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The country that received Mariátegui when he returned to Lima in March 1923, after three and a half years of exile in Europe, was slightly different from the one he had left behind. Augusto B. Leguía had ruled Peru since 1919 in a term that will be known as the oncenio, that is, eleven years in office. During the oncenio, an initial

‘honeymoon’ between his government and popular sectors had mutated by 1922 into a more explicitly authoritarian and repressive attitude. Indeed, important sectors of the working class had initially adhered to his promises of true democracy and economic development; the students had even proclaimed him as the ‘Master (maestro) of the youth’; and in his first year in office the Patronage of the Indigenous Race (Patronato de la Raza Indígena) was created as a measn to incorporate indigenous issues into his administration –if in a merely corporativist fashion (cf.

Cotler, 1988: 188).

Leguía’s oncenio is considered by historians such as Julio Cotler or Alberto Flores Galindo and Manuel Burga as the end of the ‘aristocratic republic’, an expression of the oligarchic pact characteristic of many nineteenth-century countries in Latin America. This moment witnessed the manifest breakdown of the unity that dominant groups had achieved during the previous thirty years. They argue that during the 1920s a deep reorganization of Peru’s productive structure began by means of the intensification of transference of capital from US, a concomitant increase in proletarianization, and an important countryside-to-city migration.

Cotler (1988: 193ff) situates here the outset of ‘modern Peru’, when a fraction of the local bourgeoisie, eager to directly negotiate with imperialist capital, took control of the state apparatus through an active centralist policy, largely based on international loans.³⁶ The author concludes that “the state became the thorough and refined expression of the exporter bourgeoisie” (1988: 186). On the other hand,

36 Flores Galindo and Burga (1980: 230) add that, during this term, the Peruvian public debt increased by 1000 per cent, an amount that Cotler (1988: 196) reckons to approximately 100 million dollars; conversely, the interest of the external debt increased from 2,6 to 21 per cent of the national budget between 1920 and 1930.

65 either by cooptation or open repression, the organized proletariat had lost by 1923 the political initiative displayed during the popular strikes of the biennium 1918-1919. From those mass-demonstrations demanding the eight-hour working day and the lowering of the prices of subsistence goods, the Peruvian working class suffered an ebb to more rearguard positions.

In this context, the students were perhaps the most active social force, particularly with the creation of the UPGP in 1920, in the wave of the University Reform movement. The University Reform – whose initial outburst took place in Córdoba in 1918 – was a continental movement for democratization of academic institutions, at that time a meeting point for a young generation of intellectuals committed to politics in a new fashion. As a movement largely based on new middle classes arising from within the modernization processes, these social actors suffered unprecedented forms of precariousness and marginalization that contributed to their engagement with public, political activities in a newer fashion (cf. Rama, 1996, ch. 4 and 5). In the discourse of the 1921 First International Conference of Students in Mexico City, Gabriel del Mazo (the leader of the reformist movement in Argentina) affirmed that “it is mandatory for students to establish popular universities, freed of any dogmatic and partisan spirit and that take part in the workers’ struggles, inspiring their actions in the modern postulates of social justice…”(cited in Melgar Bao, 1999: 44) In Peru, and despite the fact that these organizations were – to a certain extent and at the outset – sponsored by Leguía himself, they soon became the place where the opposition to his government started to ferment. The head of the Peruvian universities at the time was Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (1895-1979).

Soon after his return to Peru, Mariátegui started to collaborate with Haya de la Torre, first in the UPGP’s talks and then taking charge of the journal Claridad – the organ of the Peruvian Student Union – after Haya’s exile in 1923.³⁷ The increasing state repression eventually led to the closing down of the journal, while the UPGP went on working but in a semi-clandestine guise. In parallel, a stronger alliance

37 One of the linchpins of the so-called ‘new generation’ in Latin America was the proliferation of magazines named Claridad (thereby emulating Henri Barbusse’s Clarté) and the foundation of popular universities (universidades populares) in countries such as Cuba, México, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Panamá, Perú, Chile and Argentina. For an account of the impact of the University reform during the 1920s in Latin America, see Patricia Funes (2006).

