Inventing Indigenism: Francisco Laso's Image of Modern Peru

By Natalia Majluf

2023 ALAA Book Award, Association for Latin American Art/Arvey Foundation

A fascinating account of the modern reinvention of the image of the Indian in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture, seen through the work of Peruvian painter Francisco Laso.

One of the outstanding painters of the nineteenth century, Francisco Laso (1823–1869) set out to give visual form to modern Peru. His solemn and still paintings of indigenous subjects were part of a larger project, spurred by writers and intellectuals actively crafting a nation in the aftermath of independence from Spain. In this book, at once an innovative account of modern indigenism and the first major monograph on Laso, Natalia Majluf explores the rise of the image of the Indian in literature and visual culture. Reading Laso’s works through a broad range of sources, Majluf traces a decisive break in a long history of representations of indigenous peoples that began with the Spanish conquest. She ties this transformation to the modern concept of culture, which redefined both the artistic field and the notion of indigeneity. As an abstraction produced through indigenist discourse, an icon of authenticity, and a densely racialized cultural construct, the Indian would emerge as a central symbol of modern Andean nationalisms.

Inventing Indigenism brings the work and influence of this extraordinary painter to the forefront as it offers a broad perspective on the dynamics of art and visual culture in nineteenth-century Latin America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Dec 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781477324103

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INVENTING INDIGENISM

FRANCISCO LASO’S IMAGE OF MODERN PERU

Natalia Majluf

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Texas Press

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First edition, 2021

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Majluf, Natalia, author. | Laso, Francisco, 1823–1869. Works. Selections.

Title: Inventing indigenism : Francisco Laso’s image of modern Peru / Natalia Majluf.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020057445 (print) | LCCN 2020057446 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2408-0 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4773-2409-7 (library ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2410-3 (non-library ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Laso, Francisco, 1823–1869. | Painting, Peruvian—19th century. | Indigenous peoples—Peru—Portraits—History—19th century. | National characteristics, Peruvian. | Quechua Indians—Peru—Portraits—History—19th century. | Aymara Indians—Peru—Portraits—History—19th century. | Indigenous peoples—Portraits—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC ND419.L37 M35 2021 (print) | LCC ND419.L37 (ebook) | DDC 759.985/09034—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057445

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057446

doi:10.7560/324080

For Miguel and Susy, and for Martín, Verónica, Juan Pablo, and José Antonio

The new Peruvianness is something to be created. Its historical cement must be indigenous. Its axis will perhaps rest better on Andean stone than on coastal clay.

La nueva peruanidad es una cosa por crear. Su cimiento histórico tiene que ser indígena. Su eje descansará quizá en la piedra andina, mejor que en la arcilla costeña.

