In this article I discuss the modernization of Peru during the 1930s and 1940s by focusing on the variety of ways in which Peru’s interior regions, natural resources, and people were being perceived and written about. I reflect on two narratives: José Uriel García’s (1894–1965) Pueblos y paisajes sudperuanos (Towns, villages, and landscapes in southern Peru), published in 1949, and Aurelio Miró Quesada Sosa’s (1907–1998) Costa, sierra y montaña (Coast, sierra, and eastern foothills),1 published in two volumes in 1938 and 1940 with others appearing in 1947. First, I provide an overall description of Peru’s sociopolitical and cultural climates from the 1920s. I then contextualize them by discussing Uriel García’s and Quesada Sosa’s observations on regional and racial concerns and the wider implications of Peru’s modernity processes. My overall purpose is to highlight the noticeable contributions that these travelers made toward the deeper understanding of their national territory and the decolonization of Peruvian nature and society.
Peru: An Industrializing Nation, Social Inclusivity, and Indigenismo
As Peru pursued a course of modernization, radical ideas also began to circulate throughout its urban centers, forming a consensus that the social conditions were right for popular action. A pro-Indian artistic movement arose known as Indigenismo2 and was typical of the Cusco and Lima intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s. However, this movement was not specifically a Peruvian phenomenon, as it was equally characteristic of other Latin American countries with higher indigenous populations, namely, Guatemala, Mexico, Bolivia, and Ecuador. For example, in the wider Latin American context, the Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos3 was one such important contemporary theorist of mestizaje who debated the relationship between “the Indian” and the nation and the state.
In Peru, the primary social theorists were José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) and Luis E. Valcárcel (1891–1987), who defended one of the movement’s common principles—that Peru’s indigenous and marginalized sectors of society needed to be imagined back into the nation-state as the latter’s goals turned toward inclusivity. The intention was that these groups would become social participants once they were recognized as being people with their own versions of history to tell, with lifestyles, problems, and specific cultural relations regarding their environments. This further manifested itself in the national literature, for example, in the novels The Golden Serpent (1935) by Ciro Alegría and Agua (1935) by José María Arguedas,4 as well as in the sciences such as archaeology.5
Map of Peru showing the general features, cities, rivers, and modern geopolitical borders (drawn by the author).
Citation: Journeys 18, 1; 10.3167/jys.2017.180101
Map of Peru showing the general features, cities, rivers, and modern geopolitical borders (drawn by the author).
Citation: Journeys 18, 1; 10.3167/jys.2017.180101
Map of Peru showing the general features, cities, rivers, and modern geopolitical borders (drawn by the author).
Citation: Journeys 18, 1; 10.3167/jys.2017.180101
Map of the Inca kingdom, Tahuantinsuyo, detailing the four geopolitical quarters of the Inca world, with Cusco being the central point (drawn by the author).
Citation: Journeys 18, 1; 10.3167/jys.2017.180101
Map of the Inca kingdom, Tahuantinsuyo, detailing the four geopolitical quarters of the Inca world, with Cusco being the central point (drawn by the author).
Citation: Journeys 18, 1; 10.3167/jys.2017.180101
Map of the Inca kingdom, Tahuantinsuyo, detailing the four geopolitical quarters of the Inca world, with Cusco being the central point (drawn by the author).
Citation: Journeys 18, 1; 10.3167/jys.2017.180101
Excited by the rapidly modernizing and democratizing national printing press,6 Mariátegui embraced journalism and later created his own journal, Amauta,7 where he made valuable contributions as an essayist and editor. Travel was a fundamental necessity to Mariátegui, and while in Europe he immersed himself in the debates of the time, protest literature, and Marxism. Such contact and creativity encouraged him to write specifically on the need to decolonize Peruvian society and nature by tackling gamonalismo (see below) as a plausible first step (Mariátegui 1927a, 1927b, 1928, 1958; see also Miller 2008; Moore 2014). However, he knew that the problems were on a much bigger scale, and in Aníbal Quijano’s words, Mariátegui was “without a doubt, the first to begin to see that … the social relations of power … existed and acted simultaneously … in a single and whole structure of power” (2008: 221). This foresight permitted him to develop theories that colonialism incorporated the control of economy, authority, race, subjectivity, and knowledge (Mariátegui 1926). To be more specific, the continuity of colonial forms of domination that Mariátegui identified remain central to today’s modern/capitalist/patriarchal/political/economic world system (Adams and Mulligan 2003; Coronil 2008; Dussel and Fornazzari 2002; Escobar 2004; Grosfoguel 2007, 2008; Hulme 2008; Mignolo 2005, 2007, 2008; Pratt 2008; Quijano 2007, 2008; Said 1993). These forms of control inscribed a history of coloniality, and in the process they denied Peru (or any other postcolonial nation) any meaningful political, economic, or cultural independence, even though the country was formally declared independent on 28 July 1821 by José de San Martín.
Politically the peak of official Indigenismo came to an end with the overthrow of Augusto B. Leguía’s presidency, known as the “Oncenio” (r. 1919–1930). Between 1933 and 1945 Peru then entered an era of renewed military rule referred to as the “third militarism” by Peruvian historian Jorge Basadre (1981). Nevertheless, the movement had successfully incorporated the wider historical contexts of Peru’s traditions and had begun making impressions upon forms and ways of thinking about national identity by opposing the “belief held by the elites of the nineteenth-century that a large indigenous population weakened the state and impeded the development of national identity” (Earle 2007: 163; see also Miller 1999). This amounted to a moment when, in Mariátegui’s words, “the national tradition has been stretched to reincorporate a sense of the Inca past” (Mariátegui, quoted in Hunefeldt 2004: 194).8 Analysis of Inca-based ayllu9 life and the colonial system known as gamonalism—which dominated the control of land, resources, and labor exploitation—all remained core to the movement’s beliefs and “became by consensus the central ‘social problem’ and ‘national question’ of Peru” (Thurner 2011: 200). Luis Enrique Tord’s thesis supports this, stating that González Prada’s earlier title, Our Indians (1904), exposed “the reality of the indigenous population, indicating that the problem was linked to land and to socioeconomic questions” (1978: 206).10 Thus, it was argued that without a comprehensive restructuring of the sociopolitical and environmental relations of power, Peru could not embrace any significant processes of modernity or meaningful decolonization. In differing ways both Uriel García and Quesada Sosa supported this stance, with mestizaje remaining a key factor toward building a modern and inclusive society.
Landscapes and Races in Early Twentieth-Century Peru
Aurelio Miró Quesada Sosa presided over the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima (Geographical Society of Lima) between 1955 and 1957, a state-run institution of committed members whose earlier explorations especially had provided valuable knowledge on the national territory (Cueto 1992; Medd 2013). Quesada Sosa published extracts of his own travels in both El Comercio11 and the Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima in 1938, a year during which the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima stated that the genre was making an “unquestionable social contribution toward the necessary and patriotic task of knowing Peru” (A. C. 1938: 202).
