Army Veterans and Conflicts over Natural Resources

Around the year 1900, Manuel Camacho, a former soldier in Nicolás de Piérola's rebel army, decided to return home to the department of Puno.Footnote ¹⁵ Reaching the highlands, he discovered that his father had died and that what had used be to the family's estancia was now part of the nearby hacienda.Footnote ¹⁶ His mother had remarried and was living with her husband and children on an estancia in the district of Chucuito, located near Lake Titicaca. Camacho's stepfather agreed to take him in, since he was part of the extended family.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet, because of his position as a stepson, his status within the family was precarious and he stood little chance of inheriting land; this made him, in effect, a landless peasant.Footnote ¹⁸

Camacho was not the only man to discover that what he had left behind no longer existed or had significantly changed. During the final decades of the nineteenth century came construction of the railroad from the port city of Matarani to Juliaca abnd Puno and other improvements in infrastructure, and Puno, once a remote area, became much more accessible. As in other places across the globe, technology accelerated the region's integration into the world economy. International houses of commerce that exported wool and had formerly conducted business from Arequipa branched out and established permanent representatives in Puno. In doing so, they connected the region directly to the international market, bypassing local trade circuits, cutting out Indian middlemen, and making competition harder for local, especially Indian, producers.Footnote ¹⁹ As the demand for wool grew and its price soared, competition over natural resources accelerated. Endless quarrels over grasslands, reservoirs, and cultivated land erupted between Indians and local hacienda owners, among family members, and within the same community.Footnote ²⁰

In such a tense and competitive environment, military conscription was a means of “getting rid” of opponents.Footnote ²¹ During the nineteenth century, conscription was accomplished mainly through personal ties and patronage networks. Attempting to end these practices and modernize the military, Piérola initiated a military reform in 1898 that included new methods and institutions for drafting men into the armed forces.Footnote ²² The idea was to bureaucratize the draft and thus eliminate the personal ties and individual negotiations that had characterized recruitment in the past. Furthermore, as a result of these steps, regional elites were to lose an essential part of their power to Lima.Footnote ²³ Put differently, the military reform can also be seen as part of the government's centralization efforts.

Nevertheless, similar to the situation in neighboring Bolivia, in practice Lima continued to rely on regional elites to implement its orders.Footnote ²⁴ Accordingly, the people seated at the district conscription councils were usually local governors, judges, and other men who could be easily considered gamonales. In fact, according to Daniel Masterson, the practice of recruiting through personal influence and favor would disappear completely from Peru's military management only in the 1950s.Footnote ²⁵ Hence, despite the changes, hacienda owners and other strongmen were still able to target Indians who refused to obey their demands and send them to the barracks as they had done in the past.Footnote ²⁶

Because power was delegated along vertical lines in the Andes, community authorities were usually the ones in charge of rounding up recruits. In some cases these men used their power to influence recruiting procedures to the disadvantage of their opponents.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, anyone could exert whatever leverage they had to secure the recruitment of men who posed a “problem” for them.Footnote ²⁸ Obviously, the stronger and more extensive one's social networks were, the better the chances of achieving one's goal. Yet, recruitment was not accomplished strictly by force. Cecilia Méndez, for instance, argues that recruiting Indians as soldiers involved both “sticks and carrots” and was often done within the traditional reciprocal relationships characteristic of Andean societies.Footnote ²⁹ Exemption from taxes was one possible reward for Indians who agreed to serve in the army and had enough power to negotiate their terms of service.Footnote ³⁰ For many others, however, limited access to natural resources and the inability to secure a livelihood meant emigration from their communities in pursuit of work, mainly heading for plantations on the coast. However, rather than heading for Lima or to a large estate, some chose to join the army.Footnote ³¹

Because the terms under which Indians were conscripted varied greatly, veterans returned home to different realities. Those who had enough negotiating power in the first place to ensure “carrots” were obviously better off than Indians who were “pushed” from their lands and into the barracks. Yet, at least to an extent, all veterans would have to deal with changes in the status quo that took shape during their absence, and often at their expense. For example, Juan Huanca and Pedro Pauro, who would join the Adventist Church around 1912, were recruited into the Third Battalion, leaving behind an estancia in the district of Chucuito. When they returned home, sometime around the year 1900, they found that other family members had taken over pasturelands they had formerly used. Furthermore, not only did these relatives privatize what had been common resources, but they also helped themselves to parts of Huanca's estancia.Footnote ³²

