Ward 2012 Indigenismo PDF

Manuel González Prada and Rigoberta Menchú: Measuring
Indigenismo through Indigenous Thought
Thomas Ward
Hispania, Volume 95, Number 3, September 2012, pp. 400-423 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/486143
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Manuel González Prada and Rigoberta Menchú:
Measuring Indigenismo through Indigenous Thought
Thomas Ward
Loyola University Maryland, USA
Abstract: Much has been written about indianismo and indigenismo and their literary and social meaning,
but rarely have these two criollo movements been positioned face to face with actual Indigenous expression.
This article attempts a preliminary pass at just such an approach by comparing four indigenous themes
established by Manuel González Prada’s essay “Nuestros indios” (1904) with analogous approximations in
Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1985). Notwithstanding their different national
contexts, manner of composition, and periods of composition, there is a surprising conformity between both
texts’ respective discursive positions on four topics: 1) the problem of the caporal, or overseer, who rises
up over his own ethnic group; 2) the negative impact of alcohol among indigenous communities; 3) the
conundrum of language and culture with respect to education; and 4) the turn toward violence as a response
to internal colonialism. The consonance between González Prada’s Peruvian indigenismo and Rigoberta
Menchú’s Quiché perspective as dictated to anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos could be a coincidence, but
it also suggests a common frame of reference for a criollo–indigenous dialogue in the context of persistent
internal colonialism in two Latin American countries with large Amerindian populations.
Keywords: Andes, essay/ensayo, hacienda, Indians/indios, Indigenism/indigenismo, Manuel González

Prada, Quiché, Rigoberta Menchú, testimony/testimonio
Indianism, Indigenism, and Indigenous Expression
T
he great tradition of the Latin American essay has for generations given us an insider
view of the history, society, culture, thought, and politics of that region. Whether forging
ground as early ethnology in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s treatment of the gaucho
on the Pampa, or as political theory in Clorinda Matto de Turner’s defense of women in the
industrial age, Eugenio María de Hostos and José Martí’s arguments for Puerto Rican and Cuban
independence, or José Carlos Mariátegui’s refashioning of Incan communism, the essay has
made solid headway in documenting and dissecting the mechanisms that make Latin American
societies dynamic. For this reason, texts emerging from the middle of the nineteenth century
through the twentieth still offer insight, if not into society in all its complexity, then into some
of its trajectories, where the continent’s cultures came from, and where they might be going. In
fact, as Alicia Ríos has suggested, essayists such as “Bello, Sarmiento, Martí, Rodó, Henríquez
Ureña, Picón Salas, Reyes, González Prada, Mariátegui, Ortiz, Cardoso, Boff, Candido, Ribeiro,
Fernández Retamar, Rama, and Cornejo Polar, constitute, in a strict sense, the foremost precur-
sors of Latin American cultural studies” (33).1 Indeed, any comprehensive overview of Latin
American cultures should recognize the essay as a milestone in the modern study of them.
Certainly, the essay is not the only genre that provides insight into Latin American cultural
history; a similar argument could be made for the sixteenth-century chronicle and its derivative
subgenres, establishing cultural categories that have survived to the present. As Antonio Cornejo
Polar has argued, “histórica y estructuralmente la heterogeneidad socio-cultural que es la base del
indigenismo se encuentra prefigurada en las crónicas del Nuevo Mundo” (37; see also Mazzotti).
AATSP Copyright © 2012 Hispania 95.3 (2012): 400–23

Ward / Measuring Indigenismo through Indigenous Thought 401
Put another way, the colonial chronicle and the heterogeneous cultures that serve as its referent
represent a first pass at indigenismo, or Indigenism. In its most basic sense, indigenismo can
be understood as defense of the continent’s original inhabitants that moves toward a social
and political sensibility of their condition, such as is the case with the works of Bartolomé de
las Casas. Another frequently studied stage in indigenismo’s development can be found in the
novel, idealistic during the nineteenth century, with improved modes of representation during
the twentieth as it interacts with new political and social realities as well as innovative forms
of expression (i.e., the mural painting of the Mexican revolution or testimonio).
While the chronicle, the novel, and even poetry are important in the documentation and
theorization of Latin American cultures from the early modern through the Republican periods, I
would like to concentrate here on the essay and its more multicultural descendent, the testimonio,
by exploring two examples of engagement with the persistent material and ideological remnants
of colonialism including the hacienda, the detrimental role of alcohol there, the contested
authority of the Spanish language in the education system, and the persistence of violent acts
committed against the descendents of America’s first inhabitants and their response to it. As
we shall see, consideration of indigenismo’s divergent cultural conceptions in both the essay
and the testimonio can be understood as a form of cultural study that can establish the basis for
intercultural dialogue.
Unlike sixteenth- and seventeenth-century indigenismo, which was generally geared toward
a European audience and not necessarily toward political change, nineteenth-century indige-
nismo is an ideological apparatus developed by progressive-minded criollos to defend their
indigenous compatriots and improve their lot.2 This indigenismo should be distinguished from
indianismo, or Indianism, a Romantic tendency in poetry and prose that idealized indigenous
people while maintaining a strategic distance from politics. There has been little study of these
distinctions in the essay beyond the work of Eugenio Chang-Rodríguez, Martin Stabb, and
Antonio Sacoto. The best research to date remains Sacoto’s now classic study, El indio en el
ensayo de la América española, which looks at how the indigenous are portrayed in Sarmiento,
Montalvo, Martí, González Prada, Alcides Arguedas, Vasconcelos, Mariátegui, and Reyes. In the
much more familiar terrain of the novel, there are models that could be employed to catalogue
the essay. Among the various examples of Indianism in fiction can be found the Ecuadorian
Juan León Mera’s Cumandá (1879). When Amerindians appear in texts such as Mera’s, they are
stylized and can actually turn out to be criollos; such is the case with Cumandá’s homonymous
protagonist, who is revealed to be Julia, a girl of European extraction captured in a raid by
Shuars (called Jívaros in the text), who were reacting to having been treated poorly by criollos.
A more political example surfaces with Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Aves sin nido (1889), in
which Margarita, a seemingly Quechua girl, turns out to be mestiza, when it is uncovered that
her mother was raped by the parish priest.3 This latter novel, while revealing latent signs of
indianismo, such as its romanticizing of native Andeans as passive victims, also has attributes
of indigenismo, which filters its Romanticism through an incipient naturalism in order to offer
a more critical appraisal of the enduring coloniality that results from the reparto, a form of
debt peonage.4 Indigenismo in fiction continued to develop and flowered during the twentieth
century with works such as Hombres de maíz (1949) by the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias
and Los ríos profundos (1956) by the Peruvian José María Arguedas. Both of these mid-century
authors came closer to replicating indigenous thought than did León Mera or Matto de Turner.
While there are problems with these categories of representation, such as the impossibility
of an absolute periodization, a concern raised by Cornejo Polar (39), and the fact that neither is
exclusive of the other, a concern raised by Ana Peluffo (Lágrimas 13), they are the only tools
developed so far to distinguish between a literature that tends to overaestheticize its referent
and one which endeavors to analyze that referent in social and economic terms. As mentioned,
indianismo and indigenismo are less understood in the essay and I hope to deepen our under-
standing of the second category in at least one essayist in this study.
402 Hispania 95 September 2012
A third category, only recently recognized, is what I would like to call expresión indígena,
or Indigenous Expression, for if the first two categories were developed by criollo pioneers
as they collected and reorganized national cultures (my apologies to Benedict Anderson for
resemantisizing his term), the third captures the words of Amerindians themselves, that is to say
by the Quechua, the Quiché, or other autochthonous communities.5 This distinction is obvious,
but there is a clear possibility for thematic connection between these categories. Surprisingly,
works from the first two categories are rarely compared with ones from the third. This is because,
although there have been indigenous people expressing themselves in Latin America during the
nineteenth century and the first three quarters of the twentieth, their works have not entered the
canon, have been lost, or have remained in the realm of orality. There is still much to be learned
about their situation. The mid-twentieth-century literary manifestations of indigenismo were the
best we had on the autochthonous condition until the vogue of testimonio created mass-market
spaces for diverse communities of Amerindians to speak, even if in a hybrid written format. The
two best known prolocutors are perhaps the Bolivian Domitila Barrios de Chungara whose “Si
me permiten hablar…” (produced with Moema Viezzer) broke onto the scene in 1977, and the
Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchú Tum whose Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la con-
ciencia (produced with Elizabeth Burgos)6 was published in 1985. By comparing indigenismo
with the indigenous thought cached in testimonio, how the former anticipates the latter can be
measured, while at the same time the latter’s proximity to the former can also be considered.
Even though the individual apogees of indianismo, indigenismo, and expresión indígena
occur at different moments in history, it would be an error to see the latter as the outgrowth of
the former two. The latter’s locus of enunciation is quite different from the former’s. Addition-
ally, John Beverley distinguishes several fundamental differences between them: “Unlike the
novel, testimonio promises by definition to be primarily concerned with sincerity rather than
literariness” (“The Margin” 14). Furthermore, the narrator in testimonio “must be representative
of a social class or group” (15), and, he adds in another place, “is also the real-life protagonist
or witness of the events he or she recounts” (“Through All Things” 2). Put another way, the
Indigenist author writes about the lives of others while the indigenous voice explains his or her
own life in the context of his or her group.
Conversely, as has been shown elsewhere (Ward, La resistencia 276–85), there are many
attributes that testimonio shares with the essay, including those that are so important for the essay
that, in his Teoría del ensayo, José Luis Gómez Martínez writes a chapter on each of them: a
freshness in time, an imprecision in quoting practices, a dialogical aspect, a tendency toward
digression, and subjectivity (30–72).7 Testimony’s relationship to the essay is also possible, since,
as Duncan Earle has suggested, testimony develops from the “perspective of one person, at one
point in time, and one position in the social landscape” (297). These three “ones” also come
together in the essayist “I.” It could be further argued that both essay and testimonio thrive during
moments of great social and political upheaval. This would be the case with Simón Bolívar’s
“Carta de Jamaica” (1815), born in the throes of the Independence movement; with Domingo
Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845), an investigation into the violence of the Río de la Plata
civil wars; and with González Prada’s Pájinas libres (1894), his ruminations on culture and the
War of the Pacific. Likewise, testimonio, as Beverley reminds us, “began as an adjunct to armed
liberation struggle in Latin America and elsewhere in the third world in the sixties” (“The Real
Thing” 138). Besides complementing insurrection movements, testimonio also denounces state
oppression. Thus, Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco (1971) reconstructs a massacre
that happened in Mexico City in 1968; Alicia Partnoy’s The Little School (1986) recounts her
experiences in an Argentinean prison camp during the 1970s; and Omar Cabezas’s La montaña es
algo más que una estepa verde (1982) emerged from the long-time struggle against the Somoza
dictatorship in Nicaragua. From the angle of philological or stylistic analysis, it might not seem
reasonable to compare an essay with a testimonio, but from the perspective of cultural inquiry, it
makes perfect sense to compare two varieties of indigenist/indigenous nonfiction prose produced
in two war-torn and ethnically charged Latin American contexts.
Modifying a recommendation offered by Walter D. Mignolo about colonial texts helps
to explain the present methodology regarding the two variants of nonfiction prose examined
here. Mignolo, countering charges that colonial chronicles are not literature, proposes that
those writing samples be judged simply as texts produced in a colonial situation; that is to say,
it is their textuality and their engagement with coloniality that can be explored (“El mandato”
453). In similar fashion, both the essay and the testimonio genres can, and often do, engage
the heritage of colonialism. Viewed in this manner, they merit comparison because both are
useful to measure the levels of cultural and socioeconomic oppression that Amerindians and
other groups have endured. Despite differing intentions, range of thematic interest, and means
of production, the ideological correspondences encapsulated in both varieties of expression can
provide a framework for future criollo–indigenous debate.
Finally, if we have hybrid genre categories such as photo essay or film essay, it can also
make perfect sense to accept as another twentieth-century hybrid genre, testimonio with an
essayistic bent, crafted, like the essay, with discursive nonfiction prose. After all, there are
already many hybrid forms of the Latin American essay. Martin Stabb enumerates several,
including the essay as letter, the essay as technical report, the essay as newspaper reportage,
the essay as collage, the essay as prose poem, and the essay with narrative intercalations (107).
Indeed, Irene Matthews has already associated Latin American testimonio and photography with
the essay in her study of Poniatowska’s work (227–41). As society evolves and new technologies
are developed, old genres take on new attributes to interface with changing social, political,
and technological realities. The essayistic testimony, which came into being when activists’
voices were recorded with an analog microphone onto a reel-to-reel tape, is one possibility of
many. While a pure form of essayistic testimony, or even testimonial essay, is conceivable for
the future, at the present I am simply proposing one variant of testimonio already in existence,
which, besides its obvious relationship to narrative and to history, also boasts characteristics
found in the essay.
Admittedly, testimonio is usually read as narrative, but, by reading it as argumentative
nonfiction prose, we can more easily focus on the ideologies that inhere in it to compare
them to those archived in the essay. The early twentieth-century Indigenist writing of Manuel
González Prada, especially in his canonical but unfinished essay “Nuestros indios” (1904),
moves across a discursive bridge from the more romantic Indianism, our first category, toward
Indigenous Expression, our third.8 Thus, we move from an interest in narrative and form to
the exposition of ideology and ideological content. As we shall see, various of the Indigenist
tenets González Prada put forward still are relevant when trying to fathom the plight of the
descendents of the hemisphere’s original peoples. Since González Prada is one of the more
famous (although not undisputed)9 indigenistas, it makes sense to compare him to one of the
more eminent indigenous activists, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, who won the Nobel Prize for peace
in 1992, and who developed Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia with
anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos. In this, I do not mean to imply that González Prada in all of his
complexity anticipates Menchú in all of her respective complexities, for while the former was
a polymath versed in the languages and literatures of various Indo-European cultures as well
as European philosophy, sociology, and political thought, the latter was primarily concerned
with the intricacies of Guatemalan reality. Furthermore, if the former is a learned intellectual,
we can say, following Beverley who was drawing on Gramsci, the latter can best be described
as an “organic intellectual” (Beverley, “What Happens” 121–22). Notwithstanding these dif-
ferences, the passion that Menchú demonstrates for Guatemala and its indigenous people is not
unlike the concern that González Prada reveals for Peru when he discusses the descendents of
its original peoples.
In the movement forward from Indianism through Indigenism to Indigenous Expression