66 between the activists exiled by Leguía and those who stayed in the country began to forge a project in which Latin American revolution was placed at the centre of Peru’s politics. The confluence between the clarification of the country’s primary problem and the continuity of Latin America’s situation in the world setting gave life to the American Popular-Revolutionary Alliance, APRA. The conformation of this organization was made public in 1925 by Peruvian exiles in Mexico led by Haya, with the active participation of Mariátegui and other Peru-based militants.³⁸

The United Front and the APRA Project The tactic of the united front was proclaimed by the Third International from 1921 and corroborated in its 1924 Fourth Congress. In May 1924, Mariátegui wrote the short article ‘May Day and the United Front’, saluting the working class on its day, and giving a synthetic formulation of the matter: “[b]efore the perhaps inevitable hour of division, it is up to us to complete much common work, much shared labour” (2011: 342). The main aim of such a common labour – to provide the Peruvian proletariat a more definite class consciousness – is decomposed by Mariátegui into three general orientations: to distance the working class from

‘yellow assemblies’, to fight against reaction, and to defend the organs of ‘popular culture’ (i.e. proletariat organizations and press). Mariátegui immediately adds a more concrete one: “[w]e all have the obligation of sustaining the vindications of the enslaved and oppressed Indigenous race” (Ibid.). These are the elementary historical tasks to be embraced by the Peruvian vanguard in the actual stage of its formation; elementary means here basic and thus prior to any ideological or doctrinaire consideration:

The united front […] is a contingent, concrete, practical action. The program of the united front only considers the immediate reality, outside of any abstraction and of any utopia. Recommending the united front is not, then, recommending any ideological confusion. Inside the united front everyone should keep his own affiliation and his own ideology.

(Ibid., emphasis added)

38 For an account on the significance of the exile in the formation of APRA, see Martín Bergel (2009); see also Ricardo Melgar Bao (2003).

67 Insisting on the ‘concrete’ character of the united front, Mariátegui argues that: “[t]o form a united front is to have an attitude of solidarity before a concrete problem, before an urgent necessity. […] What is important is that these groups and tendencies know how to understand each other before the concrete reality of the day”. (2011:

343) This emphasis on the concrete might be read as the dialectical unity of international and national class solidarity and consciousness. Mariátegui enumerates some abstract, very general instances –class solidarity and consciousness, defence of workers’ organizations, joint fight against reaction– and then introduces what he himself will call some months later Peru’s principal problem: the enslaved and oppressed Indigenous race as the country’s central conflict.

Therefore, Mariátegui understood that without the international perspective the Peruvian working class remains blind to its own conditions of possibilities to actually and effectively participate in the world revolution; conversely, without an attentive and active commitment to the most urgent problems of its own national reality and its subaltern subjects, it remains groundless and thus lacking

‘hegemonic’ ability, to put it with Gramsci. Hence, in the context of the uneven and combined development of a capitalist system driven by imperialist forces, the tactic of the united front has to be situated in the socio-racial oppression of Peru’s and other Latin American indigenous populations. Indigeneity becomes thus the locus of an emergent revolutionary politics which needs in turn be nationalized, grounded in a concrete terrain under the guidance of anti-imperialist socialism.

National hegemony, in this sense, functions as the action that synchronizes two different but coeval temporalities: the archaic Indian and the modern proletariat.

This understanding of the dialectics of the cosmopolitan and the autochthonous is apparent in the history of what was perhaps Mariátegui’s most ambitious project. As recounted by Fernanda Beigel (2006: 181ff) and Jorge Coronado (2009: 26–9), the initial name given to his much-dreamed journal was Vanguardia. However, by the suggestion of indigenista painter José Sabogal (who would eventually paint its most iconic cover-pages), it was called Amauta, a Quechua word which means teacher, poet, or wise person –but also the one who transmits a certain worldview, the translator. The choice of this name demanded an explanation which was provided in its first editorial sheet: “This title translated our

68 affiliation to the Race, it reflects our homage to Inkaism. But with this journal the word Amauta acquires a new meaning. We are going to create it anew. […] we will always consider Peru within the world scenario.” (Maria tegui, 1987: 239) In consequence, from its very name the journal presents itself as a translational endeavour which advocates for the encounter of modern revolutionary classes with indigenous traditions –in other words, a translation through a recreated tradition.

