Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  José Carlos Mariátegui at twenty (June 1914), in his Juan Croniqueur days.

  It has not been easy for me to develop my own interpretation and understanding of Mariátegui. His name is too personal to me, because my grandparents were among his closest friends. Such illustrious connections can be blinding, because their grandeur is easily grafted onto fantasies of one’s own potential. Thanks to my grandparents, Mariátegui’s aura touches mine, but it is not as if Mariátegui’s genius somehow rubbed off on me. Genealogical proximity to greatness is an inheritance, an unalienable possession that gains a mysterious power over us, as if it were a fetish image in which origin and destiny become one and the same thing. Such a fetish makes the past luminous, true, but also darkly impenetrable. It can be experienced both as a boon and as a burden. And as a result, I’ve had to read José Carlos Mariátegui’s work rather slowly.

  Architecture of experience

  The light that emanated from Mariátegui can be more easily captured if one thinks of his collective projects: his discussion group, the editorial work on the journal Amauta, his political work toward the creation of Peru’s Socialist Party, and the spaces of intimacy and friendship that he cultivated. Mariátegui led a life in which home and work, the public and the private, the aesthetic and the political all breathed together. Indeed, his dazzling intelligence must be qualified if we are to understand him for what he really was; for it is even more useful to imagine him as an experience, as a praxis, than as an innate and individual ability (a “brain”) or even as the author of original interpretations. Mariátegui was a collectivist at heart. He did not wish to be an isolated genius. His work sought to bring Peru with him, and this involved inventing a variegated and intricate set of habits.

  Mariátegui’s house is a useful place to start to understand the way in which he organized this mode of existence. Until he turned thirty, José Carlos had been highly mobile, despite the ankylosis that afflicted his left leg. In 1920 he was exiled to Italy, and he traveled through portions of central and Western Europe until his return to Lima in 1923. Only a year later, though, his condition deteriorated to such a degree that his leg was amputated, and he was thereafter confined to a wheelchair. For this reason, Mariátegui’s house became even more central; his mobility had been seriously reduced precisely in the years in which his influence was peaking, so that he became reliant on correspondence and print, but also on social contacts in his home space.

  This is a drawing of the house that specifies the use to which each room was dedicated while it was still inhabited by José Carlos and his family. Today the house is a museum, archive, and cultural center. In the late 1920s one went into the house from the street through an entryway that led on one side to Mariátegui’s study and on the other to the living room, where at six p.m. the discussion group would meet in the so-called Red Corner. Beyond this, there was a room that served as an editorial office, first for Amauta and later also for the political journal Labor, followed in turn by another room that served as a storage space for back issues of these journals. Beyond this, there were three bedrooms for the family, the kitchen, and the spaces reserved for the domestic help.

  The communist painter Jorge del Prado shares a telling memory of the Red Corner discussion group: “Mariátegui had gotten out of his wheelchair to sit on the sofa, where he spoke with other members of the group. In another part of the room, a group of workers leafed through books taken from the shelves. On a small table there was a stack of journals and newspapers received through exchange that — I later discovered — José Carlos would consult during his work hours, but which he would also make available to his visitors.”53 In other words, Mariátegui would be seated in a corner while people circulated through the room, leafing through journals and talking among themselves until the time came for them to sit down near to him. Those evenings often stretched out well into the night, especially for those who had some private matter to discuss with Mariátegui. Intellectuals, political militants, and workers filed through the house on a daily basis.

  Mariátegui’s house was an interclass space, where people met friends and acquaintances or at least came into contact with interesting strangers. It offered a site for the interchange of knowledge, with workers leafing through books and journals and artists exchanging ideas with political activists. The scene brought together the combustible possibilities of the moment, no longer as logical propositions but as actual lived experience. These meetings had the imprint of the house’s owner, who didn’t require that participants forget their origins, but quite to the contrary, asked that they consider the differences between them so as to find ways to move forward together. Workers felt no embarrassment regarding their class status, and neither did Romanian Jews need to pretend to have been born and raised in Peru. It is as if Marx’s maxim “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs,” had been embraced by Mariátegui’s circle without waiting for the communist utopia to arrive.

  A bohemian undertow

  To capture the flavor of this alloy between a modern political party and an eighteenth-century salon, it serves to know that, in his youth, Mariátegui was a player in the “decadentist” culture that fascinated Lima’s flaneurs during its Belle Epoque. In the 1910s, Lima’s intelligentsia made its rendezvous at establishments such as the Palais Concert confectionery, described by Oscar Terán as an art nouveau structure “with an orchestra of young women who played Viennese waltzes and German lied.”54 Lima’s young communists of the 1920s had come of age in or near public spaces that had been shaped by and for a highly aestheticized sensibility that was the cornerstone of Latin American modernismo, a literary movement and aesthetic that converged with French currents such as Parnassianism and Symbolism.

  The figure of Juan Croniqueur is an example of this spirit. The chronicles that Mariátegui signed under that name frequently came in the form of short poems that invoked feelings generated by well-appreciated urbane scenes and relationships, and that sought to indulge youthful pleasure, while providing cameo portraits of an idealized bourgeois world. This stanza of “Emotions at the Race Track” provides a taste of the style in question:

  Disquiet. Negligence. Aristocracy. Laughter.