JOSÉ CARLOS MARIÁTEGUI, SIETE ENSAYOS DE INTERPRETACIÓN DE LA REALIDAD PERUANA, 1928

ALICIA MAGUIÑA, LYRICS TO INDIO, 1963

CONTENTS

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

Preface

INTRODUCTION

Francisco Laso: A Republican Biography

Indigenism’s National Imaginaries

From Society, into Painting, and Back

PRECEDENTS: A SHORT HISTORY OF THE INDIAN—CONCEPT AND IMAGE

CHAPTER 1. THE INDIAN: IMAGE OF THE NATION

A Local Antiquity

Idealization

Painting’s Critical Function

Gonzalo Pizarro: The Scene of Conquest and the Spanish Legacy

The Indian as Cultural Concept

Creole Failures

The Indian as Allegory and Symbol

CHAPTER 2. THE SCENE OF APPROXIMATION

The Country of Melancholy: The Creole Invention of the Andean World

Melancholy’s Modern Transformations

An Andean Legend: The Burial of the Priest

The Inscrutable Indian

The Rhetoric of Approximation: The Pascana Series

CHAPTER 3. PICTURING RACE

A Critical Fortune of Racial Readings

Reading Race: The Role of the Viewer

The Construction of the Indian Image

Impossible Images

The Elusive Indian

EPILOGUE: PERSONAL NARRATIVES, PUBLIC IMAGES

CHRONOLOGY

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

Throughout this book the term Indian refers fundamentally to the object of indigenist discourse, an abstraction that must be distinguished from the indigenous populations that the term purportedly designates. It is capitalized in the text to signal its arbitrary nature. The same applies to other categories such as Black, White, Creole, and Mestizo, with which it enters into dialogue in the always relational field of the social imagination. I follow a similar usage with terms such as Aymara and Quechua, which refer to specific language groups. I have chosen not to capitalize the term indigenous, as is now increasingly common in North American contexts, because I take it as a generic reference to a diversity of peoples bound in different ways to preconquest societies.

PREFACE

When I was growing up in Peru in the late 1970s, Francisco Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras would appear fleetingly on the television screen twice a day, at noon and at midnight, among other images that ran in succession to the words and music of the Peruvian national anthem. That was how I first came to know that painting, as part of a household routine that fit the tone of the intense nationalist mood of the period. The image matched the script perfectly: the nation and the Indian were one. Yet this was not the realization of indigenism, but its culmination—and the beginning of its undoing. Over the following years Laso’s image would disappear from view, hidden away in the storerooms of the municipal collections and displaced from public discourse by a new national paradigm that brought the urban population into focus. The figure of the Indian that had for decades dominated the Peruvian national imaginary started coming apart. All of a sudden it appeared as an object that could be subjected to analysis, dissected and exposed as the ideological artifact that official discourses had gradually naturalized in our minds to the repetitive rhythm of the national anthem.

Many things came undone in the upheavals of the following decades. By the early 1990s, when I began research for this book, the issues I was studying seemed to still permeate the fabric of Peruvian society, its imagery and the narratives that shaped a common culture. But now that my dissertation, substantially transformed and updated, is published as a book, the same is no longer the case. The figure of the Indian may have receded into the background, yet it nonetheless lingers on as a residual image that keeps its hold on the national imagination.

This text has been written at different moments over a long period of time. It was first presented to the University of Texas at Austin in 1995, then abandoned for many years as I assumed curatorial work at the Museo de Arte de Lima, and finally finished when I had the opportunity to undertake sustained research as Simón Bolívar Professor at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. The length of time that passed between the writing of the dissertation and the making of the book necessarily extends the list of people and institutions to which I am indebted.

This project was shaped during a moment when art history was undergoing important transformations. I am particularly grateful to Nicholas Mirzoeff and Richard Shiff at the University of Texas at Austin for pointing the way to more complex and decentered histories of art. My work has attempted to straddle disciplines, especially to bridge the distance that often separates art history from the perspectives that guide historical writing. That purpose defined the project from its inception. Although it was presented to the Department of Art History, where Jacqueline Barnitz generously guided my research, it also found support in the Department of History, where Susan Deans-Smith introduced me to the discipline and gave me a broad regional perspective on Latin American studies. Her guidance was important then, just as her constant friendship and encouragement have been over the years.

Most of the work with primary sources for this project was undertaken in the early 1990s. I was then able to study the important collection of Laso’s drawings and paintings at the Museo de Arte de Lima thanks to the unqualified support of its director, Cecilia Alayza. More recently, the registrarial team headed by Pilar Ríos has generously helped me in obtaining images and information on works in the museum’s collections. I am also grateful to the staff at the Biblioteca Nacional; the Archivo General de la Nación; the Centro de Estudios Histórico-Militares; the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú; the Instituto Riva-Agüero; and the Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Merino. Drawings and paintings in private hands became accessible thanks to the many friends—including Carmen Banchero, Leonie Roca, Arnaldo Mera, José Ignacio Peña, and Gonzalo Rodríguez Larraín—who opened doors and pointed me in the right direction. At a time when obtaining images was more difficult than it is in today’s digital age, Daniel Giannoni’s always generous support was crucial. His archive has served as a resource for many projects and continues to be indispensable for art historians. Mirko Lauer shared his collection of rare newspaper clippings with me, though my debt to him lies rather with his early work on Peruvian art and indigenism, which was a central inspiration for this project.

