Читать книгу A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art - Группа авторов - Страница 41

Defining “indigenism” is no easy task. First, and for reasons that are not entirely clear, the use of the Spanish term (indigenismo) has become customary among English‐speaking scholars, lending indigenism a certain air of exoticism that it does not possess in its original language and further complicating what is already confused in Spanish.

If we take indigenism to mean the defense of the Indian against oppression, then it is a tradition of social criticism that dates back to the passionate preaching of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas and is, therefore, as old as the exploitation of the Indians (Marzal 1993). More narrowly, however, the label has been chiefly employed to refer to a group of artists and intellectuals that, from the late nineteenth‐ to the mid‐twentieth century and on a more or less continental scale, placed the Indian at the center of their projects. These “indigenists” were themselves neither peasants nor Indians. Rather, they were white Creoles or mestizos from the urban middle classes who had, for aesthetic or political reasons, become interested in the indigenous aspects of their respective countries.

Beyond this shared focus, the indigenists had relatively little in common. Unlike other “isms,” indigenism was not a formal school, lacked a doctrinal basis, and never produced a manifesto. We are faced, then, with a movement that was essentially heterogeneous. This should not in fact come as a surprise because the indigenous populations of Latin America – around which indigenist thought and art swirled – likewise do not cohere into a single block. National differences are critical. Ideas about who the Indians are and what they might mean for the future of the country across national traditions have largely depended on two factors: (i) the historical and cultural legacy that bolsters the figure of the Indian in each country, and (ii) the weight of indigenous groups within the ethnic and socioeconomic composition of each nation. There is thus no point of comparison between the indigenisms of Mesoamerica and the Andean region, whose native populations can be considered inheritors of the great agrarian empires of the pre‐Columbian era, and those of the Caribbean, Patagonia, and the Amazon jungle, whose indigenous groups have been historically nomadic hunter‐gatherers or small‐scale farmers. Even among the regions of the first type there are important differences. The connection of the present‐day Indian with the pre‐Hispanic past serves as a good example. Whereas the memory of the Incas still occupies a central place in the Andean mentality, the cosmology of the ancient Mayas and Aztecs plays a more marginal role in the imagination of the Mexican peasantry, who, on the whole, speak more in Spanish than in indigenous languages. Another key factor to be taken into account is the degree of institutionalization of each of these indigenisms. Whereas indigenism in Mexico had the generous support of the postrevolutionary state, it never reached the status of state ideology in Peru, although some oligarchic intellectuals, and even President Augusto B. Leguía (1919–1930), employed Inca symbolism in an effort to benefit from its popularity. What further complicates any discussion of indigenism is that the label “indigenist” has been routinely applied to many artists who, in spite of their indigenous themes, had no social commitment to the Indian, and to many academics, intellectuals, and pro‐Indian activists who had no links to contemporary art.

In this climate, the distinctive trait of Mariátegui's indigenism is his vision of the Indian as the foundation of the Peruvian nation: the Indian – he says time and again – “is the cornerstone of our nationality in formation” (1959e, p. 32; 1994, Vol. I, p. 292). This, in a nutshell, is the argument sustained in the book to which he owes his reputation, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1926).

Departing from an analysis of landed property, Mariátegui explains how Peru, despite having achieved political sovereignty during the third decade of the nineteenth century, had failed to rid itself of the economic and social structures implemented during the colonial period. The Peruvian economy, unlike the most advanced European ones, had a “semifeudal” character in which the wealth of the elites was sustained by their ownership of vast tracts of land (the latifundio system) rather than by large industry. But this semifeudal quality manifested itself in the sphere of social relations as well, with life in the countryside still ruled by the serfdom system that the Spanish invaders had imposed via the encomienda regime. Although not legally enslaved, the peasants depended on a “lord” to whom they ceded a portion of their labor and income in exchange for the right to farm his land.

