Historicizing the Postcolonial Andean Predicament

This regional history of Huaylas-Ancash plots critical shifts in the discourse and practice of state-peasantry relations during Peru's long nineteenth-century transition from dual colonial to unitary postcolonial forms of nationhood. Although unreplicable, Peru's troubled transition from pluriethnic colony of castes toward unitary postcolony of citizens was an early moment in the universally ambivalent trajectory broadly characteristic of our age. To wit: in the world history of European colonialism and postcolonial nationmaking, the New World is old and the Old World new. And if the first wave of European colonialism washed up on American shores long before it reached high tide in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Asia and Africa, then the irreversible cultural and political conundrums of colonialism's aftermath were perhaps nowhere more unanticipated, and deeply contradictory, than in South America's pluriethnic Andean region.

Writing "in an anthropological spirit" on the origin and spread of nationalism, Benedict Anderson made an underappreciated move that in effect shifts the historical relationship between so-called old European nations and the new postcolonial states. Since, Anderson argued, the modern invention of nationhood was everywhere as fundamentally cultural (in Clifford Geertz's sense) as religion or kinship, one could sidestep the then regnant notion of nationalism as mere political ideology and approach nations as the cultural inventions of "print capitalism," as "imagined political communities" of intermediate scale wherein citizens were territorially bound by emerging concepts of sovereignty. This new style and scale of community was distinct from the face-to-face communities of the peasant village or small town, and it superseded the boundless, plurinational religious ecumenisms of the medieval (and early colonial?) world. The historical origins of this modern nation and its nationalism were traceable to the workings of absolutist dynasties and the rise of printing and national vernaculars, which served as narrative media for imagining the social space and "simultaneous time" of unseen national cohorts. Like Eric Hobsbawm and other critical scholars, Anderson proposed that nations and their nationalisms are of modern invention; contrary to "organicist" or "primordialist" readings, no "old nations" in this sense of the term could have existed before the late eighteenth century. Thus the Latin American republics are relatively old "by the standard of nationhood" — indeed, even "pioneering" in that they were the front line of anticolonial republican nationalism, thereby anticipating anticolonial nationalist movements in the colonized Old World. In light of this reformulation, Geertz's insightful summation of the postcolonial predicament of Asian and African "new states" as, to paraphrase, not quite the present without the past, nor the past in the present, may be rephrased for the Americas: Latin America's republics were "old" like some European nations, but they were also postcolonial like the African and Asian "new states" of the twentieth century.

Latin American nations are also relatively "old" because Spain's colonial rule in the Americas both predated and endured longer than most extra-Iberian European colonialisms in interior Africa and Asia. In the colonial core regions of Mesoamerica and the South American Andes, the antiquity of Iberian colonialism was deepened by the greater antiquity of densely peopled precolonial states and societies. The worn phrase of "old societies and new states" which Geertz summoned to describe postcolonial Asian and African predicaments, may also be applied to the core regions of ancient American civilization — despite the early demographic collapse of the indigenous population which, in the Peruvian case, did not begin to recover until the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Anderson's useful phrase "old empires, new nations" is perhaps a more precise reformulation of the state/society equation in nuclear Spanish America, since it captures the colonial predicament of much of the region. In this regard, Anderson noted, after Gerhard Masur, "the striking fact that 'each of the new South American republics had been a [colonial] administrative unit from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.' In this respect they foreshadow the new states of Africa and parts of Asia in the mid-twentieth century." As in Africa and parts of Asia, postcolonial American nations inherited the political boundaries of colonial administrative units, in this case because "the very vastness of the Spanish American Empire, the enormous variety of its soils and climates, and, above all, the immense difficulty of communications in a preindustrial age, tended to give these units a self-contained character."

But by what "hegemonic trick" were colonial administrative units — which were inscribed across the fragments of precolonial polities — to be imagined as bounded and sovereign nations? Anderson's provocative, Habermasian thesis concerning the role of the elite public sphere spread by print capitalism and vernacular understandings gets us part of the way there, as do his sparkling hypotheses about the nationalist mutation of colonial spaces and the perambulations of Creole officials. But what becomes clear with local and regional historical analysis is that the colonial legacy of administrative frontiers was rather less significant for postcolonial nationmaking than were the hierarchical, discontinuous, and internal boundaries of ethnic caste, color, class, gender, and corporation (to mention only these) bequeathed by the centuries of Spanish rule.

In Andean Peru, as elsewhere in Spanish America, the postcolonial history of nationmaking was haunted by an earlier history of colonial state formation which, in the ambivalent fashion diagnostic of postcolonial nationalist predicaments everywhere, it was condemned both to negate and reclaim. Despite critical differences, Peru — like other old postcolonial nations of the New World South — may be seen to share this predicament with the new postcolonial nations of the Old World South. In all cases, this predicament meant that the postcolonial nation and its history had to be constructed — albeit in very different ways and to different degrees — by "contesting colonial rule and [at the same time] protecting its flanks from the subalterns."

The Postcolonial Creole Predicament

In contrast to most textbook versions of the advent of European nation-states, Anderson follows John Lynch (and other historians of Latin America) in asserting that the Latin American republics were not the political by-products of middleclass struggles against an aristocratic ruling class. Instead, they were states created from above by landed colonial elites who sought to break free from a decadent metropolis whose representatives still monopolized political and economic privilege in the colonies. But...