Oldal 39 [39]
OCR
FRANCISCO QUIROZ CHUECA true, the correct, and the one and only tradition. In fact, inclusion meant to homogenize by imposing through education the version of the culture of the dominant Creole groups on non-Western compatriots who were neither Christians nor Spanish-speakers.*® Thus, to become Peruvian, the peoples of the Andes and the Amazon, as well as the descendants of African slaves and castes had to assume the hegemonic culture of the Creole elites. As the Peruvian independent Republic was consolidated the dominant Creole elites found that it was not convenient to completely deny the Spanish legacy of the country. In these circumstances and on the occasion of the twentyfifth anniversary of political independence, the fact that the pro-Spanish and Catholic historical discourse of the ultraconservative priest Bartolomé Herrera (1846) emerged can be better understood. The Lima-centrist historical interpretation of Peralta Barnuevo was modified to make room for a Spanish Peru without Spain: thanks to the development of the Creole consciousness, Peruvian Creole elites had reached maturity as if to separate themselves from their mother country in order to start a new autonomous life. Bartolomé Herrera used Viscardo’s ideas to support his Hispanic and Catholic position without mentioning the origin. Just as for Viscardo, the great concern of Herrera and the historians of his time was not the past, but the present and the future. The former greatness of Peru was not questioned as it was the historical foundation of the new republican regime in a country with a complex ethnic-cultural composition, one which had recently emerged from a long colonial regime in circumstances that left serious doubts about the relevance of the separation and of the conviction with which the elite groups had acted. Herrera accepted independence as inevitable and, to explain it, he used an argument that appears in Viscardo’s Letter: the maturity of the Peruvian nation within the Spanish nation, although Viscardo was more interested in the Hispanic American nation and Herrera had in mind religious elements in the formation of a new, Peruvian independent nation. Three centuries the motherland led us in her arms. She assured us with Catholicism, the unity of the faith that was missing, together with the order and public rest in Europe; she taught us her customs, her laws, her science, her blood, and her life; she formed us as a nation. But a nation is a group of means ordered by Providence, so that they meet their sights with intelligence and will. It was necessary, therefore, that the Peruvian nation fulfilled its destiny." Monica Quijada: Homogeneidad y nacion, con un estudio de caso: Argentina, siglos XIX y XX, Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 2000. Herrera links the nation with the racial, the cultural and the religious so that the Peruvian nation fits easily into the Hispanic American nation. He states that the nation is “a group of men who form a separate race, who by their language, their religion and their habits, + 38 +