Founded in 1888, the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima rose to become Peru’s most prestigious scientific society, holding a wealth of historical primary source material (similar institutions had already been founded in Europe and North America). Its members contributed toward debates on national identity, the determining of geopolitical borders,12 and the feasibility of projects such as the development of intensive agriculture along the coast. It prided itself on being a creative center for technocrats, scientists, and aficionados alike, and its overall direction was to assist the government in their attempts to modernize and attract investors. The ensuing debates and circulation of travel narratives opened up theoretical spaces from which to talk back to and put distance between old imperialist and monolithic notions of what constituted “the Peruvian” and Peru’s environment. The genre had now become prestigious and was also rewarded, confirming how “the work of travelers in Peru … are an inexhaustible source of ideas to hypothesize over our national space in a realist manner” (Mould de Pease 1997: 21).13 Collectively, the explorations undertaken by these nationals resisted any perceived ordinariness that travels on home territory often evoked, and their resulting narratives informed key state policies (Lindsay 2010; Mould de Pease 1997).14
Travelers rarely cross, view, and comment on the same landscape in the same way. Quesada Sosa and Uriel García mostly observed Peru’s environments and people from very different angles and sociopolitical agendas. Quesada Sosa was a lead advocate and supporter of Lima’s national roles in terms of influence and centralization, whereas the landscapes of Uriel García exhibited more independent and sacred qualities. Uriel García focused his explorations on the echoes, shadows, and environmental relations of pre-Hispanic civilizations throughout the southern Andes. His mind, while working primarily within the discipline of history, was equally committed to some of the more radical aspects of Indigenismo, evidenced by his celebration of the Andean world’s incorporation into global consciousnesses as an inevitable consequence of travel through marginal places.
José Uriel García (1894–1965). © Hélène Guyot. For further information see www.firstrainofsummer.com.
Citation: Journeys 18, 1; 10.3167/jys.2017.180101
José Uriel García (1894–1965). © Hélène Guyot. For further information see www.firstrainofsummer.com.
Citation: Journeys 18, 1; 10.3167/jys.2017.180101
José Uriel García (1894–1965). © Hélène Guyot. For further information see www.firstrainofsummer.com.
Citation: Journeys 18, 1; 10.3167/jys.2017.180101
From the outset Uriel García situated the sierra within an archaic and worldly context. He discussed how Andean music, plants, and agricultural produce—some of the principle achievements of Andean civilizations—were proudly now consumed both locally and internationally (see also the volumes of Amauta). Traveling and writing in the late 1940s, Uriel García considered it “an emotional experience to see, lost in some corner of these Serranías, fragments of such a social unity that hint toward the preconquest period” (Uriel García 1949: 8).15 The ambiguities within Peru’s social reforms rose to the foreground in his thinking: on the one hand, there were the growing societal freedoms and perceived levels of participation in national matters, while on the other, there were the beginnings of more general concerns over the disintegration of present indigenous lifestyles. Uriel García was now welcoming “lost corners” in those places where more traditional sierra lives remained untouched by the effects of the modernizing nation. This latter point also became a serious preoccupation of the aforementioned Peruvian author José María Arguedas.
With the increasingly depressed economic conditions of the interior regions, many people born in the highlands took advantage of the collective aspirations of the nation by migrating toward urban centers. They went in search of work along with the opportunity to construct new lives following the recent creation of a social security system in 1936. This provided more open access to education, services, social welfare, and better health facilities. The increase in political participation meant that Peru’s middle classes continued to grow, as did the internal market structure due, in part, to fairer labor relations. For the first time, and arising from the modernization that was particularly apparent in Lima and its rapidly industrializing coast, a greater number of people across a wider range of society were benefiting from these sociopolitical changes.
As much as Uriel García embraced the arrival of modernity across Cusco’s landscapes, the rapidity of the changes together with the realities of migrations, urban sprawl, an urbanizing indigenous workforce, full capitalistic modes of production along the coast,16 and the popularity of tourism explained why he adopted a sense of mountainous picture-postcard pride. Even so, elements of Peruvian political rhetoric (and present up until the 1960s) continued to designate the Indian as being “fixed in the mountains and incapable of dealing with modernization” (Cadena 2000: 313). Peasants are agriculturalists and their homes are in the countryside; however, the migrations underway from the sierra to the urban industrialized centers were part of an increasing fluidity and expanding labor potentiality. These factors were exactly the social conditions that Mariátegui had celebrated, and they implied that the mestizo’s location was now “at the core of industrialization, both as labourer and consumer” (Coronado 2009: 36; see also White 1976).17
Modernity itself is multidirectional, ambiguous in scope, spontaneous, and never ideologically neutral, and therefore it remains a contested term. In a Latin American context, Jorge Larrain describes it as having been a “very selective and excluding process, conducted from above, in which it was decided what to keep and what to ignore” (2000: 9). Quijano (2008) situates modernity as a leading component within coloniality and the structure of global power, including capitalistic expansionism and the hegemony of Eurocentrism.18 In a positive sense and linked to the world of travel, its consequences prompted fluidity between people and borders, offering freedoms of choice and diverse experiences (Archibald 2011; Coronado 2009; Miller 2008). Uriel García and Quesada Sosa had much to celebrate, and together with a wave of Peruvian travelers they began to challenge the previous three centuries of Eurocentric literature that often portrayed Peruvian people and their environments as peripheral and inferior. Certainly Uriel García believed that by highlighting the local and advantageous aspects to Peruvian society and environment the processes of modernity would be more beneficial to the nation as a whole—in place of adhering to a strict Eurocentric model.
As a committed Indigenista, Uriel García shared the movement’s primary concerns in confronting the sociopolitical injustices that have affected Peru since its conquest by Spain in 1532. Using Cusco’s University of San Antonio Abad as a base, he developed decolonial theories that homed in on life in the Andes while seeking adequate representations of the cultural and geographical diversity. However, as much as he challenged “outside” theories of the Andean world, he also reinterpreted them for a foreign audience by publishing Guía histórico artística del Cusco (Historic-artistic guide to Cusco) in 1918.19 This confirmed that there was a commercial engagement with debates on race and modernity by Indigenista intellectuals during that period, equally evidenced by the work and travels of Indian photographer Martín Chambi (1891–1973). Guidebooks demonstrated the importance of Cusco as a pre-Hispanic and mestizo city—one that could provide travelers with all the expectations of modern lifestyles and comforts, including international banking (Silverman 2002).
Aurelio Miró Quesada Sosa (1907–1998). © Hélène Guyot. For further information see www.firstrainofsummer.com.
Citation: Journeys 18, 1; 10.3167/jys.2017.180101
Aurelio Miró Quesada Sosa (1907–1998). © Hélène Guyot. For further information see www.firstrainofsummer.com.
Citation: Journeys 18, 1; 10.3167/jys.2017.180101
Aurelio Miró Quesada Sosa (1907–1998). © Hélène Guyot. For further information see www.firstrainofsummer.com.