There is nothing surprising in the fact that Huanca and Pauro came home to find themselves in a quarrel with their own families. Intra-familial conflicts over property were commonplace in the rural Andes, especially after Ramón Castilla enacted a new civil code in 1852. The 1852 code canceled the mayorazgo, a traditional inheritance system based on primogeniture whose main function was to safeguard the integrity of the estate, and replaced it with a system premised on partible inheritance.Footnote ³³ Estates were now divided among spouses and children, weakening ties and economic commitments among members of the same descendant group. Where no will was stipulated, or in cases of contradicting claims over property, conflict erupted easily. Moreover, since various notions of land tenure existed in Indian communities, disputes could break out over the nature of tenure even when the title to a given land parcel was not contested. Extended family might recognize an individual's title without recognizing his right to sell the land.Footnote ³⁴

Such family conflicts were widespread, especially at the turn of the century when wool was in high demand.Footnote ³⁵ While this problem was not specific to veterans, the returning soldiers were particularly vulnerable to these sorts of disputes. The Peruvian state offered meager programs and funds for demobilization and reintegration. Therefore, aside from their own ability to negotiate terms of recruitment and secure future benefits, veterans depended on kin to help them find their way back into communal life after service. Those who did not have anyone to advocate on their behalf or safeguard their possessions, or those whose families were deeply torn by internal conflict, had few sources of support and social outreach. In fact, the return of veterans often further aggravated conflicts, as there were now additional demands and needs to consider.

In some cases, disputes within the family and weak familial cohesion facilitated external interventions.Footnote ³⁶ Such appears to be the case of Candelaria Mamani and veteran Lucas Mamani.Footnote ³⁷ According to the latter, Candelaria had taken over lands that were part of his estancia and had been cultivating them together with colonos from a nearby hacienda owned by Jorge Pinazo.Footnote ³⁸ The fact that Pinazo's peons were working on an estancia in the nearby community could have been a part of a planned initiative on Pinazo's part to expand the hacienda. However, it also could very well have been that Pinazo was unaware of the skirmishes going on in his backyard and that his potential involvement was a result of dynamics among Indians.

As a woman landowner, it made sense for Candelaria Mamani to seek powerful allies. This would be especially important if she knew that the land that she had inherited, or land that was currently at her disposal, was subject to a dispute. One option Candelaria had was to sell her land to Jorge Pinazo, who owned haciendas in that area; by selling her land and becoming a peon, she would enjoy Pinazo's protection and political outreach. As a result, Lucas Mamani would have to deal with a mestizo landowner rather than an Indian woman. Yet, if Candelaria did not want to sell her land, and wished to preserve her independence, she could marry a peon or forge some sort of reciprocal relationship with Pinazo's peons.Footnote ³⁹ She would not enjoy direct protection from Pinazo but would have allies inside the hacienda who could advocate on her behalf.

Lucas Mamani, on the other side, did not have the same kind of social ties. Reciprocal relationships were established over time and depended on daily interactions and mutual, even if unequal, commitments between Indians, communal authorities, and local mestizos. Veterans who had spent years away from the community, cut away from its social fabric, did not have the same opportunities to forge these crucial social networks and were not necessarily well integrated into the local patronage networks that were crucial in quarrels over resources. Indians used social and political leverage to “pressure” men like Pinazo into helping them, or “played” hacienda owners against each other, using one to serve as a counterforce to the other.Footnote ⁴⁰ Veterans were therefore left without strong allies to protect their interests or intervene on their behalf.Footnote ⁴¹

Veterans’ distance from communal social life also had important political implications, particularly in Puno. In the central sierra, Indians protected their own lands and communities from outside invaders and “inside” traitors.Footnote ⁴² Veterans’ achievements in the battlefield may have been an asset in local politics and a way to establish political authority, but in Puno things were a bit different. Although the department had contributed to war efforts, it was not in the eye of the storm, and success in the battlefield did not confer the same social esteem as it may have in other places. Simply put, respect, or other forms of symbolic capital veterans accumulated in the barracks, did not necessary translate into social status or political authority in Puno. In fact, they could have meant the opposite, since returning veterans had to start on accumulating prestige and status at a relatively advanced age. Although some men, like Camacho, had reached rank in the army, they could not transform this into political power in the community and were asked to perform tasks at the lower end of the indigenous community's prestige system, such as that of portapliego, or mail carrier.Footnote ⁴³ Moreover, even if they were able to avoid laborious demands, their precarious economic situation was still a barrier to leadership positions within the politico-religious hierarchy

Owning land was often a prerequisite for the higher-level positions in the prestige system, which required the capital to sponsor religious festivities.Footnote ⁴⁴ Veterans who were either completely pushed off their lands, or were busy fighting over them, did not have the necessary resources. Additionally, formal marriage within the Catholic Church was also a precondition for upward mobility in the communal hierarchy.Footnote ⁴⁵ Nevertheless, the price of the sacrament had been increasing steadily since the middle of the nineteenth century, and the high cost had often led couples to choose cohabitation over marriage.Footnote ⁴⁶ As a result, young men were unable to formalize their relationships, which in turn affected their social and political mobility.

