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ABSTRACT
This work considers the paradoxes of perceived differences whereby Peruvians frequently assert that those who are more indigenous or authentically Andean live ‘más arriba,’ or higher up. Historically, there has been great social and economic interdependence across ecological zones in Peru. Today, social standing is often measured in inverse proportion to the altitude of one’s origins, with Lima at sea level holding the greatest prestige. When Andeans migrate to nearby cities or to the urban coast, they often ‘upgrade’ their status by claiming to be from somewhere other than their rural home. Using a practice referred to as ‘choleando’ (racial one-upmanship), Peruvians may reject ethnic labels for themselves just as they project them on others, in an effort to show they belong in a society that excludes many of them. At the same time, desires to embrace what is Andean as the source of celebrated national cuisine, heritage, and cultural identity are in dramatic evidence as Peru builds its ‘brand’ for global consumption. In this article I trace ambivalent notions of racialized and gendered bodies and territories across three research locations, from rural peasant community to provincial city and urban capital.
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Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I want to thank all the Peruvians who collaborated in my research. I also thank Cristina Alcalde, Amy Cox Hall, Eric Hirsch, María Elena García, Lucía Stavig, Julio Villa Palomino, Victoria Rovine, and the anonymous reviewers for LACES who made such valuable and thoughtful suggestions on an earlier version of this work. I am grateful to Madelyn Boots for her careful reading and copyediting of this article, and to Joanne Rappaport for her support of this special issue of LACES.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. My thinking about decolonizing research and scholarship, and collaborating with southern scholars and activists, has been informed by many sources, including the foundational contributions to Hale and Stephen (Citation2013).
2. Murra was an international scholar, born in Ukraine, who studied and taught anthropology in the United States for many years, but also lived in Spain and taught in Peru and Puerto Rico. Quijano was born and educated in Peru, where he taught sociology for many years, but he also held numerous visiting professorships abroad. They may be associated with North and South respectively, but their careers and influence were much broader than their place of residence.
3. During the past decade, I have spent about 15 months in Peru, returning nearly annually. I thank the Vada Allen Yeomans endowment at the University of Florida and the Anthony Harrington endowment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for generous support for this research. My earlier work in the region dates back to 1977 and includes much more time spent in Peru over the years.
4. Here I am focusing specifically on Andean Peru, but it is important to note the excellent work of such analysts as Arturo Escobar (Citation2008) on Colombia, Mary Weismantel (Citation2001) and Sarah Radcliffe (Citation2015) on Ecuador, Olivia Harris (Citation1981) and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (Citation2010) on Bolivia, as well as Cecilie V. Ødegaard (Citation2010) and Pascha Bueno-Hansen (Citation2015) on Southern Peru, who give needed attention to race, indigeneity, and gender in the broader Andean region.
5. As I discuss further in Women’s Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology (Babb Citation2018), decolonial feminism calls on theory from the South as well as the North, questioning the received wisdom of Euro-American colonialist thought.
6. This would not be so, however, if a highlander were to relocate to the lower-altitude selva in the Amazon region, which typically ranks lower in status than the highlands, as discussed by Shane Greene (Citation2007) in an insightful consideration of ‘spatial hierarchies of difference’ spanning Peru’s indigenous, Afro-Peruvian, and mestizo populations. Eric Hirsch (Citation2017) likewise offers a generative analysis of vertical mobilities in southern Peru, presenting ‘mobility stories’ of men and women who labor across multiple altitudes; he is especially attentive to social class, but his narratives shed light on race and gender as well. In one exemplary narrative, Hirsch notes that ‘sending children up the class hierarchy often meant their physical travel to a lower altitude’ (Hirsch Citation2017, 203).
7. I will not forget my introduction to John Murra at Cornell University around the time of my doctoral research in Peru in 1977. When he kindly asked me what I was working on and I told him I was studying Andean market women in the economy, he paused and then responded, ‘Well, someone’s got to do it!’ By this time, however, many of us were self-described feminists and my graduate advisor of that time, William W. Stein, was enthusiastic about the feminist currents emerging in Andean scholarship.
8. See Boesten (Citation2010) for a productive discussion of gender and intersecting inequalities in Peru, focusing on the 1990s.
9. Contributors to a landmark special issue of Bulletin of Latin American Research (1998), several of whom are named here, re-opened discussion of race in the Andes after some decades when race and ethnicity were commonly reduced to differences of social class.
10. I thank feminist economist Carmen Diana Deere for discussing with me the declining valuation of former hacienda lands in Peru and the likelihood that people who continue to live on land viewed as less productive are themselves seen as less worthy. Sociologist Gina Arnillas, however, who has worked in the Puno region, commented to me that for rural people it can be desirable to have land higher up for herding alpacas.
11. In recent years, Peruvian celebrity chefs like Gastón Acurio and Virgilio Martínez have earned high international acclaim. The most prestigious restaurants are, not surprisingly, concentrated in Lima, including Martínez’s Central, ranked number four in the world for fine dining with a menu that is presented by region and altitude, assuring that diners will have a complete Peruvian experience. Martínez recently opened a new restaurant in the sierra at an altitude of nearly 12,000 feet, with an eight-course lunch for almost $300 US for two, rendering it inaccessible both by location and price to all but the most elite Peruvians and foreigners. Fascinatingly, this chef is literally returning to the roots of Andean cuisine yet virtually all patrons will travel from afar to sample it (Kozolchyk Citation2018). This may be the exception that proves the rule, as other displays of Andean culinary arts, including the Mistura food fair, are most often found in Lima.