Citation: Journeys 18, 1; 10.3167/jys.2017.180101
Reading Uriel García, we learn that he observed these pueblos (towns and villages) as being home to indigenous peoples, peasants, and mestizos who were all contributing, on the whole, to Peru’s sociopolitical climate of change. He proudly wrote how “in the indigenous nations and oppressed pueblos … they are seeking their definitive liberation in order to reconstruct a Peru from the old Inca and colonial histories, a place where there isn’t any exploitation of man by his fellow man” (Uriel García 1949: 10).20 Such views expressed his commitment to decolonization struggles and mestizaje while informing his “critical position with respect to the dominant society” (Coronado 2009: 5). He was equally dedicated to writing, and as a traveler through home territories he was conceptualizing “the natural world in terms of one’s own culture,” and this was “simply part of being human and being associated with a particular group” (Rotholz 1996: 2–3). Similar beliefs could be said to have been upheld by Quesada Sosa, whose monumental biography on the noble chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, titled El Inca Garcilaso (1945), testified how such a mestizo figure was, to him, the ideal Peruvian. Ultimately, their travel experiences provided them both with the theoretical frameworks within which to situate their broader national politics.21
Having wanderlust, Quesada Sosa felt anxious to visit all of Peru and dispel circulating myths that coastal criollos22 could not see “the human or material values that form the character and beauty of Peru … and the three distinct regions that comprise the true nation” (A. C. 1938: 202–203).23 Thus, he traveled by “all means of communication including fragile airplanes of the 1930s and 1940s” (Martínez, prologue in Quesada 2005: 17),24 automobiles, and on foot. His descent into Cusco particularly emphasized his literary style of displaying a country marked by two main cultural groups. Enthusiastically, he wrote:
The airplane loses height … we see … the flocks of llamas, red-tiled houses, grazing fields where cows, sheep and horses are left to wander, the bogs and swamp lands where pools of water shine, ennobled with the brilliance of the Sun. It is the special radiance of the Andean Sun, considered in these parts as a father and more rightly so here than in another place … the snowy summits of Salcantay and Ausangate, the blue dresses, decorative ponchos, the foamy line of the rivers, up to and including the very stones of the surrounding mountains.
(Quesada 2005: 258)25
Aside from the beauty of Quesada Sosa’s prose, this landscape, for him, belonged to the indigenous peasant. His descriptions were of a predominantly traditional Andean world and highlighted the differing architecture, use of land, animals (some of European origin), pagan deities (the sun given a capital “S”), and the apus (the sacred mountains of Salcantay and Ausangate). As he drew the reader’s attention to the engineering feats and other hallmarks of Inca civilization, he painted harmony over the sierra as he was being propelled through the sky.
Interestingly, aviation upon Cusco’s skyline had symbolized the arrival of modernity for the city’s elites ever since Velasco Astete, a “Quechua-speaking pilot of Inca nobility and Spanish ancestry stepped down from an Italian-made biplane onto Cuzco soil in 1925.” Astete had successfully flown from Lima to Cusco, becoming the first pilot to ever do so. His journey was set to promote “Cuzco’s regionalist agenda and envision an Andean modernity” (Hiatt 2007: 327). It was precisely the symbolic feat that cusqueños needed in an attempt to bring themselves further into the nation’s consciousness by demonstrating the Inca city’s ingenuity and authenticity. This event confirmed that this modern condor, whether flying over Inca ruins or apus, “did not signal a break with the pre-Hispanic past” (336). Events of equal significance were also being celebrated at the time, such as the arrival of the railroad in 1908 that linked Cusco to the coast26 and telegraphs, telephones, automobiles, and daily newspapers. Indeed, high-profile foreign travelers such as Machu Picchu’s scientific discoverer, Hiram Bingham, commented on the state’s infrastructural improvements in and around Cusco, including sanitation (Bingham 1915, 1916; Medd 2013). In celebratory tones, Cusco was being hailed as a progressive city and interlinked into state transport and communication networks, politics, education, medicine, and the distribution of knowledge, news, and books.
However, as much as a glance upward toward the sky would reveal mechanical condors, on the ground the ever-present “gaping wound which kept Westerners and Indians apart racially, economically, politically, and philosophically was being stitched with rough kitchen thread and the needle of ‘progress.’” Under such analysis, government policies and Indigenista discourses—which sought to address interior neglect and indigenous rights—still revealed a botched stitch along the seams of a “dramatic cultural chasm.” René Prieto rightly describes the 1930s–1960s as trying times, observing that in the “highlands … Commercial culture came knocking at the door of the last bastions of Indian life … With roads came progress … but also the destruction of communal roots and traditional ways” (1996: 149). We recall how in 1949 Uriel García had begun his narrative delighted at having encountered a pocket of traditional ayllu life. Immersed in the creative hub of Cusco, Uriel García clearly recognized the scope and effects of the changes that now reached like tentacles into most aspects of sierra life (his deeper concerns also resurfaced in the works of other Peruvian writers/travelers like Arguedas).
Uriel García’s hybrid chapter titles, for example, “El arte coreográfico popular: Quena, charango, guitarra” (Popular choreographic arts: Quena, charango, guitarra), “Cruzvelacuy” (Evening of the cross), and “Taitacha temblores” (Deity of the earth tremors) all reflected his analytical interests during these travels, as he sought to record traditions, symbols, and their diverse meanings throughout southern Peru’s largely preindustrial landscapes. He certainly alluded to a fear of the masses, mechanization, renewed dependencies, loss of sacred references, and unity due to the impacts of modernity.27
Uriel García retold the following historical event that occurred in Cusco: “It is three o’clock in the afternoon of 31 March 1650 … they are falling down; the most eminent buildings, temples, convents, mansions” (Uriel García 1949: 155).28 Following a powerful earthquake, colonial Spain suddenly lay in rubble on the ground amid the still-standing base structures of the Inca capital city. Succumbing to superstition, the indigenous believed that Earth was displeased, whereas the Spanish saw their stamp of authority weakened (Walker 1999). A frightened mass took to the streets praying and chanting while forming a procession behind a crucifix of Christ. The mestizo cult of taitacha temblores was born, demonstrating how different the cultural-spiritual interpretations of violent natural phenomena were between Peru’s dominant social-racial groups. For Uriel García, this icon in the indigenous consciousness was related to the aforementioned “problem of the land,” and principally to one of being disinherited.29 Thus, the indigenous people used the idol of taitacha temblores as a vessel of communication, conveying their concerns to a mystical place where their injustices could find solace. The icon became “a supreme judge of appeals,” he wrote, and necessary in times when “the corruptible magistrate, in cahoots with the unqualified lawyer, shysters and accepting of bribes on behalf of the landowner, the latter being the one who consumes the dispossessed and miserable estate of the aboriginal, or justifies the depredation against the weak. At this moment the aggrieved victim has no further hope than ‘taitacha’ coming to their aid” (1949: 159).30
In Uriel García’s writing the sierra represented two distinct human and cultural geographies, which in every fundamental aspect were interpreted as differing realities. In the above citation he sensed how two emotions were prevalent: one of the cold, power-abusing and scheming predator, the other of the sadness and naivety of a broken-down spiritualist. Uriel García then interpreted Christian religious symbolism set onto the Andean landscape with questioning tones of suitability and relevance to place, noting how “the sierra is littered with crosses … a symbol of conquest that purported to replace all material exponents of Inca paganism; the huaca31 in other times rose triumphantly upon the brows of mountains, in sowed fields and plains” (1949: 166–167).32
His use of the verb “to purport” strengthened his point that this transplanted symbol of conquest had equally succumbed to a transcultural environment, meaning that its original significance had been altered, and that it since carried much localized interpretation. Thus, Haillihuay, Uriel García goes on to write, represented the Inca fiesta when these crosses were uprooted and carried to churches and mountains accompanied by music, dance, chicha,33 liquor, fires, candles, and orations. The purpose was to communicate a conjunction of “miseries, worries, or pleasures from within these mixed villages of Indians and mestizos who, when confronted with the material riches they create for their dominators, for themselves they create symbols that converge into cultural values” (1949: 169).34
Uriel García had been traveling for many years with social theories packed into his rucksack and forever hopeful that the roads he was pursuing would lead to a just future for Peru (1927). “We are all new Indians,” he had pronounced in 1927 (Uriel García, quoted in Tord 1978: 129),35 by which he meant that mestizaje would eventually succeed in breaking down the social injustices inherent since colonialism and intolerance would be discredited in the modernizing nation (Neira 1973, 2008). It was the moment to believe in a common good and new project—one to celebrate the nation’s complexities of cultures and bloods. “All the most vital horizons of a primitive Peru,” he wrote, “have met in harmony on the lower slopes of Misti,36 a name … that already means mestizo” (1949: 206).37 Using metaphorical language that was specific to a Peruvian context, the sense was still clear; many journeys and roads had finally converged upon a definitive ideology, meaning racial harmony was possible, at least throughout these contested landscapes of Peru’s southern sierra.