Such a recreation, conversely, will depend on building a new collective subject – a vanguard – through what Mariátegui foresaw as a process of “polarization and concentration”. This process – arguably the projected consolidation of the united front as such – will partially take place in Amauta itself, at least in its more abstract issues:

The work of the journal will set us in solidarity further. At time it will attract other good elements, it will dispel some of the floating and apathetic who now flirt with the vanguard […] Amauta will winnow the vanguard’s men – militants and sympathizers – until it separates the wheat from the chaff. It will produce or precipitate a phenomenon of polarization and concentration. (Ibid.)

The images used by Mariátegui in this passage project forth a kind of chemical force-field where, in the process of presenting definitions and their attendant polemics, some elements are attracted (concentrated) while others are dispelled (polarized). To be sure, the multi-faceted character of Amauta contributed to this action-and-reaction process. Among the recurrent themes of the magazine, it is worth mentioning: educational issues, in particular regarding to the aftermaths and continuing significance of University reform; the nature and function of artistic production; the national question in Latin America, related to the nature of imperialism and the struggle against it, as well as the forms of struggle in countries with massive indigenous populations; and the philosophical implications of contemporary discoveries such as the unconscious, spatio-temporal relativity, or aesthetic techniques of representation. From its fifth issue the journal included a section headed ‘The trial against gamonalismo’, which aimed to denounce situations affecting the Indians. It remains to be said that Mariátegui published in Amauta more than half of the Seven Interpretive Essays, including significant parts of the

69 essays on Peru’s economy (first), the land’s problem (third), public education (fourth), regionalism and centralism (sixth), and literature on trial (seventh). Finally, the journal was one of the locates in which the ‘polemic over indigenismo’ took place.

The Polemic over Indigenismo This polemic constitutes an important chapter in Peru’s intellectual history. Initiated in Amauta’s pages, it brought together a wide range of opinions and statements on the nature, current status and possible solutions to the oppressed condition of the Indians. The main contenders in the polemic were Mariátegui and Luis Alberto Sánchez –the later a promising intellectual at that time, later related to both APRA and Haya de la Torre. Among other participants in the polemic, there were Enrique López Albújar, Luis Emilio Valcárcel, José Agustín Escalante, Antenor Orrego, Ventura García Calderón, Manuel González, and Manuel Seoane.³⁹

Yet, what should be understood here by indigenismo? Mirko Lauer (1997) asserts that there existed in the period 1919-1940 two kinds of indigenista discourse in the Andes. On the one hand, there was a socio-political discourse championing the integration of the indigenous population in all aspects of social life. On the other, there was an aesthetic-cultural current whose aim was to incorporate the main elements of the indigenous cultural traditions (literature, painting and drawing, sculpture and weaving, music, archaeology and museography) in the country’s cultural landscape. Mariátegui sought to connect both the aesthetical-cultural and the political-social elements, so as to propose ‘the Indian’ as the central element of the national reconstruction.

A brief summary of the polemic’s antecedents is in order. In issues 4 and 5 of Amauta, Enrique López Albújar’s “On the Indian Psychology” and Luis Emilio Valcárcel’s “The Indigenous Problem” were published. At the same time, Mariátegui submitted to Mundial the series of articles ‘Indigenism in National Literature’ – in three instalments that will later comprise the section of ‘Literature on Trial’ that deals with indigenist literature. López Albújar (1976) depicted the Indian

39 A compilation of the main articles and columns written with regard to this debate was published in Manuel Aquézolo comp. (1976). See also Gerardo Leibner (1999) and Jorge Coronado (2009, ch. 2).

70 as two-faced, that is, she shows one face to ‘civilization’ and mistis (white people) and a different one towards themselves. Conversely, in a manifesto-like pamphlet Valcárcel represented in turn a ‘mestizo Arequipa’: in the mixture of the Indian and the European, the latter constitutes the decadent part, while the former boosts a

“new social status”. He set together Gandhi’s active non-violence, Sorel’s myth of general strike, and Bolshevism (“the dictatorship of indigenous proletariat seeks its Lenin”) to advance what he called an ‘Andean doctrine’ (“doctrina andinista”), an effort at “aboriginal ideology” (1976: 26). Such a positive account of the indigenous character contrasts with López Albújar’s, for whom the external face of the Indian – allegedly the only we can see and know – reflects a dishonest, thieving, superstitious, materialistic, and potentially treacherous nature; other features highlighted by the author are collective spirit, warrior nature, Spinozist-like pantheism, and addiction to coca leaf.