(the latter still commonly filtered through the anthropologist’s eyes and ears), González Prada
generally falls into the second category, a sociological concern with the problematic national
relationship between the indigenous and the criollos. Given that González Prada did not seem
to speak Quechua or any other autochthonous language, it is surprising that the fruits of his
ruminations fall close to some family trees of Amerindian knowledge. What I aim to show is
how his analysis in four Indigenist thematic capsules registered in “Nuestros indios” stands up
to the same themes as archived in Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia.
Certainly, I am not arguing that thought produced in the Andean region is the same as in the
Mayan one, for the Quechua and Quiché are separate peoples. But both had an organic history
as ranked societies in the Americas before the arrival of the Spanish, both suffered similarly
from the imposition of Iberian forms of colonialism, both find their languages in a diglossic
relationship with Spanish, and both, even today, must continue to negotiate with the legacy of
those forms of subordination in an increasingly globalized world. It is the remnants of those
structures of forced subservience which concern both González Prada and Menchú. My assump-
tion here is that if the inquiry carried out by the essayist is a forerunner of cultural study, the
diagnosis offered by the testimonial writer, given her interest in explaining a particular culture,
to say nothing of her work’s concomitance with the “birth” of institutional cultural studies, can
in itself be considered a strain of cultural study.10 Together they can provide the basis for an
intercultural social and political debate.
What the ideological coincidence between González Prada and Menchú means is twofold.
In the first case, it shows how a Peruvian of European extraction approached a post-colonial
stance, approximating an Amerindian perspective on certain points, implying that indigenismo
could in fact exceed its criollo mentality. In the second case, it shows how the testimony of a
Quiché woman, erroneously read as historical narrative (Stoll viii), approaches an ideological
apparatus more properly associated with the genre of persuasive nonfiction prose.11 In making
this assertion, I am in no way trying to undervalue reading testimonio as biography or in rela-
tion to autobiography, two worthwhile approaches which consider it a form of narrative. I am
merely suggesting an additional way to read this genre that goes beyond aesthetics, narratology,
biography, or objective history.
Inserting indigenismo into a dialogue with Mayan thought might not seem a sensible thing
to do, since Mayan people obviously would not think that it represents them with verisimilitude
as social actors with their own traditions, cultures, and modes of dealing with Western ways.
Indigenous doubts about Indigenist authors are succinctly summed up by the Quiché intellectual
Emilio del Valle Escalante:
Many of these writers have never experienced the racism, political marginalization, and exploita-
tion that the Indian has lived, despite their sympathy for the Indian’s condition of existence—in
some cases, a sympathy that goes so far as to be paternalistic. . . . Furthermore, indigenista
writers have defined the indigenous world as a “problem” to be resolved. The cultural and
linguistic specificities of our communities have been seen as obstacles to the desired dream of
modernity, which requires eradicating those specificities in order to materialize it. As a solution
to the “Indian Problem,” mestizaje has been proposed. . . . (20)
Del Valle Escalante has in mind the writing of his compatriot Miguel Ángel Asturias and
also the governmental policies of the Mexican Revolution. Some of what he says is certainly
applicable to González Prada, two of whose titles in the collection Prosa menuda confirm Del
Valle’s observations: “El problema indígena” and “La cuestión indígena.” That said, Del Valle
Escalante does not propose to reject indigenismo but to engage it. He explains: “‘Indians’ must
revisit and debate indigenismo because this discursivity has occupied an extremely important
space in the colonial order” (21). Menchú takes this one step further and affirms that she
herself is an indigenista: “Yo, como decía, era indigenista, no indígena. Indigenista hasta en
la sopa, yo defendía hasta lo último de mis antepasados” (192). This is a combative political
pronouncement that by its very nature inserts her into a dialogue with the criollo power elite.
The engagement of Menchú’s views on first peoples with González Prada’s is apropos since
they are both anticolonial thinkers searching for equality. To measure indigenismo by indigenous
thought is to engage them in dialogue.
The essay-ness of Menchú’s testimony has already been established (Ward, La resistencia
285–302), and here I am simply adding a further line of argument in my contention that the
ideologies that inhere in testimonio allow for the possibility of reading it in the same fashion
as the essay. Specifically, I will look at a quartet of ideological positions that are common
to González Prada’s texts and her own. These include a common paradox in the caporal or
overseer’s relationship with coethnic workers on the hacienda, the coloniality of alcohol abuse
among Amerindians, the benefits and perils of education relating to the perceived inverse
relationship between transcultural loss and liberation, and the decision to advocate violence
as a way of contesting Latin American societies’ unrelenting systems of inequality. These are
primary Indigenist arguments elaborated by González Prada in his canonical and acclaimed
“Nuestros indios,” which I have chosen as a starting point for comparison.
Peru and Guatemala: Two Countries Prone to Ethnic Violence

