This book on modern Cuzco by José Luis Rénique, a Peruvian historian who teaches at the City University of New York, continues the florescence of regional studies begun some 15 years ago. It seeks to examine Peru’s twentieth-century political history from the perspective of one of the most impoverished and backward areas of the country, but also one of the most important areas from a historical and cultural point of view. The result is a carefully documented and clearly written account of Cuzco’s alternative vision(s) of regional and national development. As such, the book offers a sharply different approach from the standard histories that focus on Lima as the center of state power and ignore regional or peripheral historical variations.
The book is divided into three historical periods, each of which constitutes a discrete analytical section. In each, regionalism is viewed as an ideological discourse expressed by different social groups intent on participating in regional and national decision making. The first section, “Nosotros, los indios,” examines the emergence of indigenismo and decentralismo in the 1920s, which reflected the rise of middle-class opposition to landlord domination in the region. Both movements are also, according to Rénique, “las expresiones que asume el regionalismo cusqueño en respuesta a una modernización tan amenazante como prometedora” (p. 369).
The same can be said of the other two periods of Cuzqueño regional effervescence in this century. “Desarrollo, para quién?,” the second section, analyzes the impact and failure of state developmentalist policies in the 1950s and 1960s, which ended with the rise of peasant movements to challenge the decaying hacienda and gamonal system. In this instance the vision that emerges from Cuzco is of radical transformation along the lines of a socialist revolution.
The final section, “La hora de las masas,” takes up the 1968 Velasco agrarian reform, which was intended to eradicate the vestiges of semifeudalism in the sierra and incorporate the peasantry into the political system at the local level. The result of this ambitious but unsuccessful project was the creation of an enormous power vacuum that the Left vainly tried, in the context of economic crisis, to fill through popular mobilization and organization, thereby opening the way for Shining Path.
While Rénique’s book joins the historiographical trend of addressing specific Andean regions, it is the first to extend beyond the year 1930 and encompass the entire twentieth century. It also offers a compelling analysis of the increasing backwardness and marginalization of the highlands. This Rénique does not attribute to Peru’s dependent position in the international economy. Rather he sees it as the direct consequence of specific policies of the oligarchical state, in alliance with the gamonal class of landowners until 1968. These policies were based on implementing an export model of development that relegated the sierra to the production of raw materials, food, and cheap labor.
