We are not satisfied to assert the Indian’s right to education, culture, progress, love, and heaven. We begin by categorically asserting his right to land. (Maríategui 50)
In his Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, José Carlos Maríategui argues that the problem of the Indian is essentially socio-economic. He disputes any attempt to reduce it to an exclusively administrative, pedagogical, ethnic or moral problem. “Indian” is essentially a class position: that of farmers and land tenants in servitude to landowners within a feudal regime. He dismisses the concept of inferior races outright as outmoded, claiming it helped rationalize European imperialism. He also rejects humanitarian appeals to “the Indian’s right to education, culture, progress, love, and heaven”—these have not halted European imperialism. This is an interesting and refreshing position, but I wonder if the concept of the Indian has had an influence that extends beyond the economic. Maríategui claims that feudalism is fundamentally opposed to the education of the peasantry—modern education is incompatible with the mechanics of the Indian’s servitude. The problem of the Indian is a problem of land—the alternative to feudalism is not distributing smaller slices of private property (as it largely happened) but communal ownership in the sense of the ayllu.
The end of feudalism in Peru did not happen in the way Maríategui proposed. I want to put Maríategui’s discussion of feudalism in dialogue with the emergence of Sendero. In the wake of Velasco’s agrarian reform, students in the Peruvian countryside had more access to modern education, including critical and Marxist ideas, than ever before. However, they were caught between ideas of modernity, universality and progress and the “traditional” lifestyles of their families, still feeling the impacts of feudalism. According to Degregori in How Difficult it is to be God, it was this particular tension which motivated a lot of these students to join Sendero, and some to participate in mass murders. While they were seeking liberation from their material conditions, I think they were also, like Maríategui, moved in pursuit of a (perhaps?) higher ideal. It is fascinating that the conflict Maríategui sets up between feudalism and modern education, and by extension, modernism perhaps led to the emergence of Sendero. I wonder if this is a fair assessment.