12. See Babb (Citation2018) for discussion of my departure from the well-known dictum offered by Marisol de la Cadena (Citation1995) that ‘women are más india,’ as I suggest that indigenous women are indeed vulnerable to multiple forms of inequality, but that they have also gained new cultural capital as a result of the commodification of difference and cultural heritage in Peru.
13. For more on the ambiguities of chola identities, see Seligmann (Citation1989), Weismantel (Citation2001), and Babb (Citation2018).
14. In this work, when I refer to indigenous Peruvians I am generally focusing on Andeans rather than those indigenous Peruvians living in the lowland Amazonian region. They too are subject to forms of social discrimination, and not because they live ‘más arriba.’ Altitude and ecological zone plays out differently in the lives of these native peoples in Peru. For further discussion, see Greene (Citation2007).
15. This ethnographic account is based on my conversations with a number of Vicosinos over the last decade.
16. During a recent visit to the community, a man pointed out that there really is no other community just ‘above’ Vicos, but there is still a perception that more remote communities are more indigenous and less developed than Vicos. Indeed, as a growing town, Vicos has experienced a degree of ‘urbanization,’ with more concentration of homes near the plaza, and some families keep both a home near the center and modest structures higher up near chacras where they go to farm.
17. All names of individuals from my field research are pseudonyms to maintain confidentiality.
18. What is less common is the unusual experience that Tomás has had as a result of working with local NGOs to advance the tourism project in Vicos. Working closely with a young man from The Netherlands over a period of years, he has made trips to Europe and even China, yet he retains a modest demeanor.
19. References to campesinos and indigenous peoples are overlapping categories here, though the word ‘campesinos’ is often in greater use in this part of the Andes.
20. Such views were expressed to me fairly frequently in Huaraz, though I do not have access to hard evidence to back up these claims.
21. See my previous work (Babb Citation2018) for more discussion of feminist debates over gender complementarity in the Andes. Sexuality and sexual difference in Andean Peru have received relatively little attention, and I have only rarely seen attention to same-sex sexuality in the region where I carry out research. A young European woman living in Huaraz and working at an NGO did tell me that she had heard of rural women’s half-joking invitations to other ‘gringas’ to marry them or spend the night together. This would be fascinating to explore further. Aside from a single notice in a local newspaper several years ago announcing a meeting of homosexuals, I have observed little evidence of organized activity.
22. Novelist Braulio Muñoz (Citation2006) tells the story of a Peruvian immigrant living in the United States who invents a higher-class social background to impress American friends, just as he exaggerates aspects of his new life when communicating with his family in Peru. This two-way deception may be found among some migrants in Peru, too, as they lead new acquaintances and family to have an elevated impression of their life experiences.
23. From the word ‘cholo,’ referring to someone of indigenous background who is adapting to the city, ‘choleando’ is understood to occur when members of one group refer to others, but not themselves, as cholo. See Bruce (Citation2007) for more discussion of this racialized practice in Peru.
24. While it has generally been the case that the city’s periphery is settled by the poor, this may be changing to a degree as some wealthy Limeños have established a gated community in Casuarinas immediately adjacent to the pueblo joven Pamplona Alta. The two neighborhoods are divided by a six-mile-long fence with barbed wire to prevent ‘invaders’ from entering the elite neighborhood.
25. Peru has laws to protect its citizens against discrimination and racism; under Article 2.2 of the Peruvian Constitution, ‘Every person has the right to equality before the law. No person shall be discriminated against on the basis of origin, race, sex, language, opinion, economic status, or any other distinguishing feature.’ But enforcement is another matter. And Peruvian popular culture has reflected and reinforced discriminatory attitudes, including the racist representation of an indigenous woman (performed by a man) in the recent TV program La Paisana Jacinta.
26. A young Vicosina living in Lima told me that after living in the capital for just a year, people back in Vicos began referring to her as a Limeña. Clearly, it would take far longer for longstanding residents in the city to see her as anything other than a serrana.
27. For discussion of the tendency to be more inclusive of indigenous than of afrodescendant peoples in Peru and elsewhere in Latin America, see Hooker (Citation2005).
28. As I complete this article, the Covid-19 virus has led to an exodus of many Lima migrants returning to their Andean homelands. The health risks and unemployment in Lima, along with concern about family members in the provinces, have prompted this sudden wave of return migration.
29. See hakutours.com regarding shantytown tours and Thompson (Citation2018) for discussion of a trend toward hacienda tourism in Peru’s Sacred Valley.
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Florence E. Babb
Florence E. Babb is the Anthony Harrington Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her latest book, Women’s Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology (University of California Press, Citation2018), examines feminist debates centering Andean women from the 1970s forward. She is currently writing another book, Scaling Differences: Place, Race, and Gender in Andean Peru, a multisited ethnography based on her research in a rural indigenous community, a provincial Andean city, and among Andean migrants living in Lima.