CHAPTER 1

THE CHANGING FACES OF HISTORICAL TIME

It is time to go beyond elitist representations of mestizaje; beyond discursivemodifications, made from the vantage point of power—as in Mexicoand Bolivia, with their nationalist conceptions of mestizaje, which haveturned it into a fixed, reality-homogenizing concept. Today, there is aneed to complicate mestizaje with the shifting syntax of recent migrations,deepening the process of fragmentary multicultures. In what follows,I will explain this process through an important example from themodern Andes.

The Peruvian literary critic Antonio Cornejo Polar saw his fellow Peruvian,the indigenista writer José María Arguedas, as juggling mestizajewith transculturation. In his book Los universos narrativos de José MaríaArguedas (1997: 227–266), Cornejo Polar argues that in Arguedas's tragicposthumous novel, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1973; translated asThe Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below, 2000), the characternamed Asto—a migrant from predominantly indigenous highland Peruto one of the country's booming coastal cities—never fully assimilatesinto modernity, nor does he comfortably adapt to the historical time ofmodernity.

A peripheral modern, the migrant Asto never entirely ceases to be amigrant, not even after he permanently settles in his new space andmodifies it in his own image and likeness, because behind him, he alwayshas the experience of his origins—not his recent past, but the more distant"ruins," which force him to see reality from a different perspective, inconflict with the forward-looking, rectilinear gaze of modernity.

Is the migrant's itinerant life a displacement, a spatial-temporal changethat complicates the stability which narratives of identity grant to mestizaje?Cornejo Polar seems to think so. He relates itinerancy to the lack ofa fixed center that is the hallmark of the mestizaje metaphor. According toCornejo Polar, the migrant loses his totalizing sense, which, as a worldview,restrains mestizaje as an organic representation of reality. When themigrant loses his roots through his itinerancy, his reality also suffers anenormous loss of coherence and organicity. Itinerancy elicits a hodgepodgeof signs, which, hailing from ancient, ancestral times, invoke intheir very confusion new situations of instability and disorder. Put anotherway: while the mestizo class in power strives to organize its complicatedsocial and discursive order toward clear political ends, subjecting itto a search for an identity that is as homogeneous as it is brittle, themigrant seems to let his erratic behavior throw reality into disorder,contaminating everything.

This disorderly displacement explains the behavior of the outstandingexamples of highland migrants in Arguedas's novel, which contrasts thealienation they encounter in the city with the authenticity of a past thatstubbornly and violently refuses to disappear altogether. It isn't the immediatepast, the so-called historical past, that we are called on here torecover, but rather the mythic past, which is rehabilitated by the complexand conflictive characters who inhabit this open and inconclusive novel.Their stories are multiple, told by multiple voices, among which thepresence of myth and magic is fundamental. Indeed, the alternation betweenpresent and mythic past, the coming and going between randomlyeventful modern life and the world of ancient memory, expresses theimpossibility of moving ahead on one level without settling some scoreson the other. And when two worlds of unequal power and prestige comeinto contact, a culture conflict takes place that is basic to an understandingof the narrative. Let's look at one revealing passage about this conflict, thespatial-temporal struggle that Cornejo Polar observes in this novel.

Asto, one of many highland migrants who go down to the coast enmasse, arrives in the boom town of Chimbote dazzled by legends of itswealth. Chimbote is the reality with which Arguedas confronts him. Understandingit—a new and intricate city, a cutting-edge city—is a realchallenge. He must become familiar with its disorder and diversity. Here,the immediate past, close to the migrant's recent history or memory,grows feeble and recedes when confronted with all the opportunities thatthe present offers him. Chimbote, a no-man's-land, a borderland city, amyth of the dispossessed, represents the possibility of radical change. Thischange is underwritten by the high wages that capitalist industry offersthe migrant. But the city does not only enlighten and attract; it also burnsand kills. Nothing is guaranteed. The only sure thing is that migratingmeans betting on change.

Adapting to the norms for behavior in this new sociocultural reality,Asto doesn't shrink before this challenge; on the contrary, he steps up to itand gets comfortable with the modern capitalist machinery of Chimbote.This machinery encompasses the need to set up a strategy for recapturingthe money paid out as salaries by creating bars and brothels, which,incorporated into the least visible strata of the empire, entail the destructionof the wage-earners' moral strength. The story focuses on Asto whenhe first enters an elegant brothel and asks for a prostitute named "Argentina."Dazzled by the money and by the blond prostitute, the Indiandenies his identity: "Me criollo ... from the coast, goddamnit; me fromArgentina, goddamnit. Who highlander now?" (2000: 42). This rejectionof his past, this transformation from poor campesino into prosperousfisherman, allows Asto to leave his insecurity and fear behind. But hisadventure, almost lost in the multiplicity of voices in the novel, acquires anew dimension only when it is suddenly displaced to another "history,"which takes place "two thousand five hundred years ago" (2000: 53). Sustainedby this system of brusque displacements, the correlations betweenthe level of plot set in the present and the level of myth from the remotepast cannot go unnoticed by the reader. Asto repeats acts carried out...