25 febrero 2003
| 25 febrero 2003 |
The Street Signs of Downtown Lima: Memory and Identity in Peru - III |
William W. Stein |
From a psychoanalytic point of view one of the significations of being jodido is something that begins early in an individual’s development. In his well known article on “the mirror stage” at the end of infancy Lacan (1977:1-7) characterizes the infant’s construction of self as a “jubilant assumption of his [sic] specular image by the child” (2), and contrasts this with the “moment in which the mirror-stage comes to an end,” a “moment that decisively tips the whole of human knowledge into mediatization through the desire of the other, constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence by the co-operation of others, and turns the I into that apparatus for which every instinctual thrust constitutes a danger” (5). In his first seminar, Lacan (1988:128-130) constructs this as a separation of the container from the contained with the vivid illustration of an optical illusion in which a bouquet of flowers appears in a concave mirror to be contained in a vase which is really separated from it. This can only be seen from a certain position. He says:
Insisto en este punto en mi teoría del estado del espejo: la sola visión de la forma total del cuerpo humano brinda al sujeto un dominio imaginario de su cuerpo, prematuro al respecto al dominio real. Esta formación se desvincula así del proceso mismo de la maduración, y no se confunde con él. El sujeto anticipa la culminación del dominio psicológico, y esta anticipación dará su estilo al ejercicio ulterior del dominio motor efectivo.
Es ésta la aventura imaginaria por el cual el hombre [sic], por vez primera, experimenta que él se ve, se refleja y se concibe como distinto, otro de lo que él es: dimensión esencial de lo humano, que estructura el conjunto de su vida fantasmática.
En el origen suponemos todos los ellos, objetos, instintos, deseos, tendencias, etc. Se trata pues de la realidad pura y simple, que en nada se delimita, que no puede ser aún objeto de definición alguna; que no es ni buena ni mala, sino a la vez caótica y absoluta, originaria. [...] Aquí es, donde, la imagen del cuerpo ofrece al sujeto la primera forma que le permite ubicar lo que es y lo que no es del yo. Pues bien, digamos que la imagen del cuerpo—si la situamos en nuestro esquema—es como el florero imaginario que contiene el ramillete de flores real. Así es como podemos representarnos, antes del nacimiento del yo y su surgimiento, al sujeto. [...]
Para que la ilusión se produzca, para que se constituya, ante el ojo que mira, un mundo donde lo imaginario pueda incluir lo real y, a la vez, formularlo; donde lo real pueda incluir y, a la vez, situar lo imaginario, es preciso, ya lo he dicho, cumplir con una condición: el ojo debe ocupar cierta posición . [...]
[E]n la relación entre lo imaginario y lo real, y en la constitución del mundo que de ella resulta, todo depende de la situación del sujeto. La situación del sujeto—deben saberlo ya que se lo repito—está caracterizada esencialmente por su lugar en el mundo simbólico, dicho de otro modo, el el mundo de la palabra. De ese lugar depende que el sujeto tenga o no derecho a llamarse Pedro.
Later, Lacan (318) adds: “La intersubjetividad está dada ante todo por la utilización del símbolo y esto desde el origen. Todo parte de la posibilidad de nombrar que es al mismo tiempo destrucción de la cosa y pasaje de la cosa al plano simbólico, gracias a lo cual se instala el registro propiamente humano. A partir de aquí, y de modo cada vez más complicado, se produce la encarnación de lo simbólico en lo vivido imaginario. Lo simbólico modelará todas las inflexiones que, en lo vivido del adulto, puede adquirir el compromiso imaginario, la captación oiriginaria.”
Perhaps it is language itself that is “jodido.” As “time travel” it certainly would be such. In her extension of Lacan’s work, Ellie Ragland (1993:90) says:
[N]o language is natural. All language is referential, not only to itself, but basically to an empty set or void. But because it is not generally understood that the referent of language is first and foremost the void, the processes that allow it to function as a binary system seem complete within themselves. Yet if one sees language as time travel, it always infers the place it comes from, the gap in time necessary to leap from a memorized sound, image, or word to the act of speaking it. [...] Looked at in this way, one can understand Lacan’s claim that the unconscious is not hidden or repressed. Rather, he came to understand the unconscious in terms of the profound and extensive functioning of desire via metaphor and metonymy.