The ideological fundamentals common to both thinkers’ works may have something to
do with similarities in their individual characters, but commonalities also have to do with the
shared Peruvian and Guatemalan experience with the hacienda system—and with war, which,
as previously stated, is an incubator for both essay and testimonio. In Peru, conflict between
different ethnicities (as well as between clan groups known as panacas and ayllus) was common
for millennia. In fact, it was a civil war between two panacas (Atahualpa’s and Huascar’s) that
gave the Spanish the upper hand as they invaded the Andean country in the sixteenth century.
That struggle was followed by the class-ethnic conflict between people of European and Andean
heritages, born during the Forty-years War (1532–72), during which the Spanish eliminated
members of the Inca royal house piecemeal, thereby allowing them, with fits and starts, to root
the institution of the viceroyalty on the Pacific coast. Despite taking on different forms during the
colonial period and during the first decades of the Republic, class-ethnic strife continues to
the present day, as was made clear with recent events including those that took place in Bagua
and Espinar.12 We are concerned with its incarnation during the latter half of the nineteenth
century when González Prada was coming of age. During that period, there were many upris-
ings with violent government reactions to them. One that most likely caught the readerly eye
of a young twenty-three-year-old González Prada was associated with a mestizo politician and
businessman by the name of Juan Bustamante. During the 1866 legislative session, Bustamante
rose up demanding that Peru honor Bolivarian legislation, “which outlawed personal service
and forced labor by Indians” (Jacobson 86). Unheard, he turned to armed revolt, taking the city
of Puno in 1867. Authorities put down the rebellion in 1868 and, afterwards, forced seventy-
seven indigenous leaders into huts which they then burned while forcing the townspeople to
listen to their cries. Bustamante himself was beheaded (Jacobson 100; McEvoy 107). Carmen
McEvoy notes that all these events were covered in detail in the Lima press (107). González
Prada certainly followed them in newspapers such as El Comercio, an important establishment
daily founded in 1839 and still in print today. There was also an economic dimension to the
social tension. Michael J. Gonzales has shown that, in Azángaro province, for example, as
wool prices went down and taxes went up (2–3), “the number of haciendas grew from 110 in
the 1820s to between 250 and 300 by 1920 . . . the most intense period of land consolidation
coming after 1886–1890” (7), that is to say, after the War of the Pacific, which ended in 1884.
González Prada came into his own after participating in the defense of Lima during the war,
and much research on the author mentions some variation of this fact. Certainly, this conflict,
which pitted Peru and Bolivia against British saltpeter investors aligned with Chile, who handily
defeated both countries, could be understood as a war between nations. Less frequently discussed
are the economic, political, and social causes, effects, and processes that also contributed to
Peru’s loss. There was an internal political struggle, pitting caudillos against caudillos. The
long-lasting dispute between Nicolás de Piérola and Andrés Avelino Cáceres is the best known
case. But the reality was much more complicated. Heraclio Bonilla, drawing on Jorge Basadre,
notes the convocation of four regional assemblies during the Chilean occupation, García
Calderón convoking one in Chorrillos (June 1881), Piérola in Ayacucho (July 1881), Iglesias
in Cajamarca (December 1882), and Montero in Arequipa (April 1883) (55). There was also
a “be true to your class” aspect to the struggle. Bonilla (and other scholars) have shown how
the landed oligarchy sided with the Chileans, subordinating patriotism to economic concerns.
These could also be understood as ethnic ones.
Any large landowner or oligarch from Lima had a clear choice to make: side with Chile
or, as Bonilla spells it out, suffer from “el despojo de sus propiedades por turbas exaltadas que
no solo habían sido secularmente sus explotados, sino que para colmo, ¡eran negros, chinos e
indios!” (56). On the other side of the coin, enlisted soldiers recruited into the Peruvian army
(many of them forcibly so) were not generally criollos, but indios who oftentimes self-identified
with their local community, their hacendado, or their caudillo, but not necessarily with the
patria criolla. To make matters worse, while Lima was occupied, General Cáceres organized his
famous montoneros, a large guerrilla force, to harass the Chileans and, as Julio Cotler empha-
sizes, to counteract the attitude assumed by the land-owning class (115). As Florencia E. Mallon
puts it: “For an elite whose regional dominance had been shaky in time of peace, the threat
of an armed peasantry in time of war seemed more dangerous than the presence of a foreign
army” (88). After the war, these soldiers were not treated as heroes, but as “Indians,” a fact they
resented. In 1885, the year González Prada published the initial version of his essay “Grau,”
eight thousand peasants rose up under the leadership of Atusparia against the reinstitution of
the Contribución personal, a new name for the old tax known as the Contribución de indígenas,
and temporarily occupied the Department of Ancash (Gonzales 16). By the very next year, when
González Prada’s famous “Conferencia en el Ateneo de Lima” brought him fame throughout
Lima, Mallon reports, “more than fifteen haciendas in the Huancayo area alone had been invaded
by the peasants” (98). They did this because, just as the landowners viewed them with fear, they
came to view the Chilean-friendly hacienda owners as traitors (see also Mallon 98). Wilfredo
Kapsoli goes over even more of these revolts, what he calls peasant movements, occurring in
Huánuco (1886), Chiclayo (1887), Cuzco (1894), La Mar (1895), and Cerro de Pasco and Juli
(1896) (25–35). Even toward the end of the century, when González Prada started crafting the
essays that would become Horas de lucha, little changed. Piérola, who dubbed himself “The
Protector of the Indians” and revoked the Contribución personal in 1895, changed position and
instituted a general salt tax that was a minor expense for elites but was oppressive on peasants’
budgets, so much so that they again revolted in Huanta and Puno (Gonzales 18). The latter half
of the nineteenth century in the Andes must surely be characterized by decreasing wool prices,
suffocating taxes, indigenous revolts to them, and the expansion of the hacienda system.13 This
is precisely the period when González Prada experienced his half-century-long coming-of-age.
Menchú’s experience was compressed into a much shorter time period, was more violent,
and consequently was much more intense than her Peruvian predecessor’s. While there have
been conquest and civil wars in the Quiché province before and since the days of the overthrow
of the last independent ruler Tecún Uman (d. 1524), we are here concerned with the second half
of the twentieth century, which may have been just as bloody as the initial Spanish invasion. The
political consequence of the Guatemalan civil war that emerged from the US-sponsored coup
in 1954 (see Schlesinger and Kinzer) was the denial of meaningful elections by “the coalition
between the army and economic elites” (Jonas and Walker 4) in the context of a class conflict
that featured large-scale government killing of unionists, intellectuals, and especially people of
Mayan extraction. Walter LaFeber cites 50,000 deaths between 1966 and 1976, and underscores
a one-year period beginning in March 1982 when “President” Ríos Montt’s “forces butchered
as many as 15,000 Indians on the suspicion they had cooperated—or might cooperate—with
URNG [Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union]” (257, 321). Arturo Arias sums up the
whole period between 1954 and 1999 this way: “[B]oth the human rights organizations and
the army itself often spoke of the destruction of more than 450 Maya villages, more than a
hundred-thousand deaths, and more than a million refugees” (5). This was the environment
that formed Rigoberta Menchú. She was born in 1954, the year of the coup; her adolescence
unfolded during the particularly brutal interval between 1966 and 1976; and she crossed the
border to the outside world one afternoon in January 1982 to record her testimonio in Paris
(Burgos 12), that is to say, just two months before the terrible scorched-earth campaigns that
“President” Ríos Montt directed toward her people.
While these periods in both countries each lasted almost a half-century, we needed to
elaborate more on the Peruvian case since González Prada’s advanced age brought him a longer
arc of life experiences. When Menchú went to Elizabeth Burgos’s apartment, she was twenty-
three and her Guatemalan experience was that of person in the first decade of adulthood. This
was exactly how old González Prada was when he read about the violent suppression of Juan
Bustamante’s revolution in the press, but he did not write “Nuestros indios” until 1904, when
he was sixty and had accumulated a lifetime worth of memories of ethnic tensions.14 Either way,
whether it was a young woman in her twenties, or an old man in his sixties, whether it was as
a criollo from the outside, or as an “Indian” from the inside, both activists shared a common
repugnance toward the repression that resulted from internal colonialism.
The Hacienda’s Caporal and His Relationship to Ethnicity and Power