Many of those who generously supported my early research have unfortunately since passed away. Juan Manuel Ugarte Eléspuru kindly shared his important family archive as well as documentation gathered while he wrote what remains the most complete biography of Francisco Laso. Félix Denegri Luna allowed me to spend long afternoons working in his exceptional library, now housed at the Instituto Riva-Agüero.

Financial support for the initial stages of this project was provided by the University of Texas at Austin through the Marian Royal Kazen Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Art and the Deans’ Association Fund. Further research was made possible by a Getty Curatorial Research Grant for 2005–2006, a visiting fellowship at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, in 2007, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2011. I am especially grateful to Kerry Webb and her team at the University of Texas Press for their support in taking the manuscript to print.

This book is the product of sustained discussion with many extraordinary colleagues. When I first began to work on my dissertation, the Peruvian nineteenth century was a largely unexplored subject. Luis Eduardo Wuffarden generously helped guide me through the sources and introduced me to artists and works that were then virtually unknown. Some years later, Ricardo Kusunoki Rodríguez joined us in the study of the art of the period, bringing new perspectives to our conversations and to the many projects we undertook together. I have learned much from them. I am greatly indebted to Rita Eder at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma in Mexico and Joan Weinstein at the Getty Foundation for the space they created for regional exchange through the seminar series Los Estudios de Arte desde América Latina (1996–2003). It was a privilege to be part of those conversations with art historians working on the nineteenth century, among them Roberto Amigo, Jaime Cuadriello, Laura Malosetti, Ana María de Moraes Belluzzo, Fausto Ramírez, and Angélica Velázquez. It has been inspiring to have been able to discuss many of the issues covered in this book with friends who have contributed significantly to expand the range and depth of Peruvian historiography, especially Thomas B. F. Cummins, Juan Carlos Estenssoro, César Itier, and Cecilia Méndez. Over time, exchanges with colleagues studying many other periods and subjects, including José Carlos de la Puente Luna, Vered Engelhard, Javier Flores Espinoza, Nicole Fourtané, Stefanie Gänger, Mijail Mitrovic, Elena Phipps, and Gabriela Rangel, have helped to broaden my perspectives. I owe a special thanks to Beverly Adams, whose friendship has accompanied the extended period during which the project became a dissertation and then a book, and Gabriela Ramos, who has followed and supported this work for a quarter of a century and generously—and very critically—contributed to its conclusion. Without their encouragement over the years this book may never have been finalized. I hope my family and my friends, especially Lucía García de Polavieja, Jimena González, Rocío Merino, Carmen Serra, and Martha Zegarra, can recognize how important they have been in making this book possible.

Introduction

It is not often that one can trace the founding moment of a discourse to an image as one can see modern indigenism visually materialized for the first time in Francisco Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras of Peru of 1855.¹ In its forceful simplicity, the painting fixes the most significant transformation to affect the concept of the Indian since the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. The Indian emerges, at once, as both cultural ideal and visual image, an icon of authenticity that would become, at different moments over the following decades, a cornerstone of modern Andean nationalisms.²

This book is a study of the conditions of possibility and the rhetorical structures of modern indigenism. It is a history of the simultaneous emergence of both the discourse and its object, the one tied inextricably to the other. And though it covers a broad field of texts and images, it is fundamentally centered on the work of Laso (b. Tacna, Peru, 1823; d. San Mateo, Peru, 1869), one of the most challenging artists of the nineteenth century. There are many reasons for this focus, not least of which is the powerful relevance and radical modernity of Laso’s paintings. Few among his contemporaries—and I consider a larger international context—engaged painting quite so intently as an intellectual project or as a tool for the active constitution of a collective imaginary. His works merge the descriptive and allegorical impulses of painting into a strategy intended to make complex concepts visible. In a few notable images he figured ideas that would be crucial for the definition of modern Peru.