Admittedly, this system had not been designed for exploiting indigenous labor in the colonies (manorialism and latifundia had organized the life of European societies for centuries); yet in Peru, it acquired a distinct racial and cultural bias, for the divide between lords and serfs was nearly identical to that between whites and Indians – the children of the victors and the children of the vanquished. If the indigenous peoples were ever to overcome their state of destitution, Mariátegui concludes, the feudal structures that supported the entire edifice of social relations in Peru had to be abolished. Any form of indigenism that merely denounced abuses or proposed protective measures without attacking the foundations of the Peruvian economic system was doomed to failure. “The chance that Indians will raise themselves materially and intellectually depends on changes in social and economic conditions. They are not determined by race, but by economics and politics” (1969, p. 31; 1994, Vol. I, p. 171; 2011, p. 313). For all their good intentions, the reformist and liberal‐democratic currents of indigenism appeared to be fatally indebted to the old colonial mentality; in proposing that educational reforms would improve the living standards of the Indian, they implicitly assumed that she was responsible for her own poverty.⁴

For Mariátegui, the only valid route to vindicate the Indians was by recognizing them as the true protagonists of Peruvian history. Peru was not like Argentina or the United States, where the indigenous populations, pursued and decimated, had been buried firmly in the nation's past. They were a living force. And they could be said to have built one of the most complex civilizations of the Americas – a great culture shattered by the Spaniards, who reduced the Indian masses to the status of serfs. It was then a cruel irony that the local elites, from the late nineteenth century on, had fixed their gaze on the glorious Inca past while neglecting the present‐day Indians, seen as little more than remainders left behind by the conquest. For the Peruvian elites, the Inca civilization served as a symbol of national pride, while the Indian of flesh and blood was an object of derision. Both the “neo‐Inca” style that adorned the façades of modern limeño constructions and the colorful stories set during the Inca Empire filling the shelves of bookstores attested to this split in the attitudes of Peruvians; they celebrated a pre‐Hispanic past in which, paradoxically, the Indians (qua impoverished peasants) were missing.

In this context, indigenist art could and should be more than just a diversion for Creole elites: “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” (1959a, p. 290; 1971, p. 272; 1994, Vol. I, p. 149). For Mariátegui, then, indigenist art had a mission: to build a bridge connecting past and present that might rekindle for the indigenous population a sense of their own history. The past should be turned into a legacy. Two key Latin American artists – Diego Rivera and José Sabogal – offered vivid examples of how to pursue that goal.⁵

What Mariátegui praises in Rivera is his capacity to built great revolutionary myths:

In Mexican literature, nobody has done anything yet as big as what Rivera has done in painting: granting the Revolution a grandiose visual representation of its myths. A realistic vision of the common man and woman, of peasant and soldier, is supplemented by an almost metaphysical, and wholly religious, conception of the symbols that contain and condense the meaning of the Revolution.

(1959c, p. 97; 1994, Vol. I, p. 586)

Seemingly unimpressed by the adulation of the machine that runs through much of Rivera's work, Mariátegui applauds the visionary who, by building “superhuman figures like the prophets and sibyls of Michelangelo” (1959c, p. 97; 1994, Vol. I, p. 586), places the indigenous population of Mexico at the very center of the country's history.

But judged against these criteria, his enthusiasm for Sabogal is less readily comprehensible. Unlike Rivera's murals, the vast majority of Sabogal's paintings lack any narrative content, thus they can hardly be said to connect the Indians with their past or transform them into a historical force. Although both artists grant indigenous figures a monumental and hieratic air, the protagonist of Rivera's muralism – the collective – is absent in Sabogal. In his paintings, the figure of the Indian typically appears alone: he is not integrated into any mass movement, nor does he participate in any activity. A distant, ageless presence, the Indian that Sabogal portrays can certainly be viewed as a cosmic force that, in its singularity, is meant to endure. That said, he also resembles a specimen exposed for inspection, an impression aggravated by the fact that he is rarely depicted so as to meet the viewer's gaze.

It is noteworthy, then, that it is Sabogal's woodcuts (not his paintings) that captures Mariátegui's attention: solid, stylized figures – like his Chimu‐inspired fishermen (Figures 3.1 and 3.2) – that reimagine and modernize the iconography of the ancient inhabitants of Peru. These works, writes Mariátegui, “reveal how an art this ancient can still yield modern realizations” (1959c, p. 93; 1994, Vol. I, p. 584). With them, Sabogal “revives elements of Inca art, so deeply connected is he to his native themes” (1959c, p. 93; 1994, Vol. I, p. 584).

