Oldal 44 [44]
THE MODERN PERU: WESTERN, INDIGENOUS OR MESTIZO
trade-unionist, indigenist tendencies constituted a difficult challenge to
counteract by a traditional oligarchy incapable of proposing creative and
effective alternatives to maintain its predominance.
Under these conditions, two projects emerged seeking to overcome the
intellectual gap, namely those of Francisco García Calderón and José de la Riva
Agüero y Osma. One supported the need to implement strong measures in
order to control the overflowing situation; the other presented miscegenation
as his central idea. Both of them appealed to history in their proposals.
Francisco García Calderón was an intellectual from the Peruvian oligarchy
but also one ofits greatest critics. Alongside other Latin American intellectuals
disabused of the republican trajectory, Garcia Calderén was committed to
an authoritarian alternative remembering Simon Bolivar, Porfirio Diaz in
Mexico and Ramon Castilla in Peru as great men because they knew how to
impose themselves and avoid the social inconveniences of representation and
democracy. In that sense, he was a supporter of the “democratic Caesarismo.”
In his essays El Perti contempordneo (1907) and, especially, in Las
democracias latinas de América (1912) published in French but with wide
circulation among Peruvian and Latin American intellectuals, he developed
ideas about the historical mission that the Latin American intelligenzia and
political elites had to carry out through authoritarian regimes and even by
collaborating with dictators. It is understood that the elite in mind was
White, Western and Christian.
On his side, aristocratic historian José de la Riva Agiiero y Osma rejected
plebiscitary caudillos who replaced democratic representation and, as a
partisan of the monarchy, he prefered a strong regime capable of controlling
the emerging economic, social, and cultural sectors. For this, he found the
perfect formula in an interpretation of Peruvian history that highlighted the
conformation of a Mestizo or mixed people nation starting with the European
conquest in the sixteenth century. He used widely the ideas of Bartolomé
Herrera about a new country created by the conquest, but his conclusion was
that the country was new because it was neither indigenous nor Spanish.
Curiously enough, the great paradigm of this new country would be the
Mestizo writer Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, author of a decentralized version
of Peruvian history, contrary to the one Lima elites had held for centuries.
As a result of a historiographical controversy about the originality of the
4 Francisco Garcia Calderön: Las democracias latinas de América. La creaciôn de un
continente, Caracas, Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1976.
43 ¢