makes him more literary than political. It is the words
themselves.
The word can be a program or a doctrine. No doctrines or programs as
such are presented in Páginas libres or in Horas de lucha. In the speeches and
essays that compose these books, González Prada does not use the language
of a statesman or sociologist to try to define Peruvian reality. He only
suggests it in the language of an author. He does not express his thought in
concrete proposals or ideas; he envelopes them in phrases that are effective as
propaganda and rhetoric but of little practical and scientific value. “Peru is a
mountain crowned with a cemetery.” “Peru is a sick body: where a finger is

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pressed, pus bursts forth.” The most memorable phrases of González Prada
reveal the man of letters, not the statesman. They are an indictment, not a
call to action.
The radical movement itself originated as a literary and not as a political
phenomenon. The Unión Nacional or Radical party began as a “Literary
Circle” and turned into a political group, thereby obeying the mandate of its
era. The biological process of Peru called for politicians rather than authors.
Literature is not bread but a luxury. The writers around González Prada
vaguely felt the vital needs of this lacerated and impoverished nation. “The
‘Literary Circle,’ a pacific society of poets and dreamers,” said González
Prada in his speech at the Olimpo in 1887, “is changing into a militant
propaganda center. Where is the source of radicalism in literature? We
receive gusts from the hurricanes that sweep over European capitals and
echoes of the voice of a republican and free-thinking France. Our youth
openly battles to put a violent end to what seems likely to die a lingering
death; it is impatient to clear the way and raise the red flag over the
crumbling towers of national literature.”22
González Prada did not resist the forces of history that drove him from
tranquil Parnassian contemplation into harsh political combat. But he could
not draw up a battle plan for his troops. His individualistic, anarchical,
solitary spirit was not suited to the direction of a vast collective enterprise.
When the Radical movement is studied, it is said that González Prada
did not have the temperament of a leader, a caudillo. It should also be
pointed out that his temperament was basically literary. If González Prada
had not been born in a country that urgently needed to be reorganized and
revitalized both politically and socially, in which a strictly artistic work could
not bear fruit, he would never have been tempted to form a party.
His culture, like his temperament, was mainly literary and philosophical.
His speeches and articles reveal that he lacked any formal training in
economics and politics. His judgments, imprecations, and aphorisms are
unmistakably literary in inspiration. I have quoted some of the penetrating
observations on sociology and history that are frequently discovered in the
setting of his elegant and sparkling prose. But as a whole, his work is literary
in style and structure.
Nourished on nationalism and positivism, González Prada exalted the
value of science. This attitude is peculiar to the modern literature of his time.
Science, Reason, Progress were the myths of the nineteenth century.
González Prada, who followed the road of liberalism and Encyclopedism to

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arrive at the utopia of anarchism, fervently adopted these myths. Even his
verses express his rationalist spirit: “Down with foolish sentiment! Let us
worship divine Reason!”
It fell to González Prada to announce only what men of another
generation ought to do. He preached realism. Denouncing the vaporous
verbosity of tropical rhetoric, he urged his contemporaries to get their feet
back on the ground. “Let us end our millenial trip through tenuous idealism
and let us return to the seat of reality, recalling that outside Nature there is
nothing but illusory symbolism, mythological fantasy, and metaphysical
shadow. At these rarified heights, we are becoming nebulous and ethereal.
Let us harden ourselves. It is better to be iron than mist.”23
But he himself never succeeded in becoming a realist; in his time, realism
was historical materialism. Although the beliefs of González Prada never
constrained his audacity or his freedom, he left to others the work of creating
Peruvian socialism. After the Radical party failed, he gave his loyalty to the
distant and abstract utopianism of Kropotkin. And in the dispute between
Marxists and Bakuninists, he supported the latter. In this, as in all his
conflicts with reality, he reacted according to his literary and aristocratic
affinities.
Because the spirit and culture of González Prada were literary, the
Radical movement has not willed to us a series of even elementary studies on
Peruvian reality or a body of specific ideas on the problems of Peru. The
program of the Radical party, which in any event was not drawn up by
González Prada, is an exercise in the political prose of a “literary circle,” none
other than that of the Unión Nacional, as we have already seen.
González Prada, although influenced by all the great myths of his time,
is not uniformly positivist. He burns with the fire of the eighteenth-century
rationalist. His Reason is passionate and revolutionary. The positivism and
historical materialism of the nineteenth century represent a domesticated
rationalism. They reflect the temper and the interests of a bourgeoisie which,
with power, has turned conservative. The rational, scientific spirit of
González Prada is not satisfied with the mediocre, timid conclusions of
bourgeois reason and science. In González Prada the intrepid Jacobin lives
on, intact.
Javier Prado, García Calderón, and Riva Agüero reveal a conservative
positivism as opposed to the revolutionary positivism of González Prada.
The ideologists of civilismo were true to their social prejudices when they
submitted us to the authority of Taine. The ideologist of radicalism claimed

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always to have beliefs superior to and different from those which in France
were identified with a movement of political reaction and which here in Peru
were used by the educated oligarchies as an apologia.
Notwithstanding his rationalist and scientific affinities, González Prada
was saved from exaggerated intellectualism by his artistic sensibilities and his
devotion to justice. Deep inside this Parnassian, there is a romantic who
never despairs of the power of the spirit.
One of his penetrating opinions on Renan, who ne dépasse pas le doute,
proves to us that González Prada was well aware of the risks of excessive
criticism:
All the defects of Renan are explained by his overly critical spirit. His fear of being
deceived and his preoccupation with keeping himself pure and passionless made him affirm
everything with certain reservations or deny everything with certain limitations; that is, he
did not affirm or deny and he even contradicted himself, for on occasion he would submit an
idea and, immediately qualifying it, go on to defend the contrary. This accounts for his lack
of popularity; the masses only understand and follow men who are frank and violent in their
affirmation—with words, like Mirabeau, with deeds, like Napoleon.
González Prada always prefers affirmation to negation or doubt. He is
bold and courageous in thought and he shuns uncertainty. He feels acutely
the need to dépasser le doute. Vasconcelos has a phrase which could have been
written by González Prada: “pessimism regarding the realities, optimism
regarding the ideal.” His words are frequently pessimistic, but they are
almost never skeptical.
In his study of the ideology of González Prada that forms part of his
book El nuevo absolute, Mariano Ibérico Rodriguez well defines the thinker
of Páginas libres in the following words:
In tune with his times, he has great faith in the efficacy of scientific work. He believes in
the existence of inflexible and eternal universal laws, but his belief in science and
determinism does not lead him to a narrow, moral eudaemonism or to Spinoza’s resigned
acceptance of cosmic necessity. On the contrary, his restless, free spirit transcended the
logical consequences of his ideas to advocate action and struggle, to affirm liberty and life.
Prada’s anarchical declarations obviously recall some of Nietzsche’s vast philosophy, and, as
in Nietzsche, the determinist concept of reality opposes the exultant drive of the inner
force.24
For these and other reasons, we feel close to González Prada in spirit, if
not in many of his ideas. González Prada deceived himself, for example,
when he preached anti-religion. Today much more is known than in his time
about many matters, including religion. We know that a revolution is always
religious. The word “religion” has a new value and it no longer serves only to
designate a ritual or a church. It is of little importance that the Soviets write

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on their propaganda posters that “religion is the opium of the people.”
Communism is essentially religious, but not in the old sense of the word,
which still misleads so many. González Prada preached the passing of all
religious beliefs without realizing that he himself was the bearer of a faith.
This rationalist is to be most admired for his passion; this atheist, almost
pagan, must be respected for his moral asceticism. His atheism is religious,
especially when it appears to be most vehement, most absolute. González
Prada is found in his creed of justice, in his doctrine of love, and not in the
rather vulgar anti-clericalism of some pages of Horas de lucha.
The ideology of Páginas libres and Horas de lucha is now largely out of
date. But what is fundamental and enduring in González Prada does not
depend on the validity of his beliefs and judgments. His beliefs do not even
characterize his work. As Ibérico remarks, González Prada is distinguished
“not only by a rigid systemization of concepts—provisional symbols of a
state of mind—but by a certain spirit, a resoluteness of the entire personality,
which are expressed in his literary artistry and in his virile exaltation of effort
and struggle.”25
I have said that what endures in González Prada is his spirit. We of the
new generation admire his austere moral example and, above all, we respect
his intellectual honesty and his noble and vigorous rebellion.
I myself feel that in the new Peruvian generation González Prada would
recognize as disciples and heirs only those men with the will and enterprise
required to surpass his own work. He would disdain the mediocrity who
repeated his phrases. He would cherish the youth who was capable of
translating his ideas into action and he would be renewed and reborn in the
man who could make a truly original and contemporary statement.
González Prada can be described in the words that he used for Vigil in
his Páginas libres: “Few lives have been so pure, so full, so worthy of
imitation. It is possible to attack the form and substance of his writings, to
brand his books as old-fashioned and inadequate, to demolish his entire
intellectual structure; but the man will remain standing, invulnerable.”
Melgar
During the colonial period, Peruvian literature appears, in its most
prominent incidents and figures, as a phenomenon of Lima. No matter that
its catalog includes the provinces. The model, style, and direction have been
set by the capital. And this is understandable. Literature is an urban product
and all literary processes gravitate toward the city. In Peru, furthermore,

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Lima has not had to compete with other cities of similar rank. Its
domination has been guaranteed by an extreme centralism.
Because of the absolute hegemony of Lima, our literature has not been
able to nourish itself on indigenous soil. Lima has been first of all the
Spanish capital and then the criollo capital. Its literature has reflected this.
Nevertheless, indigenous sentiment was not totally unexpressed in this
period of our literary history. Its first worth-while exponent was Mariano
Melgar. The critics of Lima treat him rather scornfully. They consider him to
be too popular and without elegance. They are bothered by the fact that his
verses employ a rather colloquial syntax and slang expressions. Basically,
these critics do not like the yaraví type of poetry and they prefer any
soporific ode of Pando.
I do not react by overestimating Melgar as an artist. I judge him on a
relative basis in the context of his time, when Peruvian literature was just
beginning.
Melgar is a romantic not only in his art but also in his life. Romanticism
had not officially reached our literature. In Melgar, therefore, romanticism
was not an imitation, as it was to be later in others; it was a spontaneous
outburst, indicating his artistic sensitivity. It has been said that part of his
literary fame is due to his heroic death, but this opinion barely disguises the
disdain that inspires it. Melgar died very young. Although it is always risky
to speculate on the probable career of an artist cut off prematurely, it is not
too much to suppose that a mature Melgar would have produced an art
purged of rhetoric and classical mannerisms and, therefore, more native and
pure. The rupture with the mother country would have had a special effect
on his spirit and, in any case, a very different one from the effect it had on
the spirit of the literary men of a city as Spanish and colonial as Lima.
Mariano Melgar, following his romantic impulses, would have found his
inspiration increasingly in the rural and indigenous.
Those who are offended by the coarseness of his speech and of his
imagery suffer from the prejudices of the aristocrat and the academician. The
artist who writes a poem of lasting emotion in the language of the people is,
in any literature, infinitely superior to the poet who writes a refined piece in
academic language fit for an anthology. Furthermore, as Carlos Octavio
Bunge points out in his study of Argentine literature, popular poetry has
always preceded artistic poetry. Some yaravíes of Melgar survive only as
fragments of popular poetry and by this token they have achieved
immortality.

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 Sometimes his simple imagery has a pastoral ingenuousness that reveals
his indigenous strain and autochthonous background. Oriental poetry is
characterized by its rustic pantheism in metaphor. Melgar is very Indian in
his primitive, peasant imagination.
This romantic ended by devoting himself passionately to the revolution.
For him the revolution was not the liberalism of the Encyclopedists; it was
fundamentally a patriotic fervor. The revolutionary feeling of Melgar, like
that of Pumacahua, was fed by our own blood and our own history.
For Riva Agüero, the poet of the yaravíes was only “a singular moment in
Peruvian literature.” Let us correct his judgment by saying that he was the
Peruvian moment in this literature.
Abelardo Gamarra
Abelardo Gamarra still has no place in the anthologies. Critics rank his
work as secondary and relegate it to popular literature, which, for their
refined tastes, is worthless. He is not even given a prominent place in criollo
literature. The first name cited in any history of criollo literature is always
that of Felipe Pardo, a confirmed colonialist.
Nevertheless, Gamarra is one of our most typical writers. Within the
literature of the capital, he is the writer who gives the province its purest
expression and who recalls the indigenous strain. Ricardo Palma is a criollo
of Lima; El Tunante is a criollo of the sierra. The Indian race is alive in his
jovial art.
El Tunante has the Indian’s stubbornness and resignation, his pantheistic
unconcern with the hereafter, his bucolic gentleness, his rustic common
sense, and his realistic and austere imagination. He has the criollo’s witty
speech, his mocking laughter, his keen intelligence, and his adventurous and
rollicking spirit. Coming from a village in the sierra, El Tunante adapted
himself to the capital and coast without losing his integrity. The feeling and
tone of his work make it the most authentically Peruvian in a half-century of
imitations and babble.
It is also Peruvian in spirit. From his youth, Gamarra was in the
vanguard. He participated in Radical protest with genuine devotion to its
revolutionary patriotism. What was only an intellectual and literary attitude
in other Radicalists was a profound and vital impulse in El Tunante. In flesh
and spirit Gamarra was deeply repelled by the encomendero aristocracy and
its corrupt and ignorant clientele. He always understood that these people
did not represent Peru, that Peru was something else. He guarded this
sentiment against civilismo and its intellectual and ideological expressions.

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His unerring instinct protected it from the “democratic” illusion. El Tunante
was not deceived by Piérola. He perceived that the government of 1895 was
not a democratic revolution but only a restoration of civilismo. Although he
remained until his death a fervent admirer of González Prada, whose
Catilinarian rhetoric he translated into popular language, he could not
conceal his longing for a more enterprising and constructive spirit. He sensed
the historical lack of an Alberdi or a Sarmiento in Peru. Especially in his
later years, he realized that idealistic and reformist politics must be solidly
grounded in reality and history.
His work is not merely social satire. A generous political and social
idealism underlies his lively portrayals of people and customs; and it is this
idealism that distinguished his writing from Segura’s.
Furthermore, El Tunante’s criollo character is more complete, more
profound than that of Segura. His interpretation of personalities and objects
is more authentic and alive. Gamarra’s work—which is the most widely read
in the provinces—is full of penetrating comments and triumphs of
description. El Tunante is a Pancho Fierro of our literature. He is a popular
genius, a spontaneous and intuitive writer.
Heir to the revolutionary spirit of independence, he logically had to feel
different from and opposed to the heirs to the conquest and the colony.
Therefore, no title or diploma has been conferred on his work by academic
or literary authorities. (El Tunante, like Rubén Darío, must have thought,
“Deliver us, O Lord, from academies.”) He is disdained for his syntax, his
spelling, and, above all, for his spirit.
Life joyfully mocks the carpings of his critics by bestowing on Gamarra’s
books the immortality it denies to books that have been officially honored.
Although it is the people and not the critics who remember Gamarra, this
suffices to assure for him his place in the history of our literature, even
though it is formally disputed.
The work of Gamarra appears as a scattered collection of outlines and
sketches. That it has no central theme and is not a refined artistic creation is
not altogether the fault of the author, but is also the result of the inchoate
literature it represents.
El Tunante wanted to record the language of the street as an art form.
He was not mistaken in his intention, for this is the tradition that has
produced the early classics of all literatures.
Chocano

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 It is my belief that José Santos Chocano belongs to the colonial period of
our literature. His grandiloquent poetry betrays its Spanish origins. Critics
who present him as an interpreter of the autochthonous soul use a logic that
is as simplistic as it is false: Chocano is exuberant; therefore, he is
autochthonous. This is the principle on which critics incapable of
understanding the autochthonous have based almost all their theory of the
essential Americanism and tropicalism of the poet of Alma América.
This theory could not be contested when the authority of colonialism
was absolute. Now an iconoclastic generation holds it up to the light of their
disbelief. The first question posed is: Is the autochthonous really exuberant?
A critic as wise and as distinguished as Pedro Henriquez Ureña, on
examining the matter of exuberance in Spanish American literature, observes
that the greater part of this literature does not appear to be a product of the
tropics. It proceeds, rather, from cities of a temperate and even autumnal
climate. He very correctly points out that “in America we continued to
respect intensity as long as it was prescribed for us from Europe; even today
we have three or four ‘vibrant poets,’ to use the term of the romantics. Are we
not attributing to the influence of the tropic what is really the influence of
Victor Hugo, or Byron, or Espronceda, or Quintana?” Henriquez Ureña
does not believe in the theory of a spontaneous exuberance in American
literature. This literature is less exuberant than it appears, and verbosity is
mistaken for exuberance. “If there is an abundance of words, it is because
there is a paucity of culture and discipline, and not because of any
exuberance peculiar to us.”26 Verbosity is not to be ascribed to geography or
to environment.
To study the case of Chocano, we have to begin by locating it in Peru. In
Peru, the autochthonous is the indigenous or, more precisely, the Inca; and
the indigenous, the Inca, is basically austere. The art of the Indian is the
antithesis and the contradiction of the art of Chocano. The Indian
systematizes and stylizes everything according to a hieratic primitivism.
No one claims to find the emotion of the Andes in Chocano’s poetry.
Critics like Riva Agüero, who pronounce his poetry autochthonous, think of
it only as expressing the emotion of the montaña, that is, the jungle. If, with
no idea of what the montaña really is, they rush to discover or recognize it in
the bombast of Chocano, they only repeat the poet’s own assumption that he
is “the bard of autochthonous and savage America.”
The montaña is exuberance, plus many other things that do not appear in
the poetry of Chocano. Chocano is merely an eloquent spectator of its

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landscapes and scenic pageantry. All his images represent an exterior fantasy.
It is not the man of the tropical forest who is heard but, at most, an
imaginative and ardent stranger who thinks he possesses and expresses the
jungle.
This is understandable. The montaña exists almost exclusively as nature,
as landscape, as scenery. It still has not produced a people or a civilization.
Chocano, in any case, has not been nourished on its soil. By race, mentality,
and education the poet of Alma américa belongs to the coast. He comes from
a Spanish family. He was formed intellectually and spiritually in Lima. And
his intensity, which in the final analysis is the only proof of his artistic and
esthetic Americanism, descends directly from Spain.
The techniques of, and models for, Chocano’s eloquence are in Spanish
literature. Stylistically he has been influenced by Quintana and spiritually by
Espronceda. Byron and Hugo are cited by Chocano, but it is the poets of the
Spanish language who have most directly influenced his writing. He has the
romantic egoism, as well as the arrogance and conceit, of Díaz Mirón; and
his romanticism verges on a modernism and decadence that are derived from
Rubén Darío.
These traits clearly define the artistic loyalties of Chocano, who, in spite
of the successive waves of modernism that have reached his writing without
essentially changing it, has preserved in his work the tone and temperament
of a survivor of Spanish romanticism in all its grandiloquence. His spiritual
loyalties, moreover, coincide with his artistic. The “bard of autochthonous
and savage America” is the scion of conquistadors. He himself acknowledges
this in his poetry, which, although not lacking in literary and rhetorical
admiration for the Incas, over-flows with love for the heroes of the conquest
and the magnates of the viceroyalty.
Unlike the specifically colonialist writers, Chocano is not a member of
the Lima plutocracy. For example, he cannot be identified with Riva Agüero.
He is a spiritual descendant of the conquest rather than of the viceroyalty.
Socially and economically, the conquest and the viceroyalty are two phases of
the same phenomenon, but spiritually they are not in the same category. The
conquest was a heroic undertaking; the viceroyalty was a bureaucratic
enterprise. The conquistadors belonged, as Blaise Cendrars would say, to a
mighty race of adventurers; the viceroys and the magistrates came from a
flabby nobility or an educated mediocrity.
In his early poetry the minstrel of Iras santas revealed his debt to
Espronceda and to Byronic romanticism. As a youth, Chocano’s attitude was

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one of rebellion, sometimes suggesting anarchy, other times hinting at social
protest, but always vague. He launched a delirious and bizarre offensive
against the military government of the period, but it never became more
than a literary gesture.
Chocano later appeared to be politically involved in Pierolism. His
revolutionary beliefs acquiesced in the revolution of 1895, which abolished a
military regime in order to restore a regime of civilismo under the provisional
direction of Nicolás de Piérola. Afterwards, Chocano joined the intellectual
clientele of the plutocracy. He did not abandon Piérola and his pseudo-
democracy to associate himself with González Prada but to hail Javier Prado
y Ugarteche as the thinker of his generation.
The political direction of a writer is almost always his spiritual, if not his
artistic, direction. Literature, on the other hand, is known to be permeated
with politics, even when it seems most remote and estranged from political
influences. At the moment, we do not want to classify Chocano as an artist;
we want to ascertain his spiritual and ideological position. Because this
position is not clearly indicated in his poetry, we must look for it in his prose,
which is not only more explicit than his poetry but is neither contradicted
nor weakened by it.
In the poetry of Chocano we find the heightened and self-centered
individualism so typical of the romantic ranks. All of Chocano’s anarchism is
summed up in this individualism, which in later years he reduces and limits.
Although he does not absolutely renounce his sensual egoism, he does
renounce much of his philosophical individualism. The cult of “I” is linked to
the cult of “hierarchy.” The poet considers himself an individualist, not a
liberal, and his individualism becomes a “hierarchical individualism” that, far
from cherishing liberty, almost despises it. On the other hand, the hierarchy
it respects is not the eternal hierarchy created by the Spirit; it is the
precarious hierarchy imposed by might, money, and tradition in the mutable
present.
In the same way, the poet comes to dominate his early spiritual
outbursts. At its peak, his art exhibits a rather pagan pantheism in its exalted
although rhetorical love of nature. This pantheism, as reflected in his
animistic imagery, sounds the only note of an “autochthonous and savage
America.” (The Indian is pantheist, animist, materialist.) Chocano,
nevertheless, has tacitly abandoned pantheism to adopt the principle of
hierarchy, which has taken him back to the Roman Catholic Church.
Ideologically, Rome is the historical citadel of reaction. Those who journey to