  Smile. Comment. Rumor. Languor.

  The afternoon faints and is made spiritual

  By a woman’s inexplicable swoon.

  Mariátegui later referred somewhat dismissively to his youthful preoccupation with this sort of entertainment, and called it his “Stone Age.” Still, his intense involvement in Lima’s city life and its literary culture became an ingredient of his mature style when he realized, probably in Italy, that Peru was an idea that had yet to be invented, and that it needed to be created out of the world that had been entirely excluded from Lima’s Parnassus.55 On the other hand, engagement with the aesthetic requirements of modernismo had raised the bar for journalistic writing, and its refined affectations breathed life into a salon culture that had existed in South America’s capitals since the late eighteenth century. City life came hand in glove with spaces of anonymity and with the invention of meeting grounds for those who might be driven there by their elective affinities. This combination of anonymity and selection was ordered in socially exclusive spaces such as the Club Nacional, the race tracks, the cinema, fashionable coffee houses, and confectioneries, theaters, newspaper offices, bars, churches, and squares. The very nineteenth-century habit of taking on authorial pen names is of a piece with this sort of topography, for it created a kind of imaginary Parnassus where strangers and friends came together as characters, shedding their familial baggage in order to engage in public life more freely.

  This was still mainly a space for male sociality — newspapers then were even more male-dominated than salons — in which writers were free to engage in a rarified exercise of self-fashioning to such a degree that they sometimes created pseudonyms even for their pseudonym. Juan Croniqueur, for in
stance, at times took on second-order pen names, including “Jack,” “Monsieur de Camomille,” “Val D’Or,” “Kendal,” “Kendalif,” “Kendeliz Cadet,” “Cyranno III” (after a horse named Cyrano II), and “Revoltoso.”56

  Of course, Mariátegui’s Red Corner was a very different sort of place from Lima’s aristocratic Club Nacional. Peru’s Socialist Party — which later morphed into its Communist Party — was pretty much created there, and a magazine for the working class, Labor, was laid out in the room next door. Above all, the people that came together at the Red Corner were not selected for class affinity or according to shared origin and tradition. In Mariátegui’s house, Lima’s textile workers met an intellectual elite, and young students mingled with agrarian militants from Cuzco. And yet there was also a lot of refinement there. The Red Corner was the antithesis of Lima’s bourgeois culture, and as a result it retained some elements of its opposite: it retained the amiable and refined respect that marked Lima’s older salon culture.

  Friendship and tradition

  Those who were touched by Mariátegui spoke of his humanity and his engaging way, his warmth and empathy. My grandmother, who was generally disinclined to idealize anyone or anything, compared Mariátegui to Jesus of Nazareth. For Noemí, José Carlos had the kind of touch of divinity that she imagined Jesus may have had.

  Painter Jorge del Prado described José Carlos on the day that they first met, in 1928. Prado mentions José Carlos’s angular profile and his wheelchair. He notes the amputated leg and then lingers on his eyes: “Everything made him resemble a large child, except, of course, the slow and halting motion of his body, the mature persuasion in his voice, the tremendous vital persuasion in how he’d look at you, which gave him an undeniable authority, which was in no way lessened but rather heightened by his natural simplicity and his permanent and spontaneous extension of friendship.”57

  Friendship was a core value in Mariátegui’s circle, but what exactly did Mariátegui’s predisposition to friendship consist of? Where did it come from? Jorge del Prado’s memoir provides us with a valuable clue. That painter was nineteen when he arrived in Lima from his native Arequipa. He had only recently turned into a communist, and as a result he decided to abandon painting, which seemed to him to be a superfluous pastime. He wished instead to dedicate his life to the pressing needs of the working people, and proudly expressed this determination to Mariátegui at their first meeting. José Carlos had already founded the Socialist Party by then, and was indisputably Peru’s leading Marxist, and yet his reaction took Prado by surprise: “Politics,” Mariátegui said, “is fed and ennobled by science and art. There can thus be no contradiction nor antinomy between being a revolutionary and being a painter or sculptor, writer or scientist. Neither is it right to imagine that marching in the ranks of the Revolution requires a total break with the past.”

  There was a lot at stake in his view. Devoting oneself to “The Cause” frequently involves turning one’s back on one’s parents and old friends, and bracketing off one’s own sensibilities as if they were a deformity, a selfish petit-bourgeois petulance that must be purged in order to transform oneself into a pure and chaste servant of The Cause. Mariátegui had no use for this position. There was no justification for approaching the revolutionary ideal as if it were a jealous lover, nor did it require a categorical break with tradition. Indeed, José Carlos viewed “a total break with the past” with great suspicion, because he believed in the integration of the past and the future. It was from tradition and myth that the revolution would necessarily spring.