The sierra is the origin of all Peru’s major water sources, which descend in either easterly or westerly courses, and its presence haunts the national imagination. The historical embodiment of water into the national consciousness began with the pre-Hispanic peoples’ obvious desires to excel in its provision and management—as shown, for example, by archaeologists E. G. Squier (1877) and J. C. Tello (2004), and O. F. Cook of the US Bureau of Plant Industry (1916). The practicalities of water, in terms of sources, mineralogy, future possibilities, and availability, meant that water constituted important projects for Peru, and especially as Lima dominated the centralizing ambitions of successive governments (Baca 1943; Raimondi 2009; Agüero y Osma 1995). The most obvious examples were the aforementioned massive irrigation demands for the agricultural export market, the redirection of Andean flows along the Atlantic-facing slopes toward the Pacific, and the supply of Lima’s burgeoning population (Mesones Muro 1903, 1924, 1928).
Both Uriel García and Quesada Sosa documented a history of water in their travel narratives. For example, Uriel García explored the sacred significance of water to Andean life, being aware that droughts affected the rich as well as the poor. He wrote, “Every time drought overwhelms them … they send their children to run through dry fields, streets, and plazas under nights of the most splendid moons shouting out for ‘taitacha’ … The ‘problem’ of water … is like woodworm gnawing the soul of men” (1949: 178).38 He referenced mountains as the spiritual source, describing their geographic proportions in powerful language: “Mountain, in action and reaction with man who makes use of it then places upon his own history the sense of proportion such as the sky, light and the rain; indispensable elements for life … Mountain contains the world and all the ultra-worlds” (183).39
Not many travel narratives give such a sense of proportion that link human geography to natural spaces so powerfully in an attempt to portray authenticity and create a real sense of lasting place. Uriel García foregrounded the auras of mountains to show how they acted upon the indigenous psyche, signifying the forces of “life” or “death” along a vertical axis that joined the sky to the underworld. As much as these mountains sustained life, they also gave the dead a permanent place of rest. The rhythms of his wording and language were incantatory; his meditation and celebration conveyed to the reader a respect for and commune with the wilder energies of nature and the totality of spirits that form and inhabit our places.
Quesada Sosa’s observations on nevados did not add anything particularly novel to those narratives of earlier travelers such as Peru’s first state-employed scientist, Antonio Raimondi. However, the bonds between man and resources were expressed equally as passionately and with a religious embodiment. Quesada Sosa’s thinking transcended millenniums, beginning with man’s earliest environmental relations with Earth and culminating in strong feelings of patriotism and love. He wrote of “man of the earth, in turn making the earth human … to dominate the problems of water he knew how to inspire a love of the land as intense as national sentiment” (2005: 231).40 In such unifying terms he demonstrated how timeless resources expanded from a localized space onto the bigger portfolio of a modernizing nation—for the good of all. His prose then telescoped back in history to feature pagan tales involving Inca princesses and other yarns about community conflicts while tapping further into this national obsession. “Water,” he confessed, exhibits a “pagan and loving character” (100–103). As Quesada Sosa flew over the montaña region toward Iquitos, his attention was held by the rivers below that majestically carved their courses through the Amazon forests. The language of love continued: “We see the Marañon … we see appear the Huallaga … to join in an immense nuptial ceremony” (175).41
When describing the rapid growth of Iquitos, the jungle city, Quesada Sosa referenced some earlier observations made by Raimondi, who had noted that six years prior to his visit there in 1868, Iquitos had been a “miserable ranch of indigenous.” During those intervening years Raimondi described how a “flourishing population … full of life … The land, until recently covered with virgin forest, now finds itself transformed by enchantment into a great factory” (Raimondi, quoted in Quesada 2005: 177).42 Rapid deforestation and settler colonialism induced this startling transformation, which Quesada Sosa gave as solid evidence of modern man’s industrious and conquering influences. The timelessness of the selva’s natural environment was being integrated into the nation’s industrializing networks. His thinking, at this time, did not allow nature any history or contribution of its own to make (Plumwood 2003). The Amazon merely accommodated the colonizers’ dreams, and its frontiers continued to represent a “timeless wilderness inhabited by a few passive recipients of whatever windfalls or catastrophes chance and Nature put in their way” (Guardiola-Rivera 2011: 27; see also Green 1980; Onis 1992).43
The seepage from Raimondi’s narrative (nineteenth century) into Quesada Sosa’s pages (twentieth century) effectively prolonged a history of colonial residue, as its meaning sustained the centuries of violent attitudes toward nature and indigenous people in general. The transformations Raimondi described were magical—“enchantment”—and not directly linked to the advance of global capitalism and all forms of nature-centered consumerism (Adams and Mulligan 2003; Coronil 1997; Fay 2003; Grove 1995; Guha 2000). The imagery was appalling, as it revealed groups of settlers hacking at the forests that, in turn, were choking in the wake of encroaching industrialization. Quesada Sosa pondered little over the history of Iquitos, quickly reducing the magical that Raimondi had encountered to memory and a love for global money. He summarized the époque as being “the hour of rubber, black gold that made the entire Amazonian region dream of immense wealth … It is the period that … throughout the streets of Iquitos rolled the pound sterling” (2005: 177).44
Democracy was won in Amazonas against the ruling elite landowners and speculators by Ricardo Feijoo Reina in 1931, who led the political party the Independent Labour Party of Amazonas. He then became the first politician in the history of the Amazonas to fracture and defeat the ruling castas. Reina’s success was also due to the new Peruvian National Election Law of 1931 that signified changes in land and worker relations, rights, and prospects—highlighting the overall shift toward greater public participation in national affairs and consistent with the processes of modernity being discussed in this article (Santos-Granero and Barclay 2000). His newspaper, Amazonas (later La Voz del Pueblo), proved to be an effective medium, as within its pages the powerful castas were depicted as immoral, their wealth inherited instead of being earned from labor, and their methods exposed as being violent. Geographic isolation was also a leading editorial concern, and roads, education, agriculture, and expanding new markets were proclaimed matters of urgency.