To sum up thus far, the incorporation of Puno into the global market unleashed fierce competition over natural resources. Thousands of Indians lost their lands during this period, and communities and families were torn apart because of endless conflicts over land and water. Although these problems and challenges were commonplace, veterans, having been absent for a long time, were in a particularly delicate situation, since they depended on their families’ economic resources and social and political outreach for successful reintegration. Familial fractures, therefore, debilitated this safety net and made it unreliable, which eventually burdened or hindered veterans’ reintegration efforts, economically and politically.

In some cases, veterans were even perceived by their families or communities as a direct threat. During their absence, new equilibriums were reached between disparate parts of society, sometimes at the expense of these veterans. That being the case, once the former soldiers returned home, demanding what used to be theirs, or that to which they believed they were entitled, they disturbed the fragile balance and added pressure to an already strained situation. Hence, neighbors, family members, communal authorities, and hacienda owners often shared the desire to prevent the reintegration of veterans, pushing them to the community's margins or expelling them from it. Nonetheless, the struggle over economic and political resources was not the only hurdle for veterans. Other barriers stood in the way of successful reintegration. Cultural ones.

Cultural Barriers

The young soldiers’ departure from the Indian community to spend an extended period of time in a distant location had important implications for them. Most significantly, it provided them an opportunity to observe and to absorb life in other parts of the nation. For those who descended from the Andean plateau toward the lower regions or the coast, this was of particular importance. As Sarah Radcliffe and Sallie Westwood have argued, in the Andes “race is regionalized and region racialized.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In other words, geography was intimately tied to racial identity: certain regions were considered “Indian,” while others were “mestizo.” In the Peruvian case, it has been common to differentiate the “mestizo” coast and cities from the “Indian” highlands and rural areas. The higher one climbed, the more Indian the landscape became.

It was not, of course, that Indians, even those living in the remote parts of the highlands, were isolated from outside influences. They often encountered mestizos from nearby towns, and were aware of mestizos’ way of life, even adopting specific practices and commodities.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, this was not the same as living in an area dominated by mestizo culture and directly under its influence. Moreover, leaving the community also meant leaving behind a familiar social environment and established networks. While we should not assume that the army's social structure did not resemble or rely on traditional communal networks, military service entailed a significant rupture for puneño soldiers who were sent to other regions. Soldiers were now free from the community's internal hierarchies and social pressures, making it easier for them to cross social and cultural borders. Away from the prying eyes of their neighbors, these young Indian men had adopted—voluntarily, by force, or a little of both—new habits and practices. Once discharged, veterans took this new cultural baggage with them. In an oral testimony about events in the 1920s, Mariano Larico, an Aymara Indian who became a political activist, witnessed veterans’ attempts to reintegrate into his community in the province of Huancané. He recalled that former soldiers had gone through major personal changes, changes that were visible to all when they left the army “with a blanket, shoes, uniform and a cap.” Larico noted, “They have become accustomed to underwear; they keep their uniforms so they can wear them while dancing in the fiesta.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Why was it that possessing a blanket or a pair of shoes indicated a profound personal transformation? As leading scholars such as Mary Weismantel and Marisol de la Cadena have demonstrated, race in the Andes was constructed through cultural characteristics rather than physiological properties.Footnote ⁵⁰ In other words, Indians differed from mestizos in the way they dressed, what they ate, where they lived, and how they spent their time. Clothing, in this sense, was especially important because of its visibility, and people often distinguished mestizos from Indians by referring to specific items they wore.Footnote ⁵¹ Benjamin Orlove, for example, delves into the significance of shoes as a distinctive feature that differentiated mestizos from Indians.Footnote ⁵² Accordingly, when Larico viewed veterans who used to walk barefoot, as Indians do, now wearing shoes, as mestizos do, he interpreted this as a sign of radical change in their racial identity. In his mind, they were breaking away from their past as Indians and were slowly transforming into mestizos.