Stewart (1980:129) calls attention to the “paradox [...] of container and contained, form as content and content as form”—
There is no privileged place for content. All frames, all metacommunication, take the exhausting path of an infinite regress. The infinite set of messages about messages, texts within texts [...] presented in the model of intertextuality destroys the notion of “content” independent of framing. Content appears as another occasion for interpretation, a character whose passage must be taken up in the next story, a double who splits into an infinity of doubles, who dissolves into the boundary of his [sic] being.
We move from optical illusion to intertextuality to perjury. Derrida’s (2002c:126) metaphor opens to the other in the psyche:
The substitution of the “I” for the “I” is also the root of perjury: I (the I) can always, by addressing myself/itself to (a [you]), each one to each one, substitute the other same “I” for this here “I” and change the destination. (An) “I” can always change the address in secret at the last moment. Since every “I” is an “I” (the same and altogether other: tout autre est tout autre, every other is altogether other as the same), since every other is altogether other, (the) I can betray, without the least appearance becoming manifest, by substituting the address of one for the address of the other, up to the last moment—in amorous ecstasy or in death, one or the other, one and the other.
We are now prepared to address racist violence, and for that purpose I reproduce a case from the year 1844, researched by Carlos Aguirre (1998:350) in the Archivo General de la Nación:
Un caso extremo, aunque no singular, fue el de Ramona, una niña de origen andino que trabajaba como sirvienta. Ella fue acusada del robo de doce reales y, “en virtud de los continuados robos de plata”, el patrón decidió castigarla. La paliza empezó a las siete de la mañana y sólo terminó cuando Ramona murió, siete horas más tarde. La esposa del patrón exclamaba mientras Ramona era azotada: “Dénle duro que no siente”. Más tarde le diría a una vecina que si Ramona no moría a consecuencia de los palos, sería necesario “meterle un puñal, porque a los cholos se castigaba así”.
Since Ramona “no siente”, as her patrona described her, we may conclude that she was already a symbolic corpse. The question I would like to ask, however, is this: were not Ramona’s patrones responding to much more than their annoyance with her petty thefts? Were they responding to their fear and hatred of that ever-present otherness in themselves, death? Were they acting out an overpowering desire to rid themselves of their own awful punishment by punishing a poor Andean servant girl, who was already symbolically dead, already an embodiment of their own dreaded death? How else are we going to explain their gross overreaction? And to what extent can we compare this unique case with contemporary events? Nelson Manrique (2002:59-60) writes of the indifference of urban Peruvians to casualties in the “guerra sucia”:
En muchas conferencias sobre el tema de la violencia política el el Perú he invitado al público a pensar en cuántas personas conocen de los 30,000 muertos que ha dejado la guerra. Más del 90 % de los interpelados no conoce a ninguna. Creo que este hecho merece una reflexión profunda, porque con una cantidad de muertos semejante o menor en Bolivia, en Argentina, en Chile o en Uruguay, en el perìodo de la gran represiòn llevada a cabo en el Cono Sur durante la década del 70, entre la gente que crea opinión pública virtualmente no había quien no tuviese un hermano, un primo, un pariente, un amigo o un conocido muerto, torturado, desaparecido o exilado. ¿Cómo explicar, entonces, que en una sociedad como la peruana gran parte de su elite intelectual simplemente no conociera fìsicamente a ninguno de los caídos? [...] ¿Por qué conmovieron tanto las muertes de ocho periodistas en Uchuraccay y no lo hicieron las miles de otras muertes, tan terribles o aún más que éstas, sobre las cuales los periódicos venìan informando cotidianamente?