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its hills and shrines in search of the Christian faith return disillusioned.
Those who are satisfied to find, instead, fascism and the Church—the
authority and the hierarchy in the Roman sense—reach their goal and
discover their truth. The poet of Alma américa is one of the latter pilgrims.
He who has never been a Christian finally turns Catholic. The weary
romantic, the heretical convert, takes shelter in the secure fold of tradition
and order which he once thought he had left forever in order to conquer the
future.
Riva Agüero and His Influence on the “Futurist”
Generation
The “futurist” generation—as it is paradoxically known—marks the
restoration of colonialism and civilismo in the literary thought of Peru.
The emotional and ideological authority of the heirs to colonialism had
been undermined by fifteen years of Radical teachings. After a period of
military caudillos similar to the one that followed the wars of independence,
the latifundium class had reestablished its political control but not its
intellectual dominion. Radicalism had been strengthened by the moral
reaction to defeat, for which the people blamed the plutocracy, and had
found a favorable climate for spreading its revolutionary gospel. Its
propaganda had especially stirred the provinces and a wave of progressive
ideas had swept the republic.
The old guard of civilismo intellectuals had become elderly and enfeebled,
and they could not react effectively against the Radical generation. The
restoration had to be carried out by a regiment of young men. Civilismo was
sure of the university and expected to recruit there an intellectual militia that
would extend its action beyond the university to a total reconquest of
intellect and emotion. One of its natural and primary objectives was to
recover ground lost in literature; at that time, the work of a single popular
writer, González Prada’s disciple, El Tunante, was more widely read and
understood than the work of all the university writers together.
Historical circumstances favored the restoration. Civilismo appeared to
be firmly consolidated in the economic and political order—essentially a
civilismo order—inaugurated by Piérola in 1895. Many professionals and
men of letters who had been attracted to the Radical movement during the
chaotic period following our war, now moved toward the civilismo camp. The
Radical generation had dispersed. González Prada had withdrawn into an

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aloof asceticism and had lost contact with his scattered disciples. So the
“futurist” generation encountered almost no resistance.
Civilistas and Democrats, separated in the party struggle, were mingled
in its ranks. Its advent, therefore, was welcomed by the leading newspapers
of Lima. El Comercio and La Prensa sponsored the “new generation” that
seemed destined to effect the reconciliation between civilistas and Democrats
which the coalition of 1895 had barely initiated. Its leader and captain, Riva
Agüero, who combined the tradition of civilismo and plutocracy with an
almost filial devotion to the Democratic “caliph,” revealed this tendency from
the beginning. Attacking radicalism in his study of “the literature of
independent Peru,” he said that “the parties of principle not only do not
produce goods but they do irreparable damage. In the present system, party
differences are not very great nor are party divisions very deep. Alliances are
easily formed and collaboration is frequent. Wise governments can, without
much effort, invite the participation of all useful men.”
This opposition to parties of principle betrayed the class feelings and
motives of Riva Agüero’s generation. He only too clearly announced his
intention of strengthening and consolidating a class system. To deny
principles and ideas the right to govern the country was to sanction rule by
“decent people,” the “educated class.” In this respect as in others, Riva Agüero
was in complete agreement with Javier Prado and Francisco García
Calderón, and this was because Prado and García Calderón also represented
restoration. Their ideology was basically the same conservative positivism.
Idealistic and progressive phrases disguised traditional beliefs. As I have
commented, Riva Agüero, Prado, and García Calderón all revered Taine. In
order to make clear his loyalties, Riva Agüero stated in his already cited
study—which was undoubtedly the first political and literary manifesto of
the “futurist” generation—that he was a follower of Brunetière.
Riva Agüero began his political career with a revision of literary values
that was absolutely in keeping with the aims of a restoration. He idealized
and glorified the colony, attributing to it the origin of our nationality. He
traced the roots of our nationality back to an idealized and glorified colony.
He overrated colonialist literature by acclaiming its mediocrities. He was
scornful of the romanticism of Mariano Melgar and he reproached González
Prada for the most valid and fruitful part of his work, which was his protest.
The “futurist” generation represented the university and was both
academic and rhetorical. It made use of modernism only for the elements it
needed to condemn the unrest of romanticism.

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 One of its most typical undertakings was its organization of a
counterpart of the Academy of the Spanish Language. One of its most
conspicuous artistic efforts was its return to Spain in prose and verse.
The most characteristic trait of the “futurist” generation was its
pasadismo. From the outset, its writers dedicated themselves to idealizing the
past. In his study, Riva Agüero stoutly defended established privileges and
traditions.
For this generation, the past was neither very remote nor very near, but
coincided precisely with the era of the viceroyalty, on which it lavished all its
affection and tenderness. Riva Agüero was categorical in his belief that Peru
was descended from the conquest and that its infancy was the colony. From
this moment, Peruvian literature became markedly colonialist and produced
a phenomenon that Luis Alberto Sánchez calls perricholismo and that still
continues.
This phenomenon—in its origins, not in its consequences—combines
two sentiments: love of Lima and love of the past. Translated into political
terms, they were centralism and conservatism, because the pasadismo of Riva
Agüero’s generation was not just a romantic gesture inspired by literature.
This generation was traditionalist, not romantic, and its literature, tinged
with “modernism,” was a reaction against the literature of romanticism.
Romanticism condemned the present in the name of the past or the future.
Riva Agüero and his contemporaries, on the other hand, accepted the
present, although, in order to direct and govern it, they invoked and evoked
the past. They were characterized, spiritually and ideologically, by a positivist
conservatism, an opportunistic traditionalism.
Of course, there are various shades within this overall color. Individually,
for example, José Gálvez does not answer the above description. His
pasadismo was essentially romantic. Haya calls him the “only sincere disciple
of Palma,” undoubtedly referring to the literary and sentimental nature of his
pasadismo. This distinction is not clearly expressed, but it is based on an
obvious fact. Gálvez, whose poetry was a pale, attenuated repetition of
Chocano’s verbosity, had a romantic streak. His pasadismo was therefore less
localized in time than that of the rest of his generation; it was a total
pasadismo. Although in love with the viceroyalty, he was not exclusively
absorbed by that era. For him, “all the past was better.” On the other hand,
his pasadismo was more localized in space. The scene of his evocations was
almost always Lima. But I attribute this to his romantic streak.

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 Gálvez, on the other hand, sometimes differs with the thesis of Riva
Agüero. His opinions on the possibility of a genuinely national literature are
unorthodox within the “futurist” movement. He declares himself, with a
number of reservations and qualifications, in agreement with the leader of
his generation and of his party about Americanism in literature. He is not
convinced that it is impossible to revive poetically the ancient American
civilizations.
No matter how remote the civilizations, the material itself has not disappeared; no
matter how deep the Spanish influence, even those of us of purest Spanish descent feel
bonds with that race whose golden tradition deserves recollection and whose majestic and
mysterious ruins overawe us. Precisely because we are so intermingled and our historical
roots so intertwined and because for those very reasons our culture is not as profound as it
appears, we are impressed by the literary material of those dead epochs even though we do
not consider it fundamental. If the tremulous yaraví music still can pierce our soul with a
strange anguish, we must carry within us some residue of the Inca empire and of the struggle
between the two races. Furthermore, our history cannot have begun with the Conquest and
no matter how nebulous the psychic legacy we have received from the Indian, we have
something of that conquered race whose living ruins wander disowned and neglected in our
sierras, constituting a serious social problem that painfully throbs in our life. Why can this
race not have a place in our literature, which has abounded in historical feelings for other
races that are strange and foreign to us?27
Gálvez, however, is not correct in his definition of a national literature.
“It is a matter of turning the soul toward the sound of the vibrations around
us.” But in the next line he reduces its elements to “history, tradition, and
nature.” Here reappears the lover of the past. In his concept, a really national
literature should be nourished on history, legend, and tradition, all of the
past. Although the present is also history, Gálvez certainly did not think so
when he chose the sources of our literature. For him, history was nothing
but the past. Gálvez does not demand that national literature should
interpret Peru in its entirety or that it should perform a really creative
function. He denies it the right to be a literature of the people. Arguing with
El Tunante, he maintains that “the artist should scorn slang expressions,
which are often useful in an article on popular customs but are far removed
from the fine, aristocratic form that an artistic work should take.”28
The “futurist” generation follows the ideas of Riva Agüero. When Gálvez
votes against or, rather, leaves his vote blank in these and other debates, his
dissent has only an individual value. Meanwhile, the “futurist” generation
makes use of his nostalgia and romanticism in the serenade under the
balconies of the vice royalty, which is intended politically to revive a legend
indispensable to the supremacy of the heirs to the colony.

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 The feudal caste has no titles other than those of colonial tradition,
nothing that advances its interests more than a traditionalist literary current.
At the core of colonialist literature are found only the urgent requirements
for the life force of a class, a “caste.” Any doubts about the basically political
origin of the “futurist” movement may be dispelled by considering that when
this group of lawyers, writers, men of letters, et cetera reached maturity, they
were no longer satisfied with being only a movement and wanted to become
a party.
Colónida and Valdelomar
Colónida represented not so much a revolution, which would exaggerate
its importance, as an insurrection against academicism and its oligarchies, its
emphasis on rhetoric, its conservative taste, its old-fashioned gallantry, and
its tedious melancholy. The colónidos called for sincerity and naturalness. As
a movement it was too irregular and anarchical to be condensed into a trend
or defined in a formula. It expended its energy in iconoclastic shouting and
spasms of snobbery.
A short-lived journal put out by Valdelomar gave its name to the
movement. Colónida was not a group or a school, but an attitude and a
mood; and colonidismo was produced by writers both within and outside the
circle of Valdelomar. It was a fleeting literary meteor that had no precise
outlines, no true aesthetic pattern to impose on its followers. Rather than an
idea or a method, colonidismo was egocentrism, individualism, a vague
iconoclasm, a hazy reformism. Colónida was not even an association of
kindred temperaments or, strictly speaking, a generation. Its ranks included
not only Valdelomar, More, and Gibson, but youthful writers like myself
who were just beginning.
The colónidos coincided only in their revolt against all academic values,
reputations, and temperaments. Their bond was protest, not affirmation.
Nonetheless, as long as they participated in the same movement, they had
some spiritual traits in common. They tended to have a rather morbid taste
for the decadent, the elite, the aristocratic. Valdelomar brought the seeds of
the D’Annunzio manner from Europe and sowed them in our voluptuous,
rhetorical, and meridional soil.
Although the colónidos were eccentric, aggressive, unfair, and even
immoderate, they were useful. They renewed and stirred up national
literature, which they denounced as a vulgar imitation of second-rate
Spanish literature. They attacked its fetishes and icons and proposed new
and better models. They began what many writers referred to as “a revision

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of our literary values.” Colónida was a negative, disintegrative, belligerent
force, expressing the opposition of those writers who objected to the
domination of national reputation by an antiquated, official, and pretentious
art.
On the other hand, the colónidos did not always behave correctly. They
sympathized with all the heretical, unorthodox, solitary figures of our
literature. They gathered around González Prada, taking from him what
they needed least. They cherished the aristocratic, Parnassian individualist in
González Prada and ignored the agitator and the revolutionary. More
defined González Prada as “a Greek born in a country of zambos.” However,
they appreciated and esteemed Eguren, who was disdained by the
undiscerning taste of the critics and public of that time.
Colónida was a brief phenomenon. After a series of polemics, colonidismo
fades into obscurity. Each of the colónidos went his own way and the
movement was liquidated. It is unimportant that some of its echoes remain
and that more than one youth is still stirred by some of its ideas. As a
spiritual attitude, colonidismo is not of our time. The appetite for renewal
that generated the Colónida movement could not be satisfied by small doses
of decadence and exoticism. The disappearance of Colónida went unnoticed
because it was never a faction, but only a temporary gesture.
Colonidismo ignored politics. Its individualism and elitism isolated it
from the common people and insulated it against emotions. The colónidos
regarded politics as a bourgeois function, bureaucratic and prosaic. The
journal Colónida was written for the Palais Concert and the Unión. Federico
More was compulsively dedicated to conspiracy and to pamphleteering, but
his political beliefs were anti-democratic, anti-social, and reactionary. More
dreamed of an aristocracy of critics or even of writers. He had no experience
with social reality and he despised the masses.
But once the experiment was over, the writers who had participated in it,
especially the younger ones, became interested in new political currents. This
interest has its origins in the political literature of Unamuno, Araquistain,
Alomar, and other writers for the magazine España; in Wilson’s eloquent
and professorial speeches advocating a new freedom; and in the philosophy
of Victor M. Maúrtua, whose influence on the Socialist orientation of some
of our intellectuals is almost unknown. It was marked by the appearance of
Nuestra Epoca, a journal of even shorter duration than Colónida. Among
contributors to Nuestra Epoca, which was published for the masses and not
for the Palais Concert, were Félix del Valle, César Falcón, César Ugarte,

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Valdelomar, Percy Gibson, César A. Rodríguez, César Vallejo, and myself.
Structurally very different from the Colónida writers, the group included a
disciple of Maúrtua and future professor at the university, Ugarte, as well as
a labor leader, Del Barzo. In this movement, more political than literary,
Valdelomar took second place to writers younger and less famous than
himself.
Valdelomar, nevertheless, had evolved. A great artist is almost always a
man of great sensitivity. His preference for a tranquil, easy life prevented him
from being an agitator; but, like Oscar Wilde, Valdelomar would have come
to love socialism. Valdelomar was not locked up in an ivory tower. He did
not deny his demagogic and stormy past as a supporter of Billinghurst nor
was he ashamed of this episode. In spite of his aristocratic leanings,
Valdelomar admired humble and simple people, as is evidenced in the civic
conscience found in some of his writing. Valdelomar wrote his prayer to St.
Martin for the school children of Huaura. During his lecture tours in the
north, he spoke before an audience of workers in praise of labor. I recall that
in our last talks together he listened with interest and respect to my early
ramblings on socialism. In this moment of maximum maturity and promise,
he was felled by death.
I understand why there has been no exact, clear, accurate definition of
the art of Valdelomar. He died at thirty, before he had found or defined
himself. His disorganized, versatile, and somewhat incoherent production
contains only the constituents of the work that death frustrated. Although
Valdelomar did not succeed in fully developing his vigorous and exuberant
personality, he has nonetheless left us many magnificent pages.
His personality not only influenced a generation of writers, but it
initiated a trend in our literature that has since intensified. Valdelomar, who
brought cosmopolitan elements from abroad, was attracted by criollo and
Inca elements. He relived his childhood in a fishing village and he
discovered, albeit intuitively, the quarry of our autochthonous past.
One of the essential ingredients of the art of Valdelomar is his humor.
Almost everything that the public took seriously, Valdelomar said in jest,
pour épater le bourgeois. If the bourgeoisie had laughed with him about his
egocentric poses, Valdelomar would not have been so determined to use
them. His writing was imbued with an elegant, airy humor that was new to
us, and his newspaper articles, his “maximum dialogues,” were full of wit.
This prose, which could have been more refined and enduring if Valdelomar
had had time to polish it, was improvised and journalistic.29

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 There was nothing biting or vicious in Valdelomar’s humor. He
caricatured men gently and he looked at life with a fond smile. Evaristo,
employed in a village pharmacy and twin brother to a bilious, unhappy
weeping willow tree, is one of those melancholy caricatures that Valdelomar
liked to draw. In this Pirandellian novel one feels Valdelomar’s tenderness for
his unlucky, pale, sickly character.
Valdelomar seems to fall into despair and pessimism. But these are
passing moods and temporary depressions. He was too pantheistic and
sensual to be a pessimist. Like D’Annunzio, he believed that “life is beautiful
and worthy of being lived magnificently.” This spirit is revealed in his tales
and vignettes of village life. Valdelomar always looked for happiness and
pleasure and, on the rare occasions when he found them, he knew how to
enjoy them fully.
In his “Confiteor,” which is possibly the most noble, pure, and beautiful
erotic poetry of our literature, Valdelomar reaches the height of Dionysian
exaltation. In the grip of erotic emotion, Valdelomar thinks that nature, the
universe, cannot be indifferent to his love. His love is not egoistic: it has to
feel itself surrounded by cosmic joy. Here is the supreme note of “Confiteor”:
My Love Will Animate the World
What will I do on the day that your eyes
look at me with love?
My soul will fill the world with joy,
Nature will vibrate with the beating of my heart,
all will be happy:
sky, sea, trees, the landscape . . . My passion
will sound divinely-colored notes of gladness
for the sad universe;
the birds will carol, the treetops
sing a song; the happiness in my soul
will reach the graveyard,
and the dead will feel the cool breeze of my love.
Is It Possible to Suffer?
Who says that life is sad?
Who speaks of pain?
Who complains? Who suffers? Who weeps?
“Confiteor” is the naive, lyrical confessions of a lover exulting in his love
and happiness. In the presence of his loved one, the poet “trembles like a frail
reed,” and he is convinced that not everyone can understand his passion. The
image of his loved one is Pre-Raphaelite, presented only for those who have
“contemplated the angel of the Annunciation in the canvas by Burne-Jones.”

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This absolute lyricism in love had never been reached by any of our poets.
There is something of the “allegro” of Beethoven in the above verses.
In spite of “El hermano ausente,” “Confiteor,” and other verses,
Valdelomar is denied the title of poet that is granted, on the other hand, to
Felipe Pardo. Valdelomar does not fit into the arbitrary classifications of old-
fashioned criticism. The noblest nuances and the most delicate notes of this
great lyricist’s temperament can never be grasped by those definitions. In
tune with his times, Valdelomar was versatile and restless, “very modern,
bold, and cosmopolitan.” His humor and his lyricism occasionally
foreshadow modern avant-garde literature.
Valdelomar does not herald a new era in our literature because too many
decadent influences acted on him. Together with Faith, the Sea, and Death,
he places Twilight among the “ineffable and infinite” elements that entered
into the development of his Inca legends. From his youth, his art was
influenced by D’Annunzio. The twilight emotions of Il fuoco were intensified
in Italy by the Roman dusk, the voluptuous sunset on the Janiculum, the
autumn grape harvest, and amphibian Venice—maritime and malarial.
But his vivid and pure lyricism keeps Valdelomar from becoming
poisoned by too much decadence. Humor saves him from the universe of
D’Annunzio, as in his story of “Hebaristo, the willow who died of love.” This
was a Pirandellian tale, although Valdelomar scarcely knew Pirandello, who
was an unknown playwright at the time of his visit to Italy. His method was
Pirandellian: the pantheistic paralleling of the lives of a pharmacist and a
weeping willow tree. His characterization was Pirandellian: a slightly
caricatured petit-bourgeois clerk. His drama was Pirandellian: an attempt to
break out of a monotonous existence, which ends with a ridiculous snap.
A pantheistic, pagan sentiment drove Valdelomar to the village, to
nature. The impressions of his childhood, which had been spent on a
peaceful bay, sink melodiously into his subconscious. Valdelomar is
unusually sensitive to rustic settings. The emotion of his childhood is
composed of home, beach, and field. The “heavy, perfumed sea breeze”
impregnated him with a briny melancholy: “And what it said to me remains
in my soul; my father was silent and my mother was sad, and no one knew
how to teach me happiness” (“Tristitía”).
Valdelomar, nevertheless, has the cosmopolitan feelings of the modern
man who travels. New York and Times Square attract him just as much as
the enchanted village and the “caramel-colored gamecock.” From the fifty-
fourth floor of the Woolworth Building he passes effortlessly to the mint and

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purslane of the solitary paths of his childhood. His stories exhibit the
kaleidoscopic mobility of his fantasy. The dandy-ism of his Yankee and
cosmopolitan stories, the exotic flavor of his Chinese and oriental images
(“my soul trembles like a frail reed”), the romanticism of his Inca legends, the
impressionism of his criollo tales, follow one another like seasons and repeat
and alternate in the author’s artistic journey without transitions and without
spiritual ruptures.
His work is essentially fragmentary and reflects criollo exuberance and
lack of discipline. Valdelomar combined to a high degree the qualities and
defects of the coastal mestizo. He would go from an extreme of creative
frenzy to an Asiatic and fatalistic renunciation of all desire. His mind would
be simultaneously occupied by an essay on art, a humorous sketch, a pastoral
tragedy (“Verdolaga”), and a romance (“La Mariscala”). He was so creative
that any theme—the turkey buzzards of Marinete, the Plaza del Mercado,
the cockfights—could kindle his imagination. Valdelomar was the first of
our writers to perceive the tragic beauty of the bullfight and, at a time when
this subject was relegated to the pedestrian prose of bullfight fans, he wrote
Belmonte, el trágico.
Valdelomar introduced the greguería into our literature. I can testify that
he delighted in the first books of Gómez de la Serna to reach Lima. Because
he loved originality and investigation of the microcosm, he had a natural
predilection for the greguería. On the other hand, Valdelomar still did not
suspect in Gómez de la Serna the discoverer of the dawn. His impressionist
criollo retina was expert in enjoying voluptuously from the golden riverbank
the ambiguous colors of twilight. It is impressionism, within its local variety,
that most precisely defines his artistic affinities.
Our “Independents”
Outside the movements, the trends, and even the generations
themselves, there has been no lack of more or less independent, solitary cases
of literary vocation. But the literary process slowly erases the memory of the
writer who does not leave descendants. He can work alone, but his work
cannot escape oblivion if it does not have a message for posterity. Only the
forerunner and the originator survive. For the purpose of my study, the
intrinsic value of an individual lies not in himself but in his influence.
We have seen how a generation or rather a Radical movement that
recognized González Prada as its leader succeeded a neo-civilista or
colonialist movement that proclaimed Palma as its patriarch; and we have
seen how it was followed by a Colónida movement, which was the precursor

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of a new generation. But this does not mean that all the literature of that
long period necessarily belonged to the “futurist” or to the Colónida
movement.
We have the case of the poet Domingo Martínez Luján, a bizarre
specimen of the old romantic bohemian, some of whose verses will be cited
in anthologies as the first to show the influence of Rubén Darío on our
poetry. We have the case of Manuel Beingolea, who writes short stories of
delicate humor and fantasy and who cultivates the decadence of the strange
and singular. We have the case of José María Eguren, whose poetry will go
down in our literary history as “pure” rather than symbolic.
Eguren, however, thanks to his exceptional influence, is a factor in the
setting of trends. Although he makes his name outside of a generation, he
later becomes a subject of controversy between two generations. Disdained
by the “futurist” generation that acclaims Gálvez as its poet, Eguren is
discovered and adopted by the Colónida movement.
Eguren first attracts attention in the journal Contemporáneos, about
which I should say a few words. Contemporáneos indisputably marks a date
in our literary history. Founded by Enrique Bustamante y Ballivián together
with Julio Alfonso Hernández, this journal is the voice of a group of
“independents” who feel the need to assert their autonomy from the
colonialist. These “independents” are more opposed to the aesthetics than
the spirit of Riva Agüero’s generation. Contemporáneos mainly represents the
progress of modernism in Peru; but even as a journal of purely literary
reform, it is not sufficiently aggressive or passionate. Despite the Parnassian
moderation of its director, Enrique Bustamante y Ballivián, some of its
attitudes sound a note of protest. The seeking out of González Prada, who at
that time could find no other publisher for his articles than some obscure
anarchist newspaper, is in itself a gesture of “secession.” So it was that the
poet of Exóticas and the prose writer of Páginas libres reappeared in 1909 in
the company of “independents” whose admiration, more for the aristocrat
than for the rebel, nonetheless denoted a reaction.
Contemporáneos disappeared after a few issues and Bustamante y
Ballivián asked Valdelomar to join him in founding a new and more
voluminous journal, Cultura. But before the appearance of the first issue, the
codirectors fought and Cultura was published without Valdelomar. The first
and only number gives the impression of a more eclectic, less representative
journal than Contemporáneos. The failure of this experiment paves the way to
Colónida.

