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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 twenty¬
fifth 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,
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