What made this change even more plausible was the fact that veterans returned to the community with another important and presumably mestizo asset: Spanish. One could rightfully argue that their knowledge of the language, at least in terms of literacy, was quite basic.Footnote ⁵³ As part of its “civilizing mission,” the Peruvian army launched literacy initiatives for Indians. Access to these programs, however, was limited and their success highly debatable.Footnote ⁵⁴ Even so, being in the barracks and near coastal cities provided informal opportunities for veterans to learn at least some Spanish. In an interview with anthropologists Ricardo Valderrama Fernández and Carmen Escalante Gutiérrez, Gregorio Mamani described his own attempt to learn Spanish while in service in the early 1930s. “You were unable to speak [Spanish] when you entered [the barracks] and still unable to speak when you left, Spanish barely dribbling from your tongue. There in the army those lieutenants and captains did not want us speaking the runa tongue. They would say: ‘Damn it, Indians! Spanish!’ So the noncommissioned officers would beat Spanish into us.”Footnote ⁵⁵

On one hand, Mamani declares that Indian soldiers did not learn a thing. On the other hand, Spanish had become a part of the Indian soldiers in the most physical way possible: it had been violently imprinted into them through the daily brutality of training.Footnote ⁵⁶ Where the classroom had failed, ruthlessness prevailed. In other words, it was through these daily experiences that Indian soldiers learned basic Spanish. From the city's point of view, to use Efraín Kristal's terms, veterans’ knowledge of Spanish may have seemed insufficient. However, back in the home community, “a little” became “a lot.” In this context Marisol de la Cadena offers a dynamic view of race, which changes according to the locale and the participants involved. “Indians and mestizos” she argues “emerge from interaction, not from evolution.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Consequently, the perception of a veteran as mestizo or Indian was premised less on the objective quality of his spoken Spanish than on his fluency in comparison to other interlocutors, who on average knew less than the returning soldier did. It was the context that turned an Indian into a mestizo, and reactions to this apparent change came swiftly. Footnote ⁵⁸

Race and Local Reactions Toward Veterans

“When I was discharged from the army, I didn't want to go back to my hometown wearing soldier's clothes,” related Gregorio Mamani during his testimony in Andean Lives. “Your fellow villagers see army clothes and say: ‘He'll be a little misti only as long as those state clothes last him.’”Footnote ⁵⁹ Mamani's description exemplifies the ambivalent attitudes with which veterans were faced on their return to the community. On one hand, the term “little misti” implies that returning veterans were viewed by other Indians as racially and socially superior.Footnote ⁶⁰ Despite the historical upheavals of the nineteenth century, and although all Peruvian citizens were de jure considered equal before the law, Andean social structure remained highly stratified along racial lines.Footnote ⁶¹ In other words, the more mestizo one was, the higher up he was on the social ladder.

Cultural adaptations, in this regard, also amounted to upward social mobility. On the other hand, being called a little misti was hardly a compliment. First, it marked one as an outsider, a person who was no longer considered by his peers to be an Indian and therefore no longer a part of the community. In this regard, the term demarcated social boundaries and informed members as to how they should act if they wished to be part of the group. Second, the use of this term ridiculed veterans who were perceived as attempting to imitate others rather than being true to their “authentic” selves. Without the costume, that is, without the mestizo clothing, the charade would end and veterans, the little mistis, would return to being what they truly are—Indians.

To complicate things even more, it appears that time frames it could be socially acceptable to act like a mestizo. As Mariano Larico testified, some veterans kept their uniforms “so they [could] wear them while dancing in the fiesta.” Although Larico seems to perceive such behavior as pretentious, he does not discredit veterans for it, nor does he claim that they were no longer Indians because of it. It was clearly hard to argue that one was becoming a misti while he was engaged in doing something so “Indian” as dancing in an Indian festival. Furthermore, wearing a uniform during religious celebration, which lasted a few days, was not the same as dressing in European clothes regularly. The fiesta was a special occasion and it was relatively common for participants to dress differently for its duration.Footnote ⁶²

The veterans who returned to Larico's community were, therefore, acting within the community's social and racial norms. In this sense, the logic behind their decisions on how to dress for a specific occasion was similar to the logic that guided Gregorio Mamani, who would not be seen in his community in uniform. Both adhered to similar racial notions and social conventions that dictated how Indians were normally supposed to dress if they wanted to be accepted in the community. Nevertheless, at the same time, Larico frames this ephemeral change in dress as part of a wider and perpetual transformation in veterans’ character: they had “changed a lot.” Consequently, Larico manifests a sense of ambiguity towards veterans’ racial identity, an ambiguity similar to the one expressed in the term “little misti.”