To be jodido is symbolic; it exists first in the language one learns, and it is precisely there that the task of interrogating it begins. Peru is a Spanish-speaking, reading, and writing country, despite the existence of many Native Andean and tropical forest languages. Rodrigo Montoya (1997:158) states that, in terms of language, fifty-nine cultures exist in Peru. In addition to Spanish which dominates the country’s speech and literature, fifty-eight other languages are spoken. Quechua and Aymara, which account for most of the non-Spanish speech communities, exist in the Andean parts, while the other fifty-six are found in the eastern lowlands. [And Quechua, the largest of these consists of two major variants which are at least as different from each other as Spanish and Portuguese.] Altogether, the people who speak these languages constitute about one-third of the Peruvian population. Most of these peoples are thought of as “Indians,” but Native Peruvian features mark the bodies of at least two-thirds of the Peruvians. Montoya adds: “La historia del Perú está profundamente marcada por está composición India. De manera que no estamos frente a una mal llamada noción de minoría étnica, que reduce el problema a un simple pequeño número de personas. No, estamos ante un hecho histórico muy importante.” Which is that Peru is a mestizo, or mixed-race country with a hybrid culture as well. Manrique (1999:17) points out, however, that persons defined as “Indian” have constituted a steadily shrinking category over the last century. At the beginning of the century they were nine-tenths of the Peruvian population; toward the end of the 20s, they were four-fifths; in the 40s, something less than one-half; and currently, “pues nadie puede definir con precision qué es un indio,” perhaps a third or a quarter of Peruvians. Still, Spanish is the national language and Lima is very Spanish–or perhaps only parts of it are, while other parts are Andean from the massive migrations during the second half of the twentieth century of people escaping from the stagnation of small farming and, presumably, now in the twenty-first by what, in his study of The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin (1995:126-127) calls the “redundancy” of farmers in our “high-tech” world of tissue-culture food production which biotechnology and computerization have made possible.
Derrida (2001:47) is sharply critical of such “forgetfulness of zones in the world, populations, nations, groups, classes, individuals who, massively, are the excluded victims of the movement called ‘the end of work’ and ‘globalization’ or ‘worldwide-ization.’”
These victims suffer either because they lack the work they would need or else because they work too much for the salary they receive in exchange on a worldwide market that is so violently inegalitarian. This capitalistic situation (there where capital plays an essential role between the actual and the virtual) is more tragic than it has ever been in the history of humanity. Humanity has perhaps never been further from the worldwide-izing or worldwide-ized homogeneity of ‘”work” and “without work” that is often alleged. A large part of humanity is “without work” just where it would like to have more work, and another has too much work just where it would like to have less, or even to be done with a job that is so poorly paid on the market.
A half century ago, people in the Callejón de Huaylas told me, “We don’t have real indios here; you have to go to Conchucos to find them.” And when I arrived in Huari, in Conchucos, people told me, “We don’t have real indios here; you’ve got to go down to Llamellín, on the Marañón, for that.” If I’d gone to Llamellín, I’m sure, I would have been sent somewhere else! Finding an indio was as hard as finding a gamonal. Apparently, in Peru nobody wants to be an indio, not even those who are called “Indians.” The word indio was imposed on Peru by the Spanish who called their subjects “indios,” mistakenly, because Columbus and other explorers of an earlier generation believed they had found a route to the East Indies. They set about early in their project to convert the “heathen Indians” into faithful Christians, because they knew from experience in reconquering their own country and “purifying” it from the influences of Moors and Jews that it would be strategic to the consolidation of their power. Perhaps, too, they knew intuitively from struggles with their own mixed racial, cultural, and religious backgrounds (see Manrique 1992, 1993a) that by obliterating the identities of the Indians they could transform the population into relatively docile subjects. The Spanish Inquisition demonstrates that people who allowed themselves to be jodidos escaped, while those who defended themselves were burned. The Spanish in Peru were only partially successful for their subalterns persisted in speaking up, and the history of the colonial and republican periods is filled with contestations of elite Spanish power, some quite bloody.
Gonzalo Portocarrero (1993:33) introduces the concept of “total domination”:
Lo característico de este tipo de relaciones es la omnipotencia de una de las partes y la impotencia de la otra. Esta concentración del poder permite convertir al dominado en instrumento de la voluntad del dominador; en máquina de trabajo que explotar y en objeto en el que satisfacer los impulsos sexuales y agresivos. Típicamente esta relación da lugar a personalidades despóticas que ejercen su imperio arbitrariamente, sin fronteras y, de otro lado, a personalidades serviles siempre temerosas e incondicionales. La relación entre españoles e indios se acerca bastante a esta patrón ideal. Los comportamientos y formas de ser característicos a esta relación han marcado en profundidad a la sociedad peruana. Hoy ya no hay españoles y los indios ni son los de ayer ni son la mayoría; no obstante, la desconsideración del otro y el ensañamiento con el débil permanecen como rasgos centrales de relaciones tan diferentes como las de patrón-obrero, hombre-mujer, criollo-andino, policía-delincuente, etc.
