The Independent Republic of Arequipa
Subtitle: making regional culture in the Andes
By: Thomas F. Love
Edition: First edition.
Series: Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture; Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 321
ISBN-13: 9781477313923; 9781477314593
Copyright date: 2017
Subjects: Politics and government; Regionalism; Ethnicity; History
Description: Arequipa, Peru's second largest city, has the most intense regional culture in the central Andes. Arequipenos fiercely conceive of themselves as exceptional and distinctive, yet also broadly representative of the nation's overall hybrid nature-a blending of coast (modern, "white") and sierra (traditional, "indigenous"). The Independent Republic of Arequipa investigates why and how this regional identity developed in a boom of cultural production after the War of the Pacific (1879-1884) through the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on decades of ethnographic fieldwork, Thomas F. Love offers the first anthropological history of southwestern Peru's distinctive regional culture. He examines both its pre-Hispanic and colonial altiplano foundations (anchored in continuing pilgrimage to key Marian shrines) and the nature of its mid-nineteenth century "revolutionary" identity in cross-class resistance to Lima's autocratic control of nation-building in the post-Independence state. Love then examines Arequipa's early twentieth-century "mestizo" identity (an early and unusual case of "browning" of regional identity) in the context of raging debates about the "national question" and the "Indian problem," as well as the post-WWII development of extravagant displays of distinctive bull-on-bull fighting that now constitute the very performance of regional identity.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 293-310) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Nation, state, culture, and region in Arequipa; title: Prehispanic and colonial Arequipa : altiplano ties and religious pilgrimage as the popular foundations of regional identity; title: From colony to the War of the Pacific : crises, nation building, and the development of arequipeño identity as regional; title: Literary regionalism : browning, secularizing, and ruralizing regional identity; title: Picanteras and dairymen : quotidian citizenry; title: Social genesis, cultural logic, and bureaucratic field in the changing arequipeño social space.