For this period, accounts of life in Iquitos emphasize its transient feel; waves of foreigners came and went amid the hustle and bustle of mercantile activities and boom and bust economic cycles. Yet, Quesada Sosa felt that Christianity was not well suited to the environment (as Uriel García had stated about the sierra). The tropical atmosphere, according to Quesada Sosa, made the “spirit return to something more pagan” (2005: 178).45 Transience, in his examples, seemed integral to life in the selva, with references to trade, nomadic lifestyles, the continual passing of water, and nature’s seasons. “In Iquitos,” he wrote, “one feels in every instance the presence of water … in the course of the rivers, the refreshing rainfall, lagoons … above all … in the greatness of Amazonas, being both material and spiritual” (182).46 Reading Quesada Sosa, we understand that water afforded a complete experience involving sound, touch, sight, smell, and delight, and also consisted of physical and religious entities. He principally portrayed the selva as wild, exciting, savage, and a maze of biodiversity. It was a great natural oven that continuously created and germinated only to then be consumed by its own labors; an incessant and furious cycle of life and energies; an intense struggle as natural life raced and fought to reach the sunlight. Quesada Sosa believed that nature’s power and dominance required disciplining and converting, at least partially, into “peaceful gardens or vast industrial verdant grooves, man’s hand must also be put to work in this prodigious zone” (185).47 It was an either-or situation, and the outcome signified that more intense urbanization and modernity projects were on the horizon for the Amazon forests (Nugent and Harris 2011; Slater 1996, 2002)
Building from Mesones Muro’s explorations and reports for the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima in 1924, Quesada Sosa named a variety of high-value trees and underscored the importance of rivers as the region’s only efficient transport routes. Of the industrializing panorama of Loreto, he enthusiastically wrote:
We begin to see some signs of the industrial life of Loreto: chimney stacks of the logging mills, riverboats packed with tools, steamboats that make it into Amazonas; hundreds of felled trees, afloat on the river, dragged along by a vessel and leashed together like a raft coming from who knows which distant rivers. They are the proof of an enormous wealth of timber. It is a richness that shall increase because tractors are now being used to source timber from locations deeper into the woods.
(2005: 184).48
With such a detailed account, we begin to develop a sense of the scale and variety of industrial activities occurring throughout the selva during the 1930s and 1940s. The centers for logging appeared more permanent, the logistics efficient, regular, and functioning. Quesada Sosa celebrated these forest enterprises where man, machinery, and economic markets were being inscribed. To him, Peru was beginning to profit from its natural resources in an industrious manner—the state’s presence and economic control were expanding and beginning to reach deep into the remoter areas of its national geography. He described distinctly mechanized scenes that required investments in “the differing ways that they will have extracted the robust trees … all ready to undergo the sawing process! Machines grab them, slice them, thickness and trim them, align, weigh and measure them. Finally, once classified, they are stacked in big piles” (184–185).49
It was in 1912 when the first fine hardwood samples were sent to New York (Santos-Granero and Barclay 2000) and the commercial trade in fine woods such as mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) began in small sawmills. The processes of exploration and the resulting geographical knowledge now circulating about the potential wealth of Peru’s natural resources were showing signs of a more developed network between elites who were also forming a global community.50
To conclude, from the 1930s onward the priority given to scientific exploration waned, and Peru boasted its own literary travel writers who engaged specifically in matters of national and geographical interest. Travel writing was considered to be making valuable social contributions with patriotism as its motivating force, and therefore countering the common criticism that analysis of travel writing is decontextualized, or solely linked to imperialism.51 The general opening of society and politics throughout this period provided the eclectic atmosphere for travelers of independent and institutional status—as well as political theorists, intellectuals, and artists—to challenge and confront elitist versions of history, race, and national identity (Miller 2008).
Uriel García’s passions and academic pursuits were greatly informed by travel. His journeys inspired the writing of tourist literature, his research on pre-Hispanic civilizations, and theories on decolonization. His premises were largely historical, but he was also forward thinking, as was shown by his overall stance when challenging and rethinking a long history dominated by colonial attitudes. His narrative confirmed that he remained convinced of the need to ease the sierra regions and people into the national processes of modernity. However, he maintained a philosophical distance from a wholly Eurocentric model of modernity by exploring the local aspects that were more representative of and beneficial to the nation. He saw enormous worth in racial mixing, traditions, alternative lifestyles, and environmental and spiritual relations. The democratic and communal thinking of Indigenismo was woven into his narrative, and his ideas reflected many of the nation’s overall changes and aspirations for the time. Indeed, by the 1940s—as the national census confirmed—“Peru had self-defined itself as essentially a mestizo country” (Hunefeldt 2004: 173).
Quesada Sosa wrote beautiful prose immortalizing his travels and perceptions of Peru’s interior regions. They were journeys that prompted him to reflect further on Peru’s landscapes, people, and natural resources. He wrote of “man of the earth” with reference to how, since the earliest times in human evolution, man had dominated nature in search of solutions to problems of survival and growth. But for all his valuable observations, it is also necessary to review Peru’s colonial geographical stereotypes in his thinking. The old costa-sierra-selva construct of geographical opposites failed as a narrative to incorporate other complexities, such as the interconnectedness and transcultural aspects of Peru’s pre-Hispanic civilizations—as developed first by German archaeologist Max Uhle (1856–1944) and then explored further by Peru’s national archaeologist Julio C. Tello (2007, 2009). From the 1920s onward there were also the very visible sociopolitical realities of sierra migrations across Lima’s modernizing landscapes that culminated in barrios de invasión,52 both conflicting and cooperative, raising questions of representation, identity, gender, and unequal social power.53
Ultimately, throughout his travels, Quesada Sosa aimed at describing how modernity was multidirectional and influenced as much by the processes of history as it was by the present and collective aspirations of the Peruvian people. He did not specifically engage with Indigenismo, but like Uriel García, he believed mestizaje would offer the best future for Peru. His interesting observations on the selva’s truer qualities as “pagan” arose because of ancient oral folklore and also because the forests signified wilderness that was resistant to modernity. Both writers expressed concerns of varying degrees about modernity and its impacts on the environment and peoples’ traditional lifestyles. However, Quesada Sosa’s ideas often informed an environmental schizophrenia: in citing Raimondi’s celebration of new occupancy and forest clearance so as to accommodate Western urban and industrial values, he confirmed his position that such examples demonstrated a resource-rich nation on the road to progress.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the six peer reviewers whose advice and expertise really turned my work around, making it contributory toward the debates on travel, decolonization, identity, and environmental history. Equally, I wish to thank Hélène Guyot for her wonderful illustrations, Maria-Pia Di Bella and the Journeys team, my PhD supervisor Matthew Brown and examiner Claire Lindsay, and also my academic friends Roger and Vilna Kirkup, Melisa Moore, Anthony Fothergill, Claudio Canaparo, Mariana Mould de Pease, Sandra Nava, Ximena and Paco Maurial, Graciela Cabrera for hours of attention and service at the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima, Peru’s then environment minister Dr. Antonio Brack Egg, Walter Wust, Juan Cinclinegui de la Vega, director of the Biblioteca Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás, Cusco, and Luis Felipe Villacorta Ostolaza, director of the Museo Raimondi, Lima, Peru.
