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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 ¢
