The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism (review)

Abstract

tar 1 ca, estelle. The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. xxx + 240 pp.Estelle Tarica's engaging study, The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism, expands upon Jose Maria Arguedas's statement, Lo indigena esta en lo mas intimo de toda la gente de la sierra del Peru, to show how mestizaje dominant state ideology is conformed by more personal, confessional, and narratives and thus sentimentalized intimate that creates commonalities across class and racial barriers. Through an analysis of the autobiographical writings of Arguedas himself Yawar fiesta [1941] and Los rios profundos [1958]), Bolivian writer Jesus Lara's novel Surumi (1943) and his bilingual essay anthology La poesia quechua (1947), well Mexican indigenista Rosario Castellanos's Balun Canan (1957), Tarica highlights how in Latin America's racialized societies, Indianness literally inhabits the heart of mestizos and the imaginary heart of national formations. She also analyzes how the sentimental appeal of these narratives - despite their ideological distortions - been (and continues to be) so appealing to non-Indians. Since Fray Bartolome de Las Casas's famous defense of Indians in the sixteenth century (at the expense of Africans - Jorge Luis Borges readily pointed out), indigenismo, while denouncing the exploitation of native peoples and resisting the equation of Indians with primitivism and barbarity, nevertheless, perhaps unconsciously, continued to justify the subordination of indigenous (xiii). As been shown repeatedly, indigenismo therefore consists of an objectifying, positivist perspective. But, Tarica shows, it also consists of subject ivist, outlook (xxiv). Given these two mutually conflicting perspectives, indigenismo therefore ends up being both a racist and an anti-racist discourse (xxii); private, narrative and national, one. Tarica's study traces how indigenismo' s sentimentalizing first-person affective repertoire of powerlessness and affinity (xxv) resulted in moving testimonies of self and other, hurt and debt. Yet despite contestatory political stance, indigenismo, like state sponsored indigenismo, has perpetuated Indians' subordination to the state in the name of civilizing them, and gone from being oppositional and minoritarian to dominant and hegemonic (1, xiv).The Inner Life differs from well-established critical routes in its emphasis on subjectivity and on the inner life oi mestizos. Thus, Tanca points out, rather than approach the Indians problem, mestizo writers' indigenismo works to destigmatize Indianness necessary means of crafting legitimate mestizo for themselves. They thus approach Indians as bearers of an inner voice lodged within national subjects, one to which national subjects must listen to recover their own identity (13). In Lara's Surumi, this move consists of double refusal where Lara resists dominant mestizo ideology and the concomitant pressure to negate his own indigeneity. He thus also resists the notion that Indians are slaves/objects and people without history. As consequence, he writes redemptive narratives about indigenous subjectivities. These Bildungsromane then, do not chart the transition from childhood to adulthood but rather that from slave/thing to self-knowing subject. Hence, they valorize indigenous forms of knowledge and indigenous epistemologies. And contrary to critical tradition that valorized indigenous forms of orality, they achieve this through writing. Yet despite Lara's refusal of stigmatization and markedness which led him to embrace indigeneity double refusal, his form of indigenismo became key element of the hegemony of Bolivia's populist nationalism (79).For women indigenistas like Castellanos, indigenismo served to couch Mexican women's political vindications and search for equality. …