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 The above and similar undertakings demonstrate that although Riva
Agüero’s generation never split into two antagonistic groups, it was far from
uniform and unanimous. Like every other generation, Riva Agüero’s had its
dissidents. Spiritually and ideologically, the most significant was Pedro S.
Zulen. Zulen not only disliked the academicism and the rhetoric of the
“futurists,” but he detested their conservative and traditionalist spirit.
Confronted with a colonialist generation, Zulen declared himself pro-
indigenous. The other “independents”—Enrique Bustamante y Ballivián,
Alberto J. Ureta, et cetera—were satisfied with an implicit literary
succession.
Eguren
José María Eguren represents pure poetry in our literary history. This
opinion is not in agreement with the thesis of Abbot Bremond. I contend
that, unlike most Peruvian poetry, the poetry of Eguren does not pretend to
be historical, or philosophical, or religious, but is simply poetry.
Although the poets of the republic did not inherit from the poets of the
colony their fondness for theological poetry—wrongly called religious or
mystic—they did inherit their predilection for courtly, dithyrambic poetry.
Under the republic, the Peruvian Parnassus swells with new odes, some
attenuated and some inflated. Their point of departure was always an event
or a person, so that poetry became subordinate to chronology. Odes were
written to American heroes and events, when not to the Spanish monarchs,
and poetry commemorated a date or a ceremony rather than the feelings of
an era. Satirical poetry, because of its role, was also tied to an event or a
topic.
In other cases, poets cultivated the philosophical poem, which generally
was neither poetry nor philosophy. This poetry degenerated into an exercise
in rhetoric and metaphysics.
The art of Eguren is a reaction against this garrulous, declamatory art,
almost exclusively composed of temporal and topical elements. As a pure
poet, Eguren does not write a single verse on order or for an occasion; he
does not worry about popular or critical taste; he does not celebrate Spain,
or Alfonso XIII, or Saint Rosa of Lima; he does not even recite his verses at
gatherings or parties. He is a poet who uses his verses only to transmit his
divine message to mankind.
How does this poet protect his personality? How does he find and refine
his writing skills in this turbid literary atmosphere? Enrique Bustamante y

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Ballivián, who knows him intimately, has given us an interesting outline of
his artistic development.
Two factors have been most important in the formation of this gifted poet: the
impressions he received as an infant in the countryside around “Chuquitanta,” his family’s
estate near Lima, and the Spanish classics that his brother Jorge read to him during his
childhood. The former provided him not only with the landscapes that serve as background
to many of his poems but also with a profound feeling for nature expressed in the symbols of
the country people, who liven it with legends and fables and people it with elves, witches,
monsters, and goblins. From the carefully chosen classic readings, he derived his love of
literature, his rich vocabulary, and certain archaic phrases that give a special flavor to his very
modern poetry. From his home, which was deeply, mystically Christian and of great moral
rectitude, he obtained his purity of soul and his dreaminess. It may be added that through
his sister Susana, who played the piano and sang, he became fond of music, which runs
through many of his verses. As to color and descriptive powers, it should not be forgotten
that Eguren is a good painter (although of lesser stature than as a poet) and that he began to
paint before he wrote poetry. A critic has commented that Eguren’s chief virtue is as a
children’s poet. Although we do not agree with the critic, he must have based his opinion on
the early verses of the poet, which were written for his nieces, with childhood scenes in
which they appear.30
Although it is wrong to describe Eguren as a children’s poet, he is
obviously a poet of childlike thoughts and feelings. All his poetry is an
enchanted, fanciful version of life. His symbolism comes, first of all, from his
childhood impressions and does not depend on literary influences or
suggestions. It has its roots in the poet’s very soul. The poetry of Eguren is
the prolongation of his childhood. Because Eguren keeps a child’s innocence
and daydreams in his verses, the vision of his poetry is virginal. The entire
explanation of the miracle is found in the eyes of this spellbound child.
This feature of Eguren’s art is not limited to what can be classified as
children’s poetry. Eguren always expresses things and nature with images
that are easily recognizable as the escapades of his childhood subconscious.
The image of a “red king with a beard of steel”—one of the charming notes of
Eroe, poetry with a Rubén Darío rhythm—can be imagined only by a child.
“Los reyes rojos,” one of the most beautiful creations of Eguren’s symbolism,
betrays a similar origin in its wierd chromatic composition:
Since daybreak
two red kings have fought
with golden spears.
Their scowls vibrate
through the green woods
and on the purple hills.
The falcon kings
battle in a gold distance

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 tinged with blue.
Their black shapes
are small and wrathful
in the cadmium light.
Night falls
and the red kings fight on,
staunch and frowning.
From his bewitched soul is also born Eguren’s taste for the wondrous
and fabulous. His world is the indecipherable, Aladdinesque world of “the
little girl with the blue lamp.” One of the characteristics of this poetry is its
exoticism. Simbólicas has a background of Scandinavian mythology and
German medievalism. The Hellenic myths are never glimpsed in his
Wagnerian and grotesque landscapes.
Eguren has no forebears in either Peruvian or Spanish poetry.
Bustamante y Ballivián says that González Prada “did not find the origin of
Eguren’s symbolism in any literature,” and I too recall having heard more or
less the same words from González Prada.
I classify Eguren among the precursors of the cosmopolitan period of
our literature. Eguren, as I have already said, cultivates the delicate and pale
flower of symbolism on unreceptive soil. But this does not mean that I agree
that French symbolism contains the key to Eguren’s art. It is claimed that
there are traces of Rimbaud’s influence in Eguren. But Rimbaud was by
temperament the antithesis of Eguren. Nietzschean and anguished,
Rimbaud, like Guillén in his Deucalión, would have cried: “I must help the
Devil conquer heaven.” André Rouveyre declares him “the prototype of
demoniac sarcasm and scornful blasphemy.” A militant of the Commune,
Rimbaud had the psychology of an adventurer and revolutionary. He
believed that “one must be absolutely modern,” and to this end he left
literature and Paris at the age of twenty to become a pioneer in Africa. He
had too much vitality to accept an urban and decadent bohemian life as led
by Verlaine. Rimbaud, in brief, was a rebellious angel, whereas Eguren was
never satanic. Eguren’s torments and nightmares were the enchanted
fairytales of a child. In “Los ángeles tranquilos,” he expresses his style and his
soul with crystalline clarity:
The seawind has passed, and now
the tranquil angels
with pearls and beryls
sing of the dawn solitude.
They strum sacred songs
on sweet mandolins,

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 gazing at the fallen plants
in the fields and gardens.
While the sun shakes
its tinsel in the mist,
they kiss white death
in the cruel Saharas.
The tranquil angels
depart at break of day
with pearls and beryls
and with heaven’s light in their eyes.
The poet of Simbólicas and La canción de las figuras represents symbolism
in our poetry, but not a symbolism, and much less a symbolist school. No
one can dispute his originality, for he has written lines as rigorously and
absolutely original as those of “El duque”:
Duke Nut is marrying today;
the canon comes, and the judge,
and now, with its banners,
the florid scarlet cavalcade;
count to one, to two, to ten;
the excellent Duke is marrying
the daughter of Clove Spice.
There they are, with bison hides,
the horses of Wolf-of-the-Mountain,
and that jaundiced Gaul, Rodolfo Montante,
with a frown of triumph.
And the beauty is in the chapel,
but the Duke has not yet come;
the prostrate, adulating magnates
bow their plumes to the ground;
the humpbacks, the leapyears,
make their gestures, gestures, gestures;
and the bushyhaired crowd
sneezes, sneezes, sneezes.
And the bride gazes with ardor
at the porticoes and open spaces;
her eyes are two gleaming
topazes.
And nobles as red as scorpions
cast angry looks;
the most Herculean, taking
a deep breath, shouts out:
Who is detaining the Duke?
The mighty court is annoyed!
But the Duke does not come—

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 Paquita has eaten him.
Rubén Darío believed that he thought more easily in French than in
Spanish, and he was probably right. His decadent, precious, Byzantine art
belongs to the fin-de-siècle Paris of Verlaine, of which the poet felt himself to
be guest and lover. His barge “came from the divine shipyard of the divine
Watteau,” and the gallicism of his spirit engendered the gallicism of his
language. Eguren has neither of these traits. Even his style, which is Spanish
in form, shows no French influence.31 As Bustamante y Ballivián remarks,
archaic phrases are frequently found in his verse. In our Literature Eguren
represents reaction against Spanish influence, which still consisted of
baroque rhetoric and grandiloquent romanticism.
In any case, Eguren is not, like Rubén Darío, a lover of eighteenth-
century, rococo France. His spirit descends from the Middle Ages rather
than from the 1700’s, and I find him more Gothic than Latin. I have already
alluded to his fondness for Scandinavian and Germanic myths. I shall now
state that in some of his early compositions like “Las bodas vienesas” and
“Lis,” when he was slightly influenced by Rubén Darío, the imagination of
Eguren always abandons the eighteenth-century world in search of a
medieval color or tone:
Ambiguous elderly
marquises begin
their antique dances
and their polonaises.
And archers with long
moustaches arrive
to ward off the fierce
threats of puppets.
It seems to me that some elements of his poetry, such as the tenderness
and candor of his fantasy, relate Eguren to Maeterlinck in his better days.
This vague affinity is based on the mystery which Eguren reaches through a
wonderland, a realm of dreams. But Eguren interprets the mystery with the
innocence of a fanciful, visionary child, whereas in Maeterlinck the mystery
is frequently the product of a literary alchemy.
In pointing out his gallicism and analyzing his symbolism, a secret door
suddenly opens onto a genealogical interpretation of the spirit and
temperament of José M. Eguren.
Eguren descends from the Middle Ages. He is a pure echo, strayed into
the American tropics, of the medieval West. He comes not from Moorish
but from Gothic Spain. With nothing Arabic and even very little Latin in his

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temperament and spirit, his tastes are rather Nordic. A pallid Van Dyck
character, he sometimes peoples his poetry with Flemish and German
images and evocations. French classicism would reproach him for his lack of
Latin order and clarity and Maurras would find him too Teutonic and
chaotic, because Eguren comes from the age of crusades and cathedrals
rather than the rococo Europe of the Renaissance. Like the decorators of
Gothic cathedrals, he loved the grotesque, which he delicately stylized with
pre-Renaissance taste:
Two oblong choristers rave
and lift their rapid hands to heaven
and two blonde giantesses sigh
and ancient cretins play a prelude for the choir.
And, to the sweetness of virginal camellias,
the long-lived party follows the groom;
next, the strong, rigid Aunt Adelias;
and then, limping, limping, the bride.
(“Las bodas vieneses”)
The white vampires,
old and stilted
in their tight suits,
reach the shade of the stucco.
(“Diosa ambarina”)
The aristocratic spirit, mildewed by the centuries, survives in Eguren. In
Peru, the colonial aristocracy transformed itself into a republican
bourgeoisie, and the encomendero outwardly replaced his feudal and
aristocratic principles with the democratic-bourgeois principles of the war of
independence. This simple exchange enabled him to keep his privileges as
encomendero and latifundista. Thanks to this metamorphosis, the bourgeoisie
under the republic was no more authentic than the aristocracy under the
viceroyalty.
Eguren—the example would have to be a poet—is perhaps the only
descendant of the genuine medieval and Gothic Europe. Great-grandson of
the adventurous Spain that discovered America, Eguren steeped himself in
the ancient aromas of legend in his family estate on the coast. His century
and his environment did not completely stifle the medieval soul in him. (In
Spain, Eguren, like Valle Inclán, would have loved the heroes and deeds of
the Carlist Wars.) Too late to be a crusader, he is born a poet; and the
adventurer’s soul is expressed in the adventurer’s fantasy.
Had he been born a half-century earlier, Eguren’s poetry would have
been romantic,32 although no less deathless because of this. Born into the

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decadence of the early 1900’s, he had to be a symbolist. (Maurras is right
when he sees in symbolism the end of romanticism.) Eguren would always
have tried to escape the reality of his time. Art is an escape when the artist
cannot accept or interpret the era and reality in which he lives. American
artists of this type, within their dissimilar temperaments and epochs, have
been José Asunción Silva and Julio Herrera y Reissig.
The maturing and flowering of these artists has nothing to do with and is
even at variance with the painful and harsh labor involved in their country’s
growth. As Jorge Luis Borges would say, they are artists of a culture, not of a
race. But these are the only artists that a country can possess, that a race can
produce, during certain periods of its history. Valery Bryusov and Aleksandr
Blot, who were symbolists as well as aristocrats, represented Russian poetry
in the years preceding the revolution. With the outbreak of the revolution,
the two men descended from their ancestral tower to the bloody tumult
below.
In Peru, Eguren does not understand or know the people. He is remote
from the Indian’s history and alien to his history. He is spiritually too
occidental and foreign to assimilate indigenous orientalism. But at the same
time, Eguren does not understand or know capitalist, bourgeois, occidental
civilization. He is interested only in its colossal playthings. Eguren may think
of himself as modern because he admires the airplane, the submarine, and
the automobile, the fantastic toys constructed by man to cross oceans and
continents. Eguren sees man play with the machine; he does not, like
Rabindranath Tagore, see the machine enslave man.
The bland, gray coast may have isolated him from the history and people
of Peru. Perhaps the sierra would have made him different. A colorless,
monotonous Nature is responsible, in any event, for his writing chamber
poetry which, when spoken by a true poet, casts the same spell as chamber
music and painting.
Alberto Hidalgo
Alberto Hidalgo signified in our literature, from 1917 to 1918, the last
throes and demise of the colónida experiment. Hidalgo carried to their
extremes the megalomania, egoism, and belligerence of the colónida attitude.
The bacilli of this fever, without which it would have been impossible to raise
the temperature of our literature, reached their highest degree of virulence in
Hidalgo, who was still provincial in Panoplia lírica. Valdelomar was already
back from his adventures in the land of D’Annunzio, where—perhaps
because rustic Abruzzo and the Adriatic beach are next to Byzantine Venice

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in D’Annunzio—he discovered the coast of criollo-ness and glimpsed in the
distance the continent of Incaism.
Valdelomar had kept his sense of humor throughout his most egocentric
poses. Hidalgo, who was still a little stiff in his Arequipa cutaway coat, did
not have the same easy smile. He was pathetically unsuited to the colónida
manner. Hidalgo, perhaps because of a rough provincialism unsoftened by
urban life, brought to our literary reform a virile taste for the machine,
mechanics, skyscrapers, speed, et cetera. If our sensibility, spoiled by the
thick chocolate of scholasticism, incorporated D’Annunzio thanks to
Valdelomar, it assimilated the explosive, vibrant, noisy Marinetti thanks to
Hidalgo. Hidalgo, writer of pamphlets and slogans, followed the lead of
González Prada and More. He was too violent a person for a sedentary,
rheumatic public. The centrifugal, secessionist force that drove him, swept
him away from here in a whirlwind.
Today, Hidalgo, although he does not leave his home in Buenos Aires, is
a poet of the Spanish language. Only as background can one speak of his
adventures as a local poet. He has grown in stature until he has become a
truly American poet, and his literature is circulated and sold all over the
Spanish-speaking world. As always, his art is one of secession. The southern
climate has tempered and strengthened his rather tropical nerves, which
know all the degrees of literature and all the latitudes of imagination. But
Hidalgo is, as he could not help but be, in the vanguard. In his own words,
he is to the left of the left.
This means, first of all, that Hidalgo has visited the different way
stations and has traveled the various roads of ultra-modern art. He is totally
familiar with the vanguardist experience. This ceaseless exercise has given
him a poetic technique cleansed of any suspicious leftovers. His expression is
very clean, burnished, precise, and bare. The motto of his art is “simplicity.”
But Hidalgo, without desiring or knowing it, is spiritually at the last
station of romanticism. In many of his verses we find the confession of an
absolute individualism. Of all the contemporary literary tendencies,
solidarity is least present in his poetry. His lyricism is most pure when he is
least egocentric; for example, when he says, “I clasp the hand of every living
thing—I fully possess the nearness of the world, the world as a neighbor.”
With these lines he begins his poem “Envergadura del anarquista,” which is
the most sincere and lyrical outpouring of his individualism. And from the
second line, the idea of “the nearness of the world” reveals his feeling of
withdrawal and solitude.