“Total domination” is pycho-physiological. Domination becomes not only inscribed in the minds of subalterns but in their bodies, as well. Pierre Bourdieu (2000:179-180) elaborates:
The passions of the dominated habitus (whether dominated in terms of sex, culture or language), a somatized social relationship, the law of the social body converted into the law of the body, are not of a kind that can be suspended by a simple effort of will, funded on a liberatory awakening of consciousness. A person who fights his timidity feels betrayed by his body, which recognizes paralyzing taboos or calls to order, where someone else, the product of different conditions, would see stimulating incitements or injunctions. It is quite illusory to think that symbolic violence can be overcome solely with the weapons of consciousness and will. The conditions of its efficacy are durably inscribed in bodies in the form of dispositions which, especially in the case of kinship relations and social relations conceived on this model are expressed and experienced in the logic of feeling or duty, often merged in the experience of respect, affective devotion or love, and which can survive long after the disappearance of their social conditions of production.
Hence also the “foolishness” of all religious, ethical or political stances consisting in expecting a genuine transformation of relations of domination (or of the dispositions which are, partly at least, a product of them) from a simple “conversion of minds” (of the dominant or the dominated), produced by rational preaching and education, or, as maîtres à penser sometimes like to think, from a vast collective logotherapy which it falls to the intellectuals to organize.
Subalterns are socially dead, symbolically dead. Spivak (1996:289) says: “There is [...] something of a not-speakingness in the very notion of subalternity.” This does not mean that subalterns don’t speak to each other but that they don’t speak up to their dominators. And when they speak—as in a bad dream in which one speaks but nobody hears—their dominators do not listen. Spivak (291) adds: “[W]hat we have here is the story of continuous subaltern insurgency, always failing, but continuous to this day. This is a spectacular example of the subaltern not being able to ‘speak.’” And:
The idea of agency comes from the principle of accountable reason, that one acts with responsibility, that one has to assume the possibility of intention, one has to assume even the freedom of subjectivity in order to be responsible. [...] When one posits an agency from the miraculating ground of identity, the question that should come up is, “What kind of agency?” Agency is a blank word. So the shift from “identity” to “agency” in itself does not assure that the agency is good or bad, it simply entails seeing that the idea that calling everything a social construction is anti-essentialist entails a notion of the social as an essence. (294.)
Bronfen and Goodwin (1993:6-7), in their “Introduction” to the collection, Death and Representation, play with the question, “who or what represents the corpse[?]”. How are we to read the following passage from their work in the light of Spivak’s discussion of symbolic corpses?—
A more gruesome but nevertheless pertinent question, especially given the thematics of fragmentation that the subject of death occasions, is How much of the body is needed to represent the corpse—legally, technically, emotionally? How does the representation of the corpse in a grave, in an urn, in scattered ashes, or on a cross differ in each case? What kind of “voice,” authority, presence, or repose does each marker give the dead? And what kind of metaphor does it provide the survivors who must use the body’s traces to provide closure for themselves? For cultures that have located many of their most central meanings in a crucified body, the question assumes the greatest possible proportions. To give voice to the corpse, to represent this body, is in a sense to return it to life: the voice represents not so much the dead as the once living, juxtaposed with the needs f the yet living. (Emphasis mine.)
In his novel, Garabombo, El invisible, Manuel Scorza (1977:29) writes about a comunero named Fermín Espinoza who thinks that he has been bewitched into invisibility because he has been trying to speak with a government official and is neither seen nor heard:
“No me vieron. [...] Siete días pasé sentado en la puerta del despacho. Las autoridades iban y venían pero no me miraban. [...] Al comienzo no me di cuenta. Creí que no era mi turno. Ustedes saben como viven las autoridades distraídas. Pasaban sin mirarme. Yo me decía ‘siguen ocupados’, pero a la segunda semana comencé a sospechar y un día que el Subprefecto Valerio estaba solo me presenté. ¡No me vio! Hablé largo rato. Ni siquiera alzó los ojos. Comencé a maliciar. Al fin de la semana mi cuñado Melecio me aconsejó consultar a Victoria de Racre. [...]” Era una mujer tan temida que ningún comunero osaba nombrarla sin ostentoso respeto. “[Ella me dijo ¡que] me había vuelto invisible! ¡Alguien me había hecho “daño!” (Puncuation revised.)