Magnus Mörner, drawing on other researchers, offers a basic but helpful description of the
hacienda, “a rural property under a dominating owner, worked with dependent labor, employing
little capital, and producing for a small-scale market” (185). Charles Gibson tells us that the
hacienda “was commonly to be found in areas of dense Indian settlement. . . . [I]ts lands were
characteristically former Indian lands that had been usurped” (118–19). Since colonial times,
both Peru and Guatemala have seen the rise of the hacienda, the preferred products in the former
country being wool, sugar, and cotton, and in the latter, bananas, coffee, cardamom, sugar, and
cotton. People of European heritage are rarely the ones who do the manual labor and the caporal,
representing the owner of the hacienda, is a proxy in getting the most work done for the least
amount of salary paid. The problem of the caporal, an authority figure that sometimes comes
from the same ethnic group as the people he is supervising, is one that is counterintuitive, one
that attracts the attention of both González Prada and Menchú.
González Prada begins by offering up a rule on class and power. He writes, “cuando un
individuo se eleva sobre el nivel de su clase social, suele convertirse en el peor enemigo de
ella.” He adds emphatically, “no hay quizá opresores tan duros del indígena como los mismos
indígenas españolizados e investidos de alguna autoridad” (“Nuestros indios” 336).15 Such a
view can be shocking to the reader who knows González Prada as the famous agitator whose
defense of indigenous rights was almost synonymous with indigenismo and expects him to
hold a positive view of all native peoples. So when he accuses some indigenous people of
oppressing others of their kind, readers familiar with the research on the hacienda system by
Gibson, Gonzales, Kapsoli, Keith, Lockhart, Mallon, Mörner, Wilson, and many others might
feel perplexed. The feudal lords who ruled over the great estate with an iron fist were and are
a primary cause of the continuing subordination of America’s original inhabitants. Similarly,
how nefarious is the North American businessman, the Mr. Danger depicted in a certain
Venezuelan novel, who came on the heels of Spanish and criollo elites. Comparing research
by Dudenhoefer, LaFeber, Schlesinger, and others suggests the continuity of neocolonialist
incursions into South and Central America. An informed reader would likely conceive the
hacendado and the businessman as the twin causes of the persistent inequalities to which
Latin Americans are subjected. Distaste for the mistreatment of the working masses by both
internal and neocolonialist oppressors logically leads to sympathizing with original peoples and,
consequently, the possibility that an indigenous or mestizo person could be an additional cog in
the machine of subordination seems counterintuitive. This is so, perhaps, because it results less
from a racial divide, which, of course, would be obvious, than a master-servant, class-based
hierarchy not detectible by skin color alone.
But such a reality has been documented as early as the seventeenth century. The Andean
chronicler Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala discusses “marcacamayos, mandoncillos, pampaca-
mayos y quipocamayos [que] quitan y hurtan en ausencia de los dichos yndios pobres y [que]
sacan entrando de su casa plata y comidas y le quita sus carneros” (857). We like to think
positively of professionals such as the quipucamayoc, the keepers of Andean tradition, but if we
believe Guamán Poma, they also developed and established patterns of unprincipled activities
during the chaos of the first century of colonial rule. Like Guamán Poma before him, González
Prada notes a social reality where upwardly mobile people tend to trample on laborers, even
if, or especially if, they are from the same ethnic group. Why would they do this? Besides an
individual’s desire for wealth (a symbol of success and a marker of a new social class), this kind
of attitude reveals the heritage of colonialism. In “Nuestros ventrales,” González Prada tackles
this issue when he explains, “no hemos botado el pelo de la dehesa colonial porque nuestro
régimen político y nuestra vida social se reducen a una prolongación del Virreinato, con sus
audiencias, sus alcaldes, sus corregidores, sus repartimientos . . .” (327). The expression “pelo de
la dehesa,” is not common, but its meaning is clear. According to the Diccionario de la lengua
española, it means: “resabios que conservan las gentes rústicas,” or the memories that remain
in the minds of rural folk. This awareness of the survival of the colony in republican minds
recognizes internal colonialism, a limiting factor in the nation’s economic development and in
the establishment of human equality and liberty. Unfortunately, this type of social situation is
not confined to the Republic of Peru, or to the nineteenth century.
In her conversation with Burgos seventy-six years later, Menchú also ruminates on the
nature of the caporal who despises his own people. Perhaps because she lived on a hacienda
where González Prada did not, Menchú offers more details. Yet, their views on “indígenas
españolizados e investidos de alguna autoridad” bear a remarkable resemblance. In a discussion
of “caporales y contratistas,” she observes that the contractors, “personas del mismo pueblo,”
“empiezan a tener actitudes como los mismos terratenientes. Empiezan a tratar mal a la gente”
(Burgos 43). What she is talking about is a process of transculturation that occurs when a
Quiché person becomes intellectually separated from the collective and begins to adopt the
mindset of the landed elites. Why would this happen? Menchú sheds light on the psychology
of this individual whose behavior undoubtedly results from the desire to climb the economic
ladder: “Le dan un sueldo más,” she remarks (Burgos 44). This greater salary derived from
subjecting members of his former community with strong-arm tactics offers the caporal more
life choices. Menchú spells out the benefits received, “los caporales . . . empiezan a sacar de
la gente y empiezan a tener su casita buena en el altiplano y por dondequiera tiene también
pequeñas casas” (Burgos 46). In this, Menchú verifies the same process of passing from a
passive subordinated cultural mentality to an active subordinating one. The mindset is derived
from the original coloniality of power exercised by Spaniards and criollos (called Ladinos in
Guatemala) over Quichés or the various Andean ethnicities in a process that Aníbal Quijano
describes as the imposition of a classification that orders ethnically different peoples into a
capitalistic coloniality of power (342). As the caporales appropriate the racist coloniality-
of-power mentality, they become transracial, appropriating the superiority complex of the
powerful. Thus, the encastados, or half-casts, in González Prada—a category including cholos
from the sierra as well as African-derived admixtures such as mulatos and zambos on the coast
(“Nuestros indios” 336)—can be transethnic climbers who, by working against their own group,
embrace the coloniality of power in a transracial mode much the same way as do the Guatemalan
“indígenas ladinizados” (Burgos 46). Reading González Prada and Menchú together suggests
the possibility of digging even deeper than the coloniality of power relationships described by
Quijano and recognizing a rarely commented upon coethnic coloniality of power, what could be
described as an ethnic paradox, existing in multiple times and places where individuals oppress
others from their own ethnic group.
Alcohol and the Coloniality of Power

Another ideological convergence between González Prada and Menchú on a different
yet equally thorny topic can be found with the seemingly stereotypical image of the “drunken
Indian.” The anthropologist M. J. Weismantel, commenting on this issue, laments that “drunk-
enness, after all, is the last refuge of victims of racism and poverty the world over” (866). In
“Nuestros indios,” González Prada weighs in with a recommendation: “Si el indio aprovechara
en rifles y cápsulas todo el dinero que desperdicia en alcohol y fiestas, si en un rincón de su
choza o en el agujero de una peña escondiera un arma, cambiaría de condición, haría respetar
su propiedad y su vida” (343). The inverse relationship between alcoholic beverages and self-
defense is totally apposite in discussions of colonialism.
While pre-Hispanic civilizations had fermented drinks, the Andes’s chicha (corn beer) and
Mesoamerica’s pulque (fermented agave), these had more of a ritual usage than the Western
tendency to drink for enjoyment. Basing herself on the Florentine Codex, a deep repository
of Central Mexican culture, historian Inga Clendinnen explains that “pulque was, in theory,