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 Romanticism, understood as a literary and artistic movement linked to
the bourgeois revolution, becomes individualism in concept and sentiment.
Symbolism and decadence have been only romantic stages, and this is also
true of modernism in artists who cannot help being extremely subjective.
There is a symptom inherent in individualist art that indicates, better
than any other, a process of dissolution: the determination with which every
art and even every artistic element asserts its autonomy. Hidalgo is one of
those who most tenaciously adheres to this determination, if we judge by his
idea of the “many-sided poem”: “A poem in which each line, although
subordinate to a central idea or emotion, is an independent entity.” We have
here his proclamation of the autonomy, the individuality, of verse. The
aesthetics of an anarchist could not be otherwise.
Politically and historically, anarchism is to the extreme left of liberalism;
it therefore falls, despite all protestations to the contrary, within the
bourgeois ideology. The anarchist in our time can be a “rebel,” but he is not
historically a revolutionary.
Although he denies it, Hidalgo has not escaped the revolutionary fervor
of our time in his writing of “Ubicación de Lenin” and “Biografía de la
palabra revolución.” Nevertheless, his subjectivity leads him to state in the
preface to his last book, Descriptión del cielo, that the former is “a poem of
exaltation, of pure lyricism, and not of doctrine”; that “Lenin has served in
the same way that a mountain, a river, or a machine could have served as a
pretext for creating”; and that the “biography of the word ‘revolution’ is a
eulogy of pure revolution, of revolution as such, whatever may be the cause
that originated it.” Pure revolution, revolution as such, my dear Hidalgo,
does not exist in history and neither does it exist in poetry. Pure revolution is
an abstraction. There are many revolutions, among them the liberal and the
socialist. There is no pure revolution, either as a historical event or as a
poetic theme.
Of the three main categories into which it is convenient, for purposes of
classification and criticism, to divide contemporary poetry—pure lyricism,
absolute nonsense, and revolutionary epic—Hidalgo feels the first most
intensely; and therein lies the strength of his most beautiful poetry. The
poem to Lenin is a lyric creation. (Hidalgo deceives himself only in his belief
that he is not affected by the emotion of historical events.) This poem, which
is technically perfect, is at the same time of great poetic purity. I would quote
it in its entirety, but these lines are sufficient:
In the hearts of the workers his name rises before the sun.
The spools of thread bless him

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 from the high spindles
of all the sewing machines.
Typewriters, pianos of the period, play sonatas in his honor.
He is the automatic respite
that eases the peddler’s rounds.
He is the General Cooperative of hopes.
His message falls in the money box of the humble,
helping them pay the installments on their houses.
He is the horizon toward which the poor open their windows.
Hanging from the bellclapper of the sun
he beats against the metals of the afternoon
so that the workers may leave at five o’clock.
His lyricism saves Hidalgo from falling into an excessively cerebral,
subjective, nihilistic art. It is impossible to have any doubts about someone
who can so enjoy himself as in this “Dibujo de niño”:
Childhood, village of memories,
I take the streetcar to go there.
Running away from things begins with the stubbornness of scattered oil.
The ground is not here.
A cloud passes, and blots out the sky.
Air and light disappear and this is left empty.
Then you leap from the unreachable depths of my forgetfulness.
It was in the bend of an afternoon outlined by the light of your silhouette.
A nameless emotion bound our hands together.
Your glances summoned my kiss
but your laugh was a river running between us separating us, girl,
and I from my shore put you off until dreamtime.
Now thirty years are gone of those that were bestowed on me to give to you.
If you have died I keep this landscape of my heart, painted on you.
The element of nonsense, if we judge Hidalgo at present by his
Descripción del cielo, disappears almost completely from his poetry. Although
it is, in fact, one of the elements of his prose, it is never pure nonsense. It
lacks hallucinatory incoherence and tends to be rational, logical nonsense.
The revolutionary epic, which heralds a new romanticism untouched by the
individualism of that preceding it, does not harmonize with his violently
anarchical temperament and life.
His extreme individualism makes it difficult for Hidalgo to write short
stories or novels, which require an extroverted author. His stories are written
with introspection and his characters appear sketchy, artificial, mechanical.
Even when his stories are most fanciful, they are still dominated by the
intolerant, tyrannical presence of their author, who refuses to let his

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characters live in their own right because he puts too much of his
individuality and purpose into all of them.
César Vallejo
César Vallejo’s first book, Los heraldos negros, ushers in the dawn of a
new poetry in Peru. Antenor Orrego is not speaking out of fraternal
enthusiasm when he states that “this man originates an epoch of poetic
liberty and autonomy, of the vernacular in writing.”33
Vallejo is a poet of race. In Vallejo, for the first time in our history,
indigenous sentiment is given pristine expression. Melgar, stunted and
frustrated, is still imprisoned by classical technique and enamored of
Spanish rhetoric in his yaravíes. Vallejo, on the other hand, creates a new
style in his poetry. Indigenous sentiment has a melody of its own in his
poetry and he has mastered its song. The poet, not satisfied with conveying a
new message, also brings a new technique and language. His art does not
tolerate the ambiguous and artificial dualism of substance and form. As
Orrego observes, “to dismantle the old rhetorical scaffolding was not a
caprice, but a vital necessity of the poet. When one begins to understand the
writing of Vallejo, one begins to understand the need for an original and
different technique.”34 In Melgar, indigenous sentiment is glimpsed only in
the background of his verses; in Vallejo, it flowers in their very structure. In
Melgar, it is the intonation; in Vallejo, the word.
In Melgar, it is but an erotic lament; in Vallejo, a metaphysical
undertaking. Vallejo is a creator; even if Los heraldos negros had been his only
work, it still would have inaugurated a new epoch in our literary process.
These initial lines of Los heraldos negros probably mark the beginning of
Peruvian, in the sense of indigenous, poetry:
There are such heavy blows in life . . . I don’t know!
Blows like the hatred of God; as if, before them,
the backwash of everything suffered
had drained into the soul . . . I don’t know!
The blows are few, but they fall . . . They open
dark furrows in the boldest face, the strongest shoulder.
Perhaps they are the ponies of barbarous Attilas,
or black heralds sent to us by Death.
They are the precipitous falls of the soul’s Christs,
of some adorable faith that Destiny blasphemes.
Those bloody blows are the crepitations
of some loaf of bread that burns in the oven’s door.
And man . . . Poor . . . poor man! He turns his eyes

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 as when somebody taps us on the shoulder;
he turns his mad eyes, and everything he lived
wells up, like a pool of guilt, in his gaze.
There are such heavy blows in life . . . I don’t know!
In world literature, Los heraldos negros would be classified, partly because
of its title, as belonging to the symbolist school. But the symbolist style is
better suited than any other to interpret the indigenous spirit. Being animist
and rustic, the Indian tends to express himself in anthropomorphic or
pastoral images. Vallejo, moreover, is not entirely symbolist. Especially his
early poetry contains elements of symbolism, together with elements of
expressionism, dadaism, and surrealism. Vallejo is essentially a creator,
always in the process of developing his technique, a process which in his art
reflects a mood. In the beginning, when Vallejo borrows his method from
Herrera Reissig, he adapts it to his personal lyricism.
But the Indian is the fundamental, characteristic feature of his art. In
Vallejo there is a genuine Americanism, not a descriptive or local
Americanism. Vallejo does not exploit folklore. Quechua words and popular
expressions are not artificially introduced into his language; they are
spontaneous and an integral part of his writing. It might be said that Vallejo
does not choose his vocabulary. He is not deliberately autochthonous. He
does not delve into tradition and history in order to extract obscure
emotions from its dark substratum. His poetry and language emanate from
his flesh and spirit; he embodies his message. Indigenous sentiment operates
in his art perhaps without his knowledge or desire.
One of the clearest and most precise indications of Vallejo’s indigenous
bent is his frequent attitude of nostalgia. Valcárcel, who probably has most
fully interpreted the autochthonous soul, says that the melancholy of the
Indian is nothing but nostalgia. Very well, Vallejo is supremely nostalgic. He
evokes the past with tenderness, but always subjectively. His nostalgia,
conceived in lyric purity, should not be confused with the literary nostalgia of
the pasadistas. Vallejo’s nostalgia is not merely retrospective. He does not
yearn for the Inca empire in the way that pasadismo perricholesco yearns for
the viceroyalty. His nostalgia is a sentimental or a metaphysical protest; a
nostalgia of exile, of absence.
What might she be doing now, my sweet Andean Rita of rush and fruit;
now that Bizancio suffocates me and my blood
dozes like flaccid cognac within me.
(“Idilio muerto,” Los heraldos negros)
Brother, today I am sitting on the stone bench in our house,
where we miss you endlessly!

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 I remember how we used to play together at this hour, and how mamá
caressed us: “But sons . . .”
(“A mi hermano Miguel,” Los heraldos negros)
I have eaten alone today, and have had
no mother urging me, no “help yourself,” no water,
no father who, in the talkative family rite
of eating corn, would ask for the greater
clasps of sound to make its image memorable.
(xxvin, Trilce)
The stranger is finished with whom you came back,
late last night, chatting and chatting.
Now I will have no one to wait for me,
to keep my place, in good times and bad.
The hot afternoon is finished;
your great bay and your shouting;
finished, your chats with your mother,
who offered us a tea filled with afternoon.
(xxxiv, Trilce)
At other times, Vallejo foresees or foretells the nostalgia that is to come:
Absent! The morning on which, like a mournful
bird, I go to the shore of the sea of shadow,
the shore of the silent empire,
the white cemetery will be your captivity.
(“Ausente,” Los heraldos negros)
Summer, I am leaving. And I am grieved
by the submissive little hands of your afternoons.
You arrive devoutly; you arrive old;
and now you will not meet anyone in my soul.
(“Verano,” Los heraldos negros)
Vallejo interprets the race at a moment when all its nostalgia, throbbing
with a pain three centuries old, is intensified. But—and this also reveals a
trait of the Indian soul—his recollections are full of that sweetness of tender
corn which Vallejo savors with melancholy when he speaks to us of the
“eloquent offertory of ears of corn.”
Vallejo has the pessimism of the Indian in his poetry. His hesitation, his
questioning, his restlessness, are summed up skeptically in a “What for!”
Piety always underlies this pessimism. There is nothing satanic or morbid in
him. It is the pessimism of a spirit that endures and expiates “man’s
affliction,” as Pierre Hamp says. This pessimism is not of literary origin. It
does not reflect the romantic despair of the adolescent troubled by the voice
of Leopardi or Schopenhauer. He sums up the philosophical experience, he
condenses the spiritual attitude, of a race and a people. There is no

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relationship or affinity between him and the nihilism or intellectual
skepticism of the West. The pessimism of Vallejo, like the pessimism of the
Indian, is not a belief or a feeling. It is tinged with an oriental fatalism that
makes it closer to the Christian and mystic pessimism of the Slavs. But it can
never be confused with the anguished neurosis that drove madmen like
Andreyev and Artzybaskev to suicide. Therefore, in the same way that it is
not a belief, it is not a neurosis.
This pessimism is full of tenderness and compassion, because it is not
engendered by egocentricity and narcissism, disenchanted and exacerbated,
as is the case almost throughout the romantic school. Vallejo feels all human
suffering. His grief is not personal. His soul is “sad unto death” with the
sorrow of all men, and with the sorrow of God, because for the poet it is not
only men who are sad. In these lines he speaks to us of the grief of God:
I sense God, who walks within me
with the afternoon and with the sea.
We leave together with Him. Night falls.
We greet nightfall with Him, Orphanhood . . .
But I sense God. And it even seems
that He dictates to me I know not what good color.
He is kind and sad, like a Hospitaler;
He emanates a lover’s sweet disdain:
His heart must pain Him much.
Oh, my Lord, I have recently found myself,
today when I love so much in this afternoon: today;
when, in the false balance of some breasts,
I see and weep for a fragile Creation.
And You, which will You weep for . . . You,
lover of such an enormous revolving bosom . . .
I consecrate You, Lord, because You love so much;
because You never smile; because always
Your heart must pain You much.
Other lines by Vallejo deny this divine intuition. In “Los dados eternos”
the poet bitterly reproaches God: “You who have always been well, You feel
nothing of Your creation.” But this is not the poet’s true feeling, which is
always expressed with piety and love. When his lyricism, exempt from any
rationalist repression, flows freely and generously, it is uttered in lines like
the following, which ten years ago were the first to reveal to me Vallejo’s
genius:
The lottery vendor who shouts “Win a thousand”
contains I know not what essence of God.
All lips pass by. The tedium

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 blunts his “No more” in a wrinkle.
The lottery vendor passes by, who, perhaps
nominal like God, treasures up,
among tantalizing loaves of bread, human
impotence of love.
I look at that rag of a man. And he
could give us his heart;
but the luck he carries in his hand,
shouting it at the top of his voice,
will fly off, like a cruel bird, to perch—
where, this bohemian god
neither knows nor cares.
And I say on this warm Friday
that moves on sunlit shoulders:
Why has the will of God
dressed itself as a lottery vendor!
“The poet,” Orrego writes, “speaks individually, he particularizes the
language; but he thinks, feels, and loves individually.” This great poet, lyrical
and subjective, acts as an interpreter of the universe, of mankind. There is
nothing in his poetry reminiscent of the egoistic, narcissistic lament of
romanticism. The romanticism of the nineteenth century was basically
individualistic; the romanticism of the 1 goo’s is, on the other hand,
spontaneous and logically socialist, unanimist. Vallejo, from this point of
view, belongs not only to his race but also to his century, to his era.35
His compassion is so great that sometimes he feels responsible for part
of man’s suffering. And then he accuses himself. He is beset by the fear, the
anguish, that he too is robbing others:
All of my bones are alien;
perhaps I stole them!
I took for my own what perhaps
was assigned to another;
and I think that if I had not been born
another poor man would be drinking this coffee!
I am a bad thief . . . Where shall I go!
And at this cold hour, when the earth
transcends human dust and is so sad,
I would like to knock on every door,
and beg I do not know whose pardon,
and bake him little pieces of fresh bread
here in the oven of my heart.
This is typical of the poetry of Los heraldos negros. Vallejo gives his entire
soul to the sufferings of the poor:

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 Muledriver, you are fantastically glazed with sweat.
The Menocucho Hacienda charges
a thousand vexations a day in exchange for life.
This art announces the birth of a new sensitivity. It is a new, rebellious
art that breaks with the courtly tradition of a literature of buffoons and
lackeys. The great poet of Los heraldos negros and of Trilce—that great poet
who has been ignored and disregarded in the streets of Lima, where carnival
mountebanks have been welcomed and praised—appears in his art as a
precursor of the new spirit, the new conscience.
In his poetry, Vallejo is always avid for the infinite, thirsty for truth.
Creation in him is at the same time indescribably painful and exultant. This
artist aspires only to express himself purely and innocently. Therefore, he
strips himself of all rhetorical ornament and of all literary vanity. In this way,
he reaches the most austere, humble, and proud simplicity. He is a mystic of
poverty who removes his shoes so that his bare feet will know the hardness
and cruelty of his road.
Here is what he writes to Antenor Orrego after having published Trilce:
This book was born in a great void. I am responsible for it. I assume all responsibility for
its aesthetics. Today and perhaps more than ever, I feel the weight, unknown until now, of
man’s most sacred obligation: to be free! If I am not free today, I shall never be free. I feel
that the curve of my forehead gathers its most heroic force. I give mself as freely as I can, and
this is my greatest artistic contribution. Only God knows up to what point my freedom is
sure and true. Only God knows how much I have suffered to prevent that freedom from
degenerating into license. Only God knows what dreadful abysses I have gone to the edge of,
filled with terror, fearful that everything is going to die so that my poor spirit may live.
This is unmistakably the voice of a true creator, an authentic artist. His confession of
suffering is proof of his greatness.
Alberto Guillén
Alberto Guillén inherited the iconoclastic and egocentric spirit of the
colónida generation. His poetry carries the paranoid exaltation of the ego to
an extreme. But, in keeping with the new mood that was already developing,
his poetry was virile in tone. A stranger to the poisons of the city, Guillén,
like a rustic Pan, roamed the pastoral roads of the countryside. Obsessed
with individualism and Nietzscheism, he felt himself to be a superman. In
Guillén, Peruvian poetry repudiated, not very elegantly but emphatically, its
sources.
This is the time when Guillén wrote Belleza humilde and Promoteo, but it
is in Deucalión that the poet fulfills himself. I number Deucalión among the
books that most nobly and purely represent the Peruvian lyricism of the early

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century. In Deucalión there is no bard who declaims from a platform, no
troubador who sings a serenade. There is a man who suffers, exults, affirms,
doubts, denies; a man bursting with passion, eagerness, longing; a man
thirsty for truth, who knows that “our destiny is to find the road that leads to
Paradise.” Deucalión is the song of embarkation:
Where to?
No matter! Life hides
germinating worlds
not yet discovered:
Heart, it is time to leave
for the worlds that sleep!
This new knight errant does not watch over his arms in any inn. He has
no horse, no squire, no armor. He walks naked and serious, like Rodin’s John
the Baptist.
Yesterday I went out naked
to challenge Fate:
for a shield, my pride;
for a helmet, Mambrino’s.
But the tension of waiting has been too hard on his youthful nerves. And
his first adventure, like Don Quixote’s, has been unlucky and ridiculous.
Furthermore, the poet reveals his weakness from that time on. He is not
crazy enough to follow the path of Don Quixote, who was unaware of fate’s
mockery. He carries the ironic Sancho crouched in his soul. He is not
completely deluded or altogether mad. He sees the grotesque and comic side
of his wanderings. Therefore, weary and undecided, he pauses to question all
the sphinxes and all the enigmas:
For what do you give yourself, heart,
for what do you give yourself
if you are never to find
your illusion?
But doubt, which gnaws at the poet’s heart, still cannot conquer his
hope. The poem thirsts for the infinite. His illusion may be damaged, but it
is still imperious. This sonnet summarizes the whole episode:
At the midpoint of my journey
I asked, like Dante,
“Traveler, do you know
my destiny, my route?”
Like an echo, a donkey
gleefully answered me,
but the good pilgrim
gestured me onward;

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 then a heroic voice
rose up within me,
telling me, “Keep on!”
And I cast off my doubt
and in my bare hand
I carry my determination!
The wanderer is not always so strong. The devil tempts him at every step.
In spite of himself, doubt begins to work its way into his conscience,
corrupting and weakening it. Guillén agrees with the devil that “we do not
know who is right, Quixote or Panza.” A relativist and skeptical philosophy
undermines his will. His actions become a little uncertain and mistrustful.
Between Nothing and the Myth, his impulse is toward the Myth. But
Guillén knows his relativity. Doubt is sterile and faith is fruitful. For this
reason alone, Guillén chooses the road of faith. His quixotism has lost its
candor and purity. It has become pragmatic. “Think that it is good for you
not to lose hope.” To hope, to believe, is a question of what is desirable and
convenient. It does not matter that this intuition should be defined later in
more noble terms: “And better yet, do not reason; illusions are worth more
than the strongest reasoning.”
But the poet still recovers, from time to time, his divine madness. His
hallucination still burns. He is still capable of expressing himself with a
superhuman passion:
In the same way that old Paul
was thrown to the ground
I have been struck by the spear
of infinite longing:
therefore, in what I say to you,
I put the desire for flight;
I must help the Devil
to conquer heaven.
And in this admirable sonnet, heavy with emotion and religious in tone,
the poet states his creed:
Strip your heart
of all vanity
and bring your will
to where your illusion is;
oppose with your fist,
oppose with your freedom,
the ancient alluvium
of Fatality;
and let your thoughts,
like the elements,

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 destroy all restraints,
as the seed quickens
into life despite
the worm and the mire.
This poetry has roots in Nietzsche, Rodó, and Unamuno. But the flower
is Guillén’s and there can be no argument about its ownership. Thought is
totally identified with form in Deucalión. Form, like thought, is bare, tense,
urgent, simultaneously angry and serene. (One of the things I admire most
in Deucalión is precisely his rejection of any ornament, his deliberate refusal
to use rhetoric.) Deucalión is a new dawn on the horizon. In Deucalión man
sets out, still young and pure, in search of God and to conquer the world.
But along the way, Guillén is corrupted. He becomes vain and haughty.
He loses his innocence and forgets the ingenuous goal of his youth. The
spectacle and emotions of an urban, cosmopolitan civilization enervate and
slacken his will. His poetry is infected by the negative, corrosive humor of
the West. Guillén becomes sly, mocking, and cynical. And the sin carries its
expiation. After Deucalión everything is inferior, lacking in human intensity
as well as in artistic significance. El libro de las parábolas and Imitatión de
nuestro señor yo succeed in many ways, but they are hopelessly monotonous
books. They seem to be products of an alembic in which the skepticism and
egoism of Guillén are slowly distilled, drop by drop. So many drops make a
page; so many drops, a preface; so many, a book.
The most interesting side of Guillén’s personality is his relativism.
Guillén amuses himself by denying the reality of the individual. But his
testimony is suspect, because Guillén may base his reasoning on personal
experience: “My personality, as I dreamed of it, as I envisaged it, has not
been realized; therefore, the personality does not exist.”
In Imitatión de nuestro señor yo, Guillén’s thought is Pirandellian. Here
are some examples: “He, she, all exist, but in you.” “I am all men in me.” “Are
my contradictions not proof that I bear in me many men?” “False. They do
not die: as we who die in them.” These lines contain strands of the
philosophy of Pirandello’s One, None, and a Hundred Thousand.
Nevertheless, I do not believe that Guillén, if he continues in this
direction, will ever be classified among the authors of humorous and
cosmopolitan Western literature. Guillén, basically, is a rather rural and
Franciscan poet. Do not take his blasphemies literally. Deep inside, he
retains a little of his provincial romanticism. His psychology has many
peasant roots. Underneath, he remains strange to the quintessence of the

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city. When reading Guillén, one notices immediately that he is not skilled in
artifice.
The title of Guillén’s last book, Laureles, sums up the second phase of his
literature and his life. In order to gain these and other laurels, which he
himself secretly scorns, he has struggled, suffered, and fought. He has turned
away from the road to heaven to take the road to laurels. In adolescence his
ambition was more lofty; will it now be satisfied with some municipal or
academic laurels?
I agree with Gabriel Alomar when he accuses Guillén of strangling the
poet of Deucalión with his own hands. Because of his impatience, Guillén
must have laurels at all cost. But laurels do not last. Glory is made of less
ephemeral materials and it is reserved for those who refuse its fallacious and
fictitious advance rewards. The duty of the artist is not to break faith with
his destiny. Guillén resolves his impatience in abundance, and abundance is
what most damages and diminishes the merit of his work. His recent verse,
although avant-garde in style, is weary and jaded and repeats his early
themes.
Magda Portal
Magda Portal is important in our literary process. She is Peru’s first
poetess as distinguished from mere women of letters, few of whom had
artistic or, more specifically, literary temperament.
The term “poetess” should be explained. In the history of Western
civilization, a poetess is to some extent a contemporary phenomenon.
Previous eras produced only masculine poetry; even that written by women
was only a variation of men’s lyric themes or philosophical ideas. There was
also an asexual poetry lacking either virility or the stamp of a woman—
virgin, female, mother. Today, women finally put their own flesh and spirit
into their poetry. The poetess is now someone who creates a feminine poetry.
And ever since women’s poetry became spiritually emancipated and
differentiated from men’s, poetesses have occupied a high place in the catalog
of all literatures.
In the poetry of Spanish America, two women, Gabriela Mistral and
Juana de Ibarbourou, have for some time attracted more attention than any
of their male colleagues. Delmira Agustini has founded a long and noble
lineage in her country and in America. Blanca Luz Brum has brought her
message to Peru. These are not solitary, exceptional cases but part of a
widespread phenomenon common to all literatures. Poetry, grown old in
man, is born again, rejuvenated, in woman.