Laso took it upon himself to redeem the possibilities of a nation conceived from its inception as a heterogeneous body destined for failure, a society in which the indigenous population was envisioned as an element of difference, to be either idealized at a distance or incorporated and dissolved. In his precise account of indigenism, Henri Favre summarized these contradictions, defining the Indian as at once proof of the impossibility of the nation and its very foundation, both an idealized people and an ethnicity condemned to be abolished in society, while suffusing the collective imagination with its irreducible specificity.³ The emergence of the modern image of the Indian (el indio)—always singular and generally masculine—was intricately tied to a cultural definition of the nation that, against standard accounts that place its appearance in the early twentieth century, surfaced earlier. The Indian was not, as some broad narratives have proposed, always temporally displaced to a distant past, but was in fact also firmly established in the present.⁴ In the visual arts, Stacie Widdifield’s pioneering study of nineteenth-century Mexican painting already suggested the changing nature of the concept.⁵ Yet, as I argue, indigenism profoundly transformed the terms of both earlier Creole patriotism and the national community that had been forged in contractual and political terms at the moment of independence. Reversing Ernest Gellner’s proposition, we could say that in Latin America, nations engendered nationalities, not the other way around.⁶ Laso’s generation was key in effecting this change, infusing the already constituted nation-state with new meanings based on the ever more extended premise of a people bound by a common genealogy, history, and culture. It was this paradigm of the nation as the expression of an original and self-contained culture that established the conditions for the definition of the modern concepts of both the Indian and indigenism.⁷

FIGURE 0.1. Francisco Laso, Inhabitant of the Cordilleras of Peru, 1855. Oil on canvas, 145 × 90 cm. Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Merino, Metropolitan Municipality of Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

That this may seem self-evident today leads us to forget that its appearance marked a major break in a long history of representations. Standard definitions of indigenism as the social and political vindication of indigenous populations have obscured the specificity of its modern variants. Discourses of defense can be traced to the sixteenth century, to the ardent argumentation of the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas, and even to Spain’s tutelary laws.⁸ In the context of this continuity, the literature has differentiated modern from earlier indigenism through its political commitment, its intensity, and its ever-expanding reach. Prevailing accounts tell the story of discriminatory national discourses that would be dispelled by the rise of an enlightened indigenism.⁹ Literary studies have further drawn a distinction between a sentimental and exoticizing vision dominant in the nineteenth century and the more realist and politically committed position of later indigenists.¹⁰ The narratives of art history follow a similar script, a teleological account of ever more realist representations that reflect a mounting tide of interest in the Indian, a gradual awakening to a concept that remains constant and unchanging over time. I argue, to the contrary, that the rise of modern indigenism marks a major rupture, one that affects and radically transforms the very notion of indigeneity.

I relate this broad paradigm shift to another global transformation of the period: the emergence of the modern concept of culture.¹¹ The Indian that appears in Laso’s painting is not a stable subject whose origins can be traced to the conquest, but a new construct emerging out of the cultural discourses of modernity. It is a figure of authenticity that elicits a peculiar longing, at once modern and antimodern that, as Regina Bendix has stated, seeks to recover an essence whose loss has been realized only through modernity, and whose recovery is feasible only through methods and sentiments created in modernity.¹² In the Andean region the disappearance of indigenous culture was but the projection of a future loss: the always distant and deferred but inevitable realization of the liberal elite ideal of a homogenizing modernization. Yet, simultaneously, the idea of indigenous culture was fundamental to the discourses of modern ethnolinguistic nationalisms, so that loss—however imaginary—was compensated by an ideal Indian, a concept with scarcely any connection to actual indigenous populations, one that was conceived and understood as representation. Central to my argument is precisely that the Indian is neither a shorthand for a complex reality, nor a synonym for an ethnic group. It is a figure of indigeneity that emerged from elite discourses and acquired a life of its own as a category around which discourses were reorganized and redeployed.¹³

This construct determined a form of national identification paradoxically advanced by groups that did not identify as Indian. The poignant image of Laso dressed in an indigenous poncho and chullo (woven hat) speaks to those stagings of identity as a founding instance in a long history of non-Indians playing Indian.¹⁴ To wear the other’s clothes points to a horizon of desire in which longing fixes upon cultural objects; to pose in them for the camera is to flaunt the very gesture in a way that reveals no intention to deceive, no purpose other than to foreground and figure difference as an effect of empathy. The Indian returns to its origin in Creole imaginaries of alterity.