forbidden, save to specified groups on specified occasions, and to the aged” (48). The early
seventeenth-century Chichimec historian Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl reports that the
poet-king Nezahualcoyotl had to kill Zilamiauh because she earned her living selling pulque,
“pareciéndole cosa indecente a la calidad de persona de la señora, y contra lo que las leyes
disponían” (91). His contemporary, Guamán Poma de Ayala, itemizes a number of insistences
where chicha was also prohibited to Incas before a certain age, or during certain festivities, or
during times of thirst or famine, or upon the death of the Sapa Inca (119, 190). Guamán Poma
lists other restrictions as well (203). While the Incas, an elite group that governed most of the
Andes by the time the Spanish arrived, may have imbibed large quantities of alcohol on festival
days, it must be remembered that drinking was not necessarily a means of escaping from poverty
as it can be in our time (see Weismantel 870).16 This ceremonial and limited consumption of
alcoholic beverages was violated when post-contact society extended its use to include drinking
for personal enjoyment, coinciding with an even more egregious yet perhaps, at least initially,
unintended aspect of the Conquest: the introduction of sugar-derived spirits into Amerindian
communities. Jan Rogoziński reminds us that Columbus first brought sugar from the Canary
Islands to Hispaniola in 1493 (51). This cultural change was a slow one. Another chronicler
contemporary to Guamán Poma and Alva Ixtlilxóchitl was Inca Garcilaso de la Vega who reports
that even after the introduction of wine, indigenous folk continued to prefer their “antiguo
brebaje hecho de zara y agua” (2: 615). A drink made from zara (maize) and water is, of course,
chicha. But, by the nineteenth century, Andeans, continuing to endure a long process of cultural
change, had generally bypassed any preference for wine, going over to the side of distilled liquor.
In 1910, just six years after “Nuestros indios,” the early twentieth-century intellectual José de
la Riva-Agüero laments this preference, because “la chicha es bastante menos alcohólica que el
aguardiente y el ron que actualmente usan” (4: 181). This view seems to be accurate. In 1991,
Weismantel reported that “Zumbagua [Ecuador] is typical of the rural Andes in that chicha has
almost disappeared, having been replaced by a much stronger alcoholic drink, a very high-proof
liquor made from sugar cane and known as trago” (864). Another anthropologist has described
this drink as “an undiluted distillate of sugar cane that contains 89% ethyl alcohol” (Mandelbaum
282), and another as “watered-down industrial alcohol” (Harvey 7).
It is well known that distilled beverages came to be used in the contrivance of an internal
coloniality of power. In the United States, for example, Moses Merrill, a missionary among
the Oto people associated with the southern Sioux, reports the use of whiskey as a tool of
conquest in a diary entry dated April 14, 1837. Considering the case of “the Shiennes, a tribe
of Indians on the Platte River,” he refers to a certain “trader, Captain Gant, who, by sweeten-
ing the whiskey, induced them to drink the intoxicating draught,” turning them into “a tribe
of drunkards” (Nebraska 4: 181). It must be remembered that the post-invasion substitution of
distilled drinks for fermented ones changes the nature of the situation and reorients tradition
in dangerous ways. It is part of the same smoke screen deployed to cover up colonialism’s use
of alcohol to further the conquest even during the so-called post-colonial era. This apparatus
deflects blame from the victimizer to the victim, covering up the former’s role in subordinating
the latter. In the pursuit of a coloniality-free approach, González Prada suggests that alcohol
is a debilitating force in the political tug-of-war between Quechua and Spanish speakers and
cries out for indigenous self-defense.
His call for the indigenous to move away from drinking so that they may better protect
themselves finds an echo in Menchú who explains that the sale of alcohol in Guatemala dulls
resistance to the finca, or hacienda, system. One feature of this system can be described as
debt peonage. Gibson explains, “in peonage, a condition of indebtedness gave an employer a
legal (or semilegal) opportunity to compel a laborer to work” (146–47). Menchú warns that
alcohol is integrated into the debt-driven mechanism of control when there is a cantina, a
drinking establishment, where the peons can go after toiling in the fields to imbibe. The farm
worker goes to the cantina and partakes of guaro, most generally aguardiente de caña, a clear
brandy made from sugar cane. Menchú offers the case of her father who would go in times
of “desperation,” or after a particularly difficult day at work, or when things went against his
sensibilities (Burgos 45). This is a human thing to do and would not surprise an observer of
bar-room behavior whether in the Quiché province or in a big metropolis. But what is differ-
ent on a finca is that cash is not accepted. What the cantina clerk does is apuntar, or add, the
amounts spent in the register and, at the end of the month, descontar, or deduct, the charges
against the worker’s salary. The typical pattern is that “la mayor parte del sueldo se gasta,” “el
mismo dinero se quedaba con el terrateniente” (Burgos 45). By describing this process, Menchú
explains the mechanisms of peonage, how in the absence of chattel slavery, the landed elite can
gain control of braceros and their families. By accumulating debt, the worker cannot leave or
move on. For this reason, Menchú informs her readers, “el mismo terrateniente ha puesto esa
cantina.” At the same time, the Guatemalan government prohibits indigenously produced guaro,
because “[a] ellos no les conviene. Bajaría los precios en las cantinas” (Burgos 91). In addition,
if the Quiché are not allowed to produce but only to consume, then alcohol becomes integral
to the lopsided coloniality of power. Alas, if you establish cantinas, the people will go to them
and become deudores apuntados. This complex hacienda coloniality of power organized by
means of ethnicity and gender has multiple tentacles. Not unexpectedly, on the finca, the cantina
connives with the tienda and the farmacia to accumulate even greater amounts of debt against
the peón (Burgos 45), allowing structures of subordination to survive into the twentieth- and
twenty-first centuries.
Menchú’s perspective on alcohol is also gender nuanced because oftentimes it is the wife
and mother who is responsible for the family finances: “Muchas veces la mamá es la que tiene
que llevar una serie de cuentas, qué es lo que se come, qué es lo que se compra” (Burgos 38).
Consequently, the system puts additional post-drinking strain on women who end up not hav-
ing the necessary funds to balance a family’s budget. Additionally, on the matter of fiestas and
alcohol, Menchú weighs in acknowledging the all-inclusive nature of the problem, given that
not only the men drink. “Para nuestro pueblo no es raro ver a una mujer tomando. De hecho
muchas mujeres toman. Y peor en las fiestas” (Burgos 241). These moments of gender awareness
broaden González Prada’s analysis by going beyond the obvious ethnic or racial hierarchies.
Finally, Menchú is concerned that over-imbibing leads to two disastrous situations. On the
one hand, “después de la fiesta no queda ni un centavo,” and on the other, “hay muchos ladinos
que aprovechan este tiempo para vender, ponen sus comercios y ganan dinero” (Burgos 232). In
the first case, there is no money left after going to the fiesta or to the cantina (which she again
mentions in this context), or, in the not-too-likely second case of some money remaining, the
inebriated Quichés are confronted with aggressive purveyors of goods. Menchú concludes that
for these street sellers, “cada fiesta es para hacer dinero” (Burgos 232). She explains how the
precapitalist economy of the finca enslaves, while at the same time recognizing the stealthy nature
that private enterprise can assume at a moment that should be restricted to friends and family,
catching up with a poverty-stricken people when they are least prepared to defend themselves.
It is almost as if Menchú had read González Prada (which, needless to say, she most likely
did not) and responded with empirical evidence to support and broaden his interpretation. The
most likely reason for this conformity of opinion is that González Prada, during his residence
in the Mala Valley outside Lima, saw campesinos getting drunk and wasting money, despite
the enduring shadow of peonage hanging over their heads. What he saw was not unlike what
Menchú lived.
Ethnicity and Modernity in the School House