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 A brilliantly intuitive writer, Félix del Valle, remarking on the large
number of outstanding poetesses in the world, told me that the scepter of
poetry had passed to women. With his natural wit, he put it this way:
“Poetry is turning into a woman’s occupation.” This is an extreme statement;
but poets certainly have a tendency to make of poetry a nihilistic, skeptical
exercise, whereas poetesses tend to give it fresh roots and gleaming white
flowers. Their poetry has more vitality and biological force.
Magda Portal is still not sufficiently known and appreciated either in
Peru or in Spanish America. She has published only one book of prose, El
derecho de matar (La Paz, 1926), and one book of verse, Una esperanza y el
mar (Lima, 1927). El derecho de matar presents only one of her sides: the
rebellious spirit and revolutionary messianism that in these times are
indisputable evidence of an artist’s historical awareness. Furthermore, the
prose of Magda Portal always contains something of her magnificent
lyricism. “El poema de la cárcel,” “La sonrisa de Cristo,” and “Círculos
violeta”—three poems in this volume—have her charity, passion, and exalted
tenderness. But El derecho de matar does not characterize or define her; even
its title, which rings of anarchy and nihilism, does not represent her spirit.
Magda is essentially lyrical and she is compassionate in the same way
Vallejo is compassionate. This is the only way she appears in the lines of
“Anima absorta” and “Una esperanza y el mar,” and this certainly is the way
she is. She is not tainted by the decadence of the tgoo’s.
In her early verse, Magda Portal is almost always a poetess of tenderness.
And in some of this verse may be seen her lyricism and humanity. Exempt
from egoism, megalomania, or romantic narcissism, Magda Portal says to us:
“I am small!”
In addition to the compassion and tenderness found in her poetry, there
is the voice of a woman who lives passionately and intensely, glowing with
love and longing, tormented by truth and hope.
Magda Portal has written on the frontispiece of one of her books these
words by Leonardo da Vinci: “The soul, first source of life, is reflected in
everything that it creates.” “The true work of art is like a mirror in which the
soul of the artist is seen.” Magda’s ardent loyalty to these creative principles
reveals an artistic sense that her poetry never contradicts and always ratifies.
In her poetry she gives us, above all, a clear image of herself. She never
practices sleight of hand, nor does she mystify or idealize. Her poetry is her
truth. Magda does not labor to dress up her soul for us. We can enter one of
her books without ceremony, confident that we shall not encounter some

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sham or snare. The art of this profound and pure lyricist reduces to a
minimum, almost to zero, the proportion of artifice that it requires in order
to be art.
This is for me the best proof of Magda’s great value. In this era of social
and, therefore, artistic decadence, the most urgent duty of the artist is the
truth. The only works that will survive this crisis are those that constitute a
confession and a testimony.
The eternal and dark contrast between the life and death principles that
govern the world is always present in the poetry of Magda. At the same time
that she longs for oblivion, she is eager to create and live. Magda’s soul is a
soul in agony. And her art is a total translation of the two forces that lacerate
and inspire her. Sometimes the life principle triumphs and sometimes the
death principle prevails.
This dramatic conflict gives the poetry of Magda Portal a profound
metaphysics, which her spirit easily reaches through her lyricism without the
aid of any philosophy. It also gives her a psychological depth that enables her
to record all the contradictory voices of her dialogue, her combat, her agony.
The poetess expresses herself with extraordinary strength in the following
lines:
Come, kiss me!
What does it matter if something dark
is gnawing at my soul
with its teeth?
I am yours and you are mine . . . kiss me! . . .
I do not weep today . . . I am drowned in joy,
a strange joy
that comes from I know not where.
You are mine . . . You are mine? . . .
there is a door of ice
between you and me:
your thoughts!
Those that beat upon your brain
and whose hammering
escapes me . . .
Come, kiss me . . . What does it matter? . . .
My heart called to you all night long,
and now that you are here, your flesh and your soul,
why should I care about what you did yesterday? . . .
What does it matter!
Come, kiss me . . . your lips,
your eyes, and your hands . . .
Then . . . nothing . . .

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 And your soul? And your soul!
This poetess of ours, whom we should hail as one of the foremost
poetesses of Indo-America, does not descend from Ibarbourou, or Agustini,
or even Mistral, whom she nonetheless resembles more than anyone else
because of a certain similarity of tone. She has an original and autonomous
temperament. Her secret, her word, her force were born with her and are in
her.
In her poetry there is more pain than joy, more darkness than light.
Magda is sad. Her life force moves her toward light and gaiety. And Magda
feels herself powerless to enjoy them. This is her drama. But it does not
embitter or worry her.
In “Vidrios de amor,” a poem in eighteen emotional stanzas, all Magda is
in these lines:
With how many tears did you shape me?
I have so many times assumed
the attitude of the suicidal trees
along the dusty, lonesome roads—
secretly, without your knowing it,
everything must hurt you
for having made me thus, with no sweetness
for my acid hurts.
where did I come from with my fierce
desire to conform?
I have never known the merry-go-round happiness
of childhood, I have never dreamed of it.
Ah!—and nevertheless
I love happiness the way
bitter plants will love
a sweet fruit.
Mother, alert
and receptive,
do not answer today because you would be drowned,
do not answer today my almost
tearless weeping.
I bury my anguish inside me in order to watch
the lefthand branch of my life,
which has put only love
into the kneading of my daughter’s heart.
I would like to protect her from myself
as from a wild beast,
from these accusing eyes,
from this tattered voice
in which insomnia scoops caverns,

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 and, for her, to be happy, ingenuous, a child,
as if all the bells of happiness
rang out their everlasting Easter in my heart.
Is all of Magda here in these lines? No, because Magda is more than a
mother, more than love. Who knows out of how many dark powers, out of
how many conflicting truths, a soul like hers is made?
Contemporary Literary Currents—Indigenism
The “indigenous” current typical of the new Peruvian literature is
spreading and probably will intensify, but not as a result of the extrinsic or
fortuitous circumstances that usually determine a literary fashion. Its
significance is more profound. The fact that it coincides and intimately
relates with an ideological and social current that daily gathers support
among youth is sufficient evidence that literary indigenism reflects a state of
mind and of conscience in the new Peru.
This indigenism, which is in germination and still needs time to flower
and bear fruit, might be compared—allowing for all differences in time and
space—with the “muzhikism” of prerevolutionary Russian literature.
Muzhikism was bound up with the first phase of social unrest that prepared
and incubated the Russian revolution. Muzhikist literature performed a
historical mission by putting Russian feudalism on trial and condemning it
with no possibility of appeal. The muzhikist novel and poetry were
prodromes in the socialization of land as carried out by the Bolshevik
revolution. It does not matter that the Russian novelist and poet had no
thought of socialization when they portrayed the muzhik, nor does it matter
whether they caricatured or idealized him.
In the same way, Russian “constructivism” and “futurism,” which delight
in representing machines, skyscrapers, airplanes, factories, et cetera, belong
to a period when the urban proletariat, after creating a regime that still
chiefly benefits the farmer, work to westernize Russia through
industrialization.
The indigenism of our contemporary literature is linked to recent
developments. If the indigenous problem is part of politics, economics, and
sociology, it cannot be absent from literature and art. One would be
mistaken to think of it as an artificial issue simply because many of those
who advance it are novices or opportunists.
Nor should one deny its vitality because it has so far failed to produce a
masterpiece. A masterpiece can only flower in soil that has been amply
fertilized by an anonymous multitude of mediocre works. The genius in art
is usually not a beginning but the end result of a vast experience.

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 There is even less reason to be alarmed by sporadic outbursts and
reported excesses. They do not contain the key to historical fact. Any
affirmation must be carried to extremes. To speculate on anecdotes is to
remain outside history.
This current, moreover, is encouraged by the elements of
cosmopolitanism that have been assimilated into our literature. I have
already pointed to the interest of the American avant-garde in autonomous
and local themes. In the new Argentine literature, no one feels more native to
Buenos Aires than Girondo and Borges, or more gaucho than Güiraldes. On
the other hand, those who, like Larreta, remain in bondage to Spanish
classicism are basically incapable of interpreting their countries.
Some are stimulated by the exoticism that has invaded European
literature as the symptoms of decadence in Western civilization intensify.
César Moro, Jorge Seoane and other recent emigrants to Paris are expected
to employ native and indigenous motifs. The art of our sculptress, Carmen
Saco, has found its most valid passport in her Indian statues and designs.
This last, and external, factor has influenced such “emigrant” writers as
Ventura García Calderón toward indigenism, al though they are not
numbered among the avant-garde or thought to have been infected by the
ideals attributed to the young writers who work in their own countries.
Criolloism has not flourished as a nationalist current in our literature,
mainly because the criollo still does not represent a nationality. It has long
been accepted that our nationality is in the process of formation and now a
dualism of race and spirit is observed. In any event, we have not even begun
to fuse the racial elements that make up our population. The criollo is not
clearly defined. Until now, the word “criollo” has been little more than a
generic term to designate a many-shaded mestizo group. Our criollo lacks
the distinctive character of the Argentine criollo, who, unlike the Peruvian,
can be identified anywhere in the world. This confrontation proves precisely
that there is an Argentine nationality, whereas there are no traits peculiar to
a Peruvian nationality. Our criollo in the sierra is different from our coastal
criollo. In the sierra, the mestizo is made more Indian by his terrestrial
surroundings; on the coast, the spirit inherited from Spain is maintained by
colonial tradition.
Nativist literature in Uruguay, born of a cosmopolitan experience like its
counterpart in Argentina, has been criollo because the population of
Uruguay has a unity which ours does not. Nativism in Uruguay, moreover, is
essentially a literary phenomenon without the political and economic

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undertones of Peru’s indigenism. Zum Felde, who has promoted it as a critic,
states that the time has come to liquidate it.
An autonomous native feeling was needed to oppose slavish imitation of the foreign. As
a movement of literary emancipation, it achieved its end. The moment was ripe. Young poets
turned toward national reality and saw that, in contrast with the European, it was more
authentically American. But having completed its mission, traditionalism should yield to a
lyrical Americanism more in tune with life’s imperative. Today’s sentiments feed on different
realities and ideals. Río de la Plata is no longer a gaucho domain. And gaucho folklore,
having withdrawn to the most remote corners, is now being consigned to the silent cult of
the museum. The advance of urban cosmopolitianism has completely transformed the
customs and character of rural life in Uruguay.36
In Peru, Criolloism has not only been sporadic and superficial, but it has
been nourished on colonial sentiment. It has not been an affirmation of
autonomy. Until very recently, it has been content to describe local customs
within the surviving colonial literature. Abelardo Gamarra is probably the
only exception to this domesticated Criolloism without native pride.
Our nativism, which is also necessary for revolution and emancipation,
cannot be a simple Criolloism. The Peruvian criollo has not yet liberated
himself spiritually from Spain. His Europeanization, in reaction to which he
must find his own personality, has been only partly completed. Once he is
Europeanized, today’s criollo will become aware of the drama of Peru,
recognizing in himself a bastardized Spanish and in the Indian the cement of
nationality. (Valdelomar, the coastal criollo who returned from Italy imbued
with the teachings of D’Annunzio and with snobbishness, had his most
enlightening experience when he discovered—or imagined—the Inca.)
Whereas the pure criollo generally conserves his colonial spirit, the
Europeanized criollo of our times rebels against that spirit, even if only as
protest against its limitations and archaism.
Undoubtedly, the criollo, diverse and numerous, can be the source of an
abundance of characters and plots in our literature—narrative, descriptive,
social, folkloric, et cetera. But what the genuine indigenist current
subconsciously seeks in the Indian is not just character and plot, much less
picturesque character and plot. Indigenism is not essentially a literary
phenomenon, as is the nativism of Uruguay. It is rooted in another historical
soil. The authentic indigenists, who should not be confused with those who
exploit indigenous themes out of mere love of the exotic, deliberately or
unknowingly collaborate in a task of redressing political and economic
wrongs, not in a task of restoration or resurrection.
The Indian does not represent solely a type, a theme, a plot, a character;
he represents a people, a race, a tradition, a spirit. It is impossible to consider

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and evaluate him from a purely literary standpoint, as though he were a
national color or feature on the same plane as other ethnic elements in Peru.
On closer study, it becomes clear that the indigenist current is not based
on simple literary factors, but on complex social and economic factors.
Because of the conflict and contrast between his demographic predominance
and his social and economic servitude, not just inferiority, the Indian
deserves to be the focus of attention in present-day Peru. That three to four
million people of autochthonous race occupy the mental panorama of a
country of five million should not surprise anyone, especially in a period
when this country is trying to find an equilibrium which to date has been
denied it by history.
Indigenism in our literature, as may be gathered from my earlier
statements, is basically aimed at repairing the injustices done to the Indian.
Its role is not the purely sentimental one of, for example, Criolloism. It
would therefore be a mistake to judge indigenism as the equivalent of
Criolloism, which it neither replaces nor supplants.
The Indian is prominent in Peruvian literature and art, not because he is
an interesting subject for a novel or a painting, but because the new forces
and vital impulses of the nation are directed toward redeeming him. This
tendency is more instinctive and biological than intellectual and theoretical. I
repeat that the genuine indigenist does not concern himself with the Indian
as a source of picturesque character and plot; if this were the case, the zambo
would be as interesting as the Indian to the writer or artist. Moreover, the
indigenist current is lyrical rather than naturalist or costumbrista in character,
as is demonstrated in the beginnings of an Andean poetry.
In making reparation to the autochthonous race, it is necessary to
separate the Indian from the Negro, mulatto, and zambo, who represent
colonial elements in our past. The Spaniard imported the Negro when he
realized that he could neither supplant nor assimilate the Indian. The slave
came to Peru to serve the colonizing ambitions of Spain. The Negro race is
one of the human alluvia deposited on the coast by Spain, one of the thin,
weak strata of sediment that formed in the lowlands of Peru during the
viceroyalty and the early period of the republic; and throughout this cycle,
circumstances have conspired to maintain its solidarity with the colony.
Because he has never been able to acclimatize himself physically or spiritually
to the sierra, the Negro has always viewed it with distrust and hostility.
When he has mixed with the Indian, he has corrupted him with his false
servility and exhibitionist and morbid psychology.

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 Since emancipation, the Negro has become addicted to his status of
liberated slave. Colonial society turned the Negro into a domestic servant,
very seldom into an artisan or worker, and it absorbed and assimilated him
until it became intoxicated by his hot, tropical blood. The Negro was as
accessible and domesticated as the Indian was impenetrable and remote.
Thus the very origin of slave importation created a subordination from
which the Negro and mulatto can be redeemed only through a social and
economic revolution that will turn them into workers and thereby gradually
extirpate their slave mentality. The mulatto, still colonial in his attitudes, is
subconsciously opposed to autochthonism. By nature he feels closer to Spain
than to the Inca. Only socialism can awaken in him a class consciousness
that will lead him to a definitive rupture with the last remnants of his
colonial spirit.
The development of the indigenist current does not threaten or paralyze
other vital elements of our literature. Indigenism does not aspire to preempt
the literary scene by excluding or blocking other impulses and
manifestations. It represents the trend and tone of an era because of its
sympathy and close association with the spiritual orientation of new
generations who, in turn, are sensitive to the imperative needs of our
economic and social development.
A critic could commit no greater injustice than to condemn indigenist
literature for its lack of autochthonous integrity or its use of artificial
elements in interpretation and expression. Indigenist literature cannot give
us a strictly authentic version of the Indian, for it must idealize and stylize
him. Nor can it give us his soul. It is still a mestizo literature and as such is
called indigenist rather than indigenous. If an indigenous literature finally
appears, it will be when the Indians themselves are able to produce it.
The present indigenist current cannot be equated with the old colonialist
current. Colonialism, which reflected the feelings of a feudal class, indulged
in nostalgic idealization of the past. Indigenism, on the other hand, has its
roots in the present; it finds its inspiration in the protest of millions of men.
The vice-royalty was; the Indian is. And whereas getting rid of the remains
of colonial feudalism is a basic condition for progress, vindication of the
Indian and of his history is inserted into a revolutionary program.
It is clear that we are concerned less with what is dead than with what
has survived of the Inca civilization. Peru’s past interests us to the extent it
can explain Peru’s present. Constructive generations think of the past as an
origin, never as a program.

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 All that survives of Tawantinsuyo is the Indian. The civilization has
perished, but not the race. After four centuries, the biological material of
Tawantinsuyo has proved to be indestructible and, to a degree, immutable.
Man changes more slowly than might be imagined in this century of
speed, when his transformation has broken all records. But this is a
phenomenon peculiar to the West, which is, above all, a dynamic civilization
and the one that, logically enough, has investigated the relativity of time. In
Asiatic societies, which are kindred to the Inca society, there is a certain
quietism and ecstasy, periods when history seems to be suspended and a
single social structure endures, petrified, for centuries. It can therefore be
assumed that in four centuries the Indian has undergone very little spiritual
change. Servitude has undoubtedly depressed his flesh and his spirit. But the
dark depths of his soul have hardly altered. In the steep sierra and the jagged
horizons still untouched by the white man’s law, the Indian continues to
abide by his ancestral code.
Enrique López Albújar, spokesman for the Radical generation, has
written a book, Cuentos andinos, which is the first to explore these paths. In
its harsh sketches, Cuentos andinos grasps the elementary emotions of life in
the sierra and charts the soul of the Indian. López Albújar and Valcárcel
both search in the Andes for the origin of the Quechua’s cosmic
consciousness. “Los tres jircas” by López Albújar and “Los hombres de
piedra”37 by Valcárcel express the same mythology. The participants and
settings of López Albújar have the same backdrop as the theory and ideas of
Valcárcel. This coincidence is especially interesting because it is the product
of different temperaments and methods. López Albújar wants to be a
naturalist and to analyze, Valcárcel to be imaginative and to synthesize.
López Albújar looks at the Indian with the eyes and mind of a coastal man,
Valcárcel with the eyes and mind of a sierra man. There is no spiritual
kinship between the two writers, no similarity in the genre and style of the
two books. Yet they listen to the same distant heartbeat of the Quechua
soul.38
Although the Indian was formally converted by the conquest to
Catholicism, he has not really surrendered his old myths. His mysticism has
been modified, but his animism remains. The Indian does not understand
Catholic metaphysics. His pantheist and materialist philosophy has entered
into a loveless marriage with the catechism. In his concept of life, it is not
Reason but Nature that is interrogated. The three jircas, the three hills, of

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Huánuco weigh more heavily on the conscience of the Huánuco Indian than
the Christian hereafter.
“Las tres jircas” and “Como habla la coca” are, in my opinion, the best
chapters in Cuentos andinos, but neither is, strictly speaking, a story.
“Ushanam Jampi,” on the other hand, has a strong narrative context and,
moreover, is a valuable document on indigenous communism. This tale
describes how popular justice operates in small Indian villages isolated from
government law. Here we find an institution that survives from the
autochthonous regime, an institution that categorically demonstrates that
the Inca organization was a communist organization.
In an individualistist system, the administration of justice is bureaucratic
and assigned to a magistrate. Liberalism, for example, fragmentizes justice
and creates a caste, a bureaucracy, of judges of different hierarchies. In a
communist system, the administration of justice is a function of society as a
whole and, as in the Indian system, it is performed by the υayas, or elders.39
According to current predictions, the future of Latin America depends
on the fate of mestizaje. In contrast to the hostile pessimism of the Le Bon
school of sociology, a messianic optimism has exalted the mestizo as the
hope of the continent. In the forceful words of Vasconcelos, the tropics and
mestizo are the setting and the protagonist of a new civilization. But the
thesis of Vasconcelos, which outlines a Utopia—in the positive and
philosophical meaning of the word—to the same extent that it attempts to
predict the future, ignores the present. Nothing is more alien to his thought
and purpose than a criticism of contemporary reality, to which he turns
exclusively for elements to support his prophecy.
The mestizaje extolled by Vasconcelos is not precisely the mixture of
Spanish, Indian, and African which has already taken place on the continent.
It is a purifying fusion and refusion, from which the cosmic race will emerge
centuries later. For Vasconcelos, the mestizo in his present form is not the
prototype of a new race and a new culture, but only its promise. The
reflections of a philosopher, of a Utopian, are not bound by limitations of
time or space. In his ideal construction, centuries are only moments. The
work of a critic, historiographer, or politician is another matter. They must
concern themselves with immediate results and be satisfied with nearby
landscapes. The object of their research and the subject of their program are
the real mestizo history, not the ideal of prophecy.
In Peru, because of the imprint of different environments and the
combination of many racial mixtures, the meaning of “mestizo” varies.

