A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art - Группа авторов

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as such an imperative would make sense only if art and revolution were understood to be two different things, that is, if one forgot that “the power of creation is one alone” and that “a revolutionary epoch is, par excellence, one that creates” (1959f, p. 85; 1994, Vol. I, p. 451). Following this clue, he goes as far as to argue that, ultimately, the difference between revolutionaries and conservatives lies not in the political doctrines they profess or the ideals they defend, but in the power of their imagination: “To be revolutionary or reformist is, from this point of view, a consequence of being more or less imaginative” (1959b, p. 36; 1994, Vol. I, p. 506). A revolutionary is the one who, thanks to his imaginative powers, “reacts against contingent reality” and “struggles to change what he sees and what he feels,” whereas the conservative, led by the force of habit, “rejects any idea of change due to a mental inability to conceive of and accept it” (1959b, p. 36; 1994, Vol. I, p. 506).

      The present is key: if a revolutionary movement is to succeed or to be considered legitimate at all, Mariátegui thinks, it will be because it encapsulates the moods and, above all, the collective myths born within each society. It is here that the influence of the French syndicalist Georges Sorel – the third major influence in his personal pantheon, alongside Nietzsche and Spengler – becomes evident. For he is persuaded that every mass movement, as Sorel wrote, requires the assistance of myths, “which enclose within them all the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party or of a class, inclinations which recur to the mind with the insistence of instincts in all the circumstances of life” (Sorel 1999, p. 142). Myth, says Mariátegui, “moves man in history. Without myth, man's existence has no historical meaning. History is made by people possessed and enlightened by a higher belief, by a superhuman hope” (1959b, p. 19; 1994, Vol. I, p. 497; 1996, pp. 142–143).

      For Mariátegui, revolution is not the sort of foundational act that entails an absolute break with society in its present form. The attitude of the revolutionary is not to be one of celebrating radicalism and novelty for their own sake but rather of giving to each epoch what it asks for and what it needs. And the twentieth century, according to him, demanded that one take the side of the masses.

      Defining “indigenism” is no easy task. First, and for reasons that are not entirely clear, the use of the Spanish term (indigenismo) has become customary among English‐speaking scholars, lending indigenism a certain air of exoticism that it does not possess in its original language and further complicating what is already confused in Spanish.

      If we take indigenism to mean the defense of the Indian against oppression, then it is a tradition of social criticism that dates back to the passionate preaching of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas and is, therefore, as old as the exploitation of the Indians (Marzal 1993). More narrowly, however, the label has been chiefly employed to refer to a group of artists and intellectuals that, from the late nineteenth‐ to the mid‐twentieth century and on a more or less continental scale, placed the Indian at the center of their projects. These “indigenists” were themselves neither peasants nor Indians. Rather, they were white Creoles or mestizos from the urban middle classes who had, for aesthetic or political reasons, become interested in the indigenous aspects of their respective countries.

      Beyond this shared focus, the indigenists had relatively little in common. Unlike other “isms,” indigenism was not a formal school, lacked a doctrinal basis, and never produced a manifesto. We are faced, then, with a movement that was essentially heterogeneous. This should not in fact come as a surprise because the indigenous populations of Latin America – around which indigenist thought and art swirled – likewise do not cohere into a single block. National differences are critical. Ideas about who the Indians are and what they might mean for the future of the country across national traditions have largely depended on two factors: (i) the historical and cultural legacy that bolsters the figure of the Indian in each country, and (ii) the weight of indigenous groups within the ethnic and socioeconomic composition of each nation. There is thus no point of comparison between the indigenisms of Mesoamerica and the Andean region, whose native populations can be considered inheritors of the great agrarian empires of the pre‐Columbian era, and those of the Caribbean, Patagonia, and the Amazon jungle, whose indigenous groups have been historically nomadic hunter‐gatherers or small‐scale farmers. Even among the regions of the first type there are important differences. The connection of the present‐day Indian with the pre‐Hispanic past serves as a good example. Whereas the memory of the Incas still occupies a central place in the Andean mentality, the cosmology of the ancient Mayas and Aztecs plays a more marginal role in the imagination of the Mexican peasantry, who, on the whole, speak more in Spanish than in indigenous languages. Another key factor to be taken into account is the degree of institutionalization of each of these indigenisms. Whereas indigenism in Mexico had the generous support of the postrevolutionary state, it never reached the status of state ideology in Peru, although some oligarchic intellectuals, and even President Augusto B. Leguía (1919–1930), employed Inca symbolism in an effort to benefit from its popularity. What further complicates any discussion of indigenism is that the label “indigenist” has been routinely applied to many artists who, in spite of their indigenous themes, had no social commitment to the Indian, and to many academics, intellectuals, and pro‐Indian activists who had no links to contemporary art.

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