Mariátegui, in turn, offered in the pages of Mundial a general survey of the indigenista ‘literature’ produced over the recent period. In his account, the Indian comes to represent not a local or ethnographic colour but the very possibility of speaking of the Peruvian nation; the Indian is thus irreducible to a more abstract concept of the national, such as literary criollismo: “In Peru, criollismo has not only been sporadic and superficial, but it has been nourished on colonial sentiment. It has not been an affirmation of autonomy. […] Our indigenism (nativismo), which is also necessary for revolution and emancipation, cannot be a simple criollismo.”

(Mariátegui, 1974: 271) Crollismo had been Luis Alberto Sánchez’s designation for the more authentic moment of national letters (1921; 1974; cf. also Costigan, 1994). In Mariátegui’s view, the definition of the ‘national character’ derived from this attribution only contributes to blur indigenous expressions, by means of an amalgamation of elements typical of miscegenation ideologies. Sanchez addressed the issue against Mariátegui in unusually aggressive terms, pointing out the absurd and barely constructive contours of the polemic and the non-sense in the coupling of indigenismo and socialism. Mariátegui’s counter-argument, in turn, expressed that

from the confluence or amalgamation of ‘indigenismo’ and ‘socialism’, no one who looks at the content and essence of things can be surprised.

Socialism organizes and defines the vindications of the masses, of the working class. And in Peru the masses –the working class– are

four-71 fifths indigenous. Our socialism would not be, thus, Peruvian –nor would it even be socialism– if it did not primarily support indigenous claims (1986: 217).

Sánchez’s reply came in a more virulent fashion, echoing the idea according to which socialism operates by means of opportunistically taking up local discomfort in order to channel its own power ambitions. Mariátegui’s next intervention was thus oriented to further define the socialist content of the claims:

The vindication that we argue for is that of labour. It is that of the working classes, without distinction between coast and highlands, Indian or cholo. If in this debate – that is, in theory – we distinguish the problem of the Indian, it is because in practice it is also differentiated in the facts. The urban worker is a proletarian; the Indian peasant is still a serf. […] The primary problem that has to be solved here is, consequently, the liquidation of feudality whose expressions are two:

latifundium and servitude. If we do not recognize the priority of this problem, yes it would be right, then, to accuse us of not being tied to Peruvian reality (2011: 176, trans. modified; cf. Maria tegui, 1986: 222) In my view, the significance of the polemic lies in the recognition of the ‘colour line’

that cuts across Peru’s class struggle, permeating the so-called ‘superstructural’

spheres such as literature and linking the Indian cause to socialism. The anti-Indian stance characteristic of Peru’s entire history is, in Mariátegui’s view, an index of the sensitivity of the country’s superstructures to those of the imperialist conjuncture.

On the other hand, the amalgamation of national and socialist tasks is a hallmark of the intuition of uneven and combined development that informs (albeit implicitly) Mariátegui’s Marxism, drawing the lines along which contemporary battles for social emancipation were expressed through indigenous, subaltern elements. A close attention to vital cultural forces made apparent, in Mariátegui’s account, their potential confluence with socialism, a possibility funded for instance in the affinities between political and aesthetic vanguards of the time – indigenismo. It is as though Mariategui endows the Indian, presented hitherto as a monolithic and singular entity, both with the role of grounding and completing the nation, and of sharing the socialist paths of the working class.

72 By means of this debate, the prospects of the united front found a pathway of

‘concentration’ in the searching for a deeper dialogue between socialism and indigenismo, while ‘polarizing’ itself from those positions reactive to comprehend such an encounter. Therefore, the polemic over indigenismo constituted a decisive step in the maturation of a hegemonic will – understood as the attempt to synchronize the temporal lag separating the archaic and the modern. The terms of the debate were: the validity of the convergence of indigenismo and socialism in political-revolutionary terms; the valuation of the pre-colonial period as source of national elements, and the parallel criticism of the colonial and republican epochs;

the consideration of the indigenous community as traceable back to the pre-colonial period; and finally, the possibility for the Indian, as a subject, to be the pivotal element of national reconstruction –rather than one of its discrete components and hence subordinated to a more abstract representation such as ‘criollismo’ (in

the consideration of the indigenous community as traceable back to the pre-colonial period; and finally, the possibility for the Indian, as a subject, to be the pivotal element of national reconstruction –rather than one of its discrete components and hence subordinated to a more abstract representation such as ‘criollismo’ (in