The Indigenous in the Modern

The indigenismo of the first half of the twentieth century has been widely criticised in recent decades for being romanticised, essentialist and anti-modern.  This paper explores two critiques along those lines, the interest of which lies in the fact that they were made in the 1920s by two famous public intellectuals of the era, namely Alfonso Reyes of Mexico and José Carlos Mariátegui of Peru.  Manifestly different in many respects, what these two had in common was a commitment to challenging the kind of dualistic thinking implied by oppositions such as hispanista/indigenista, cosmopolitan/national and universal/local. In so doing, they were articulating widespread popular doubts about the technocratic model of modernity that was being implemented by Latin American elites (first elaborated by the Argentine Generation of 1837, it emphasised industrialisation and agricultural colonisation by North European immigrants as ways of eliminating the impediments to progress caused by the legacy of colonialism and racial mixing). Unlike the many conservatives (both in Latin America and in Europe) who retreated from the instrumentalist onslaught by reacting against all forms of modernisation, Reyes and Mariátegui were both committed to finding a way in which Latin America could become modern (that is, fulfil the emancipatory promise upon which their countries had been founded) without abandoning qualities such as solidarity, democratic participation, secular spirituality, cultural continuity and hospitality.  As they grappled with these problems, they developed many of the ideas that have now become widely accepted by Latin Americanists, such as the hybridity of Latin American culture; the need to historicise; and the importance of analysing the extent to which categories that originated in Europe were modified as they migrated to Latin America.