This book tells the story of how the northern Peruvian town of Chachapoyas is transformed from an isolated fief ruled by a series of rustic caudillos, who alternated in power, into a more democratic society, as it is swept into the political logic and structures of a modern state. Key agents of this transformation are the rising Chachapoyan middle classes, who, sheltered by a set of nationwide transformations that revolutionized Peru’s political system in the 1920s and early 1930s, abolished “casta” rule and established themselves in power.

Chapters 2 through 5 present an analysis of local power under the “castas,” or “clans” of ruling “aristocracy” of Spanish descent. The next three chapters take up the process of “democratización.” These latter are, stylistically, the most accomplished chapters of the book. The frequent long quotes that makes for tedious reading in the earlier chapters diminish as does the profusion of redundant statements. In the first and concluding chapters Nugent presents his theoretical framework.

Editorial problems apart, this book has the merit of disclosing a wide array of rich, previously unknown data, culled from local archives, newspapers, and oral interviews, that along with the author’s finest interpretative insights will remain an enduring contribution to the study of local politics and culture in the northern Andes and the emergence of a “public sphere” in early-twentieth-century Peru.

The author himself may not, however, gauge his contribution in this way. Less engaged with the larger history of Peru and Latin America and more interested in theoretical debates on “state-formation,” Nugent uses the Chachapoyas case in his attempt to demonstrate that states are not powerful forces that spread “from a center to the regions” or that impose themselves “from above.” Processes of state-formation are not the matter of elites alone. States are also pushed and molded locally and “from below.” They can become liberating, democratizing instances embraced by underrepresented sectors that seek to free themselves from the yoke of a quasi-feudal, personalistic oppression. Such was the case in Chachapoyas by the 1920s and 1930s.

Up to this point, I could not agree with Nugent more—though one might add that these assessments no longer ring so new. Popular input in state-making; local analysis of the state; and popular perceptions of nation, nationalism, and citizenship have not only become common topics in the historiography of Latin America (as elsewhere) in recent years, but they have, in fact, generated a “boom” of studies that transcend periods and disciplines. The list could be quite long, but the earliest Peruvian example that comes to my mind stems from the debates on “peasant nationalism” provoked by Nelson Manrique’s pathbreaking Las guerrillas indígenas en la guerra con Chile (Lima, 1981). The “boom” has not left the colonial era untouched, as historian Juan Carlos Estenssoro’s fine essays on the Bourbon state and plebeian discourses of modernity in eighteenth-century Lima attest. In scholarly works throughout the world we are witnessing the abandoning of monolithic, unidirectional views of the state as well as the withering of Marxist-inspired theories of class struggle, with their emphasis on the repressive aspects of the state. Nugent’s failure to credit an academic production so much connected with his own endeavor is striking, particularly given the magnitude of his own theoretical pretensions and his claim that Chachapoyas is a “case apart” that may typify the “distinctiveness” of Latin America, where theories of state-making born in and for “Western Europe,” are not applicable (pp. 317-23).

These controversial statements may puzzle attentive readers when they reach the conclusion. For the book seems to have been narrating a sort of Peruvian version of the Fall of La Bastille—the Chachapoyan middle class as the emerging French bourgeoisie and the “castas” as the deposed aristocracy, as one of Nugent’s own informants states. Inexplicably, the author opts to liken the backward Chachapoyan aristocracy with a “modern,” sophisticated (yet atemporal) “European bourgeoisie class,” only to conclude that unlike the latter, Peruvian local elites opposed the state, while only the “the subaltern" or the “pueblo” welcomed it (pp. 320-21). Readers now ask themselves the identity of this “pueblo” or “subaltern” of Nugent’s conclusions, for until then it was clear that the agents of Chachapoyas’s “democratizing” process were the educated, urban middle classes, not any of the other more marginalized sectors of the population.

The main organizing principle and prime theoretical lesson that the author wishes to derive from the Chachapoyas case is the existence of an autonomous entity called “el pueblo” that epitomizes “modernity,” an entity that “brings the state into being” from an “essence” called “the local” and whose ideology and political aspirations are substantially different from (for “antagonistic to”) those of the “backward elites.” Itself an over-statement, this conviction mars the best of Nugent’s (less pretentious) interpretative insights, and accounts for the book’s more serious methodological flaws.

Thus Nugent removes from his narrative those elements of the historical context that threaten his idealized, dual model, but that are absolutely crucial to understanding the political process he explores. Nugent presents the “revolution of 1930” as the landmark of the “democratization” and “modernization” of Chachapoyas without mentioning that it corresponded, at the national level, to the rise to power of a government (that of Sánchez Cerro) whose fascist sympathies and methods were clear. Nor does he mention that this government brought about an implacable nationwide persecution of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), the party par excellence of the rising middle classes and the very party that according to Nugent so influenced Chachapoyas’s own democratization process, but whose own political structure and ideology were permeated by authoritarian and messianic traits. Why is a party that emerged in the 1920s as epitomizing the middle classes suppressed by “the revolution of 1930” that epitomized these same classes? Nugent does not even pose the question, as his conception of the middle classes (or “pueblo”?) seem to be that of an unproblematic, monolithic bloc.

In failing to notice these troubling ironies, Nugent not only dismisses the intricacies of political history as mere contingencies to his analysis. He leaves a whole array of equally important theoretical issues unaddressed: the problem of political leadership (Nugent’s “pueblo” is leaderless); the circularity of the relationship between the ruling and the ruled (some call it “hegemony”); and the intricacies and limits of domination—problems that connect directly with the state-making process with which he is so concerned.

I do not doubt that the democratization process Nugent describes for Chachapoyas was such. But it cannot be analyzed apart from its own authoritarian ingredients. There is nothing specifically Latin American in this situation. The rapid rise of middle sectors thirsty for political representation; a self-proclaimed modern state; and a humbly-born, charismatic, authoritarian leader, are all elements that configure a situation of “state-making” that by the 1920s and 1930s was that of fascist Europe. Nugent fails to see the coexistence of similar elements in Peru, and thus to delve into what is truly distinctive in its history.

In so comfortably dismissing European theories of “state-making” as unsuitable for Latin America, Nugent commits a major, though not the worst, error. The main problem with his whole approach, as I see it, is not the failure to read theory but to grasp history.