The Chimalpahin Conference 2007:

Colonial and Post-Colonial Remembering and Forgetfulness

Questions of identity are not limited to shades of the self, but also extend to other realms, such as culture, ethnicity and nationhood. In these realms, too, the social recognition of identities and group memberships are by no means guaranteed, but are instead in constant movement, transformation, and contestation. In this manner, it is important to ask how identities are constructed, and how certain topics, strategies and devices are employed to erect sameness on the one hand, and differences on the other. 

A prominent example of the importance of identity construction, in this case national and cultural, is found in early Republican Peru, specifically around the time of the Confederación Perú-Boliviana of 1836-1839. I have decided to present an example of the reproduction of some of these imagined early Republican identities and their ideologies (conservative, fearful, exclusive and hegemonic) in postcolonial Peru. I argue that the very nature of an “imagined” republican Peru will lead to its postcolonial predicament, namely, the desire to create a unified and cohesive nation by fashioning certain bonds. Instead the architects of post-colonial Peru restricted the inclusion of the popular classes, mostly indios by restraining and overlooking them in the creation of a national plan. In order to explore the failure of post-colonial Peru to form a cohesive and inclusive state, I briefly present a representative production of the early Republican period (1825-1840), specifically the newspaper El Comercio. 

The articles and editorials of El Comercio represent postcolonial Peru’s transition from a pluri-ethnic colony of castes toward a unitary nation of citizens. The aim here is to manifest the long-lasting notion of colonialism even after the wars of Independence in Republican Peru by re-reading El Comercio’s writings and finding in them the building blocks of an exclusive state, a state that did not take into account Peru’s heterogeneity, but that reproduced the hegemonic, conservative, and fearful discourse of the late colonial period. Historian Jorge Basadre has described this early republican period as an era where, “The most genuine representatives of the aristocratic colonial class assumed since the early republican period an attitude of condemnation and of protest.” The Peruvian aristocracy directed their pessimism not at its own class, but to the rest of the country; to a pueblo that they considered to be very well below their level, uncultured and irredeemable. The old criollo disdain for the provincial and the conviction that everything that incarnated Peru had to be either criollo or limeño and that “Lima es el Perú,” could not be better represented during this period of Peruvian history than by the newspaper, El Comercio. This period also served as the starting point for the modern Peruvian republic. 

A state mired in the predicament of promoting a sense of Peruvianess for its citizens while at the same time silencing a vast majority of its population. The modern Peruvian state imagined itself as a racially white and ideologically Western society, thus, suppressing its immense indio and racially mixed majority much in the same manner as the late colonial period.

About Joseph Zavala