Besides different levels of attention paid to detail on the hacienda, another area where
González Prada and Menchú differ, at least to a degree, is on the question of indigenous education.
In the end, González Prada was a criollo invested with a criollo mindset that saw education as
a way to culturally “whiten” society, and, therefore, even in the middle of his argumentation for
indigenous rights in “Nuestros indios,” as we will see, he adopts a culturally insensitive peda-
gogical position. Taking contemporary sociologists to task for their racist views on primordial
peoples with his caustic humor, González Prada imagines that if schools are built, Quechua and
Aymara speakers will send their children to them for schooling:
. . . algunos pesimistas a lo Le Bon marcan en la frente del indio un estigma infamatorio: le

acusan de refractario a la civilización. Cualquiera se imaginaría que en todas nuestras pobla-
ciones se levantan espléndidas escuelas, donde bullen eximios profesores muy bien rentados,
y que las aulas permanecen vacías porque los niños, obedeciendo las órdenes de sus padres, no
acuden a recibir educación. (340)
As we will see with Menchú, indigenous leaders might look at a school established by the
governing class with trepidation. What is not stated is that the institutions that González Prada
imagines would not likely offer a curriculum in Quechua. A die-hard proponent of Western
Civilization as a means of overcoming colonial situations, he most certainly has in mind
instructional environments where classes are taught in Spanish, where French literature is a
subject, and where Western science and technology will be imparted so that Andean people may
improve their economic status (“Nuestros indios” 340; see also Ward, “De Auguste Comte”).17
Such a posture is progressive in that González Prada rejects segregation, a social practice he
rigorously opposed as early as Páginas libres (1894), when he lampooned mestizo people of
power who, because they were “passing” as white, were afraid of their children brushing up
against other students of color (“Instrucción católica” 74). But González Prada is not criticizing
people of African or Asian heritage when he says: “Hay tal promiscuidad de sangres y colores . . .
que en presencia de muchísimos peruanos quedaríamos perplejos para determinar la dosis de
negro y amarillo que encierran en sus organismos” (“Nuestros indios” 341). He is making fun of
aristocratic folk who suppose their families have respected over the centuries the social doctrine
of pureza de sangre, or blood purity. González Prada’s derision of mestizos who reject their roots
is not unlike his broadsides against caporales who trample their own people underfoot. Both
cases should be construed as a criticism of those who seek power at all costs, but especially of
those who seek power and are, at best, ignorant because they do not comprehend that they are
identifying with the oppressor and, at worst, hypocrites because they attempt to hide their origins.
What the Peruvian essayist was looking for was a race-free path to modernity. In a well-
known address on literature dating from the 1885–86 period and ultimately included in Páginas
libres, González Prada recognizes that “en la vorágine de las sociedades modernas, nos sentimos
empujados a vivir ligeramente, a pasar desflorando las cosas . . .” (“Conferencia” 14). He accepts
this rush toward modernity while enjoining his peers to get on board when he says, “marchemos
hacia donde el siglo nos impele” (17). This embrace of modernity sets the stage for “Nuestros
indios,” in which all people have the right to attend schools where they would learn the positive
values imbued in the arts, industry, and, more than anything, morality (340). In the interest of a
post-racial modernity, he makes these same calls to rural and urban workers, to the burgeoning
middle class, and to aristocrats alike, irrespective of their roots in the Andes, Africa, Asia, and
Europe, the four points of origin of the Peruvian people.18 His indigenismo represents an earnest
thrust toward Western-style equality, yet does not perfectly coincide with indigenous thought
because it does not take into account a mindset fearful of assimilation.
For that view, we turn to Menchú. Unlike González Prada whose ideas to a large extent
forced him to reject his lineage and heritage, Menchú is deeply linked to her local culture and
her ancestors, a word that is often repeated in her work.19 She perceives a danger embodied in
machines and the soft drink Coca-Cola, “que trata[n] de matar nuestras costumbres” (Burgos
97). Modernity and the industrial-age education that comes with it represent the silencing, or
even worse, the eradication of her culture. She notes how the Ladino ideology, which imbues the
imposed pedagogical model, skews history to favor the continued deculturization of the Maya.
Menchú offers a case in point when she talks about how “en las escuelas se celebra el día de
Tecún Uman” (Burgos 229). Tecún Uman was a sixteenth-century Quiché leader who fought
against Pedro de Alvarado during the initial Spanish penetration of Guatemala. To celebrate his
day is to suggest that the war is over and Ladino-Maya relations no longer suffer from colonialist
frameworks. Menchú gives the West an earful when she declares, “para nosotros existe la lucha
todavía” (Burgos 229). This assertion reflects the general reality for the Quiché. As Lovell and
Lutz explain, “conquest as a way of life lingers as the central fact of life for the five to six million
Mayas who make up roughly half of Guatemala’s national population” (173). The formulation of
Tecún Uman as a thing of the past serves Ladino interests because it teaches that the Conquest is
over when the Quiché do not consider it to be so. In this regard, Menchú also offers the example
of how Guatemalan Independence Day is celebrated (Burgos 230). In this, Menchú recognizes
the same feature of Guatemalan society González Prada noted in Peruvian society when, as stated
above, he declared, “no hemos botado el pelo de la dehesa colonial.” Such an assertion suggests
a pedagogical challenge not unlike Menchú’s pointers regarding Guatemalan education. The
typical misrepresentations of Tecún Uman and Independence Day have to be decolonized and
can no longer be “taught” as they were. An inverse complement to pedagogical decolonization
is the position that understands Quiché knowledge as “our secrets” (Burgos 93).20 It cannot be
shared with Ladinos for it could then be turned against the Quiché. On the one hand, there is a
recommendation, but on the other, there is a fear which tends to cancel it out.
Quiché education is caught between modernity and tradition and it favors the latter. It teaches
the young that the water is sacred, that the earth is the mother of man, and that both should be
respected (Burgos 81–82). It looks back to origins and nature while modern education looks to
Europe and the future. Menchú is aware of this difference and what modernity implies. She talks
about Ladino educators who go into Mayan villages to teach the virtues of capitalism and of
getting ahead.21 Parents then take a stand against this curriculum and say, “es preferible no tener
estudio que ladinizarse” (Burgos 230). Menchú remembers her father’s warning: “Hijos, no
ambicionen las escuelas porque en las escuelas nos quitan nuestras costumbres” (Burgos 195;
also 115). Given the hierarchical relationship between autochthonous and colonialist cultures,
as well as the assimilationist feature of Western pedagogical models, it could be deduced that
González Prada to a degree was—true to his time—culturally unaware and that indeed Andeans
would not rush to criollo schools in much the same way Quichés do not rush to Ladino ones.
González Prada saw education as a path to a modernity he naively understood to be free
from racial and class hierarchies.22 In some ways, he was so far ahead of his time that he is still
ahead of ours. While Menchú was not interested in modernity because of its negation of tradition,
she was interested in a class-free society, where all could be equal. But, to get to that point, one
has to gain a historical perspective. She eventually does begin to consult books, and in them, she
discovers not only her people’s history, but also the histories of other Mesoamerican nations.
She comes to infer that the problem lies not with education as a concept but with “las malas
educaciones que dan al pueblo,” teaching that the Conquest was a good thing, an easy victory
for the Spaniards because “los indígenas no sabían pelear” (Burgos 195–96). Unsurprisingly,
she asserts that the rape of her forebears, together with the sins perpetrated by the Europeans
reformulated as a “great” historical narrative, were “bad examples” her people need to overcome
(Burgos 92). She proclaims that if those colonialist abuses had not happened, “nosotros . . .
estaríamos juntos, estaríamos iguales,” and states that to understand this is to achieve “algo de
concientización” (Burgos 92), thus, the así me nació la conciencia of the book’s title. The fact
that Burgos left the expression “estaríamos iguales” with the verb estar, instead of changing it to
ser, implies that the meaning here is an awareness of being in a survival state. By developing this
kind of language, cultivating a consciousness of the situational nature of social station, inspiring
a quest for togetherness, equality, and liberation, Menchú takes a step out of the coloniality of
power. Gustavo Gutiérrez explains, “the oppressed reject the oppressive consciousness which
dwells in them, become aware of their situation, and find their own language” (57). Gonzalo
Portocarrero calls this breakthrough the “idea crítica,” achieved through a discourse that wakes
up the conscience while at the same time accepting “la validez y legitimidad de expresar senti-
mientos de indignación” (124). Becoming conscious is integral to the liberation of the self and
the ethnic community. By having stereotypes negotiate with a consciousness of discrimination,
a new, more inclusive mode of understanding develops.
What is needed is a pedagogical model based on tolerance and interethnic objectivity or
neutrality. This type of formation would not necessarily be exclusive of Western knowledge.
Menchú meets a Ladino teacher who grounds her in an understanding of an economic system
that divides peoples for the benefit of the few (Burgos 191). Even though the Establishment
view of the Maya may come with stereotypes, Menchú, in contact with Ladinos, comes to
develop a concept of discrimination (Burgos 193). Conversely, whether or not she attended
an escuela or colegio on a regular basis,23 Menchú learned about the conditions under which
her people suffer through her own experience (Burgos 144). Accordingly, education for her
became a political tool, even when it was an informal activity. As she begins to learn other
Mayan languages—Mam, Kaqchikel, Tz’utujil, and along with them, Spanish—the possibility
of uniting the multicultural social fabric is born (Burgos 188). Ultimately, when Menchú’s father
warns against Ladino schools, she rebels against him, repeatedly saying, “Yo quiero, yo quiero
aprender” (Burgos 115). In this, we come full circle. Menchú begins to desire an education
because it can mean liberation, which puts her on a trajectory established by González Prada
who wants to “educate” the indigenous thereby freeing them from surviving colonial structures
and consequently inserting them into modernity. Their views are different but not incompatible.
The Turn toward Violence
The fourth thematic capsule that bears investigation is the decision to advocate violence
in hopes of averting future bloodshed. As we have seen, González Prada endorses its use in
“Nuestros indios” when he suggests that Andeans stop wasting their money on drink and use it
instead to buy “rifles y cápsulas” (343). He suggests: “A la violencia [el indígena] respondería con
la violencia, escarmentando al patrón que le arrebata las lanas, al soldado que le recluta en nombre
del Gobierno, al montonero que le roba ganado y bestias de carga” (343). In some instances,
González Prada developed his violence-to-violence strategy into a philosophy of tyrannicide.
Two years earlier, in “Nuestros magistrados,” he declares acerbically that there are two ways
a soldier’s tyranny can be redressed, “con un levantamiento popular o con la eliminación del
individuo” (282). In “La acción individual,” drafted sometime between 1910 and 1918, González
Prada ponders the sad paradox of brute force being legal when committed by the State, but not
when committed by citizens. He writes, “el tirano puede asesinar al pueblo, mas el pueblo no
debe matar al tirano” (123).24 Governmental brutality against its own people is perhaps the most
appalling way to scorn the maxim that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
González Prada’s mordant yet moral logic in resolving the paradox is inescapable: “Si se da
muerte a un perro hidrófobo y a un felino escapado de su jaula, ¿por qué no suprimir al tirano
tan amenazador y terrible como el felino y el perro?” (“La acción” 124). If the social good is at
stake, why not kill the one, to save the many? It goes without saying that such a posture is radi-