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Mestizaje has produced a complex species rather than a solution of the
dualism of Spaniard and Indian.
Dr. Uriel García discovers the neo-Indian in the mestizo. But this
mestizo comes from the mixture of Spanish and indigenous races and is
subject to the effects of Andean environment and ways of life. Dr. Uriel
García has conducted his research in a mountain medium that has
assimilated the white invader. The crossing of the two races has engendered
the New Indian, strongly influenced by regional tradition and setting.
This mestizo, who in the course of several generations and under the
steady pressure of a single physical and cultural environment has acquired
stable characteristics, is not the mestizo produced by the same races on the
coast. The coast makes less impression; the Spanish factor is more active.
The Chinese and Negro complicate mestizaje on the coast. Neither of
these two elements has so far contributed either cultural values or
progressive energies to the formation of nationality. The Chinese coolie has
been driven from his country by overpopulation and poverty. He introduces
into Peru his race but not his culture. Chinese immigration has not brought
us any of the basic elements of Chinese civilization, perhaps because these
have lost their dynamism and generating power even at home. We have
become acquainted with Lao Tse and Confucius through the West. Probably
the only direct importation from the Orient of an intellectual order is
Chinese medicine, and its arrival is undoubtedly due to practical and
mechanical reasons, stimulated by the backwardness of a people who cling to
all forms of folk remedies. The skill of the small Chinese farmer has
flourished only in the valleys of Lima, where the proximity of an important
market makes truck gardening profitable.
The Chinese, furthermore, appears to have inoculated his descendants
with the fatalism, apathy, and defects of the decrepit Orient. Gambling,
which is an element of immorality and indolence and is particularly harmful
to people prone to rely more on chance than on effort, is mainly encouraged
by Chinese immigration. Only since the Nationalist movement, which has
had wide repercussions among the expatriate Chinese of this continent, has
the Chinese colony shown signs of an active interest in culture and progress.
The Chinese theater, almost exclusively reserved for the nocturnal
amusement of people of that nationality, has made no impression on our
literature except on the exotic and artificial tastes of the decadents.
Valdelomar and the colónidas discovered it during their opium sessions,
when they were infected by the orientalism of Loti and Farrère. The Chinese,

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in brief, does not transfer to the mestizo his moral discipline, his cultural and
philosophical tradition, or his skill as farmer and artisan. His language, his
immigrant status, and the criollo’s scorn for him combine to act as a barrier
between his culture and the environment.
The contribution of the Negro, who came as a slave, almost as
merchandise, appears to be even more worthless and negative. The Negro
brought his sensualism, his superstition, and his primitivism. His condition
not only did not permit him to help create culture, but the crude, vivid
example of his barbarism was more likely to hamper such creation.
Racial prejudice has diminished; but the progress of sociology and
history has broadened and strengthened the idea that there are differences
and inequalities in the evolution of people. Although the inferiority of
colored races is no longer one of the dogmas that sustain a battered white
pride, all the relativism of today does not suffice to abolish cultural
inferiority.
Race is only one of the elements that determine the structure of society.
Vilfredo Pareto lists the following categories: (1) Soil and climate, flora and
fauna, geological and mineralogical conditions, et cetera. (2) Other elements
external to a given society at a given time; that is, the actions of other
societies on it, which are external in space, and the consequences of the
previous condition of that society, which are external in time. (3) Internal
elements, of which the principal are race, the “residual” feelings that are
manifested in propensities, interests, aptitudes for reasoning and
observation, the state of knowledge, et cetera. Pareto argues that the
structure of a society is determined by all the elements that operate on it and
that once a society has been determined, it operates in turn on those
elements, so that it may be said that the action is reciprocal.40
What is important, therefore, in a sociological study of the Indian and
mestizo strata is not the degree to which the mestizo inherits the qualities or
defects of the progenitor races, but his ability to evolve with more ease than
the Indian toward the white man’s social state or type of civilization.
Mestizaje needs to be analyzed as a sociological rather than an ethnic
question. The ethnic problem that has occupied the attention of untrained
sociologists and ignorant analysts is altogether fictitious. It becomes
disproportionately important to those who, abiding by the idea cherished by
European civilization at its peak (and already discarded by that same
civilization, which in its decline favors a relativist concept of history),
attribute the achievements of Western society to the superiority of the white

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race. In the simplistic judgment of those who advise that the Indian be
regenerated by cross-breeding, the intellectual and technical skills, the
creative drive, and the moral discipline of the white race are reduced to mere
zoological conditions.
Although the racial question—which has implications that lead
superficial critics to improbable zoological reasoning—is artificial and does
not merit the consideration of those who are engaged in a concrete and
political study of the indigenous problem, the sociological question is
another matter. The contrast in color will gradually disappear, but the rights
of the mestizo are legitimized in his customs, feelings, and myths—the
spiritual and formal elements of those phenomena that are called society and
culture. In existing socio-economic conditions, mestizaje produces not only a
new human and ethnic type but a new social type. The blurring of that type
by a confused combination of races does not in itself imply any inferiority
and may even presage, in certain ideal mixtures, the characteristics of the
cosmic race. However, because of a murky predominance of negative
sediments, the undefined or hybrid nature of the social type manifests itself
in a sordid and unhealthy stagnation. Chinese and Negro admixtures have
almost always had a destructive and aberrant effect on this mestizaje. Neither
European nor Indian tradition is perpetuated in the mestizo; they sterilize
each other.
In an urban, industrial, and dynamic environment, the mestizo rapidly
catches up with the white man and assimilates Western culture together
with its customs, motivations, and consequences. Usually he does not grasp
the complex beliefs, myths, and feelings that underlie the material and
intellectual creations of the European or white civilization; but the
mechanics and discipline of the latter automatically impose its habits and
ideas on him. When he comes in contact with a mechanized civilization that
is amazingly equipped to dominate nature, he finds the idea of progress, for
example, irresistible. But this process of assimilation and incorporation is
quickly accomplished only within a vigorous industrial culture. In the
lethargy of the feudal latifundium and the backwater town, the virtues and
values of racial intermixture are nullified and replaced by debilitating
superstitions.
To the man of the mestizo village—portrayed by Valcárcel with a
pessimism and passion tinged with sociological preoccupations—Western
civilization presents a confused spectacle. Everything in this civilization that
is personal, essential, intrinsic, and dynamic is alien to his way of life.

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Despite some external imitations and subsidiary habits, this man does not
move within the orbit of modern civilization. From this point of view, the
Indian in his native environment, as long as emigration does not uproot or
deform him, has nothing to envy the mestizo. It is evident that he is still not
incorporated into this expanding, dynamic civilization that seeks to be
universal. The Indian has a social existence that preserves his customs, his
understanding of life, his attitude toward the universe. The “residual” feelings
and derivations described to us in the sociology of Pareto, which continue to
operate in him, are those of his own history. Indian life has a style.
Notwithstanding the conquest, the latifundium, and the gamonal, the Indian
of the sierra still follows his own traditions. The ayllu is a social structure
deeply rooted in environment and race.41
The Indian continues his old rural life. To this day, he keeps his native
dress, his customs, and his handicrafts. The indigenous social community
has not disappeared under the harshest feudalism. The indigenous society
may appear to be primitive and retarded, but it is an organic type of society
and culture. The experience of the Orient—in Japan, Turkey, and China
itself—has proved to us that even after a long period of collapse, an
autochthonous society can rapidly find its own way to modern civilization
and translate into its own tongue the lessons of the West.
Alcides Spelucin
The first book of Alcides Spelucín includes the poetry that he read to me
nine years ago in Lima when we were first introduced by Abraham
Valdelomar in the office of the newspaper I worked on. Since then Alcides
and I have seldom seen each other, but we have grown continually closer.
Although outwardly dissimilar, our destinies are analogous. He and I belong
not only to the same generation, but to the same time. We were born under
the same sign. In our literary adolescence we were both nourished on
decadence, modernism, aestheticism, individualism, and skepticism. Later,
we both had the painful and difficult task of liberating ourselves from their
unhealthy influence. We went abroad, not to learn the secret of others, but to
learn the secret of ourselves. I discuss my trip in a book on politics and
Spelucín describes his in a book of poetry. But this only indicates a difference
in our attitudes or temperament, not in our adventures or spirit. The two of
us set sail on “the golden boat in search of a good island” and in the course of
our stormy expedition we discovered God and mankind. Alcides and I have
chosen the future over the past. As survivors of a literary skirmish, we feel
today like troops in a historical battle.

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 El libro de la nave dorada is a way station in the voyage and spirit of
Alcides Spelucín. In the emotional preface Orrego has written for this book,
he tells the reader:
It does not represent the aesthetic present of the creator. It is a book of adolescence, and
initial poetic effort that barely opens the cloister of anonymous privacy. Since them, the poet
has known anguish as well as success and pleasure. His spirit is now more refined; his vision
more luminous; his expression richer, more flexible, and more powerful; his thought more
enlightened with wisdom; his panorama broader and more valuable because of accumulated
knowledge; his heart more religious, more sensitive, and more open to the world. This
should be noted so that the reader will realize the painful precocity of a poet who was little
more than a child when he wrote this book.42
As a song of the sea and a ballad of the tropics, this book represents in
the poetry of America something like an incantatory prolongation of
“Sinfonía en gris mayor,” a melodious echo of the music of Rubén Darío. The
mark of the Uruguayan poet Herrera y Reissig, who had already made his
influence felt in Spanish-American lyricism, is splendidly vivid in lines like
the following:
And, to the planetary awakening of the spikenard,
the divine vespertine leopards, roaring
sad lilacs, depart along the road to the east.
(“Caracol bermejo”)
But the presence of Herrera y Reissig and even of Rubén Darío is
noticeable only in technique and form. Spelucín has the expression but not
the spirit of the decadents. He is completely healthy, with no morbid
tendencies. Although Alcides has absorbed much of the poison of his epoch,
his robust and fundamentally rustic soul has remained pure and wholesome.
Therefore, he is more alive and personal in this prayer of immaculate
lyricism:
Will you not give me clay from the rose-colored quarry
with which to shape my base for savoring Love?
Will you not give me a bit of melodious earth
with which to mould the fever of my dream, O Lord?
Like Vallejo, Alcides is compassionate, humble, and affectionate. At a
time when the Byzantine egotism of D’Annunzio was fashionable, the poetry
of Alcides is perfumed with the Franciscan parable. In substance, his soul is
naturally Christian. His characteristic tone appears in another prayer,
flavored with ears of wheat and the angelus, like some verses of Francis
Jammes: “For this sweet little sister with gentle eyes.”
The clear innocence of Alcides is perceptible even in the “strong stuff,”
derivative of Baudelaire, which, taking full responsibility for the poetry of his

233
youth, he has included in El libro de la nave dorada. And this innocence may
account for his socialism, which is an act of love rather than of protest.
Provisional Balance Sheet
I have not intended this very brief review of literary values to be a history
or even a criticism, if criticism is understood to be limited to the field of
writing techniques. My purpose has been to sketch the outlines or essential
characteristics of our literature. I have tried to interpret its spirit, not to
report its episodes; to present a theory, not an analysis.
This will explain the deliberate omission of certain works that
undeniably would merit discussion in a history or criticism of our literature,
but that are not significant to the literary process itself. In all literature,
significance is measured by two criteria: the exceptional intrinsic value of the
work or the historic value of its influence. The artist survives in literature
either through his work or through his followers. Otherwise, he survives
only in libraries and histories, where he may be of great interest to
researchers and bibliographers but of almost no interest to an interpretation
of the deeper meaning of literature.
The most recent generation, which is a movement well under way and
still developing, cannot yet be studied in this manner.43 National literature is
put on trial in the name of the new writers; and the past, not the present, is
judged. The new writers, who belong more to the future than to the present,
are judge, attorney, lawyer, witness, everything but the accused. Furthermore,
a table of standards that seeks to establish present or potential values would
be premature and hazardous.
The new generation signifies, above all, the definitive decline of
colonialism. It is now that the spiritual and sentimental prestige of the
viceroyalty, jealously cultivated by its heirs, sinks into oblivion. This literary
and ideological phenomenon is naturally a facet of a much vaster
phenomenon. The generation of Riva Agüero made a last attempt in politics
and literature to save the colony. But the so-called futurism, which was only
a neo-civilismo, has been liquidated in both areas because of the flight,
abdication, and dispersal of its supporters.
In the history of our literature, it is not until this generation that the
colony ends and Peru finally becomes independent of the mother country.
Earlier writers had laid the groundwork. González Prada was the precursor
of cosmopolitan influences when forty years ago, from the platform of the
Ateneo, he urged young intellectuals to rebel against Spain. In this century,
the modernism of Rubén Darío, although attenuated and counteracted by

234
the colonialism of the futurist generation, contributed innovations in style
that have permeated our literature and given it a French cast. And then the
colónida movement incited the generation of 1915, which was the first to
heed the admonition of González Prada to mutiny against Spanish
academicism, which had been solemnly albeit precariously restored in Lima
with the installation of the appropriate Academy. But colonialism, the
intellectual and sentimental prestige of the viceroyalty, remained in spirit if
not in form.
Today the rupture is complete. Indigenism, as we have seen, is gradually
uprooting colonialism. And this movement does not originate exclusively in
the sierra. Valdelomar and Falcón, both coastal criollos, are among those
who have first turned their attention to race, whatever the success of their
efforts. From abroad we simultaneously receive various international
influences. Our literature has entered a period of cosmopolitanism. In Lima,
this cosmopolitanism is reflected in the imitation of corrosive Western
decadence and in the adoption of anarchical fin-de-siécle styles. But under this
swirling current, a new feeling and revelation are perceived. The universal,
ecumenical roads we have chosen to travel, and for which we are reproached,
take us ever closer to ourselves.
Notes
1 Piero Gobetti, Opera critica, I, 88. This idea is entirely in accord with Marxist
dialectics and in no way excludes those a priori syntheses so cherished by intellectual
opportunism. Outlining the personality of Domenico Giulotti, Papini’s companion in the
cultural adventure of the Dizionario dell uomo salvatico, Gobetti writes: “Individuals must
take clear-cut positions. Compromise is the work of history and of history alone; it is a
result.” (ibid., p. 82). In the same book, concluding some observations about the Greek
concept of life, he states: “The new test of truth is a task in harmony with the responsibility
of each person. Ours is an era of struggle (struggle between men, between classes, between
states) because only through struggle can abilities be tempered and can each person, by
stubbornly defending his position, collaborate in the life process.”
2 Benedetto Croce, Nuovi saggi di estetica, pp. 205–207. With relentless logic, this same

collection disqualifies the aestheticist and historicist trends in artistic historiography. It

declares that “the true criticism of art is certainly aesthetic criticism, not because it scorns
philosophy as a pseudo-aesthetic criticism, but because it functions as a philosophy or
concept or art; and it is historical criticism, not because it is concerned with what is extrinsic
to art, like pseudo-historical criticism, but because, having availed itself of historical data for
an artistic reproduction (and at this point it is still not history), once the artistic
reproduction is accomplished, history is made by deciding what has been reproduced, that
is, by characterizing it according to the concept and establishing precisely what has
happened. Therefore, the two trends that conflict in the undercurrents of criticism coincide

235
in criticism; and historical criticism of art and aesthetic criticism of art are one and the
same.”
3 Although or perhaps because it was written in his youth, Carácter de la literatura del

Perú independiente is a vivid and sincere reflection of Riva Agüero’s spirit and feelings. His
later literary criticism does not basically alter this thesis. In its praise of the talented criollo
and his Comentarios reales, his Elogio del Inca Garcilaso could have presaged a new attitude.
But, in fact, neither his erudite curiosity about Inca history nor his ardent efforts to
interpret the sierra landscape have diminished Riva Agüero’s loyalty to the colony. His stay
in Spain, as we all know, has intensified his conservative and viceroyal sympathies. In a book
written in Spain, El Perú histórico y artístico: Influencia y descendencia de las montañeces en él
(Santander, 1921), he shows a deeper concern with the Inca society, but this is only a sign of
a scholarly interest that has been influenced by the opinions of Garcilaso and of the most
objective and cultured of the chroniclers. Riva Agüero states that “at the time of the
conquest, the social regime of Peru aroused enthusiasm in observers as scrupulous as Cieza
de León and in men as learned as the Licenciado Polo de Ondegardo, the Oidor Santillán,
the Jesuit author of Revelatión anónima, and Father José de Acosta. The social content and
agrarian regulations of the vagaries of the illustrious Mariana and of Pedro de Valencia
(disciple of Arias Montano) may have been influenced not only by Platonic tradition but by
the contemporary data of the Inca organization that made such an impression on all who
studied it.” Riva Agüero does not try to excuse his mistakes, as when he acknowledges that
in his early criticism of Ollantay he had greatly exaggerated the Spanish inspiration of the
present version in his essay on the “character of literature in independent Peru” and that, in
the light of recent studies, even if Ollantay still appears to have been reconstructed by a
colonial writer, “it must be admitted that its design, poetic techniques, all its songs and
many of its passages are in the Inca tradition and only slightly modified by the editor.”
Nevertheless, none of these demonstrations of scholastic integrity nullifies the purpose and
criteria of his work, which is intensely Spanish in tone and which pays homage to the
motherland by championing the “deep-rooted” Spanish heritage of Peru.
4 I prefer to discuss and criticize Riva Agüero’s thesis because I consider it to be the

most representative and predominant. Further proof of Riva Agüero’s pre-eminence and
influence is the fact that later studies aspiring to critical impartiality and untouched by his
political motives are attached to his opinions and evaluations. In the first volume of La
literatura peruana, Luis Alberto Sánchez admits that García Calderón wrote in Del
romanticismo al modernismo, dedicated to Riva Agüero, what is really a gloss of the latter’s
book. Although years later García Calderón was to do more research for his synthesis of La
literatura peruana, he did not add much information to that already noted by his friend and
colleague, the author of La historia en el Perú, nor did he attempt a new interpretation or go
to the indispensable popular sources.
5 Francesco de Sanctis, Teoria e storia della letteratura, I, 186. Having already cited

Croce’s Nuovi saggi di estetica, I should mention that in reproving Adolf Bartels and Richard
M. Meyer for their preoccupation with nationalism and modernism respectively in their
histories of literature, Croce asserts that “it is not true that poets and other artists are the
expression of the national conscience, of the race, of the stock, of the class, or of anything

236
similar.” Croce’s reaction against the inordinate nationalism that characterized the literary
historiography of the nineteenth century—with the exception of the exemplary European,
George Brandes—is, like all reactions, extreme; but the vigilant and generous universalism
of Croce responds to a need to resist the exaggerations of works imitating the imperial
German models.
6 See in nos. 12 and 14 of Amauta the news and comments of Gabriel Collazos and José

Gabriel Cossío on the Quechua comedy by Inocencio Mamani, who had probably been
exposed to the influence of Gamaliel Churata when he wrote it.
7 De Sanctis, Teoria e storia delta letteratura, I, 186–187.
8 Jose Gálvez, Posibilidad de una genuina literatura national, p. 7.
9 In his Teoria e storia della letteratura (p. 205), De Sanctis says: “In art as in science,

man’s departure point is subjectivity and, therefore, lyricism is the earliest form of poetry.
But subjectivity later turns into objectivity and subjective emotion in a narrative is secondary
and incidental. Lyricism is the terrain of the ideal, narration is the terrain of the real. In the
first, impression is purpose and action is occasion; in the second, the contrary is true. The
first does not dissolve into prose except by destroying itself; the second is resolved in prose,
which is its natural tendency.”
10 De Sanctis writes: “In times of struggle, mankind ascends from one idea to another

and the intellect does not triumph unless fantasy is shaken. When an idea has prevailed and
developed into a peaceful exercise, the epic is replaced by history. Epic poetry, therefore, can
be defined as the ideal history of mankind in its passage from one idea to another.” (Ibid., p.
207.)
11 José de la Riva Agüero, Carácter de la literatura del Perú independiente (Lima, 1905).
12 Ibid.
13 In Sagitario, no. 3 (1926), and in Por la emancipación de la América Latina (Buenos

Aires, 1927), p. 139.

14 Ibid., p. 139.
15 In a letter to Amauta, no. 4, Haya, carried away by his enthusiasm, undoubtedly

exaggerates this vindication.

16 Federico More, “De un ensayo sobre las literaturas del Perú” in El Diario de la Marina

(Havana, 1924) and in El Norte (Trujillo, 1924).

17 See the essay “Regionalism and Centralism” in this book.
18 Only two issues of Nuestra Epoca ( July, 1918) were published and they were rapidly

sold out. Both issues followed a tendency strongly influenced by España, Araquistain’s
journal, a tendency that was to reappear a year later in the short-lived newspaper La Razón,
which is best remembered for its campaign for university reform.
19 Manuel González Prada, Páginas libres.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 ibid.
23 ibid.
24 Mariano Ibérico Rodríguez, El nuevo absolute, p. 45.

237
 25 Ibid., pp. 43–44.
26 Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Seis ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión, pp. 45–47.
27 Gálvez, Posibilidad de una genuina literatura national, pp. 33–34.
28 Ibid., p. 90.
29 Valdelomar’s humor fed on vulgar pretentiousness. One evening in the Palais

Concert, Valdelomar said to me: “Mariátegui, they offend the light and fine dragonfly here
by calling it a hummingbird.” At that time as decadent as he, I urged him to defend the
noble and injured rights of the dragonfly. Valdelomar asked the waiter for some paper and in
the midst of the mellifluous mumur of the cafe, he wrote on a table one of his “maximum
dialogs.” His humor was always like this—innocent, childlike, lyrical. It was the reaction of a
refined and pure soul against the vulgarians and a dull, provincial atmosphere. He disliked
“fat, drunken men,” gold stickpins, detachable cuffs, and elasticized shoes.
30 In the Boletín Bibliográfico, no. 15 (December, 1915), University of Lima. A review of

a selection of Eguren’s poetry made by the university librarian, Pedro S. Zulen, one of the
first to appreciate the genius of the poet of Simbólicas.
31 There is no lack of Italianate words in Eguren’s poetry. His taste for Italian—which

does not Latinize him—springs from his acquaintance with Italian poetry, introduced to
him by the readings of his brother Jorge, who lived many years in that country.
32 Much of Eguren’s writing is romantic, not only in Simbólicas, but also in Sombra and

even Rondinelas, his last two poetic works.