Laso’s self-portrait projects his altruism as it objectifies indigeneity through material traits. The Indian here is made into an emblem of culture. As in his Inhabitant of the Cordilleras, Laso’s self-image thus condenses the essential elements of modern indigenism as a cultural narrative, one that overlaps and intertwines with social and political vindications of the indigenous population but remains a discourse unto itself, structured by its own logic. The understanding of culture as both a transcendent spirit and an immutable essence that evolved in this period in effect placed indigeneity in a separate sphere, one that could coexist with and engage other fields but would obey different rules.¹⁵ Rather than marking successive stages in a singular historic path, the cultural and the economic or political were defined as distinct domains of discourse and practice, an ideological separation that defines academic disciplines, institutions, and policies relating to Peru’s indigenous populations until the present.¹⁶

The Indian as cultural paradigm transformed but did not replace older notions of difference. Visually configured as and through a body, it built upon notions of heredity and lineage that charted subtle genealogical, historical, and geographic arguments. This complex figure was not made up of only cultural facts; it was an object shaped by colonial racial ideas, but adaptable enough to incorporate the scientific narratives that emerged in the late eighteenth century and rapidly consolidated globally.¹⁷ My account of this versatile figure of alterity relies on David Theo Goldberg’s critical undoing of the arbitrary distinctions between culture and biology that until recently framed discussions of race and led to overlooking its many flexible and changing faces.¹⁸ The indigenous population became an object of both desire and discrimination precisely through discourses that fixed difference within a dense web of disciplinary frameworks and rhetorical strategies.

The Indian as an ethnoracial concept—that is, one that evokes the complex and mutually reinforcing nature of the terms which it incorporates—collapses accounts that would simplify and reduce ethnicity to culture, and race to biology.¹⁹ So conceived, it adds nuance to standard narratives, as summarized by Deborah Poole, that nineteenth-century racialist thought charted a transition from a genealogical or historical paradigm of racial identity to the objectifying discourse of biologically determined racial types.²⁰ Race did become ever more caught in the arguments of science and biology, but it is not always acknowledged that the notion of an embodied racial essence was given even greater force with the rise of new cultural paradigms of difference. Robert Young has traced how forms of racialization profoundly marked and transformed European cultural discourses in the nineteenth century.²¹ The spread and endurance of those discourses in the Andean context is revealed in Marisol de la Cadena’s subtle account of the ways twentieth-century Cuzco indigenists deployed culture to produce a figure of exclusion in which race was only rhetorically silenced.²² I argue further that the modern concept of culture surfaces as the defining though largely invisible matrix behind the central changes of the period.

FIGURE 0.2. Anonymous photographer, Francisco Laso in Indigenous Dress, ca. 1857–1865. Photograph on paper mounted on cardboard, 21.1 × 24.2 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, Prado Family Bequest, V 2.11–52. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

Though not always going by its name, culture emerged as a profoundly racialized site of discourse through two distinct, interrelated, and often conflicting concepts: that of culture as cultivation, which converted the particularities of international bourgeois culture into the universal model of a larger civilizing process, and that of culture as diversity, which idealized difference.²³ Defined by the latter meaning through a cultural field bound to the former sense, indigenism was structured through the asymmetrical antinomies of tradition and modernity, past and present, the vernacular and the cosmopolitan, the oral and the written, which Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs have proposed as the operative framework of modernity.²⁴ In this context, it appears as a specific manifestation of broader transnational processes that constructed alterities through racialized cultural repertoires, practices, and artifacts. The modern image of the Indian, in effect, articulated the complex transformation of these discursive structures to forge what is fundamentally a cultural construct of race. How that figure emerged in the nineteenth century is the subject of this book.