Hence, presumed attempts to cross racial borders were not easily accepted.Footnote ⁶³ Indians and mestizos who were familiar with veterans’ personal histories and genealogies had a difficult time reconciling their past identities with their present appearance, thus implicitly suggesting that they were imposters. In this regard, scholarly conceptualizations of hybridity or the fluidity of racial and ethnic identities in the Andes underestimate the psychological dissonances that the process of mestizaje creates, particularly in situations where the protagonists were previously acquainted with each other. Psychological uneasiness, however, was not the entire story. The veterans’ “unsettled racial identity,” to use Mary Weismantel's expression, had important practical ramifications.Footnote ⁶⁴

Rooted in the colonial legal system, racial identification was initially implemented by the crown in order to distinguish between disparate segments of the population (Indians, mestizos, and creoles) and to judge them differently. Each racial category entailed a different set of duties and privileges, as well as differing legal consequences.Footnote ⁶⁵ After independence, Peru adopted liberal legislation that emphasized ideas of citizenship and equality before the law. However, de facto the colonial social stratification remained intact and Indians de jure were still obligated to pay a head tax and provide labor upon the request of local authorities.Footnote ⁶⁶ Consequently, if one's racial identity was in question, as was the case with veterans, so was the nature of his commitments and obligations.Footnote ⁶⁷

Obviously, local mestizos, who were the prime benefactors of Indian labor, had the most to lose from veterans’ supposed transformation into mestizos. Veterans’ unclear racial identity also posed a problem for traditional communal authorities. Part of the power of communal authorities stemmed precisely from their ability to recruit Indian labor and collect taxes from community members. Veterans who no longer contributed to these ends compromised the success of these authorities and were a burden for the rest of the community. Moreover, how could the traditional communal authorities exercise power over men whose racial identity was ambiguous and unsettled? What would be their source of authority over those who adhered to new values, displayed new habits, possessed a new set of skills, and were unwilling to act the ways Indians were supposed to act? The inability to place veterans in a neat racial category disturbed the racial order and exposed the system's vulnerabilities. As a result, it became crucial to police racial boundaries in an effort to keep individuals in the “right” place.

In this regard, insults or mockery served as disciplinary methods aimed at regulating behavior and punishing deviation. In fact, when these tools failed, harsher ones were implemented. Manuel Camacho, together with two recently converted Adventist Indians, Santos Valdéz and Mariano Chahuaris, were beaten by local mestizos and carried off to prison for wearing European clothing in the nearby town of Chucuito. Whether or not Valdéz and Chuhuaris were veterans is unknown; however, they did spend several years in Arequipa where they came into close contact with mestizo culture and adopted some of its cultural traits.Footnote ⁶⁸ These men were effectively presented with a choice: either succumb to the hegemonic notions of race and act as “Indians” were supposed to act, or leave the community for good.

Some, like Gregorio Mamani, who opted not to return to his community, accepted these social demands. Instead of returning home, he settled on the outskirts of Cusco where he could continue to dress in European clothing without suffering the social sanctions that would ensue from doing so in a rural setting. But others, like Camacho, did not. On one hand, these veterans refused to give up the habits and tastes to which they had become accustomed while away. On the other hand, they returned to their communities and would not leave, even under extreme pressure. Moreover, although Adventist veterans were constantly accused of being racial imposters, they themselves never claimed to be anything but Indians. In fact, in their correspondence with local or national authorities, or even with international Adventist Church representatives, they repeatedly stated that they were “Indians from the district of Chucuito,” or an “Indian from the community of … ,” or an “Indian named … ,” rarely, if ever, claiming another racial identity.Footnote ⁶⁹

At least de jure, Indians were not obligated to address their race and could simply state their place of residence.Footnote ⁷⁰ Of course, one could argue that this notion was the official version and that it is therefore hard to learn about people's “actual” racial identifications from them. However, people did not use terms that followed legal formalities simply because this was the convention. They did so because they wanted to receive official recognition of whatever it was they were claiming.Footnote ⁷¹ An important part of mestizaje took place between the fine lines of bureaucratic paperwork.Footnote ⁷² It was not uncommon for Indians to present themselves as mestizos when approaching authorities; when these claims went uncontested, it served to validate their mestizo-ness.Footnote ⁷³ Consequently, it made little sense for anyone who sought social recognition as a mestizo to define himself as an Indian in official correspondence. If, in fact, veterans were engaged in mestizaje, it would have made much more sense for them to present themselves as mestizos in correspondence to assert their new identity rather than to proclaim the exact opposite.