33 Antenor Orrego, Panoramas, essay on César Vallejo.
34 Ibid.
35 Jorge Basadre believes that although Vallejo uses a new technique in Trilce, he

continues to be romantic in his themes. However, as he observes in the case of Hidalgo, the
newest of the “new poetry” is also romantic to the extent that it is subjective. Vallejo
certainly conserves a great deal of the old romanticism and decadence up to Trilce, but the
merit of his poetry is the way in which he transcends these residual influences. Moreover, it
would be useful to come to an understanding about the meaning of the term “romanticism.”
36 Alberto Zum Felde, La cruz del sur (Montevideo).
37 Luis E. Valcárcel, De la vida inkaica (Lima, 1925).
38 López Albújar sounds a note in his book that concurs with that of Valcárcel’s book

when he speaks of the nostalgia of the Indian. The melancholy of the Indian, according to
Valcárcel, is nothing but nostalgia: the nostalgia of the man who has been wrenched from
his land and his home to serve the military or pacific enterprises of the state. In Ushanam
Jampi, the hero is destroyed by his nostalgia. Conce Maille is condemned to exile by the
elders of Chupán. But the longing to feel his roof overhead is stronger than his instinct for
survival. He furtively steals back to his hut, although he knows that the death penalty may
await him in his village.
This nostalgia defines the spirit of the people of the sun as agricultural and sedentary.
The Quechuas are not and never have been adventurous or wanderers. Perhaps for this
reason, their imagination is not and never has been adventurous or nomadic. Perhaps for
this reason, the Indian makes his natural surroundings the object of his metaphysics.

238
Perhaps for this reason, the jircas or household gods of his region govern his life. The Indian
cannot be monotheist.
For four centuries the causes of indigenous nostalgia have multiplied. The Indian has
frequently been an emigrant. And since he has not been able to learn to live as a nomad in
those four centuries, because four centuries is very little time, his nostalgia has acquired the
tone of despair that is heard in the wail of the Indian flutes.
López Albújar looks deeply into the mute abyss of the Quechua soul. In his digression
on coca, he writes: “The Indian, without knowing it, is a Schopenhauerist. Schopenhauer
and the Indian have a point of contact, but with this difference: the pessimism of the
philosopher is theory and vanity; the pessimism of the Indian is experience and disdain. If,
for the former, life is evil, for the latter it is neither evil nor good, but a sad reality that he has
the profound wisdom to accept as it is.”
Unamuno finds this to be a correct judgment. He also believes that the skepticism of the
Indian is experience and disdain. But the historian and sociologist can perceive other things
that the philosopher and the writer may scorn. Is this skepticism not partly a trait of Asiatic
psychology? The Chinese, like the Indian, is materialistic and skeptical. In China, as in
Tawantinsuyo, religion is more a moral code than a metaphysical concept.
39 In the prologue he wrote for Cuentos andinos, Ezequiel Ayllón explained indigenous

popular justice in this way: “The substantive, common law, carried down from the most
remote antiquity, establishes two penal substitutes that are aimed at the social rehabilitation
of the delinquent and two punishments for murder and theft, which are the two crimes of
greatest social significance. The Yachishum or Yachachishum is limited to warning the
delinquent, making him understand the disadvantages of the crime and the advantages of
mutual respect. The Alliyachishum is supposed to forestall personal vengeance by
reconciling the delinquent with the injured party and his relatives, in the event that the
Yachishum has not had a restraining effect. Application of the two substitutes, which are not
unlike the procedures advocated by the penalists of the modern positivist school, is followed
by the penalty of confinement or exile called Jitarishum, implying a definitive expatriation. It
is the surgical removal of the diseased element that represents a threat to the security of
people and property. If the one who has been warned, reconciled, and expelled, robs or kills
again within the jurisdiction of the region, he receives the extreme penalty, with no hope of
pardon, called Ushanam Jampi. This final solution is death, usually by beating, after which
the body is quartered and thrown to the bottom of the river or to the dogs and birds of prey.
This trial is held in a single session, orally and publicly, and it includes the accusation,
defense, proof, sentence, and execution.”
40 Vilfredo Pareto, Trattato di sociologia generale, III, 265.
41 In this regard, the studies of Hildebrando Castro Pozo on the “indigenous

community” contain extremely interesting information which I have already referred to

elsewhere. This information absolutely agrees with the substance of Valcárcel’s statements in
Tempestad en los Andes, which might be thought to be overly optimistic and apologetic if
they were not confirmed by objective research. Furthermore, anyone can demonstrate the
unity, style, and character of indigenous life. Sociologically, the survival of what Sorel calls
“spiritual elements of work” in the community are of utmost value.
42 El libro de la nave dorada (Trujillo: Ediciones de “El Norte,” 1926).

239
 43 I also recognize that this essay has omitted some ranking contemporaries whose

writing must be considered as still continuing and developing. I repeat that my study is not
complete.

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 GLOSSARY
Aguardiente: Liquor, especially a cheap liquor distilled from sugar cane
Ayllu: A group of related Quechua families; a “community”
Caciquismo: Rule by caciques, or rural political bosses
Civilismo: A political movement that originally opposed the military through the
formation of the Partido Civil (Civil party), but that later represented the joint desire of the
aristocracy, big business, and the military to preserve the status quo; as a general term,
extreme conservatism
Colónida: A short-lived Peruvian literary movement to which Mariátegui once belonged,
anti-academic in spirit; also, the name of a literary journal
Comunero: Communal landholder
Costumbrista: A term used in Hispanic literature to describe the novel of customs and
similar prose
Encomendero: The holder of an encomienda
Encomienda: A tract of land which, with the Indians living on it, was granted by the
Spanish crown to favored individuals
Gamonal: An hacendado, latifundista, cacique, or other member of the provincial
“establishment”
Greguería: A brief, poetic impression or comparison, usually in one sentence, often
surrealistic; “invented” by the Spanish writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna
Hacendado: The owner of an hacienda, or landed estate
Latifundista: The owner of a latifundium, or large landed estate
Libra peruana: Ten soles; at the time this book was written, the libra peruana was worth
about four U.S. dollars
Limeño: A native of Lima; as an adjective, pertaining to Lima
Lp: Libra peruana
Mestizaje: The mixing of races, especially of the white and the Indian
Minga: A voluntary gathering of Quechuas to work on a communal project
Mita: The colonial system of forced labor under which Indians worked the farms and
mines
Montaña: As a region of Peru, the forested region east of the Andes
Pasadismo: A literary attitude that rejected the present in favor of the past, especially the
colonial era
Perricholismo: A literary attitude that romanticized the colonial era; pasadismo
Puna: The high plateau of the Andes
Quipu: The mnemonic record-keeping device of the Incas, consisting of a main cord
with from one to over a hundred colored, knotted strings pendant from it
Serrano: One who lives in a mountainous area, specifically the Peruvian sierra region
Sol: The monetary unit of Peru; SEE Libra peruana
Yanaconazgo: A form of tenant farming in which the farmer, or yanacón, in exchange for
the use of a plot of land on which to raise subsistence crops for his family, works on the

241
hacienda lands a given number of days each week and performs other services for the
landowner
Yaraví: A type of plaintive Quechua song, often accompanied by the quena, or
indigenous flute; literary yaravíes have been written
Zambo: A person of Negro and Indian blood

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 INDEX
Academy of the Spanish Language: 224
Agrarian Subdivision Company: 65
agriculture: and domestic markets, 16–17, 68–69; and feudalism, 18, 32; and socialism,
33; and liberalism, 34; coastal, 38, 54–55, 63–64, 68, 72; Prado on, 41; and revolution, 47–
48; and Civil Code, 50, 51; and irrigation, 53–54; in sierra, 54, 66, 73–74; and foreign
markets, 70–71
aguardiente: 58, 60
Aguirre Morales, Augusto: on communism, 74–75 n
Agustini, Delmira: 263, 266
alcohol: and Indian, 28. SEE ALSO aguardiente
Alma América: 217
Alomar, Gabriel: on Guillén, 262–263; mentioned, 229
America: Chateaubriand on, 7–8 n; and immigration, 72; and national literature, 189
Anastasio el Pollo: 194
Andes: Spaniards and, 5; metals in, 6; and agriculture, 35; and Peruvian economy, 164,
165; development of, 176; and Peru-Bolivia Confederation, 176; literature of, 201; and
Chocano, 218; mentioned, 10
animism: 128, 129
Anti-Duhring: 139
Apologético en favor de Góngora: 190
Apurímac: 165
Araníbar P., Alberto: and student reform, 110
Arequipa: movement of, 151; regionalism in, 165; and Lima, 202
Argentina: and western trade, 8: revolution in, 46–47; student and university reform in,
91, 94, 97, 98 n, 99, 107, 114; national literature of, 188, 194, 214; criollo in, 270
Atahualpa: execution of, 131
Aulard, Alphonse: on French Christianity, 147
Ayacucho: 177
Ayllón, Ezequiel: on indigenous justice, 277 n
ayllu: and farmland, 35, 57; communism in, 42; nature of, 56–58, 75 n; and totemism,
129. SEE ALSO “community”
Bakuninists: 209
bankers: and colonial independence, 8
Bard, Dr.: and Organic Law of Education, 88
Barreda y Laos, Felipe: 79
Basadre, Jorge: on Vallejo, 256 n
Baudelaire, Charles: and Alcide, 285
Beingolea, Manuel: 235
Belaúnde, Dr. Víctor Andrés: on university, 100, 101
Benedictine order: Sorel on, 41, 42
Billinghurst (president of Peru): policy of, 156; and Valdelomar, 230
Blok, Aleksandr: 245

243
 Bolivia: 158, 167, 176
Borges, Jorge Luis: influences on, 194; and Argentine literature, 269; mentioned, 245
Bouroncle, Dr.: on educational reform, 88–89
Bremond, Abbot: on Eguren, 237
Brunetière, Ferdinand: Riva Agüero and, 223
Bolsheviks: and rural class, 46; mentioned, 33, 180
bourgeoisie: European, 6; growth of, 11, 15; economy of, 12; and landowners, 13; and
feudalism, 32; role of, 52
British Empire: and capitalism, 7; and Grace Contract, 13
Buenos Aires: protests in, 202; Hidalgo in, 246; mentioned, 173
Bunge, Carlos Octavio: on Argentine literature, 214
Bustamante y Ballivián, Enrique: and Contemporáneos, 236, 237; on Eguren, 238, 240,
242
Byron, Lord: and Chocano, 218, 219
Cajamarca: 131
Callao: 174, 177
Calvinism: Engels on, 139; Maetzu on, 140–141
canción de las figuras, La: 241
Canning, George: on South America, 7, 8
Cápac Raymi: worship of, 134
capitalism: rise of, 7; in British Empire, 7; in Peru, 11, 15, 21, 32; and Castilla regime,
11; in Chicana Valley, 18, 19; and criollo landowner, 21; spirit of, 21 n; and coastal
agriculture, 54–55; effect of, on “community,” 55; and liberalism, 80–81; and education, 83,
121; and civilismo, 116; and use of machine, 117; and Protestantism, 138–139; Marx on,
140; and Reformation, 141
Casas, Fray Bartolomé de las: and emancipation, 27, 31–32; as missionary, 134, 138;
mentioned, 159
Castilla regime: and capitalism, 11; policy of, 50
Castro Pozo, Hildebrando: on “community,” 56–57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 283 n
Catholic Church. SEE Roman Catholic Church
Catholicism: political nature of, 142; in Spanish America, 142, 148; and Indian, 276.
SEE ALSO Roman Catholic Church.
caudillos: in Peru, 11; power of, 48–50; Vasconcelos on, 49–50; and latifundista, 52;
and liberals, 115
Caviedes. SEE Valle y Caviedes, Juan del
centralism: and civilistas, 155; under Billinghurst, 156; and decentralization, 166–170;
and federalism, 170; and gamonal, 172; and Lima, 172, 177
Chancay River: 73
Central Railroad: economic effect of, 176, 177
Chicana Valley: capitalism in, 18, 19
Chile: student unrest in, 91, 96
China: immigrants from, 9, 279–280; university reform in, 95–96; and national
literature, 188; mentioned, 80, 126
Chocano, José Santos: 217–221

244
 Christianity: in North America, 125; and pagan tradition, 132; Unamuno on, 136; and
revolution, 147
Cisneros, Luis Benjamín: 193
Civil Code: effect of, 50–51; García Calderón on, 51; Ugarte on, 51
civilismo: power of, 52–53; defeat of, 105; justification of, 102; and universities, 109,
115, 116; rise of 150; and centralism, 155; and Concha, 167; and intellectuals, 185–186,
222; literature of, 199
clergy: internal quarrels of, 138; in Peru, 146
coast: economy of, 11; and industry, 14; hegemony of, 15; agriculture on, 17; feudalism
on, 18; population on, 18; characteristics of, 162–163; description of, 164–165
collectivism: and Incas, 3, 4; and Spanish conquistadors, 4
Colombia: students in, 96; missionaries in, 125
colonialism: organization of, 5; and economy, 7; heritage of, 34; Prado on, 101–102,
205; and indigenism, 274
Colónida: effect of, 228, 229; founding of, 236
colónidos: characteristics of, 227–229; Eguren and, 235; and Hidalgo, 246; mentioned,
235
colonizers: Gobetti on, 4–5; characteristics of, 4, 41, 83, 133
communism: and Incas, 35, 74–76 n; religion and, 212
“community”: economic customs of, 42, 43; condition of, 45; and revolution, 48; and
Civil Code, 51; destruction of, 53; and republican legislation, 55; Villarán on, 56, 57; Castro
Pozo on, 56, 57, 59, 61; and latifundium, 59, 60; as social institution, 61. SEE ALSO ayllu
Concha, Carlos: on local government, 167
Condorcet, Marquis de: 78
“Confitear”: 231–232
Confucius: 279
conquest, Spanish: effects of, 3, 4
conquistadors: Gobetti on, 4–5 n; and Incan economy, 4; and religion, 125–126; and
colonization, 132–133, 143; and Lima, 176; and Garcilaso, 189
Conservatives: policies of, 154–155, 157
Contemporáneos: 235–236
copper: and Peruvian economy, 14
consumption, domestic: statistics of, 17
Córdoba. SEE University of Córdoba
Cosío, José Gabriel: and student reform, 110
cotton: export of, 16, 20; and labor, 17; and landowners, 18; and coast, 54, 55, 68–69;
mentioned, 19, 70
Council of Deans: 111
Counter Reformation: effect of, 132; Unamuno on, 136; mentioned, 134, 144
Créer: 84, 161
criollo: in sierra, 5; and independence, 7; and Indian, 31; of Lima, 199; and national
literature, 270, 271
Croce, Benedetto: 183, 187
Cuba: students in, 96

245
 Cuentos andinos: 275, 277
Cultura: founding of, 236
Cuzco: and student reform, 104, 202; Indians in, 134; regionalism in, 165; and railroad,
177; as Incan capital, 180, 181; mentioned, 67, 171
Czechoslovakia: agrarian laws in, 32
D’Annunzio: ideas of, 203; and Valdelomar, 231, 233, 246
Darío, Rubén: and Chocano, 219; and Eguren, 239, 242; influence of, 235; and
Spelucín, 284; mentioned, 216–217
decentralization: efforts toward, 159, 164–165, 166, 167
democracy: Vasconcelos on, 49–50
Democrats: and civilistas, 222
demonetization: 13
department: as political term, 161; function of, 168–169
derecho de matar, El: 264
Descriptión del cielo: 248–249
Deucalión: importance of, 258–259; style of, 261; mentioned, 240
Deustua, Dr.: on education, 115–119 passim
Díaz Mirón, Salvador: and Chocano, 219
Dominicans: as colonizers, 41; in theocracy, 132; and Indians, 133
Don Quixote: and Guillén, 259, 260
dualism: Peruvian, 188, 201
Durand, Augusto: and federalism, 155; and Democrats, 156; manifesto of, 160
Echevarría, Esteban: on American society, 46–47; mentioned, 52
education: of Indian, 26; Vasconcelos on northern, 40; Spanish, 52; influences on, 77,
78, 83, 86, 88, 121; and government, 78–79; Herriot on, 84–85; Renan on, 84; Pecqueur
on, 84; French, 83–86; Villarán on, 79–80, 85–86, 87; during Piérola regime, 86, 87; levels
of, 86; reform of, 88, 90, 92; Bouroncle on, 88–89; and university reform, 107; and social
problems, 114; and economic laws, 119; and industrialism, 120; indigenous, 122 n; in
colonial period, 133; and decentralization, 168, 169
Eguren, José María: as literary leader, 191; and colónidos, 228; poetry of, 235–236;
works analyzed, 237–245; as children’s poet, 238–239; symbolism in, 240–243; influences
on, 243–244
El Comercio: and “futurists,” 222
Elegía a la muerte de Alfonso XII: 193
Encinas, Dr. José A.: on Indian property, 23–24
encomenderos: and legislation, 24; and Riva Agüero, 184–185; during republic, 198; and
Gamarro, 216; and Eguren, 244
encomienda: abolishment of, 48; in theocracy, 131; Indians in, 133
Encyclopedists: and independence, 7; and González Prada, 209; and Melgar, 215
Engels, Friedrich: on Protestantism, 139–140
England: capitalism in, 7, 83, 139; and Spanish colonies, 8; and Peruvian economy, 10,
11, 12, 16
España: social criticism of, 203; writers in, 229
Espronceda, José de: and Chocano, 218, 219

246
 exports, Peruvian: statistics of, 15, 16, 17, 20
Extracto estadístico: quoted, 17
Falcón, César: on city development, 174; in Nuestra Epoca, 229
federalism: and gamonalismo, 154; and Democrats, 155, 156–157; and Liberals, 156–
157; and regionalism, 161; administrative divisions of, 166; in Santa Cruz, 167; and
centralism, 170
feudalism: and Spanish colonies, 5, 34; and western trade, 9; transformation of, 12; in
agriculture, 18, 32; on coast, 18; European, 19, 33, 62; and criollo, 21; and capitalism, 21;
and Indian, 24, 25; in republic, 32; Vasconcelos on, 39–40; in Russia, 44, 45; in America,
62; on sierra, 67–68, 73, 170–171; in Spain, 80–81; and civilismo, 116; and teaching, 118,
121; and church, 146
fief: in Peru, 18–19; and capitalism, 21
finance: in Peru, 14, 15–16
France: capitalism in, 83, 139; education in, 83–86; educational influence of, 121;
centralism in, 167; and literature, 186; and Eguren, 242; mentioned, 7
Frank, Waldo: on North America, 124–125; on Puritanism, 141–142
Frazer, James George: on Graeco-Roman civilization, 126; on religion, 128, 129–130,
135
Freemasonry: and independence, 146
French Revolution: and South America, 6; and rural class, 46; and War of
Independence, 146; and church and state, 147
friars: and Indian, 31, 32; activities of, 131, 133
Froebel, Friedrich: 120
“futurists”: and reform, 102; and national culture, 103, 104; and literature, 195, 221–
227 passim, 235
Galván, Dr. Luis E.: on teaching, 112
Gálvez, José: Leguiía on, 149–150; on colonial literature, 188; pasadismo of, 225; on
national literature, 225–226; and “futurists,” 235
Gálvez y Lorente, : and university, 100, 101
Gamarra, Abelardo (El Tunante): More on, 201–202; discussed, 215–217; and Gálvez,
226; and criolloism, 271
gamonales: role of, 22, 23; Encinas on, 23; and legislation, 24, 53; in sierra, 73, 74
gamonalismo: and Indian, 22, 23, 27, 30 n; and “community,” 56; and road program, 74;
and teachers, 122; and federalism, 154; and decentralization, 159–160, 167–168, 170;
reform of, 171, 172
García, Dr. Uriel: and student reform, 110; on mestizo, 278–279
García Calderón, Francisco: on Civil Code, 51; and university debate, 115; on colonial
period, 136; on Catholicism, 137, 149; positivism of, 210; and Riva Agüero, 223
García Calderón, Ventura: on González Prada, 203–204; and indigenism, 269–270
Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca: 188, 189
Gastañeta, Dr.: and student reform, 106
Germany: trade schools in, 120; capitalism in, 139; literature of, 186
Gibson, Percy: in Nuestra Epoca, 229
Gide, Charles: on agriculture, 71

247
 Girondo, Oliverio: 269
Gobetti, Piero: on Spanish colonizers, 4–5 n; on reform, 182–183
gold: in Peru, 10
Golden Bough, The. SEE Frazer, James George
Gómez de la Serna, Ramón: 234
Góngora, Luis de: imitators of, 188; mentioned, 190
González, Julio V.: on university reform, 93–94
González Prada, Manuel: on Indians, 23 n, 25, 26, 27; as literary leader, 102, 191; and
Palma, 197; importance of, 202; and popular universities, 203; and cosmopolitan period,
203–204; discussed, 203–213 passim; and Gamarra, 216, 222; and Chocano, 220; and
colónidos, 228; and radical movement, 235; in Contemporáneos, 236; Bustamante y Ballivián
on, 240; and Hidalgo, 246
“González Prada” popular universities: 121
González-Pradism: and protest, 151; dissolution of, 156; effects of, 199
Grace Contract: 13
greguería: and Valdelomar, 234
guano: and Peruvian economy, 9, 11, 12; and War of the Pacific, 12; loss of, 12, 13;
beneficiaries of, 52; mentioned, 14
Guillén, Alberto: discussed, 258–263; and colónidos, 258; sources of, 261; relativism of,
262; mentioned, 240
Güiraldes, Ricardo: and Argentine literature, 269
hacendado: and caudillos, 49; and health problems, 72
hacienda: and trade, 18, 19; and coastal agriculture, 62–63
Hamp, Pierre: on labor, 117–118; mentioned, 254
Hay a de la Torre, Víctor Raúl; and agrarian question, 58–59 n; and university reform,
106; on Mexico and Peru, 180–181 n; on Tradiciones, 197; on Gálvez, 225
Henríquez Ureña, Pedro: on Mexican culture, 118–119; on Spanish American
literature, 218; mentioned, 203
heraldos negros, Los: discussed, 250, 251–252, 256–257
Hernández, Julio Alfonso: and Contemporáneos, 236
Herrera y Reissig, Julio: 245, 285
Herrera, Fortunato L.: and student reform, 110
Herriot, Edouard: on French agriculture, 71; on education, 84; on regionalism, 161
Hidalgo, Alberto: discussed, 246–250; and Colónida, 246
Hindu religion: and Inca mythology, 126
Holy Office, The: Luchaire on, 144
Horas de lucha: 207, 212
Huacho: 73, 177
Huancayo: constitution of, 154
Hugo, Victor: and Chocano, 218, 219
Hurtado de Mendoza, Mariano: on university reform, 94–95
Ibarbourou, Juana de: importance of, 263; and Portal, 266
idealism: and university debate, 116
Imitatión de nuestro señor yo: 262