Notes
Without a standard translation of the book’s title, I have respected Quesada Sosa’s intended perception that Peru consists of three geographical entities. Friar Uriarte wrote that the “name given to the montaña region of Peru geographically represents the eastern slopes of the eastern Cordilleras stretching to the Ecuadorian, Colombian, Brazilian, and Bolivian borders, demarcating Peru’s own geopolitical frontiers. The montaña region begins at 1,500 meters altitude on these eastern slopes and features innumerable ravines and gullies. Most of the region does not exceed 300 meters in altitude” Original text: “Se designa con el nombre de montaña en el Perú, a la parte del país que se extiende desde las faldas orientales de la cordillera oriental hasta las fronteras del Ecuador, Colombia, Brasil y Bolivia, con las cuales Repúblicas es limítrofe el Perú … La montaña comienza a los mil quinientos metros aproximadamente de la falda oriental de la cordillera del mismo nombre y cuenta con inumerables quebradas … el nivel medio de la mayor parte de la montaña no pasa de trescientos metros de altura sobre el nivel del mar” (Uriarte 1938: 14–15).
The Indigenismo movement centered on the rethinking and evaluation of indigenous cultures. It incorporated the political and ideological theories of artists, academics, essayists, and government policy makers. It was very fractured with many of its proponents coming with differing agendas. However, it was instigated by intellectuals of mostly socialist belief structures, with Luis E. Valcárcel considered to be the movement’s most prolific writer. Scholar Rebecca Earle writes, “Indigenismo is a general term used to describe a movement that developed in a number of Spanish American countries from the second decade of the twentieth century. Martin Stabb has defined it as a ‘sympathetic awareness of the Indian.’ Indigenismo was characterized by a concern with the well-being of contemporary indigenous peoples, often expressed as a desire to elevate Indians from their lowly position so that they might enjoy the benefits available to other citizens” (2007: 185).
In his position as Mexico’s minister of education, José Vasconcelos (1882–1959) aimed to improve the condition of the “Indian” as well as the low national literacy rates. He sponsored the now famous works of the muralists José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. His most renowned literary work is La raza cósmica (The cosmic race), published in 1925, which can be studied as a travel narrative. In its pages he argued that the Latin American mestizo constituted a new race comprising all the virtues of all the previous ones and thus forming “the final race, the cosmic race.” His ideas have been highly criticized due to racist theories and overt stereotyping. In the 1925 edition his Las notas de viaje documented his travels to Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and an excursion into Chile (Vasconcelos 1925, 1997).
Ciro Alegría (1909–1967) was exiled in 1934 due to his political militancy. He then turned to writing and journalism, focusing on social problems and inequality while verse and prose became his voice in the struggle. The Golden Serpent is set in Calemar in the Marañon Valley. Its inhabitants and protagonists are cholos who earn their living by agriculture, ferrying people, goods, and cattle across the Marañon River. In this socioenvironmental setting the novel can be seen as Indigenista and is quite different from the southern Andean regions of Arguedas’s works. Cholos are Alegría’s heroes of mestizaje and form part of a transcultural narrative written for and by the lower middle or mestizo classes. Both are rising socially and economically and feel hampered by the well-rooted and all-controlling landowners.
Considered the greatest “Indianist” writer, the question for José María Arguedas (1911–1969) was how the traditional Andean world could form part of a national collective project. His writing was a reaction to the centuries of false portrayals of Indian characters, livelihoods, and their landscapes, left void of feeling. Agua exposed some of the many horrors experienced by highland peoples in terms of social inequalities, power struggles, land ownership, and access to resources. Arguedas settled in Lima when in his thirties, and in his final novel, published posthumously, The Fox from Above and the Fox from Below (1971), he was forced to tackle the idiosyncrasies in the counterpositioning of the Limeño and the provincial peoples. Overpowered by modernity’s compulsiveness and suffering a deep depression, he committed suicide (see Cornejo 1984).
For example, Julio C. Tello (1880–1947), a Peruvian archaeologist, ascertained that the valuable environmental knowledge gained by Peru’s pre-Hispanic civilizations equally had contemporary significance for a modernizing and industrializing nation (see Medd 2013, 2015b; Tello 2009).
“In 1919, 145 publications in the form of journals, newspapers, magazines, and so on, were in circulation. By 1928 that number had leapt to 473” (Archibald 2011: 31).
Amauta is a Quechua word from the Inca dynasty. Overall, I believe, as gleaned from travel narratives and texts, that amautas were people dedicated to learning, to the art of using one’s mind to maximum benefit for the rest of society. This process might have included debating, reflection, counseling, pilgrimages, personal suffering, official representation (ambassadors), knowledge of quipus systems, and official reporting and accountability, to name a few duties of an amauta. As a journal Amauta ran between 1926 and 1930, folding shortly after Mariátegui’s early death. The editorial ethos was that of an open and intellectual medium hosting ideas and encouraging debates from all political persuasions, particularly the national concerns of colonialism/postcolonialism, modernity, society, industrialization, environment, art, and Indigenismo. Many articles in Amauta were travel-based and offered insights into Andean life, environment, and folklore. For example, Luis E. Valcárcel’s article “Detrás de las montañas” (Behind the Mountains) was a celebration of Andean communities and the virtues of the Andean woman (Valcárcel 1926: 8–9).
All translations from the Spanish are my own unless otherwise stated.
Ayllu refers to an indigenous communistic social-economic unit whose founding principals were the sharing of the means of production, distribution, and allocation. It is Inca in origin and is also employed to describe forms of adherence to kinship groups: “The ayllu comprised all people who were related, by marriage or consanguineously. Since preconquest settlements were generally small hamlets, the term ayllu could refer to the entire community. In a broader sense, the ayllu could be a separate cultural and linguistic group” (Cook and Cook 2007: 19).
The original text reads, “‘Nuestros Indios,’ de Manuel González Prada … la realidad del indígena y la primera vez que se señaló que el problema estaba ligado a la tierra y a cuestiones socio-económicas.”