cal and would not likely be condoned by communities, senates, and churches. But, in a country
with a tradition of ethnic oppression, especially when the outer trappings of democracy such
as “elections” camouflage that dark tradition, González Prada suggests committing tyrannicide
may be the humane thing to do.
His proclamation that to stem future violence tyrannicide may be necessary, that the indig-
enous should bear arms, could be taken as prophetic. Some sixty years after he died, Peru would
suffer a civil war whose actors were the Peruvian state, the military, a Peruvian Communist
Party known as Sendero Luminoso, the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA),
community self-defense leagues known as Rondas campesinas, and hundreds of thousands of
civilians caught between the primary actors. Generally, the hostilities are considered to have
ended during the period that runs from 2000 to 2003. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission
headed by Salomon Lerner reports that some 69,280 individuals met their death in the war (see
General Conclusions 1.1). Additionally, as Lisa J. Laplante and Kimberly Susan Theidon have
summarized, “the Commissioners state that Sendero Luminoso was responsible for 54 percent
of the deaths and disappearances reported to the TRC, and the armed forces were responsible for
37 percent” (233). González Prada’s relevance becomes apparent when the report also suggests
that of those who perished 75% spoke Quechua or another autochthonous language, despite the
fact that the 1993 census put only 16% of the total population in the Quechua-language category
(see General Conclusions 1.6). (The 1981 national language population estimate established 24%
of the population as Quechua speakers and 3% as speakers of Aymara or other languages [Klee
402].25) That three quarters of the people exterminated spoke an Amerindian language when
less than a fifth of the total population falls into the category of Amerindian-language speakers
suggests a violence directed against non-Spanish speakers by the primary actors. What happened
during this time frame approaches the category of “genocide.” I am not the first to suggest this,
but since this term is not generally applied to this context, a few details would be helpful to
understand its applicability. Nelson Manrique, just before the publication of Peru’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission Final Report, uncovers a military attitude against what was termed
“excedente poblacional,” which refers to “los subversivos, sus familiares y su entorno social,
ante el cual la única política posible debería ser el exterminio” (44). This line of thinking holds
that if Sendero members are terrorists, so too must be the peasants surrounding them, stressing
the need for eradicating all of them from the Peruvian nation (Flores Galindo 3: 364, 357;
Laplante and Theidon 232; Poole and Renique 148). The guileful political construction equat-
ing rural folk with terrorists opened the door to government just-war “retaliatory” campaigns
to exterminate civilian peasants, seemingly negating the term genocide’s applicability to these
circumstances, since the campaigns were responding to “terrorist” activity.
However, such political rhetoric had little basis in reality. The Maoist organization was not
largely an organic indigenous movement. Alberto Flores Galindo explains that its members came
from an “aristocracia provinciana embobrecida,” or were “mestizos frustrados,” and did include
some political figures from the “mundo campesino” (3: 343). The presence of this third category,
whose limited influence has not been quantified, does not make Sendero an organic indigenous
entity. Furthermore, drawing on and synthesizing the work of other scholars, Portocarrero
completely counts out sympathy toward Sendero in the highland communities which were
more traditional, although there may have been a small degree in the valley population centers
that were more in contact with the “modern” world and whose young people’s education
allowed them a framework for dialogue with Sendero (118–19). Yet, some indigenous people
in dialogue with Sendero does not make indigenous a Sendero that was vertically organized.
Paradoxically, not only was the revolutionary organization not indigenous, it actively carried
out acts of repression against traditional communities. A predominantly non-indigenous entity
targeting indigenous individuals and communities moves toward a situation that could be
classified as genocide. Manrique does not shy away from the term when he talks of Sendero’s
activities as “una represión inmisericorde que por momentos llegaba a una acción genocida
en zonas de emergencia” (42). Similarly, he maintains, when Sendero moved from the Sierra
to the Selva, it again achieved “niveles genocidas con el secuestro de poblados completos, el
enrolamiento compulsivo y graves masacres contra integrantes de la etnia de los asháninka,
la población nativa amazónica más numerosa” (48). Thus, we can conclude that while there
was not one mastermind as in the twentieth-century’s infamous manifestations in the Ottoman
Empire and Germany, there may have been a dual thrust by unintentional allies to weed out
overly traditional peasants, or soplones, as they were viewed in the case of Sendero, terrucos,
in the case of the army and police (Flores Galindo 3: 363; Manrique 42, 47; Poole and Renique
144). This continuing repression against native peoples that González Prada perhaps foresaw
and that he tried to circumvent with his proposals parallels the Guatemala civil conflict of
1980–2000 that would push Rigoberta Menchú onto the world stage (though, as we will see,
the war there was more organic in a true indigenous sense).
Menchú’s arguments fall strikingly along the same lines as those her Peruvian predecessor
expressed. With the persistence of debt peonage, of Ladino encroachments on the Guatemalan
highlands, of Quiché squabbling over remaining lands, and of escalating government savagery
perpetrated against the people of Quiché, it became clear to Menchú and her community that
there was a need to declare the existence of an enemy, and to determine exactly what form
that enemy took. The answer points toward an army that was increasingly engaged in genocidal
practices. Victoria Sanford explains that General Fernando Romeo Lucas García’s “presidency”
“ushered in the epoch that would come to be known as La Violencia, which began with selec-
tive assassinations and later radiated into massacres in Maya villages throughout the country”
(“Between Rigoberta Menchú” 39). After Lucas García’s handpicked successor, Efraín Ríos
Montt, diverted the army from suppressing protests against him to the guerrilla war, the bloodiest
violence was yet to come. John Coatsworth describes what happened: “The army got back to
the business of killing insurgents, along with suspected insurgents, suspected supporters of the
insurgents, peaceful dissidents of any kind, and indigenous villagers in zones where subversives
were known to be or suspected of operating” (ix). In the sixteen months Ríos Montt controlled
the presidency (March 1982–August 1983), a period that would have been especially perilous
to Menchú and her community, what could be called genocide occurred. Coatsworth continues,
“the Guatemalan army destroyed some 400 towns and villages, drove 20,000 rural people out
of their homes and into camps, killed between 50,000 and 75,000 mostly unarmed indigenous
farmers and their families, and violently displaced over a million people from their homes” (x).
According to the Guatemalan Truth Commission, governmental authorities allowed for massacres
in 626 villages during those years (Sanford, “Violence and Genocide”).
State sadism at that time was especially terrifying to women and indeed was to Rigoberta
Menchú. Referring to her female friends, she recounts, “dos de ellas se quedaron embarazadas
del ejército . . .” (Burgos 169). These were not isolated incidents. Jean Franco explains, “in
Guatemala, there were grotesque scenes in which captured women were forced to cook for the
soldiers and dance to marimba music that accompanied the assaults. Gang rapes were common”
(1663). As suggested above, Peru and Guatemala during the eighties share startling parallels.
Franco adds, “rape in Guatemala and Peru was a form of torture often accompanied by beat-
ings, insults, and other humiliating treatment” (1663). There were differences, however. If the
sexual violence in Guatemala occurred in the countryside, in Peru, Michelle Leiby explains,
“55 percent . . . of sexual abuses occurred in state-controlled facilities, like the prisons in Lima
or regional military bases” (456). Leiby contrasts this period in both countries: “[I]n Peru
sexual violence was more selective” and “was perpetrated for the explicit purpose of targeting
actual or suspected guerrillas. . . . Sexual violence in Guatemala was an explicit tool of repres-
sion, employed indiscriminately against the indigenous peasantry” (456, 466). In the Central
American context, these young women, the ones who did not die, are then confronted with the
reality of bringing a soldier’s child into the world or getting an abortion, which goes against
Quiché beliefs. Franco explains that in Guatemala, like Peru, “those who were known to have
borne children of rapists were isolated and rejected by their communities and their menfolk”
(1663–64); a child born of this kind of violence is by definition a Ladino.
In this context, there may arise a broad-scale, community reaction. Menchú admits that this
entailed the use of violence: “Entonces decíamos, si vienen los soldados de los terratenientes, los
vamos a matar aquí. Fue allí donde nosotros, nos decidimos a usar la violencia” (Burgos 146).
Again, this is not a capricious decision, for Lucas García came to power “con tantas ganas de
matar y que empieza a reprimir la zona del Quiché como si fuera un trapo en la mano. Puso bases
militares en muchos lugares de las aldeas y empiezan las violaciones, las torturas, los secuestros.
Empiezan las masacres . . .” (Burgos 187). When a people get pushed too far by the generalized
violence directed toward their family members, they may, as did the Quiché, resort themselves
to violence. The basis for such a decision lies in resolving the sad paradox of brute force being
legal when committed by the State and illegal when committed by individuals, a paradox, as
previously mentioned, pointed out by González Prada. Menchú ponders the same sad paradox,
with the same logic, but with Christian langauge: “[S]i es pecado matar a un ser humano ¿por
qué no es pecado lo que el régimen hace con nosotros?” (Burgos 205). The response to that
question remains unanswered within the legal system and thus makes itself manifest as a turn
toward violence. Such a turn could seem quixotic since the kinds of weapons the Quiché had
at their disposal were “el machete, las piedras, el agua caliente, el chile, la sal” (Burgos 155),
while the Guatemalan army, in contrast, had modern weapons of war supplied or funded by the
United States government.26 The decision to fight back, under such a meager defensive position,
is the asymmetrical response of the powerless deprived of their human rights trying to regain
some vestige of their prerogative to exist as humans.
Menchú frames such a decision as a difficult one. She claims: “No hay violencia en la comu-
nidad indígena,” and “[n]i siquiera nos gusta matar a un animal” (Burgos 227). Such assertions
suggest either unfamiliarity with Mayan history or a reformulation of it. By way of illustration,
Mary Miller and Simon Martin deduce from their studies of ancient Mayan art that “the themes
of war and sacrifice became common in the artistic output of almost every Maya city, particularly
during the fractious 8th century” (163). In a twentieth-century sense, it is safe to conclude that
Menchú knew of the interethnic conflicts over the remaining nonusurped land and that, as Earle
puts it, she glossed over “the ways [the Maya] do not get along, the internal conflicts” (306).
This would be a rhetorical decision made in the construction of her proindigenous testimony.
While there may have been internecine, interethnic, or even intravillage squabbling among
the Maya over land (Stoll 34–35, 54–57), it must be remembered that this land was all that is left
after massive Ladino expropriations (Grandin 87–88) and that it was the Spanish and successor
Ladino governments that singled out these cultures for extermination. In fact, intra-Maya wran-
gling is, at least in part, an unconscious recoil to the violent coloniality of power that favored the
few and fostered a divided and conquered mentality among the many. The trajectory beginning
around 1962 allowed for the extermination of 200,000 individuals, more than three quarters
of them “Maya” (Sanford, “Violence and Genocide”). Lovell and Lutz caution: “Menchú’s
urge to communicate what was happening to her people arose from, and must be seen in, the
murderous context of that conflict” (173). The dualist Ladino–Indian construct was what gave
form to those years, more than any disinterested understanding of intraindigenous disputation.
Conclusions and a Hope