A stay in El Frontón with “apristas y comunistas” cures him of his “pathological” condition. Eventually, “Garabombo” becomes the representative of the rural community and gets to speak with the Subprefecto:
¡Lo veían! La multitud exhaló algo tramado por el alivio, el regocijo y la angustia. ¡Lo veían! ¡Garabombo cumplía su promesa: era visible! ¡Nadie los derrotaría! Se verificaban las promesas. “Ni herbolarios ni brujos me curarán. El día que ustedes sean valientes me curaré. ¡El día que comande la caballería comunera!” (227.)
The comuneros invade an hacienda’s land. Many of them are massacred by the Guardias, along with their horses and, of course, Garabombo, who, having become visible, becomes a target. The point is that once visible (and audible), subalterns are “cured” and become something else: in this case, ghosts. (Not that the weight of comunero land invasions in the central highlands did not contribute mightily to the demise of the hacienda system.) Did Garabombo err in letting himself get cured and thereby becoming visible and audible? Stewart (1980:49) says: “If we agree about what a mistake is, we can begin to agree about what is not a mistake. The force of past experience, its constraints and consensuses, should not be underestimated.” A subaltern makes a decision to act or not to act on the basis of the information s/he “owns.” In a capitalist universe agency is a commodity. Anyone who appropriates it without paying for it commits “grand theft agency” and is treated like an offender. In Garabombo’s case, apparently, it was a “capital” offense. Whether or not he made a mistake is undecidable.
Scorza’s metaphorical treatment of subalternity as pathology is poetic but inaccurate, and his allegory of land recovery as recovery of history and self is seductive but incomplete, and the novel ignores Spivak’s caution that “agency” is a “blank” to be filled in. Scorza also reveals himself as patriarchally inclined3—hardly the recipe for successful “revolution.” And Scorza leaves completely out of his novel what Gose (1994:243) notes as the “consultative séances and coca leaf divinations” used by the comuneros “to interrogate the political conjunctures in which they found themselves . [...] These hegemonic maneuvers are especially clear in the sacrificial offerings that took place during land occupations, since [...] these offerings allow the reconstructing from below of the very powers that assimilate them. [...] Not surprisingly, this aspect of the 1956-64 movements went largely unnoticed, misunderstood, and unrecognized by the rest of Peruvian society. This blindness only emphasizes [...] that the apus do not sacralize actually existing power relations, but represent instead an attempt to reconstruct them on a different basis. [...] Because the mountain spirits represent the very land that commoners have struggled for, they naturally become rallying points for political action.” Scorza prioritizes indoctrination and disregards divination.
Not that magic is absent from the novel which contains: a queerly invisible hero who can appear to some characters but not to others, except at the end, mostly invisible women who only appear, seemingly, to certify that the hero has a hetero sex-life (i.e., to unqueer him), talking horses and their talking ghosts, and a penile dwarf who has the capacity to zoom himself large and then unzoom. It all has a theatrical quality that complicates the matter (or unmatter) of agency. Is Garabombo only acting—from Scorza’s script—like an agent? Catherine Liu (2000:113) points out:
Linguistic performance is always subject to theatricalization. [...] [T]he problem is that any speaker at any time can be simply acting. What acting might in fact be is, of course, highly problematic in all cases, but when we are dealing with actors we are perhaps adding to the confusion of agency: an actor follows a script and a nonactor supposedly does not. But it is certainly possible to imagine that a certain amount of acting takes place far from the stages of the world.
Bourdieu (1991:138) applies “the metaphor of censorship” to the field of symbolic power:
The metaphor of censorship should not mislead: it is the structure of the field itself which governs expression by governing both access to expression and the form of expression, and not some legal proceeding which has been specially adapted to designate and repress the transgression of a kind of linguistic code. This structural censorship is exercised through the medium of the sanctions of a field, functioning as a market on which the different prices of different kinds of expression are formed; it is imposed on all producers of symbolic goods, including the authorized spokesperson, whose authoritative discourse is more subject to the norms of official propriety than any other, and it condemns the occupants of dominated positions either to silence or to shocking outspokenness. [...] Censorship is never quite as perfect or as invisible as when each agent has nothing to say apart from what he [sic] is objectively authorized to say: in this case he does not even have to be his own censor because he is, in a way, censored once and for all, through the forms of perception and expression that he has internalized and which impose their form on all his expressions.
