The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810-1930. By Rebecca Earle. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. viii, 367 pp. Cloth, $84.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-4063-8. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-4084-3.)

Abstract

Rebecca Earle has produced an imaginative work on Spanish American Creole visions of “nation” from independence to the rise of indigenismo (a sympathetic awareness and advancement of the Indian) in the 1920s and the advent of the mestizaje nation-building myth. This singular overview, based on history, literature, art, and material culture, shows the changing place of the pre-Hispanic past in the construction of a national sense of self in Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia. This cultural and intellectual history traces how national spokespersons sometimes embraced and sometimes rejected ancient indigenous civilizations, but often presented contemporary native populations as a problem. In Peru, this idea has been summed up as “Inca sí, Indio no” (Inca yes, Indian no). Thus, native preconquest populations initially represented the origins of the new nations. Aztec and Inca emperors were depicted as heroes in festivals, and native resistance to colonial rule, especially in the late eighteenth century, was recalled to justify Creole insurgences against the tyrannical Spanish regime. That equation between independence heroes and native rebel leaders gave rise to an “Indianesque nationalism,” symbolized by native iconography, such as the Inca sun, on state emblems. But after 1840 such precolonial icons were gradually replaced by a new pantheon of independence war heroes, depicted as “fathers of the nation” in history texts, patriotic speeches, and public statues, and on postage stamps and coins. Independence, in places such as Argentina, represented the birth of the nation and democratic ideals and the country's European roots. Native imagery there and in Chile represented a barbarous Indian past as intellectuals highlighted their own Iberian genealogies. Gradually, the precolonial era passed into folklore, was recast in terms of ancient Greece and Rome, or was orientalized. This exotic vision of the native “other” became the patriotic history celebrated in romantic literature or taught in schools to develop “good citizens.”