One way to read Menchú’s depiction of violence is to discredit it, smothering a newer voice
in the fabric of Latin American discourse. Another is to read it as a cry for outside help. David
Stoll is representative of the former response, and he calls for “evaluating the reciprocal stories
of victimization that are used to justify violence” (274). Stoll inserts Menchú into a Western
conception of a political left and right by positioning her on the left, and is terrified that her words
would fuel guerrilla movements in Guatemala and, even worse, that they would spark leftist
activity on the campuses of colleges and universities in the United States. Beverley represents
the latter approach, reading her testimony “as a way of mobilizing international opinion in
favor of an end to the violence” (“What Happens” 224). Read this way, she could be “an active
agent of a transformative cultural and political project” (233). Of course, both stances could
and can be substantiated by degrees, but there is a level of vitriol that energizes the former to
anti-Rigoberta action, and oftentimes away from Menchú’s intent. We do not censure the learned
essayist González Prada for reformulating knowledge as he forged a new and innovative cultural
path. To do so would be to ignore the historical circumstances that he abhorred and that moved
him to promote radical change. Neither should we censure the essayistic testimonial writer
Menchú for selecting her own truths while forging a new and unconventional view of Quiché
culture. To do so would also be to ignore the historical circumstances that destroyed her family
and much of her community.27
The clamor born of indignation (as explained by Portocarrero) to counter political or
economic brutality with pan-indigenous violence is a clear parallel between both intellectuals’
logic. Just as González Prada ponders the overarching paradox that tyrants can get away with
killing masses of people while individuals generally do not escape punishment for killing tyrants,
so too does Menchú. Her view, like his, suggests a reaction to humanity’s interminable efforts
to maintain the status quo, despite the praiseworthy progress that was achieved with the English
Magna Carta, the efforts of Bartolomé de las Casas, the gains of the Enlightenment, the almost
total independence of the Americas, and the International Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
Both intellectuals came to advocate violence because, in societies that were democratic in
name only, it seemed the only path out of oppression. The discourses they confected, if less than
the nonviolent idealism of Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is within You, react to State brutality
on the plane established by the State.28 With the twentieth century now behind us, reflection on
their positions relative to their social contexts suggests the cyclical nature of violence. Thus,
to avoid such downward spiraling, perhaps only the enlightened doctrines of Tolstoy, Gandhi,
Martin Luther King, and César Chávez can liberate citizens from class, ethnic, or even racial
cruelty. And indeed, since the signing of the peace accords between 1994 and 1996, the Maya
Movement has intentionally shied away from violence, employing more peaceful methods that
draw on the openings established by the peace accords.
By considering both intellectuals together, two things are accomplished. We see that Menchú,
like González Prada, is capable of formulating ideological arguments that get to the roots of
social and cultural problems. Despite the fact that he was old and she was young, that he was a
man and she a woman, that he was more theoretical and she more empirical, that he rejected his
heritage while she embraced hers, there are many other ways they come together. We see that,
despite his preconceptions about indigenous education, like her, he was telling the descendents of
the original Americans to rise up and forgo the hacendado’s liqueur. Both were warning against
emulating the rural lords’ values of coloniality inherent in their brand of stratified civilization.
He was before his time in searching for an absolute equality, since many of his contemporaries
did not think “civilizing” Indians was possible. But, he was also a man of his time in that his
views, as advanced as they were, did not always take into account cultural differences regarding
education. We must remember that González Prada died thirty-five years before Menchú was
born. He was a visionary trailblazer who helped create open spaces for the Rigobertas of the
world to promote the same values of justice, but now from the perspective of diversity. As a
consequence of the increasing institutionalization of cultural studies as a discipline, it is much
more likely for the testimonio to be published in our time than it was during González Prada’s,
making us more aware of cultural diversity than an earlier age, given form by an exclusionary
literary environment. What remains is for both oppressing and oppressed groups to give up on
stoking the repetitive fires of violence.
Finally, by studying points of culture in González Prada and Menchú, we see that both of
their views have validity and hold our interest, his because it was progressive, hers because it
was grounded in a radical view of tradition. When taken together, a new understanding gels,
as they mutually cross the often incomprehensible cultural divide between indigenismo and
expresión indígena. Both seek out common ground for dialogue, not with fear, but with courage.
The indigenismo of González Prada, despite his not speaking Quechua, moves ideologically
from Lima to the Andean heartland and produces a discourse that conveys Andean issues back
to the nation’s capital and into criollo consciousness. From there it expands out of Peru to
Argentina, Venezuela, France, Spain, Mexico, the United States, and other countries where
it was republished in pamphlets, books, and other media. The Quiché thought of Menchú,
despite her having to learn to speak Spanish fluently, produces with Burgos’s transcription and
organization a published discourse that transports Mayan issues from the Guatemalan highlands
onto the horizon of world consciousness. Their nonfiction prose texts both became frequently
anthologized in university-level readers in the United States. “Nuestros indios” crosses the
cultural frontier to reveal the Andean economic, social, and political condition and Me llamo
Rigoberta Menchú transcends the borders of Quiché-ness to make public the social and economic
oppression of native peoples. Read together, they represent for the twenty-first-century reader
the possibility of intercultural debate, addressing the hierarchies of power still rooted in Peruvian
and Guatemalan societies. Our comparative reading of both texts establishes a framework for
overcoming Eurocentrism, a process that concomitantly breeds solidarity, allowing people of
different heritages to come together in dialogue in the quest for tolerance, mutual comprehen-
sion, and, ultimately, justice.
NOTES
1
Besides the canonical essayists listed here who are men, there is a wide variety of women essayists
who need to be considered. Among these are Soledad Acosta de Samper, Luisa Capetillo, Mercedes
Cabello de Carbonera, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Rosario Castellanos, Teresa González de Fanning,
Clorinda Matto de Turner, Victoria Ocampo, Dolores Veintimilla, Marietta de Veintemilla, and others.
2
I use the Spanish word criollo instead of the English Creole to avoid the racial connotations that
inhere in the latter term.
3
Despite K’iche’ seemingly being the preferred spelling for Quiché in English, and even though the
Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua prefers Qheswa over Quechua (other variants include Quichua,
Kewcha, or Kewsa), for two reasons I make the difficult decision to refer to both groups and the languages
they speak by the Spanish-language Quiché and Quechua: 1) neither the Quiché nor the Quechua refer
to themselves or their languages as K’iche’ and Qheswa respectively, the former, for example, referring to
their language as Qatzijob’al (“Our Language”) and the latter as Runa Simi (“The Language of the
People”); and 2) there are regional differences in their spelling and pronunciation.
4
My understanding of coloniality as a mindset is derived from Albert Memmi, Aníbal Quijano, and
Walter D. Mignolo.
5
The Peruvian theorist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) notes that indigenismo is written by
mestizos, and he argues that there will be no indigenous literature until “los propios indios estén en grado
de producirla” (306). I have chosen the term Indigenous Expression regarding testimonio to take into
account testimonio’s problematic relationship with the notion of “literature.”
6
Despite the fact that Elisabeth Burgos was publishing a transcription of Rigoberta Menchú’s own
words, she chose to not ascribe authorship to Menchú, nor even share authorship with her. The Siglo XXI
edition lists Burgos as the sole author, and thus, to respect bibliographic norms, we must list her so, despite
the cultural colonialism that the denial of official authorship implies. The reader should be aware that, in
the very least, the text is a coauthored text, and to have been fair, Menchú should have been listed as the
author, the same way a scholar is listed as the author of an academic article or book, despite the fact there
are editors and anonymous readers who make suggestions.
7
There are additional chapters in José Luis Gómez Martínez’s book whose subjects’ relationship with
the testimonio still have not been ascertained.
8
It is one of those strange twists of literary history that “Nuestros indios” would become the most
anthologized of González Prada’s essays. He wrote it as part of a series with titles such as “Nuestros bedui-
nos,” “Nuestros magistrados,” “Nuestra aristocracia,” but when it came time to publish the series in Horas
de lucha (1908), he deemed it unfinished and left it out of the mix. When his wife published a second edition
in 1924, she included it, paving the way for its becoming González Prada’s best-known essay. Curiously,
this essay, in whole or in part, has oftentimes been issued under the erroneous title, “La educación del indio.”
9
Chang-Rodríguez documents how González Prada was influential in the work of Jose Carlos Mariá-
tegui, who became Peru’s most important socialist theorist and also in Raul Haya de la Torre who founded
the Aprista movement, which is still very active today in politics (Pensamento y acción). Regarding his
Indigenism, Phyllis Rodríguez-Peralta describes González Prada as the “great vindicator of the Indian”
(149). José Miguel Oviedo, referring to “Nuestros indios” and other essays, calls them “las primeras
muestras indiscutibles de un indigenismo que había superado el tono sentimental, filantrópico y plañidero
que tenía, por ejemplo, en Aves sin nido (Lima 1889) de Clorinda Matto de Turner” (“Manuel González
Prada” 75). But, Ana Peluffo seems to move him back away from indigenismo toward indianismo when
she avers that “in 1888 González Prada portrays Indians as bodies without a soul whose main historical
responsibility is to sacrifice their lives for a national ideal” (“Why Can’t” 6).
10
Regarding the supposed birth of Cultural Studies in Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies in 1964, or thereabouts, Abril Trigo makes the following assertion: “Well before British
cultural studies were coined in Britain and post-modernism was born, many Latin American intellectuals
were already doing some sort of cultural studies” (5). For Trigo, Latin American cultural studies were
consolidated during the 1980s and 1990s, that is to say, during the time frame when Menchú’s text was
created and disseminated.
11
On the first page of the preface to his book, Stoll uses the word “story” or “stories” four times,
the word “account,” and the expression “she told,” establishing the parameters to interpret the work as a
narrative whose content “is not true” (viii).
12
On the 2009 assault of the Awajun peoples in Bagua, Peru, see Dudenhoefer; on the peoples of
Espinar, mining interests, and the national government’s response toward both in 2012, see Gutiérrez R.
13
There were also decreasing guano prices, which affected many elites.
14
González Prada was born in 1844, not 1848, as Luis Alberto Sánchez has documented (Mito y
realidad 10). This would have made him 23 in 1867, the year of Bustamante’s uprising. Burgos states
that “Rigoberta tiene apenas 23 años” when she produced her testimonio (7).
15
This phenomenon has been observed in diverse regions throughout the world. Albert Memmi, for
example, discusses the same sort of difficulty among some Tunisian peoples (16–17).
16
It is noteworthy that pre-Hispanic festival drinking has also survived to the present. See Saignes
and Salazar-Soler.
17
It would not be until the revolutionary military government, in power between 1968 and 1980, that
“bilingual programs at the primary level were instituted in order to insure that Quechua-speakers would not
be left behind” (Post 274). Note that these were “bilingual programs,” not Quechua-language curriculum.
18
While González Prada’s sometimes ambiguous views on Asians and blacks were relatively more
enlightened than his contemporaries, they were not more so than his views on Amerindians, according to
Sánchez, who, for example, shockingly affirms that “Prada despreciaba al negro y al amarillo” (Mito y
realidad 30). This judgment is unfair. For example, regarding the Chinese, González Prada taunts other
criollos by affirming that human rights must come before the national interest and that the main difference
between the Oriental and the Occidental is that the former do not exhibit the insatiable greed of the latter
(Prosa menuda 209). There is no study of González Prada’s conceptions of Asians. On his attitude towards
blacks, see Velázquez Castro (249–64). The study of his views on “negros” and “amarillos” lies outside
the scope of this article on indigenismo.
19
González Prada was an aristocrat and could trace his roots back to high ranking functionaries in
the royal government of Carlos V (see Sánchez, Nuestras vidas 28).
20
For more on “Rigoberta’s Secrets,” see Sommer.
21
The original Spanish reads: “la idea del capitalismo y de superarse” (Burgos 230).
22
This idea is nuanced by his declaration in “Nuestros indios”: “La cuestión del indio, más que
pedagógica, es económica, es social” (342).
23
Stoll finds some discrepancies between Menchú’s narrative regarding her education and other
testimonies he collected in her town, Chimel (159–64). With these kinds of arguments, Stoll has sparked a
controversy so wide-reaching that researchers consistently feel compelled to comment on it. The problem
with Stoll’s methodological apparatus, which has been shown to be completely flaw-ridden (see Arias and
Del Valle Escalante), is that he has been able to establish a paradigm for studying Menchú that completely
obliterates the reasons why she offered her testimony in the first place: the genocide of Amerindians in
Guatemala. Stoll’s hypothesis has been succinctly described by Del Valle Escalante: “[T]hose to be blamed
for the massacres and the genocide in Guatemala are not the government and the army, but rather the
guerrillas and Mayas themselves” (60).
24
It is revealing that González Prada later published a fragment of “La acción individual” with the
title “Tiranicidio” in his last collection of essays, Bajo el oprobio.
25
These census figures may not reflect the total number of Quechua speakers since speakers of this
language are oftentimes reluctant to admit they speak the language in a Spanish-centered cultural environ-
ment that exhibits widespread disdain for “Indian” languages.
26
As noted by Susan Jonas in Foreign Policy, support in Washington for the Guatemalan army was
effected by overt US military aid before 1977, and, because of Jimmy Carter’s public support of human
rights, it went underground as covert CIA assistance, remaining so during the Reagan administration due
to congressional resistance until 1987 when open collaboration began anew (148).
27
It should not matter to us if Menchú’s brother was burned alive, burned after he was killed, killed
on a road, killed in front of a church, or in an army encampment, all concerns raised by Stoll (69–70).
What matters is that he was killed, a fact Stoll himself admits, and that he was murdered in the middle of
a massive campaign of genocide being executed by the Guatemalan government.
28
Regarding González Prada’s theories on violence, José Miguel Oviedo argues that while his thought
is generally lucid, his position on violence is sophistic, falling into the same defect he criticizes, censuring
violence as he calls for it (“González Prada, el anarquismo”).
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Manuel González Prada and Rigoberta Menchú: Measuring

Indigenismo through Indigenous Thought

Hispania, Volume 95, Number 3, September 2012, pp. 400-423 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

Keywords: Andes, essay/ensayo, hacienda, Indians/indios, Indigenism/indigenismo, Manuel González

Indianism, Indigenism, and Indigenous Expression

AATSP Copyright © 2012 Hispania 95.3 (2012): 400–23

In the movement forward from Indianism through Indigenism to Indigenous Expression

Peru and Guatemala: Two Countries Prone to Ethnic Violence

The Hacienda’s Caporal and His Relationship to Ethnicity and Power

Alcohol and the Coloniality of Power

Ethnicity and Modernity in the School House

. . . algunos pesimistas a lo Le Bon marcan en la frente del indio un estigma infamatorio: le

The Turn toward Violence

Conclusions and a Hope

———. “Manuel González Prada.” Letras Libres (2001): 74–76. Print.

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