This kind of commitment, in fact, is all that one could reasonably expect from indigenist art. As Mariátegui saw it, indigenism, because of its origin, was an art of transition, meant to give way to a properly indigenous art in the future. Following this rationale, he found it mistaken to accuse the indigenist writers of having wrongfully usurped the representation of the Indians. In a telling passage from the last of the 7 Essays – the one devoted to literature and occupying almost a third of the book's pages – he argues that “… 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” (1959a, pp. 291–292; 1971, p. 274; 1994, Vol. I, p. 150). Indigenist literature was bound to idealize and stylize the Indian because it was still a literature made by mestizos: “If an indigenous literature finally appears, it will be when the Indians themselves are able to produce it” (1959a, p. 292; 1971, p. 274; 1994, Vol. I, p. 150).

Figure 3.1 José Sabogal, Chimu Fishermen, 1929. Woodblock print, 23 × 24 cm. Colección Isabel María Sabogal Dunin Borkowski.

Figure 3.2 José Sabogal, Caballito, Huanchaco, 1929. Woodblock print, 24.5 × 25.5 cm. Colección Ana Sabogal Dunin Borkowski.

Without going into further details, Mariátegui nonetheless advances here a remarkable conceptualization of art as a practice of social empowerment. When he states that true indigenous art is (or will be) an art made by Indians themselves, he is not claiming that only indigenous people have the ability (or the right) to tackle indigenous themes. His point, rather, is that artistic creation is key to human emancipation. The Indians of Peru ought to be freed from exploitation so that they could have the chance to access the spheres of artistic production and consumption. They ought to be given the opportunity to create and be recognized as creators. What Mariátegui sets out to defend here is not primarily the expression of racial or cultural identity but a right to which he accords the highest importance: the right to self‐development. No other, to his mind, would allow the Indians to fully become agents – masters of their own destiny.

Be that as it may, Mariátegui's argument for constructing the future of the Peruvian nation on an indigenous foundation did not go unchallenged. Perhaps his most biting critic was Luis Alberto Sánchez, who found it unfair to define “Peruvian‐ness” solely on the basis of its indigeneity. Although Creole traditions, he remarked, had been introduced by the Spaniards, over the course of four centuries they had taken roots in the country and had the right to be called “Peruvian” as well. Sánchez, in other words, accused Mariátegui of clinging to an overly narrow idea of Peru that not only discounted the country's enormous cultural diversity but also revived the “archaic dilemma” that opposed the highlands and the coast (Mariátegui and Sánchez 1976, p. 70). It should be noted, however, that Mariátegui was not advocating for the withering away of all nonindigenous elements in Peruvian society, nor did he believe in the racial or cultural superiority of the indigenous population. In fact, he considered any kind of sociopolitical analysis supported by racial or cultural categories (the language of the time made no consistent distinctions between race and ethnicity) to be little more than pseudoscientific mystification:

From the prejudice of the inferiority of the Indigenous race, one begins to pass to the opposite extreme: that the creation of a new American culture will be essentially the work of autochthonous racial forces. To subscribe to this thesis is to fall into the most naïve and absurd mysticism. It would be foolish and dangerous to oppose the racism of those who despise Indians because they believe in the absolute and permanent superiority of the white race with a racism that overestimates Indians with a messianic faith in their mission as a race in the American renaissance.

(1969, p. 30; 1994, Vol. I, p. 171; 2011, p. 313)

If Peruvians were obliged to recognize the indigenous population as the cornerstone of their nation, Mariátegui believed, it was because of a long‐overdue historical debt but also because no people or nation could possibly aspire to produce a plausible picture of itself by ignoring its majorities.

The search for national autonomy did not, then, entail the elimination of all external influences. Defending the autochthonous did not mean rejecting all things Western, only those ideas and values of the West that supported the systems of feudality and dependence (Rochabrún 2007, pp. 549–550). Non‐Western peoples seeking a legitimate political option should not be wary of embracing socialism: “Socialism is certainly not an Indo‐American theory. But no theory, no contemporary system, is or could be. And socialism, although born in Europe as was capitalism, is neither specifically nor particularly European. It is a worldwide movement from which none of the countries that move in the orbit of Western civilization can escape” (1969, p. 248; 1994, Vol. I, p. 261; 1996, p. 89).