Quesada Sosa was a distinguished scholar, graduating with a PhD in literature from the University of San Marcos, Lima (UNMSM), in 1935. He had extensive economic and political influences—his family owned and edited Peru’s oldest and most reputed daily newspaper, El Comercio, Lima, which he also managed from 1980.
When the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima published and widely distributed the national map—“El Mapa Mural del Perú”—in 1912 throughout schools, business locales, and across Peruvian society, it is believed that this gave Peruvians, “for the first time, a visual representation of what their country was.” It signified the “modernization of the state, prompted by the civil elite at the turn of the century. It was the acknowledgment of a drawn-up national territory” (Cueto 1992: 41–42). The original text reads, “El Mapa Mural del Perú de 1912, elaborado por la Sociedad, fue un mapa clásico … podia ser encontrado en todas las oficinas del estado. La modernización del estado que impulsó la élite civil de comienzos de siglo implicó el reconocimiento gráfico del territorio nacional. La geografía trajo por primera vez para muchos peruanos una representación visual de lo que era su país.”
The original text reads, “La obra de los viajeros al Perú … son una fuente inagotable de ideas para asumir de manera realista nuestro espacio.” The Sociedad Geográfica de Lima debated a wide range of narratives, including early chronicles, with a view toward further investigations and establishing favorable circumstances specific to Peru and the national geography. Examples of the travelers are: Prof. Antonio Raimondi (1824–1890); Manuel Antonio Mesones Muro (1862–1930); and Carlos Oyague y Calderón (no dates available). Also see Tomas Cantella (1989) for details on Raimondi’s travels, who actually placed Machu Picchu on his map and proceeded up the valley path, narrowly missing the ruins.
However, following the series of military and dictatorial governments that ruled from 1931 until 1945, the political events discouraged state attachment to such an institution and, with its resources diminishing, its earlier position as the vanguard of scientific-patriotic travel and resource exploration was over.
The original text reads, “Todavía es emocionante ver, perdidos en algún rincón de estas serranías, fragmentos de aquella unidad social que da lustre a la prehistoria humana.”
The country’s major irrigation projects, for example, had “contributed to a 66 per cent increase in the cultivated area on the coast between 1929 and 1961” (Bertram 1991: 397).
The actual growth of workers’ unions and populist-centered politics for the period, as well as the efforts to modernize services such as the country’s hydroelectric output, confirm these increases in labor and consumption trends (Bertram 1991; Hunefeldt 2004).
Quijano’s definition is apt here: “Eurocentrism is … the name of a perspective of knowledge whose systematic formation began in Western Europe before the middle of the seventeenth century, although some of its roots are … much older. In the following centuries this perspective was made globally hegemonic, travelling the same course as the dominion of the European bourgeois class” (2008: 197).
Valcárcel contributed toward another historical-cultural guide, titled Cusco histórico (1934).
The original text reads, “en los sufrimientos de naciones indígenas y pueblos oprimidos, que … buscan su liberación definitiva para hacer del Perú incaico y colonial, un nuevo Perú, donde no haya la explotación del hombre por el hombre.”
For more on travel and theory, see James Clifford (1989).
Criollo/a is a highly nuanced term. In Peru it generally refers to a person of European lineage who was born in Latin America—and it implies elitism and wealth. However, it also refers to a diverse cultural heritage. For example, in the Caribbean creoles share mixed African and Spanish ancestries. It can also depict the white settlers in the Caribbean.
The original text reads, “a percibir, recoger y exaltar los valores humanos o materiales que forman el carácter y la belleza del Perú … tres regiones distintas y un solo bien verdadero: el Perú.”
The original text reads, “utilizó todos los medios de comunicación, desde los frágiles aviones de las décadas de 1930 y 1940.”
The original text reads, “el aeroplano pierde altura … vemos más claramente los rebaños de llamas, las casas de tejas rojas, los campos de grama en que discurren vacas, ovejas y caballos, los tremedales y las ciénagas, donde unos simples charcos de agua lucen y se enaltecen con el brillo del Sol. Es la refulgencia especial del Sol serrano, considerado aquí como padre con más razón que en otra parte … las cimas de nieve del Salcantay y el Ausangate, los trajes azules, los ponchos decorados, la línea espumosa de los ríos, y hasta las piedras mismas de las montañas circundantes.”
For more on Peru’s railroads, see Thomas Hutchinson (1873–1874).
These “impacts” upon society and nature were precisely what nature writers and explorers were to document and comment upon from the mid-twentieth century onward—writers such as Peter Matthiessen (The Cloud Forest) and Gene Savoy (Antisuyo), who both made difficult and extensive journeys throughout Peru.
The original text reads, “Son las tres de la tarde del 31 de marzo de 1650 … Se vienen abajo, los más egregios edificios, templos, conventos, mansiones.”
In a response toward tackling a history of gamonalismo, a Ministry of Agriculture was created in 1943 that resulted in some revisionism in land titles. This led to small-scale producers becoming landowners or leaseholders, as they participated in both local and export markets. Peru’s accessible lands were extensively developed for an export market—and formed the economic backbone to government policies—whereas the small amount of land available to produce food for Peruvians was dispersed, insufficient to meet the needs of a growing and migrating urban society (Bertram 1991; Hunefeldt 2004; Rudolph 1992; Schwartz 1970).
The original text reads, “un supremo juez de apelaciones. Cuando el magistrado venal, coludido con el tinterillo y cohechado por el terrateniente, consuma el despojo de la mísera heredad del aborigen o justifica la depredación contra el débil, el agraviado no tiene otra esperanza que acudir a ‘taitacha.’”
Huaca/waka is a feature on a landscape like a mound, a man-made pyramid; it may be of cut stone and is believed to have had religious significance, such as the Huaca de la luna that pertained to the Moche culture. The aforementioned Peruvian archaeologist, Julio C. Tello, wrote the following: “the monuments and cemeteries were, for the Indians, wakas, or sacred relics, the places where their gods or the spirit of their ancestors dwelled … Waka is, therefore, for him, an intangible and invulnerable place, a taboo. No conscientious native dares, even today, to profane his wakas. Wakas are all the ancient monuments of Peru” (Tello 2009: 92; see also Medd 2015b).
The original text reads, “Todo el campo de estas serranías está poblado de cruces … La cruz, símbolo justificador de la conquista, pretendió sustituírse a todo exponente material del paganismo incaica, a la huaca que en otros tiempos se alzaba triunfante sobre las cejas de las montañas, o en la orilla de los sembrados y pampas.”
Chicha is a fermented liquor made from Indian corn, barley, and quinoa (millet). Chicha is loved by Peruvians and described in many travelogues. It is also a style of dance music that originated in Lima during the 1970s—a Peruvian fusion of funk with indigenous and black influences.
The original text reads, “conjugue miserias, inquietudes o placeres de estos pueblos de indios y mestizos, que frente a la riqueza material que crean para sus dominadores, crean para ellos las fórmulas adecuadas que los unifiquen en valores de cultura.”
The original text reads, “Nuevos Indios somos todos.” See also Marisol de la Cadena (2000) for crucial scholarship on mestizaje and the diverse discourses being articulated in early to mid-twentieth-century Peru.