248
 imperialism: struggles against, 26
Imperial Valley: small property in, 65
imports, Peruvian: statistics of, 15, 17; monopolization of, 20; necessity of, 69
Incas: economy of, 3, 34–36; characteristics of, 3, 4; and communism, 35, 74–76 n;
Ugarte on, 35; and road program, 74; and work, 118; religion of, 125–126, 127, 128; Frazer
on, 129–130; rites of, 134–135; Valcarcel on, 161; and national literature, 193–194; and
Chocano, 219
independence: 7, 8. SEE ALSO War of Independence
Indian: and Spanish pioneer, 4–5; and population, 16; and gamonales, 22, 23; as
problem, 22, 25–28; González Prada on, 23 n, 25–27; Encinas on, 23–24; protection of,
24; Mayer and, 25; and Las Casas, 27, 31–32; and land tenure system, 28; and Socialists,
31; and friars, 31, 32, 133; and agrarian problem, 32, 34, 35; and slaves, 37; and War of
Independence, 47, 48; and property, 48; and civilismo, 53; and individualism, 57–58; Castro
Pozo on, 61; and education, 78, 122; Villarán on, 82; religion and, 127, 128, 134–136, 143,
276–277; Peralta on, 127 n; and magic, 129–130; Ors on, 158; Valcárcel on, 161, 275;
migration of, 164; redemption of, 171, 172; and national literature, 194; and Vallejo, 252;
Albújar on, 275–276; and mestizo, 282–283
indigenism: requirements of, 271–272; and Indians, 272–273; and colonialism, 274
industry: in Peru, 14; in cities, 19, 178–179; and hacienda, 19; German, 21; effects of,
117; and education, 120; and religion, 139; in Lima, 178–179
Inquisition: officials of, 4; in Peru, 131; and colonial period, 133; and Catholicism, 136;
as political institution, 144; mentioned, 34
Iras santas: 220
irrigation: by Incas, 35; coastal, 73
Italian language: and literature, 186; and Eguren, 242 n
Italy: immigrants from, 72; capitalism in, 139; regions in, 162; economic development
of, 176; political capital of, 180
International Congress of Students: propositions of, 96
Jacobinism: and independence, 78, 146; and regionalism, 153; and González Prada, 210
Japan: university reform in, 95–96
Jauja: 59, 202
Jesuits: and South America, 5, 41, 133
Junín: development of, 13; mineral wealth of, 176, 177
Kon: Inca worship of, 129
Kropotkin, Piotr: González Prada and, 209
labor: and manufacturing, 17; and latifundium, 23; coastal vs. sierra, 64; and university
reform, 92
landowners: and economy, 13, 17; role of, 20–21, 23. SEE ALSO latifundista
land tenure system: and Indian, 22, 23, 28; influence of, 34; in sierra, 55
Lanuza, José Luis: on university reform, 94
La Plata: students of, 114, 202
Larreta, Enrique: and Argentine literature, 269
Las Casas, Fray Bartolomé de: SEE Casas, Fray Bartolomé de las

249
 latifundista: supremacy of, 32; and slavery, 38, 39; as agent, 70; and Eguren, 244. SEE
ALSO landowners; latifundium
latifundium: and Jesuits, 5; and cities, 18, 19; Encinas on, 23; preservation of, 32, 53;
and socialism, 33; and revolution, 48; and caudillos, 49–50, 52; and Civil Code, 51; coastal,
54, 55, 59, 62; on sierra, 59, 62, 73; and “community,” 59, 60; and road program, 74; in
theocracy, 131
Laureles: 262
Lavalle, José Antonio de: 195, 196, 199
Law of 1886: 168
Laws of the Indies: and Indian “communities,” 42, 43
Leguía, Jorge Guillermo: on Gálvez, 149–150
Lenin: and industry, 178; Hidalgo on, 248
León y Bueno, José: on Indian, 27 n
liberalism: in England, 7; and agriculture, 33; and justice, 277
Liberals: policies of, 115, 154–155; during Pardo administration, 156; views of, 157
La Libertad: and landowners, 20–21
Lemaitre, Jules: 183
libro de la nave dorada, El: 284–285
libro de las parábolas, El: 262
Lima: life in, 4, 5; agriculture in, 68; and regionalism, 165; and centralism, 172–175;
founding of, 176; and railroad, 177; industry in, 178–179; future of, 181; More on, 202;
contrasts of, 203; and literature, 213; mentioned, 164
literature, Argentine: 194, 269
, Peruvian: renaissance of, 104; dualism in, 188; Spanish influence on, 190, 192;
periods of, 191; colonialism in, 192, 227, 235; of common people, 195; and sierra, 201;
Gálvez on, 225–226; and colónidos, 228; and poetry, 237; indigenism in, 268–269; and
criollos, 270, 271
, Russian: and Peruvian literature, 268–269
livestock: in Peru, 17
loans: and agriculture, 69
London: and Peruvian economy, 13; markets in, 70; and industry, 178; mentioned, 8
López Albújar, Enrique: on Indian, 275–276 n
Loreto: economy of, 162–163 n
Luchaire, Julien: on colonization, 143; on Holy Office, 144
lunarejo, El: 187, 190
Luque, Hernando de: 131
Maeterlinck, Maurice: and Eguren, 243
Maetzu, Ramiro de: on Calvinism, 140–141
magic: and Indians, 129
malaria: 72
Mamani, Inocencio: 187
Mama Pacha: cult of, 35
Mantaro River: electric plant on, 59
manufacturing: and labor, 17

250
 Marinetti, Filippo: and Hidalgo, 246
Martínez Luján, Domingo: 235
Marx, Karl: on Protestantism and capitalism, 140; and González Prada, 209
Maurras, Charles: 245
Maúrtua, Victor M.: 229
Mayer, Dora: 25
Mazo, Gabriel del: on university reform, 91
Melgar, Mariano: as folk writer, 195; discussed, 213–215 passim; Agüero on, 224; and
Vallejo, 250–251
Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino: 192, 193
mestizo: as colonizer, 5; and Indian problem, 31; and future hopes, 278; meaning of,
278–179; racial influences on, 279–282
Mexico: agriculture in, 33; Jesuits in, 42, 43; Henríquez Ureña on, 118–119; missionary
in, 125; magic in, 129–130; ecclesiastical privilege in, 146; de la Torre on, 180–181 n
Milan: growth of, 175, 176; mentioned, 135
military: in Peruvian economy, 13
minga: 58, 59
mining: and Spanish colonizers, 5, 10, 37; and economic system, 11; in the sierra, 11; in
Junín, 13; export products of, 17; and capitalist class, 17; and exploitation, 40, 41;
mentioned, 16
mir: Schkaff on, 44
missionary: and Indian, 27; role of, 125
Mistral, Gabriela: importance of, 263; and Portal, 266
mita: and Spaniards, 37; abolishment of, 48; mentioned, 74
monasteries: in Lima, 4, 134; role of, 41
More, Federico: on Palma, 200; on national literature, 200–203 passim; on González
Prada, 204; beliefs of, 229; and Hidalgo, 246
Moro, César: 269
Muzhikism: and revolution, 268
mysticism: 136, 137
Napoleon: and education, 84–85; and church and state, 147
nationalism: and Indian, 158–159; and literature, 186–188, 191
Negro: status of, 273; and mestizo, 279–280. SEE ALSO slavery
neogodos. SEE civilismo
Neothomism: 141
New England: and Spanish colonies, 4; and Protestantism, 143
New York: markets in, 70; and industry, 178; mentioned, 16, 180
Nietzsche, Friedrich: and Guillén, 261
nitrates: and Peruvian economy, 9, 11, 12; beneficiaries of, 52; mentioned, 14
nobility: Gobetti on, 4–5; in Lima, 5; creation of, 40
North America. SEE United States novel: and national literature, 189
Nuestra Epoca: founding of, 203; contributors to, 229
nuevo absoluto, El: 211
Office of Public Health: and coast, 72–73

251
 Oliviera, Dr.: and indigenous education, 122 n
Organic Law of Education: and reform, 88, 90; effect of, 112
Organic Law of Teaching: acceptance of, 105; and reform, 107
Orient: literature of, 188
Orrego, Antenor: on Vallejo, 250–251, 257; on poets, 256
Ors, Eugenio d’: 158–159
otrabotki: Schkaff on, 66
paganism: and Spanish Catholicism, 138
Páginas libres: 204, 207, 212, 213
Palacios, Alfredo L.: on university reform, 92–93, 107–108; and student rebellion, 103
Palma, Ricardo: writings of, 195–203 passim; More on, 200, 202; reputation of, 215;
Haya on, 225; mentioned, 188
Panama Canal: and Peruvian economy, 14
Panoplia lírica: 246
Papini, Giovanni: on religion, 141
Paraguay: Jesuits in, 41, 42, 43
Pardo y Aliaga, Felipe: writings of, 191, 195, 196, 199, 215
Pardo, José: policy of, 156
Pardo, Manuel: policy of, 155; and gamonalismo, 160
Pareja, Leandro: and student reform, 110
Pareto, Vilfredo: on societal structure, 280–281; on Indian, 283
Paris: financial market of, 139; and industry, 178
pasadismo: and “futurists,” 224, 225; and Vallejo, 252
Pecqueur, Constantin: on public education, 84
Peralta, Antero: on Indian pantheism, 127 n
perricholismo: and colonialism, 34; Sánchez on, 203, 224
Peru-Bolivia Confederation of Santa Cruz: 165–166, 176
Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich: 120
petroleum: and Peruvian economy, 14
Piérola, Nicolás de: policy of, 13, 14, 115, 155; education and, 86; and civilista party,
150, 222; and Lima, 202; and Gamarra, 216; and Chocano, 220
Pirandello, Luigi: and Valdelomar, 233; and Guillén, 262
Pizarro, Francisco: 131
Pizarro, Gonzalo: 133
Poland: agrarian laws in, 33; mentioned, 72
polovnischestvo: explanation of, 63
Ponce de León, Dr. Francisco: on feudalism, 67–68
popular sovereignty: in Peru, 160
Portal, Magda: discussed, 263–268
positivism: of Jesuits, 5; and González Prada, 210
Prado, Javier: on slavery, 38; on colonialism, 41, 101–102; on Negro religion, 137–138;
on viceroyal society, 118; on ecclesiastic science, 145; positivism of, 210; and Chocano, 220;
and Riva Agüero, 223
priests: in Spanish America, 4, 5; Villarán on, 144

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 Pro-Indian Association: 25–26
proletariat: and landowners, 13, 14
property, Indian: and Republicans, 32; Vasconcelos on, 39–40; Ugarte on, 43–44
Protestantism: in England, 7; and capitalism, 138–139; Engels on, 139; Marx on, 140;
in Spanish America, 142, 151, 152; in New England, 143
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph: 61
population: concentration of, in Peru, 16
Puritan: as colonizer, 83, 132, 143; nature of, 124–125
Quechua: religion of, 126, 127, 128; literature of, 187; and Vallejo, 252; mentioned, 171
Quintana, Manuel José: and Chocano, 218, 219
railroads: British domination of, 11, 13; development of, 175, 176–177, 178
Radical movement: and university reform, 94; activities of, 150–151, 209–210; and
centralism, 155; origin of, 207–208; and Gónzlez Prada, 208; and intellectuals, 222;
literature of, 235; and López Albújar, 275
realism: and Gónzalez Prada, 209
Reformation: and colonization, 132; and capitalism, 141; and France, 146; and
Freemasonry, 146; and national literature, 189; mentioned, 137
reform, constitutional: of 1873, 167; of 1919, 169
reform, educational: of 1902, 86–87; Villarán on, 87–88; of 1920, 87–90; and student
movement, 91–97, 99–100, 101–114
regionalism: nature of, in Peru, 153–154; and decentralization, 159–161; and
definitions of regions, 161–166; and centralism, 166–170, new approaches to, 170–172
religion: Papini on, 141; González Prada on, 212. SEE ALSO Catholicism;
Protestantism; Quechua
Renan, Ernest: and education, 84; Gónzalez Prada on, 210–211
rentier: role of, 71
revolution: American, 46–47; Bolshevik, 180
rice: 17
Rimbaud, Arthur: and Eguren, 240
Ripa Alberdi, : on university reform, 93
Riva Agüero, José de la: and “futurists,” 102, 221–227; criticism of, 184–186; Spanish
heritage of, 184 n; on colonial literature, 192–193, 199; on Palma, 196; positivism of, 210;
on Chocano, 218; on González Prada, 224; and independents, 236; mentioned, 219
Rodó, José Enrique: and Guillén, 261
Rodríguez, César A.: and Nuestra Epoca, 229
Roman Catholic Church: and Spain, 132–134; Romero on, 134–135; and Indians,
135–136; and Chocano, 221. SEE ALSO Catholicism.
romanticism: and Melgar, 214; and “futurists,” 224–225; Maurras on, 245; and
Hidalgo, 247; and Vallejo, 256
Romero, Emilio: on Incas and Catholicism, 134–135
Romier, Lucien: on villages, 18 n, 174; on French feudalism, 147–148
Rouveyre, André: on Eguren, 240
rubber: and Peruvian economy, 15, 17
Rumania: agrarian laws in, 33

253
 Ruskin, John: on work, 117
Russia: feudalism in, 44; rural class of, 46; crop yields in, 60; and university reform, 94;
trade schools in, 120; industry in, 178; futurism in, 268–269; mentioned, 33
Saco, Carmen: 269
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin: 183
Saint Ignatius of Loyola: characteristics of, 5; in Counter Reformation, 132, 137
Saint Paul: 136
Saint Rosa of Lima: García Calderón on, 137; mentioned, 237
Saint Teresa: in Counter Reformation, 132, 137
Saint Thomas: 141
Sánchez, Luis Alberto: on perricholismo, 203, 224
Sanctis, Francesco de: on national literature, 187–189; on epic poetry, 190 n
Sanguinetti, Dr. Florentino: on University of Buenos Aires, 98; on teaching, 100, 112
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino: 216
Schkaff, Eugene: on mir, 44; on otrabotki, 66; mentioned, 68
School of Literature: 103, 104, 112
schools: and Indian population, 28
science: Caillaux on, 12; and education, 120; González Prada and, 209
Seoane, Jorge: and Peruvian literature, 269
Seventh-Day Adventists: mentioned, 27
sierra: conquest of, 5, 6; and mining, 11; and agriculture, 17; characteristics of, 162–
163; description of, 164, 165. SEE ALSO Andes
Silva, José Asunción: mentioned, 245
Simbólicas: 239, 241
slavery: Gobetti on, 4–5; in Peru, 4, 9; Spanish use of, 5, 37, 38; González Prado on,
38, 137–138; Ugarte on, 39; and Castilla, 50; and coastal landowners, 54, 62; and
Catholicism, 137, 143; and national literature, 194
Social Democrats: and trade schools, 120
socialism: and agriculture, 33; and viceroyalty, 34; and rural class, 46; and education,
121; and religion, 151
Sorel, Georges: on monasteries, 41, 42; philosophy of, 61; on religion, 152
South America: independence of, 7–9; magic in, 130
Soviets: and religion, 212
Spain: and viceroyalty, 4; and colonies, 4, 8, 9; and economy, 4, 7; influence of, 34;
educational influence of, 78, 121; decadence in, 80–81; during Inquisition, 133; mysticism
in, 136–137; Catholicism in, 139; scholasticism in, 145; regions in, 162
Spanish America: religion in, 125, 142, 143
Spanish Reformation: Unamuno on, 132
Spanish Empire: demise of, 8
Spanish language: and literature, 186, 187
Spelucín, Alcides: on Trujillo, 20 n; discussed, 283–285
Student Congress of Montevideo: declarations of, 99; and “futurists,” 102
Student Federation: reorganization of, 107; power of, 111

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 students: characteristics of, 95, 110; demands of, 96–97; national congress of, 104–105;
participation of, 111
sugar: and Peruvian economy, 16, 17, 18, 20; and coastal agriculture, 54, 68
Tagore, Rabindranath: on work, 117; mentioned, 245
Taine, Hippolyte: on French education, 86; followers of, 223; mentioned, 102
Talara: 175
Tawantinsuyo: works of, 35; Valcárcel on, 35; and religion, 126, 127–128, 135; and
Peru-Bolivia Confederation, 176; survivors of, 274–275
teaching: reform of, 112, 113
textile industry: in Peru, 179
theocracy: in Peru, 131
Third Republic: education during, 85; Peruvian model of, 167
trade: between South America and West, 8; with U.S. and Britain, 14–15
Tradiciones peruanas: discussed, 195–202
trade school: and education, 120, 121
transportation: and capitalist class, 17
Trilce: quoted, 253; Vallejo on, 257–258
Trinity College of Huancayo: mentioned, 79
Trujillo: Spelucín on, 20; and regionalism, 165; and independence, 181; protests in, 202
Tucuipac Manashcan: 187
Tunante, El. SEE Gamarra, Abelardo
Ugarte, César: on Incas, 35; on slavery, 39; on Indian property, 43–44; on Civil Code,
51; on conquistadors, 82–83; in Nuestra Epoca, 229
Unamuno, Miguel de: on Spanish Reformation, 132; on Christianity, 136; on
mysticism, 136–137; on Protestantism, 143; and Guillén, 261; mentioned, 5, 229
Unión Nacional: origin of, 207–208; and Radical party, 210
United States: Constitution of, 6; and Peruvian trade, 14, 15; capitalism in, 83, 139;
education in, 118, 121; Frank on, 124; early development of, 143; political capital of, 180
universities: and student movement, 91, 96–99; Palacios on, 92–93; Ripa Alberdi on,
93; Gónzalez on, 93–94; Lanuza on, 94; Hurtado de Mendoza on, 94–95; popular, 95; in
China and Japan, 95–96; purpose of, 97–98; conservative oligarchy in, 99, 100, 109;
Belaónde on, 100, 101; the colony in, 100–101; Peruvian reform of, 103, 105, 107, 110,
112–113 n; of the Americas, 133; Frank on North American, 142
University Center: and “futurists,” 102
University Council: and Organic Law, 112
University Federation of Buenos Aires: and student movements, 91
University of Arequipa: and reform, 114
University of Buenos Aires: history of, 98; mentioned, 112
University of Córdoba (Argentina): student demands at, 91, 97, 103, 114
University of Cuzco: reform at, 110–111, 114; mentioned, 67
University of Lima. SEE University of San Marcos.
University of San Marcos: and reform, 96–97, 104–109, 111–112
University of Trujillo: reactionaries at, 108, 113–114
Uruguay: national literature of, 270–271 n

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 urbanization: in Lima, 173
Ureta, Alberto J.: 237
Urquieta, Miguel Angel: 151
Valdelomar, Abraham: and D’Annunzio, 203; and Colónida, 227; characteristics of, 230,
246; works of, 230–234; and Cultura, 236; and Criolloism, 271
Valcarcel, Luis E.: on Indian, 28–30 n, 161, 252, 275; on Tawantinsuyo, 35; and
student reform, 110; on Peruvian religion, 126; Maríategui on, 163; on Incan society, 171
Valle, Félix del: in Nuestra Epoca, 229; on poetesses, 264
Valle y Caviedes, Juan del: 188, 190
Vallejo, César: in Nuestra Epoca, 229; discussed, 250–258; and Indian, 251, 254;
nostalgia of, 252–254; pessimism in, 254–255; Basadre on, 256 n; and Portal, 264; and
Spelucín, 285
Vasconcelos, José: on caudillos, 49–50; on enthusiasm, 109–110; on native cultures,
130–131; and Prada, 211; on future, 278
viceroyalty: effects of, 4; and socialism, 34; remnants of, 34; loyalty to, 78; basis of, 81;
people of, 133; and Lima development, 176; and national literature, 194
Vienna: finance in, 179–180
Villarán, Dr. Manuel Vincente: on “community,” 56; on education, 79–80, 85–86, 87,
88, 90, 102; on social order, 81–82; as university rector, 105, 106; departure of, 109; and
Deustua, 115, 118; and colonial ideology, 123; on colonial priesthood, 144
War of ’79: and education, 86, 168
War of Independence: economic aspects of, 6; and feudalism, 34; and economy, 39;
character of, 45, 46; conditions during, 46; participants in, 47, 146; effect of, on Lima, 176;
mentioned, 32
Washington, D.C.: 180
West: influence of, 8, 14
wheat: import of, 17; scarcity of, 69, 70
Wilson, Woodrow: philosophic influence of, 92; and colonidismo, 229; mentioned, 192
wool: export of, 16
yanacón: demand for, 64–65; Ponce de León on, 67–68
yanaconazgo: explanation of, 63; and economic development, 64, 65–68
yaraví: and Melgar, 213, 214; Riva Agüero on, 215
Zulen, Pedro S.: death of, 108; and independents, 236; mentioned, 106, 112
Zum Felde, Alberto: on Uruguayan literature, 270–271

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