Among the most effective and best concealed censorships are all those which consist in excluding certain agents from communication by excluding them from the groups which speak or the places which allow one to speak with authority. In order to explain what may or may not be said in a group, one has to take into account not only the symbolic relations of power which become established within it and which deprive certain individuals (e.g. women) of the possibility of speaking or which oblige them to conquer that right through force, but also the laws of group formation themselves (e.g. the logic of conscious or unconscious exclusion) which function like a prior censorship.
Symbolic productions therefore owe their most specific properties to the social conditions of their production and, more precisely, to the position of the producer in the field of production, which governs through various forms of mediation, not only the expressive interest, and the form and force of the censorship which is imposed on it, but also the competence which allows this interest to be satisfied within the limits of these constraints.
What Spivak and Bourdieu are saying is well illustrated in Sarah Lund’s (2001) Kafkaesque account of social/symbolic life and death in bureaucratic places of Cusco. She writes about the Civil Registry Office:
While in theory the need for documentation in theory applies equally to everyone born in Peru, hierarchical relationships are made evident within the registrar’s office, delineating, separating and in certain cases even demeaning the applicants. The subordinate position of the applicant in relation to the attendant is an obvious distinction, the representatives of the state mediating and cajoling the public to conform in prescribed ways. The majority of the applicants show deference when presenting their papers. Can something be found at fault? Will the bureaucrats demand a fine because of the deadline? People are also required to wait. During their wait they consult with one another, compare what they know and try to learn what to expect another time. They may be sent out because they do not have the right papers with them, told in no uncertain terms of how ignorant they are, and instructed to come back another day. In the small office, there is no privacy. People’s mistakes or failings are publicly displayed in the free-for-all required to gain the attention of the functionaries in charge. Others need hardly ask for assistance but can rather demand it and within a limited time.
Important social differences can be observed between the applicants, not only in terms of the way th3e registrar treats them, but also in the use of the spatial dimension in the office, and the patio beyond. Distinctions are expressed in the way people move about the office or choose to congregate outside the doorway. Some enter in an authoritative fashion and win special treatment on the grounds of status or familiarity. Others make way with humility for such self-assuredness, unsure of where they should present themselves and what actually is required. Impatience is laced with deference as people watch the clock from the edge of their bench and realize that their needs are to be deferred yet again. (11-12.)
Lund (10) relates the experience of a young subaltern woman “with her baby on her back,” who is shouted at, scolded, and humiliated by a clerk, and who leaves the office in tears. No doubt, mourning her symbolic demise. She is reduced to symbolic ashes or cinders by bureaucrats practicing a symbolic terrorism, who are following the same metaphysical model which led Abimael Guzmán, from his reading of Kant and other philosophers, to practice a bloody terrorism. Essentially the same: putting people “in their place”.
All of this suggests that discourses of subalternity will necessarily disappear before humans achieve equality. In a preliminary discussion of power Michel Foucault (1980:89-90) points out: “[P]ower is not primarily the maintenance and reproduction of economic relations, but is above all a relation of force. The questions to be posed would be these: if power is exercised, what sort of exercise does it involve? In what does it consist? What is its mechanism? There is an immediate answer that many contemporary analyses would appear to offer: Power is essentially that which represses.” Does this say enough? Basing her text on Foucault’s work, Soledad Escalante (1997:483) writes with regard to one discourse of subalternity, “woman” (but her text applies as well to other discourses if we change words to indicate race, class, “ethnicity”, political or religious ideology, or sexual preference, and so on):
Los discursos que constituyen a la mujer en un status subordinado no están localizados en una sola institución. La subordinación de la mujer no puede ser erradicada reformando tan sólo las estructuras políticas y/o económicas, porque los elementos de dicha subordinación están constituidos por la pluralidad de los regímenes discursivos que estructuran todos los aspectos de la sociedad y no sólo aquellas dos estructuras. Así, la subordinación de la mujer no será eliminada dándole derecho a voto, un igual salario o mayores cuotas en las listas que los partidos presentan a las candidaturas. En este sentido, Foucault sugiere a las teóricas de género interesadas en esta perspectiva, que hay que cuestionar todo discurso de poder ligado al conocimiento que subordine a la mujer en cualquier lugar a lo largo de toda la sociedad.