Veterans also affirmed their Indian identity by joining the they called “The Indian Mission to Lake Titicaca.” This name stands out among Seventh-day Adventist missions worldwide, as it is rather unusual.Footnote ⁷⁴ Missions were usually named in accordance with their geographical location—the Peruvian Mission, or the Upper Paraná Mission, and so on, giving no indication of ethnic or racial characteristics.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the Andean context specifically, it is hard to see how any self-proclaimed mestizo would want to identify with such an institution. The Adventist Church in this sense was like any other Indian community in the region: it did not include mestizos. Therefore, veterans who were “mistis” were engaging in racial transformation mostly in the eyes of others. In their own eyes, they remained Indians despite their new, apparently mestizo, habits. Coupled with conflicts over natural resources, tensions over former soldiers’ racial identity quickly exploded, leading to constant clashes with mestizos and other Indians. Ostracized, they searched for an alternative, finding it in the pews of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

The Regenerated Indian and Seventh-day Adventism

The Seventh-day Adventist Church was born in mid nineteenth-century New York out of the Millerite movement. Distinguished by the observance of Saturday as the Sabbath and by the belief in the imminent advent of Christ, the church began its overseas expansion rather late, the first ordained minister arriving in Latin America in 1894. The Peruvian mission was officially established about a decade later, in 1906. At the time, Roman Catholicism was the official religion of the country and the only one allowed for public practice under Article 4 of the Peruvian constitution. In short, Adventists, like other Protestant denominations, began their venture in Peru illegally. Even so, they did enjoy the support of some liberal intellectuals and were able to gain a few converts, one of whom was Manuel Camacho.

Where exactly Camacho came across Adventism and how he converted is subject to debate. However, it is clear that about a year after returning to Puno, he turned his home into an improvised classroom for local Indians.Footnote ⁷⁶ Between 1902 and 1905, at least 25 students recited the alphabet and learned to add and subtract under Camacho's guidance. Some were grown men, among whom five are confirmed veterans, and others were young boys.Footnote ⁷⁷ Camacho's educational initiatives irritated local authorities, which was probably one of the reasons that he was so eager for Adventist support.Footnote ⁷⁸ For a few years, he appealed to the Adventist headquarters in Lima, asking them to send permanent assistance. Help would come later, in 1911, when Ferdinand Stahl, an Adventist missionary stationed in La Paz, moved to La Platería and, together with Camacho, began preaching among Aymara Indians and opening schools to serve both adults and children.Footnote ⁷⁹ The pair's religious activities, and especially their relative success, aggravated local authorities even further and eventually culminated in an organized attack on the Adventist school and mission in La Platería. On March 3, 1913, a group of local hacienda owners and Indians helmed by the bishop of Puno, Monseñor Valentín Ampuero, set out from the village of Chucuito for the Seventh-day Adventist mission in La Platería. When they arrived at the mission, they broke into the main house, stole property, and took five Indian converts, among them Camacho, as prisoners.Footnote ⁸⁰

The incident fell like ripe fruit into the hands of anticlerical liberals, who were themselves in the midst of a heated debate with conservatives over Article 4 of the constitution. For many liberals, freedom of religion was one of the cornerstones of the modern nation and, accordingly, altering Article 4 was a necessary step if Peru was to move forward. Moreover, although they rarely converted, many liberals believed that Protestantism was much more compatible with modernity.Footnote ⁸¹ After all, it was the religion of the progressive nations of Northern Europe and North America. Therefore, they looked positively upon missionaries’ work among the Indians, especially their educational efforts, seeing them as a way to “civilize” the Indians and push their nation forward.Footnote ⁸² From this perspective, the attack on the Adventist mission was another piece of evidence of Catholic brutality, executed by narrow-minded men who were guided more by self-interest than by the greater good. If Indians were not freed from the claws of the Catholic priests and the highland gamonales, these intellectuals believed, Peru would never advance.Footnote ⁸³

The political clamor caused by the incident made it inevitable for departmental authorities to investigate it, and while it does seem that none of the authorities who participated in the episode were punished, all of those involved were called in for questioning.Footnote ⁸⁴ As the police reports included numerous testimonies from both converts and local authorities, they provide a glimpse into the tense relationship between the parties and also reveal the self-perceptions of the Seventh-day Adventist neophyte. Camacho explains:

Camacho spoke those words during the interrogation, drawing a portrait of converted Indians: they abjure Catholic festivals and worship a true God, they study the Gospel, refrain from coca and alcohol, adopt new medical and hygienic practices, and undergo personal regeneration. Becoming a Seventh-day Adventist, therefore, involved what one no longer did at least as much as it did what one had begun to practice.

