Peru’s Principal Problem

Originally published (in Spanish): *Mundial*, Lima, 9 December 1924

Edited and Translated by Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker

Before one turns off the echoes of the celebration of the figure and the work of Clorinda Matto Turner,#1 before the delegates of the fourth congress of the Indigenous race disperse, we turn our eyes to the fundamental problem, to Peru‘s principal problem. We say something that Clorinda Matto Turner would certainly say if she were still alive. This is the best tribute that the new men, the young men from Peru, can pay to the memory of this singular woman who, at a time more complicated and cooler than our own, nobly rose up against the injustices and crimes of the exploiters of the Indigenous race.

The creole people, the metropolitan people, did not like this tough issue. But their tendency to ignore, to forget, should not be spread. The gesture of an ostrich that hides its head in the sand when threatened is too dumb. Refusing to see a problem does not make it go away. The problem of the Indians is the problem of four million Peruvians. It is the problem of three-quarters of the Peruvian population. It is the problem of the majori ty. It is the problem of the nationality. The unwillingness of our people to study it and approach it honestly is a sign of mental laziness and, above all, moral insensitivity.

The viceroyalty, from this and other points of view, appears to be less responsible than the republic. Originally the full responsibility for the misery and depression of the Indians fell to the viceroyalty. But in those inquisitorial days, a great Christian voice, that of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, vigorously defended the Indians against the brutal methods of the colonizers. There has not been so stubborn and effective an advocate of the aboriginal race during the republic.²

While the viceroyalty was a medieval and foreign regime, the republic is formally a Peruvian and liberal regime. The republic, therefore, had a duty the viceroyalty did not have. The republic has the responsibility to raise the status of the Indian. And contrary to this duty, the republic has impoverished the Indians. It has compounded their depression and exasperated their misery. The republic has meant for the Indians the ascent of a new ruling class that has systematically taken their lands. In a race based on customs and an agricultural soul, as with the Indigenous race, this dispossession has constituted a cause for their material and moral dissolution. Land has always been the joy of the Indians. Indians are wed to the land. They feel that life comes from the earth and returns to the earth. For this reason, Indians can be indifferent to everything except the possession of the land which by their hands and through their encouragement is religiously fruitful.Creole feudalism has behaved, in this respect, worse than Spanish feudalism. Overall, the Spanish encomendero often had some of the noble habits of feudal lords. The creole encomendero has all the defects of a commoner and none of the virtues of a gentleman.

The servitude of the Indian, in short, has not decreased under the republic. All uprisings, all of the Indian unrest, have been drowned in blood. Indian demands have always been met with a military response. The silence of the puna afterward guards the tragic secret of these responses. The republic has in the end restored, under the title of the road labor draft, the system of mitas. Our nationalists, of course, have protested against this restoration. Jorge Basadre,#3 a young avant-garde writer, has been one of the few who have felt the duty to denounce, in a moderate and discreet study that nevertheless has a tremendous result, the true nature of the road conscription. The rhetoric of nationalism has not followed his example.

In addition, the republic is also responsible for the lethargic and weak energies of the race. The Túpac Amaru insurgency proved, in the viceroyalty‘s seat, that the Indians were still able to fight for their freedom. Independence weakened this capability. The cause of the redemption of the Indians became under the republic a demagogic speculation of some caudillos. Creole parties have signed up for their program. And thus the Indians lost their will to fight for their demands.

But by postponing the solution of the Indian problem, the republic has postponed the realization of its dreams of progress. A policy that is truly national in scope cannot dispense with the Indian; it cannot ignore the Indian. The Indian is the foundation of our nationality in formation. Oppression makes the Indian an enemy of civilization. It practically annuls an element of progress. Those who impoverish and repress the Indian, impoverish and repress the nation. Indians cannot be creators of wealth if they are exploited, mocked, and stultified. Devaluing and depreciating someone as a person is equivalent to devaluing and depreciating that person as a producer. Only when Indians gain the value of their work will they acquire the quality of consumer and producer that a modern nation‘s economy needs from all of its members. When one speaks of Peruvianness, one should begin by investigating whether this Peruvianness includes the Indian. Without the Indian no Peruvianness is possible. People of a truly bourgeois, liberal democratic, and nationalist ideology should particularly appreciate this truth. The motto of all nationalisms, beginning with the nationalism of Charles Maurras and L‘Action Française, says: ―All that is national is ours."

The problem of the Indian, which is the problem of Peru, cannot find its solution in an abstract humanitarian formula. It cannot be the result of a philanthropic movement. The patronage of Indigenous caciquesand phony lawyers are a mockery. Leagues of the type of the former Pro-Indigenous Association provide a voice clamoring in the wilderness. The ProIndigenous Association did not arrive on time to become a movement. Their action was gradually reduced to the generous, selfless, noble, personal actions of Pedro S. Zulen and Dora Mayer. As an experiment, the Pro-Indigenous Association was a failure. It served to contrast and measure the moral callousness of a generation and an era.

The solution to the problem of the Indian must be a social solution. It must be worked o ut by the Indians themselves. This concept leads to seeing the meeting of Indigenous congresses as a historical fact. The Indigenous congresses have not yet formed a program, but they do represent a movement. They indicate that the Indians are beginning to gain a collective consciousness of their situation. The least important aspect of the Indian Congress is its deliberations and its votes. The transcendent, historic aspect is the congress itself. The congress is an affirmation of the will of the race to make their own claims. But the Indians lack a national presence. Their protests have always been regional. This has contributed in large part to their defeat. Four million peoples, conscious of their numbers, do not despair of their future. These same four million people, though they are nothing more than an inorganic mass, a dispersed crowd, are unable to decide its historical course.#4 In the Indian Congress, the Indian from the North has met the Indian from the center and the Indian from the South. The Indian in congress, moreover, has been in contact with vanguard leaders in the capital. This vanguard treats them as brothers. Their accent is new, their language is also new. Indians recognize in them their own emotions. These emotions widen with this contact. This is something that is still very vague, very confused, something outlined in this human nebula, which probably, surely, contains the seeds of the future of Peruvian nationality.

Notes

1. Clorinda Matto Turner was a Peruvian feminist indigenista writer of the late nineteenth century. Her most famous work is Aves sin nido, a novel of Indigenous life and priestly oppression in Peru. See Birds Without a Nest (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). ↩
2. This paragraph and the following two largely repeat part of "On the Indian Problem." ↩
3. Jorge Basadre was Mariátegui‘s contemporary who became one of Peru‘s best-known intellectuals and historians. ↩
4. This paragraph to this point is also found in "Aspects of the Indian Problem" in Seven Essays. ↩