Then the lifting of repression is not sufficient. Foucault (1980:119) adds later: “In defining the effects of power as repression, one adopts a purely juridical conception of such power, one identifies power with a law which says no, power is taken above all as carrying the force of a prohibition. Now I believe that this is a wholly negative, narrow skeletal conception of power, one which has been curiously widespread. If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.”
In Peru the original cultural and linguistic variation which existed at the time of the conquest was ignored by the Spanish who feared difference, and Native Peruvians all became “Indians,” servants of the Spaniards. “Indians,” consisting of many different peoples, with different languages and cultures, were pressed together, homogenized, and told they had to pray to a Christian god, hope for their reward in the hereafter, and work hard to produce Spanish wealth, because that god had ordained it. The Spanish authorities set up two “republics,” one of Spaniards and one of “Indians,” but it soon became apparent that there were middle categories, mestizos, the offspring of mixed race, and criollos, the offspring of Spaniards born in Peru, and with perhaps some mestizo mixture when it was convenient, as well as an infusion of mulatto mixture from the African slaves who were imported to work on coastal plantations, again when it was convenient. The “dense” term “mestizo” has more than one meaning: one is that of métissage, mestizaje in Spanish, that is, hybrid or mixed genome—which applies to nearly everybody in Peru (to everybody, in fact, in Peru and the world because there is no such thing as a “pure” genome). Another is a negatively charged one, as for example what Max Hernández (1993:190) has to say about Peruvian feelings:
La identidad quebrada y ambivalente, el disimulo y la desconfianza, la angustia, los oscilaciones sísmicas entre la arrogancia y la humildad, la vergüenza frente a la mixtura original sentida como hibridismo, la obsesión por los orígenes y el evitamiento del saber histórico son frecuentes entre nosotros. Tales problemas hacen que sintamos el mestizaje como un desgarro, y que reconozcamos como lo más nuestro el desarraigo.
While reading her paper on tourism on Taquile Island (Lake Titicaca), Elayne Zorn (n.d.) described how the mestizos on the shore of the lake encroached on the successful business of the indio islanders and remarked that “mestizos turn out to be the ‘bad guys’”—as in a cowboy movie with “good guys” and “bad guys.” It’s true enough: people who believe they are “bad” do bad things—a self-fulfilling prophecy. Zorn’s remark sticks in my mind, because my reading of Peruvian history reinforces my conviction that mestizo overlords have always been the “bad guys,” that is, that they have profited from the misery of their subalterns and intensified both their profits, the misery, and subalternity. We are confronting here yet another meaning has to do with the structural location of the more or less dominant sectors of Andean society. Sarah Lund Skar (1994:23) provides this definition:
In general it can be said that the bulk of the mestizo population lives in the nucleated towns [...] , these most often dating from Spanish colonial times. [...] [T]o be a mestizo is not a question of race but rather an indication of a way of life. Nowhere is this more evident than in the small towns where the categories “mestizos” and “Indians” overlap in their applicability according to the context. Roughly, the characteristics of a mestizo identity with Hispanic culture in terms of dress, language, food habits, housing, and degree of education and “professional” employment. Mestizos are the politically and frequently economically dominant group in society; the shop-owners, the teachers, the clerks, the police, and the operators of the transport system. [...] While some Indians live on the periphery of the nuclear towns, the population of the sierra [Andean highlands] most typically lives in hinterland hamlets with their houses dispersed across the cultivated slopes, frequently located at higher altitudes than the centralized towns.