One of the most important indicators of personal regeneration may well have been converts’ abstention from the consumption of coca and alcohol, and from participation in local fiestas. Coca and alcohol had a history that stretched back to pre-Inca times, often serving as offerings to the gods (or later to God and the saints) and functioning as a gateway to the supernatural world.Footnote ⁸⁶ They also had important earthly functions and were essential in the formation of social networks and reciprocal relationships. As anthropologist Catherine Allen has written, “Hallpay (coca chewing), carries a way of life with it. To do hallpay properly, according to traditional ceremony, is to be Runa[indigenous, rural and Quechua- speaking] … To chew coca leaves is to affirm the attitudes and values … that are characteristic of indigenous Andean culture.”Footnote ⁸⁷

By refraining from these practices, Adventist converts chose to exclude themselves from a significant part of indigenous culture, which in turn prompts a question. If chewing coca or dancing drunk in a fiesta was among the parameters that defined an Indian as such, how could someone avoiding these practices still be considered an Indian?Footnote ⁸⁸ It is for this reason that Camacho goes beyond simply stating that Adventists “abjure fiestas” and deprecates fiestas by adding that they “have been reduced among Indians to the payment of large sums to the priests and to the worship of an invented God.” From his perspective, fiestas have been drained of their deep cultural meaning and their varied and extensive social functions, becoming an empty mechanism implemented by greedy priests who had invented a god with the sole purpose of exploiting Indians and profiting from them. In this context, coca and alcohol lost their function as methods to approach divinity or extend social connections, and thus their sacred meanings. Instead, the consumption of coca and alcohol had turned into vices that stood in the way of harmony with God and with other men. Therefore, rejecting coca and alcohol—and the context in which they were consumed—did not amount to a rejection of indigenous culture but became a way to resist exploitation.

Similarly, the Adventist Church fostered alternative discourses that helped to mitigate tensions arising from contradictions between the veterans’ self-proclaimed Indian identity and the mestizo characteristics they had adopted. The issue of veterans’ clothing speaks to this point. Influenced by the health reform movement in the United States, the Adventist Church vigorously promoted ideas about health and healthy living.Footnote ⁸⁹ Missionaries, believing that Indians knew little about personal hygiene, taught them how to wash their faces with soap in the first school session.Footnote ⁹⁰ Endless comments were made about the filth in which Indians lived. Even converts themselves pointed to cleanliness as one of the qualities that separated them from their surroundings.Footnote ⁹¹

Yet, hygiene turned out to be more than a way to distinguish between converts and their neighbors: it became an alternative discourse that emphasized qualities such as cleanliness over style of dress. Rather than having a clear dress code for services, missionaries emphasized Adventists’ hygienic state, turning the cleanliness of clothing into a rule by which to abide. One missionary reported that “when they came to meeting on the Sabbath, many were dressed in clean or new clothes, while others were careful to tell us that they too would soon have new clothes, but they had not finished making them.”Footnote ⁹²

The Adventists’ attitude should not be taken for granted or seen as an obvious or singular method to attract converts. Missions across the world often had an established policy towards indigenous clothing. In some places, missionaries encouraged natives to adopt European clothing, since they saw it as part of their larger “civilizing mission.” In other places missionaries aimed to construct clear and always visible boundaries between themselves and the natives they had come to convert. As a result, in these missions, natives were forbidden to dress in European clothes.Footnote ⁹³ The Adventists in Puno, however, played down differences in wardrobe, diminishing their importance as a racial marker.

It was not that the Adventist Church was free of prejudice or US-centric attitudes with regard to indigenous traditional clothing. For example, in describing converts’ traditional Indian attire, missionaries were inclined to emphasize that their traditional clothes were spotless, a quality that was not mentioned with regard to Western clothing.Footnote ⁹⁴ In other words, it seems that European clothes were in themselves imbued with the quality of cleanliness, while indigenous dress, and the Indians who wore these clothes, were in need of purification. Yet, once “purification” took place and clothes met the necessary standard, indigenous dress was considered appropriate. Notwithstanding the obvious European/North American attitude of superiority, hygiene had become a way of discussing and judging appearances without invoking the strict racial implications that usually accompanied dress in the Andes.