Francisco Laso: A Republican Biography

A study of the rise of modern pictorial indigenism in nineteenth-century Peru cannot be anything but a monograph on the work of Francisco Laso. No other artist engaged the subject so explicitly and thoroughly, perhaps because no other undertook quite so intently and deliberately the project of building a national imaginary. His undisputed status as a pioneering figure of modern Latin American painting has been sustained mostly by the force of his own work. This book cannot compensate for the lack of monographic studies on his painting; it does not attempt to recount Laso’s life or explore the general corpus of his works. The broad outlines of his biography were first established by his friends and later developed in the extensive research undertaken by José Flores Aráoz when he organized the earliest retrospective of Laso’s work in 1937. This was complemented by Juan Manuel Ugarte Eléspuru’s biographical studies and, more recently, by my own account of Laso’s contributions as a writer and political figure.²⁵ The chronology included in this publication offers a schematic account of the basic facts of his artistic, political, and intellectual activity, tracing the sketch of a life that remains largely uncharted.²⁶ Yet a few words are nonetheless necessary to understand where Laso stands in the larger picture of mid-nineteenth-century art and society.

The first thing to note is that Laso was born to privilege. He was the son of Benito Laso (b. Arequipa, 1783; d. Lima, 1862), the influential patriot, jurist, writer, and minister of state who was part of the new national leadership—composed mostly of Creoles emerging from the middle and upper sectors of colonial society—that took over the political void left by the mass migration of Spaniards and viceregal authorities after independence. His mother, Juana de los Ríos, was the daughter of an important army officer, hacendado, and mine owner active in Puno whose wealth seems to have sustained the family fortunes. After her early death in 1830, Benito Laso’s marriage to the aristocratic Petronila García Calderón y Crespo further helped to establish his position. Marked by his father’s often turbulent career in the unstable world of early national politics, Laso’s childhood was spent between Tacna, his birthplace; La Paz, during a period of exile; and Arequipa, where the family settled in 1836, the same year in which they relocated to Lima. These movements mirror a broader pattern of elite migration from regional centers, a process that contributed to the centralization of economic and political life in the capital and along the coast. Creole national discourses cannot be understood without taking into account this crucial but understudied process, which increased the separation between elites and the larger highland cities that had dominated and organized colonial biographies and trajectories.

FIGURE 0.3. Courret Hermanos, Francisco Laso, ca. 1864. Albumen silver print, 10.6 × 6.2 cm. Museo de Arte de Lima, 2013.29.15. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni.

Such distance was not merely spatial. The period also generated greater social and cultural disparities. Laso’s biography reveals aspects of that process. He received instruction in Lima at the private school of Clemente Noel while taking lessons at the small, makeshift National Drawing Academy, which Quito painter Francisco Javier Cortés first directed and with whom he probably studied. He was a student there when in 1837 the young aristocrat Ignacio Merino, trained in Paris under Raymond Quinsac Monvoisin, took over direction of the school upon his return from Europe.²⁷ But local training was insufficient to satisfy the aspirations of a generation wanting to leave behind colonial traditions to participate in a world that independence had opened to them. Like his teacher before and others after him, in 1843 Laso left Peru to pursue formal training as a painter. Following a journey through Spain, he settled in Paris, where he studied under Charles Gleyre and undertook the obligatory Italian tour before returning to Peru in 1849. His movements trace key aspects of the aesthetic ideals, the lived geography, and the cultural worlds of Peruvian elites. Their rapid insertion into the global capitalist economy generated significant fractures as new cosmopolitan trajectories forced a break with local traditions, in effect cutting off young artists from their colonial predecessors, many of whom were still active in Lima. It also generated a rift between painters of high social standing and their peers of indigenous and Afro-descendant backgrounds, who remained on the margins of elite circles of power and influence. Itinerant European artists and the massive import of prints and books rapidly altered what had been a traditionally insular society. Thus, to Lima’s growing internal detachment from regional centers was added a further distance from local models, which in effect implied a major ethnic reconfiguration of the artistic field.²⁸