Fernando Fuenzalida (1970:66), a generation ago, wrote: “cualquiera que haya sido la acepción original de estas palabras, el misti o el mestizo no es primariamente el que mezcla dos razas o culturas y no es reconocido como parte plena de ninguno de dos grupos más o menos puros y bien delimitados. Es más adecuado a la realidad el definirlo como ‘aquel que está en el medio’. Es, más que un marginal, un intermediario, un mediador en una escala de poder e información.” Nobody has said it better, or exploded a binary with more zest, and here is more of his sparkling prose:
Si la medida de la modernidad es la asimilación de valores, estereotipos, actitudes y modos de comportamiento generados en los estratos superiores. Si decir ritmo de cambio equivale a decir ritmo de modernización en tal sentido. Entonces, en un sistema como el que venimos describiendo, el estatismo será una característica asociada, no exclusivamente con los grupos campesinos, sino un rasgo compartido que se asocia de modo creciente a posiciones cada vez más bajas en la escala de las mediaciones. Estatismo y tradicionalidad o arcaísmo no son otra cosa que situaciones relativas originadas por y asociadas con un contexto estructural en el que la intensidad del ejercicio del poder se incrementa en niveles sucesivos. No existen unidades meramente estáticas o tradicionales. Sólo existen unidades más o menos afectadas por la difusión de informaciones y en distintas condiciones para su aprovechamiento y asimilación.
Then people are more or less dominant and more or less subaltern and we are plunged into a field of economic, political, cultural, and symbolic power in which we can find a mestizo (or an indio) anywhere. The facts of biological and cultural mestizaje have complicated Peruvian racism, as Manrique (2002:334) indicates:
En el Perú, en la inmensa mayoría de los casos, es imposible tal “objetivación” del discriminado, pues el sujeto discriminador con frecuencia no puede separarse del objeto de la discriminación. Personas con evidentes rasgos fenotípicos indígenas que insultan a otras personas utilizando peyorativamente el calificativo de “indio” sólo pueden hacerlo a costa de negar una parte de su propia identidad —india—, lo cual supone discriminar, odiar y despreciar a elementos constitutivos del propio yo. El racismo, en este caso, constituye una forma superlativa de la alienación, pues supone la imposibilidad de reconocer el propio rostro, como lo refleja el espejo. Se produce así una forma de racismo profundamente enrevesada y difícil de abordar teóricamente.
Indeed, de la Cadena (1996a:601) defines “Indianness” in terms of “lack of cultural capital.” She provides an account of category oscillation in Cusco, a century ago:
[The] relational or context-sensitive aspect of racial interactions allowed a person who was an “Indian” in a given relationship to become a mestizo in another, depending on who was inferior and who was superior in the relationship. In certain circumstances, identifying oneself as Indian could even be a personal choice subject to change.
In Indigenous Mestizos, de la Cadena (2000b:32-33), a Limeña, reports a conversation in the university cafeteria in which an informant told her: “Well you see, Marisol, in Cuzco, el pueblo, we can all be Indians, and some Indians are also mestizos. Like us. We are not entirely Indians, but we are indigenous, aborigines, whatever you want to call us, because we are not like, for example, you.” De la Cadena replied: “What do you mean you are not like me? We are all university students, we have the same skin color, the same kind of hair, we are speaking in Spanish.” Her two informants answered: “Yes but you don’t believe in the things we do. [...] We are different and alike, do you understand? Like you and we are, you may say you are mestiza because of your race, we are all mestizos in Cusco. Nobody is pure anymore. But some mestizos like us are also indigenous, aborigines, oriundos, because of our beliefs. Others are only mestizos like you.”
3 Vargas Llosa (1996:138-139) makes this parallel observation in regard to Arguedas’s Yawar Fiesta: “El machismo es un tótem que todos reverencian en la realidad ficticia: blancos, mestizos e indios. Las oposiciones y antagonismos entre razas, culturas y regiones desaparecen en lo que concierne a la relación del hombre y la mujer, pues, no importa cuál sea su educación, procedencia o patrimonio, todos los hombres son machistas. Y de manera tan obstinada y excluyente que las mujeres casi no figuran en la sociedad que describe la novela. Cuando asoman, en apariciones furtivas, no parecen dotadas del mismo grado de humanidad que los varones; se diría que pertenecen a una especie inferior, a medio camino entre el ser humano y el animal.” Vargas Llosa goes on for two paragraphs more. Apparently, Arguedas’s utopia was for men only. The latter author seems to have been crushed by a fear of women, on one hand, and homophobia (see El Sexto [Arguedas 1969] for the clearest expression of this theme which also shows up in his other novels), on the other.
© 2003, William W. Stein
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