El Misti (5,822 meters) is an active and symmetrical volcano close to Peru’s second-largest city, Arequipa (2,380 meters).
The original text reads, “Todos los horizontes más vitales del Perú primitivo se conjugaron armoniosamente en las faldas del Misti, nombre … ya significa mestizo.”
The original text reads, “cada vez que la sequía los agobia … mandar a sus hijos a que por las noches de luna, más espléndidas, por la misma sequía, recorren calles y plazas clamando: ‘Taitacha …’ … el ‘problema’ del agua … que es carcoma que va royendo el alma de los hombres.”
The original text reads, “El monte, en acción y reacción con los hombres que lo utilizan … sobre su historia misma, el sentido de la proporción, como el cielo, la luz y la lluvia, indispensables para la vida … el monte contiene el mundo y todos los ultramundos.”
The original text reads, “Hombre de tierra, que hace también la tierra humana … ha sabido inspirar un amor a la tierra tan intenso que el sentimiento nacionalista.”
The original text reads, “vemos el Marañon … vemos aparecer el Huallaga … unirse en una inmensa ceremonia nupcial.”
The original text reads, “fue una miserable ranchería de indígenas hace seis años, hoy es una población floreciente y llena de vida … El terreno, que hasta hace pocos años estaba cubierto por un espeso y virgen bosque, se halla transformado por encanto en una gran factoría.”
As stated, it was too early to investigate further into the logging industry regarding the “lives of both trees and people” (Slater 1996: 115), and reliable information on extraction and revenue would also have been scant. It was simply enough for Quesada Sosa to proudly observe and write about the forests’ resources being industrially extracted by entrepreneurs. The list of valuable trees Quesada Sosa named was impressive, with rosewood (palo de rosa) and caoba being just two species that across Amazonia today are considered overlogged; both are being removed illegally from protected nature reserves in astonishing quantities and require urgent protection (INRENA 2016; Medd 2015a, 2016; Rodríguez 2009; Rumrrill 2008; Rumrrill and Zutter 1976; Sabelli 2011.
The original text reads, “Viene la hora del caucho, el oro negro, que hace soñar a toda la región amazónica con una inmensa riqueza … Es la época … por las calles de Iquitos ruedan las libras esterlinas.” While referencing the bustling streets and British domination of the rubber boom, Quesada Sosa failed to mention the thousands of indigenous lives that this “great factory” had so recently consumed, disgracing Peru internationally (Casement 1997; Goodman 2009; Taussig 1984).
The original text reads, “en estas regiones de selva y trópico, el espíritu se vuelve algo pagano.”
The original text reads, “En Iquitos se siente en todo instante la presencia del agua. Se le siente en el curso de los ríos; en la caída de la lluvia refrescante; en las lagunas … sobre todo … en la grandeza inmensa, al mismo tiempo material y espiritual, del Amazonas.”
The original text reads, “Apacibles jardines o vastas florestas industriales, la mano del hombre tiene que poner también su parte en esta zona pródiga.”
The original text reads, “empezamos a ver algunos signos de la vida industrial de Loreto: chimeneas de los aserraderos; lanchas cargadas de herramientas, vapores que van a surcar el Amazonas; cientos de troncos de árboles, que vienen navegando, arrastrados por una embarcación y amarrados como una balsa, desde quién sabe qué ríos lejanos. Son los representantes de una enorme riqueza madera. Riqueza que ahora va en aumento, porque con los tractores se empieza a aprovechar los árboles que quedan en el centro de los bosques.”
The original text reads, “En cuántas formas se habrán extraído los árboles robustos que ahora veo, listos para pasar todo el proceso de su sierra! Las máquinas los cogen, los rebanan, les igualan su grosor y sus bordes, los alinean, los pesan y los miden, y, ya clasificados, los colocan en grandes pilas.”
From 1863 onward Raimondi’s extensive travels and reports on Peru’s selva and its wealth of natural resources were being debated and followed closely by members of the Royal Geographic Society of London. Their comments in the Proceedings show an awareness of the increasing value of tropical hardwood timbers and other forest produce. For more information, see Antonio Raimondi (1863–1864, 1866–1867, 1867). Linked to the relationship between economic development and the forest is a triangular construct that now questions the implications of such economic development for indigenous Peruvians and their overall relationship with the state and capital. The “classification” processes Quesada mentioned are today seeped in environmental laws amid a backdrop of extreme levels of land encroachment, corruption, and violence. Those early signs of mechanized timber extraction now translate into an eco-apocalypse; the twenty-first century began as one confronting climate change fueled by bona fide lawlessness, high murder rates of environmental activists (mostly indigenous) across Latin America, impunity for perpetrators, and Mafia domination of resources, including control of the mechanization, river systems, and export markets. The encroachment into the forests that both Raimondi and Quesada mentioned continue, threatening the futures of both the Amazon and indigenous peoples. Throughout Amazonia today “over half of its residents now live in cities, that Indians make up less than 2 percent of the population” (Slater 1996: 114). The Bagua uprising in Amazonas, Peru, in 2009 demonstrated that still today race issues reside at the heart of ancestral lands and resource concerns (Adams 2009; Peru Support Group 2009)—as discussed by the Indigenistas from the 1920s. The high-profile cases of the Brazilian Chico Mendes, the rubber tapping trade union leader and environmentalist murdered in 1988, and the Peruvian Edwin Chota, also murdered while trying to halt illegal logging and the extraction of natural resources and forest wildlife in 2014. More recently is the equally violent death of the Honduran activist and 2015 Goldman Prize Recipient for South and Central America, Berta Cáceres (1971-2016). Cáceres was assassinated at her home after opposing the Agua Zarca Dam project. All cases highlight the criminality, the lack of state governance to protect the basic human rights of its citizens, and the lack of enforcement of environmental laws. United Nations Article 26 (Rights of Indigenous Peoples) recognizes the legal obligation to consult indigenous peoples over forest resources that are linked by tradition to their lifestyles. For more on environmental lawlessness within Latin America, see Rupert Medd (2013, 2015a, 2016). For information on a history of violence, environmentalism, ecology, conflicts, and valuations of the poor, see Joan Martinez-Alier (1991, 2002) and Rob Nixon (2011). For homicides in the Peruvian Amazon linked to criminal logging, see Scott Wallace (2014).
On travel writing and imperialism, see Richard Grove (1995) and Mary Louise Pratt (1992); and in a Peruvian context, see Shannon Butler (2005).
Barrios de invasión are shantytowns, literally “invading neighborhoods.”
For more on slum dwellers and political and social spaces, see Slavov Zizek (2008).
References
A. C. 1938. “Bibliografía costa, sierra y montaña por Aurelio Miró Quesada Sosa.” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 2 (3): 202–203.
Adams, Guy. 2009. “Images Reveal Full Horror of ‘Amazon’s Tiananmen.’” The Independent World, 18 June. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/images-reveal-full-horror-of-amazons-tiananmen-1708990.html (accessed 19 June 2009).
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