  So, for instance, in an essay on the role of tradition in revolution, Mariátegui began with a reflection on the Castillian medieval poet Jorge Manrique: “Manrique’s poetry is tied to tradition, but not to traditionalism. Against what the traditionalists want, tradition is alive and changing. It is created by those who deny it, so that they can renew and enrich it. And it is murdered by those who want to fix it, by those who seek the extension of the past in a feeble present…”58 Mariátegui then goes on to say that, contrary to the usual view of revolutionaries as iconoclasts, “true revolutionaries never proceed as if history started with them,” and he offered as examples Karl Marx’s assimilation of the ideas of the bourgeois economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and Proudhon’s reliance on ancient community institutions in order to formulate his critique of private property. Tradition, in other words, is alive and is always the ground from which the present and the future are shaped. Therefore, tradition’s penetrating force should never be confused with the dead weight of traditionalism.

  Indeed, Peru’s malady rested on a Lima-based traditionalism that sought to suffuse the present with the culture of the conquistadors, while breaking Indian participation off from national culture, relegating always the Incas to prehistory, to a time before time. It was this traditionalism that had reduced the nation to its European or mestizo component, and that excluded its Indian majority. As a result, Peru itself was a concept that had yet to be created, yet to be forged.59 In such a moment, tradition needed to be heard, seen, and recognized, and an openness toward friendship was necessary for any of this to happen. Otherwise, diverging traditions would continue to fold in on themselves, rather than to open up to the transformative possibilities of the present.

  I think that Mariátegui understood that, more than a relationship, friendship is an event. It happens when people do something together, and it involves recognizing what each friend has experienced. In the Lima in the 1920s, obliterating tradition involved ignoring others. Friendship was a way of bringing various traditions back into play, and so of fostering an entirely new discussion. It is certainly for this reason that the people touched by Mariátegui tended to feel that he changed them, since he facilitated the incorporation of their past into a future-oriented project. I think that it was this transformative spirit that moved my grandmother to compare José Carlos to Jesus. Knowing José Carlos changed her.

  The Amauta

  In his life in exile, Mariátegui came to understand that Peru lacked one thing: a true teacher. José Carlos had been edged out of Peru in the aftermath of Lima’s 1919 student movement, an episode that formed part of a pan–Latin American uprising for university reform that had started at the University of Córdoba, in Argentina, but that spread to many South American capitals. José Carlos had dropped out of school early, so he was not involved in the student movement. Rather, he and his friend César Falcón had recently founded the paper La Razón, Lima’s first leftist daily. That paper was the first venue to criticize Augusto Leguía, who was instated as president in July of that year, and it supported both labor and the student movement. Leguía shut down La Razón as a result, and exiled Falcón and Mariátegui to Italy.

  When Mariátegui returned to Peru in 1923, there was a sequel to the 1919 student movement, and he took the occasion to express his ideas on the subject of university reform. To Mariátegui, the Universidad de San Marcos was a decrepit institution. Stuck in the past, and stifled by the elite’s stranglehold on its faculty, it could not rise to the challenges that emerged after the close of the Great War. The most painful symptom of San Marcos’s deficiencies was the lack of a teacher or guide who might rise to the task of opening the world up to Peru’s student youth: “The university has a few valuable professors, who teach their courses faithfully and intelligently, but there is not a single exemplar of a true leader and teacher (maestro) for the youth. There isn’t a single faculty member who could be a conductor. Not one prophetic voice, no leader, director or apostol.”60 Germany had figures like Einstein and Spengler, Spain had Miguel de Unamuno, Mexico José Vasconcelos and Antonio Caso, Argentina had José Ingenieros. Peru’s university had no one. At some intimate level, Mariátegui decided to occupy that position.

  Obviously, he could not do that from the university, but Mari átegui knew perfectly well that in Peru that institution could not be the mainspring of intellectual creativity and ferment
. The nation’s university — San Marcos — had closed itself off to the country’s people, to the Indians, and elitist enclosure led inevitably to foundering in a sea of hypotheses. Thus, José Carlos wrote that “illiterate people find their own path more easily than their lettered counterparts or than the philosopher. Given that they must act, they act. Given that they must believe, they believe…Their instinct steers them away from sterile doubt.”61 So instead of turning to the university for teaching, Mariátegui relied on his writing, and he used the newspaper as his podium.

  He began the arduous work of opening up the world for Peru in his weekly dispatches from Italy. Upon Mariátegui’s return to Lima, in 1923, his lessons were so appreciated that he was invited to teach at a new alternative space for higher learning, opened for workers and a general public as a night school, the Universidad Popular González Prada. That school had been launched in 1921 by the student leader and anti-imperialist militant Víctor Manuel Haya de la Torre, and it was Haya himself who invited Mariátegui to teach. Mariátegui’s twenty-or-so lectures on the crisis of the West would be his one and only experience as a lecturer. His approach to his classes is summed up in a sentence from his opening session: “Comrades, I am not here to teach you the history of the world’s current crisis, I am here to study it with you.” Mariátegui was critical of educational philosophies that relied on disciplining students. The true teacher, he wrote, is recognized by his students wherever he might be: “surrounded familiarly by his students, he is always their teacher.” Rather than relying on the classroom, the podium, and disciplinary measures, the true teacher’s authority “is a moral fact.”62 And indeed Mariátegui’s authority was a moral fact that was offered openly and generously, in friendship.