Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual, and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes, 1885-1935

Abstract

Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual, and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes, 1885-1935. DAVID NUGENT. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1997; xiv + 404 pp. Reviewed by MARC EDELMAN Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York In the 1960s and 1970s social scientists spilled much ink arguing whether Latin America was or capitalist. This was not simply an academic polemic. If Latin America were feudal, as Marxists and modes-of-production enthusiasts maintained, the bourgeoisie was a progressive class that, with peasant and working-class support, would usher in the next stage of history, capitalist democracy. If, on the other hand, Latin America was already capitalist, as dependency theorists argued, the bourgeoisie could only be a reactionary bulwark of the status quo, to be overthrown in the struggle for socialism. With the end of the Cold War, the debate seems quaint and arid. That it could take place at all, however, reflected not just the political effervescence of the period, but a troubling empirical reality: well into the twentieth century much of Latin America, particularly in rural zones, was in the grip of caudillos or regional strongmen. Even if these local seigniorial regimes were immersed in market relations, they looked feudal in their rigid ethnic- and estate-based stratification, coercive labor relations, and customs of domination and deference. The entire feudalism discussion would have been much richer, however, if its participants had engaged in the kind of careful analysis that David Nugent undertakes in his extraordinary investigation of the Chachapoyas region in northern Peru. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chachapoyas, an elite claiming descent from Spanish conquistadors dominated the town and the surrounding department of Amazonas. Self-defined or aristocratic family alliances feuded with each other for control of the regional space and government. Elsewhere in Latin America such groups often derived wealth and power from control of farmland and commerce. In Chachapoyas - with little fertile soil and separated from Lima and the Pacific by the nearly impassible canyon of the Maranon River the primary source of riches was holding government office, which permitted access to tax revenues, contracts and licenses, patronage appointments, road tolls, and assorted forms of graft and outright extortion. Casta rule depended on claims about the natural right of white aristocrats to rule mestizos and Indians and on the ability to persecute and humiliate competitors. Casta leaders frequently assaulted, imprisoned, and murdered opponents; at times they staged ceremonies of public degradation in which enemies would be forced to render abject apologies and promise future obeisance. Simultaneously, however, casta officials had to represent political life in terms of republican principles, individual rights, and constitutional guarantees. While this was in part a concession to the central state in Lima, intended to secure non-interference with local casta domination, it was also a way of demonstrating the ruling group's power. As in other authoritarian regimes, the capacity to proclaim publicly as true what everyone knew to be false was a demonstration of potency. Ruling castas were hardly as invulnerable as their repression and shaming of enemies might suggest. Supporters in outlying areas were undependable, since their motivation for allying with a ruling casta was to increase their own wealth, rather than channel it to their political patrons. …