The displacement of colonial practitioners and traditions by modernizing professional discourses contributed to the concentration of power around a new elite culture that Laso helped shape.²⁹ The painter became a key figure among a younger generation that would come to dominate Peruvian intellectual and political life, including Clemente Althaus, Luis Benjamín Cisneros, Manuel Nicolás Corpancho, Juana Manuela Gorriti, José Arnaldo Márquez, Ricardo Palma, and José Casimiro Ulloa. Unlike earlier generations, they not only associated in private but gathered in the capital’s emerging literary sphere, a space formed in the theater and in the pages of newspapers and literary reviews such as El Progreso (1849–1850) and El Semanario de Lima (1848). Most adopted a liberal stance in politics, but their views ranged from radical socialism to conservative liberalism, so they would find themselves fighting on opposite sides during the revolutionary cycle of the mid-1850s. Among Laso’s closest friends, Francisco García Calderón, Manuel Pardo, and Mariano Ignacio Prado rose to the Peruvian presidency, while others, such as José Antonio de Lavalle y Arias de Saavedra, took on leading ministerial and diplomatic positions. In one way or another, as Alejandro Losada has noted, they all entered into service of the state.³⁰ They shaped the Peruvian bourgeoisie, a heterogeneous group of large and small business owners, rich and poor intellectuals, politicians and public servants—all bound by their relation to power, a shared cosmopolitan culture, and their ethnic background: considering the elasticity that the term could have in mid-nineteenth-century Peru, they could all have been considered White.³¹

One could, in fact, argue that the nineteenth century saw a process of elite whitening, both through actual family alliances with European immigrants and through processes of cultural assimilation. This transformation, closely tied to the elite’s insertion into international bourgeois circuits, was associated with an expansive modernizing mission.³² Based in Lima, elites administered the economic boom generated at midcentury by the export of guano (the accumulated excrement of seabirds, mined for use as fertilizer) to produce the first consistent effort to forge institutions and shape a constituency through projects ranging from urban renewal to official support for scientific publications and government-subsidized textbooks. Literature, history, archaeology, and geography delimited a new cultural sphere that emerged to sustain the logistics of nation-building.

Laso’s work was central to this national project, perhaps less in terms of its immediate visibility—constrained by the absence of a proper artistic field of museums, exhibition spaces, and a viewing public—as in relation to the very self-conscious role he assumed in national leadership and public life. In 1854 he noisily entered the public arena with his pamphlet Aguinaldo para las señoras del Perú (New Year’s Present for the Ladies of Peru), a biting criticism of Peruvian customs that shook Lima society. His work as a writer developed further after 1859, when he joined the editorial board of La Revista de Lima (1859–1863), the period’s most important intellectual forum. He took an active role in politics, first siding with General Vivanco’s revolution in Arequipa in 1857 and later supporting Mariano Ignacio Prado’s 1865 coup against President Juan Antonio Pezet. Over the following years his political activities seem to have taken over his work as a painter. In 1866, as an elected official in Lima’s city council, he courted Lima’s urban artisans and formed a company of firefighters to wage the Battle of May 2 against the Spanish fleet at the port of Callao. As representative for the capital at the Congress called in 1867 by Prado to draft a new constitution, he supported the government through his participation in the National Academy and the newspaper La Tribuna. Later, as director of the Beneficencia Pública, Lima’s public charity board, he actively fought the devastating yellow fever epidemic that struck the capital in 1868. The following year, shortly after having taken on a weekly column about political events for the daily El Nacional, he died at age forty-six of an unknown illness.

In the span of what was a relatively short life, Laso participated in almost every instance of his generation’s efforts