Similarly, within the walls of Adventist churches, neophytes and missionaries were slowly disentangling the strong bonds between language and race. First, the Adventists provided translations to Aymara or Quechua, turning indigenous languages into an integral part of the church's formal life. In fact, missionaries took pride in their ability to speak these languages, boasting about disseminating the church's message in the vernacular.Footnote ⁹⁵ Accordingly, the Aymara and Quechua languages received an official recognition never granted to them by the Catholic Church or state institutions. Second, the meaning of the Spanish language as a social marker changed: rather than distinguishing mestizos from Indians as it did in Andean society at large, it helped determine which followers were ready for baptism. As was the case in other Protestant denominations, conversion to Seventh-day Adventism required the ability to read the Scriptures. Learning Spanish became a religious requirement and was associated with the long process of conversion rather than one of racial transformation. Instead of turning Indians into mestizos, the Spanish language helped turn Catholics into Seventh-day Adventists.

In this context, it is important to note that the racial reconstruction that was taking place under the auspices of the Adventists was conditioned by gender. Methodological restraints, most conspicuously those inherent in primary sources, make it extremely difficult to study women converts in the Adventist Church's early years.Footnote ⁹⁶ Yet, the few testimonies that I have been able to locate indicate, unsurprisingly, that Adventist women did not have the same options and opportunities as men. More specifically, while men were busy reshaping the meaning of Indian-ness, women were confined to much more traditional and hegemonic racial notions. For example, in a 1922 article published in the Adventist journal Youth Instructor, Gussie Field- Colburn, a missionary's wife laboring in Puno, reported that boys were “quick to acquire ‘white dress and manners’” but that girls accepted these changes at a much slower pace, if at all.Footnote ⁹⁷ Colburn is also explicit about why this might be, bluntly stating that “while the man has been in slavery to a conquering nation, his wife has been in slavery to him.” Notwithstanding the implicit US or Eurocentric attitude tainting Colburn's vision of native women, her observation accurately reflects the connection between race and gender in the Andes.Footnote ⁹⁸ Indian women were, as Marisol de la Cadena argues, “the last link in the chain of social subordination,” since they were subordinated to their husbands who were themselves subordinated to both male and female mestizos.Footnote ⁹⁹ Consequently, for indigenous men to sustain their dominance over women in the household and the community, those women had to be racially inferior, or “more Indian,” than themselves.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Conversion did not bring about a sudden or quick change in patriarchal ideologies. Veterans who joined the Adventist Church may have been vocal about their right to acquire the “mestizo” intellectual and cultural capital that enabled social mobility, but they were not necessarily willing to give up their own privileges and areas of dominance. Hence, Adventist women not only continued to wear traditional “Indian” clothing, but they were also much less educated. In schools with 50 to 100 students, only a handful of the students were girls and they were often ignored by male Indian teachers.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Other testimonies describe how, during sermons or other church meetings, male converts would sit on benches or stones while the women sat on the ground.Footnote ¹⁰² Distance from the earth, Benjamin Orlove notes, was an important factor in the “making” of Indians or mestizos. Indians, in this context, were those who were physically closer to the earth.Footnote ¹⁰³

Furthermore, through female Indian-ness, male converts were able to manifest their connection to the community and affirm an Indian identity despite their apparent mestizo appearance. Indian men could confront the idea that they no longer fully belonged to an Indian community by having Indian wives—in the traditional and hegemonic sense of the word “Indian”—and raising Indian daughters. As these women manifested their connection to the Indian community and the indigenous past, they relieved men in part of the need to do so. Consequently, a man could be an Indian without paying the full cost of Indian-ness (that is, Spanish illiteracy or the lack of cultural capital that enabled social mobility).

Sources provide little insight about veterans’ perceptions of their own conversions. Yet there are a few moments when Manuel Camacho, together with a few other converts, addresses the topic, mentioning that they had adopted the “path to redemption” or were engaged in “regeneration.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Redemption and regeneration have long been central ideas in both Catholic and Protestant Christian theologies of salvation, and their meanings vary according to time and place.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Specifically, for the Adventist Aymara in Puno, these terms became synonymous with a group of practices that included alphabetization, new hygienic practices, abstention from coca and alcohol, and even the use of modern medicine.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In fact, it appears that the term had become part of the converts’ daily discourse and that they used it against Catholic Indians, calling them “degenerate,” because they had not undergone the same changes.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Regeneration, therefore, pointed to the very same cultural practices associated at the time with mestizaje. In this sense Adventism was an alternative discourse to that of mestizaje and a way to resist it. In fact, even the semiotics and morphology of terms such as “regeneration,” “redemption,” and “rehabilitation” contrasted with the idea of evolutionary mestizaje. Beginning with the prefix “re-” these concepts signify ‘restoration,’ that is the bringing back of something or someone to its former state, rather than a gradual development from a low stage to a higher one. From this perspective, the answer to the Indians’ dire state should not be sought in the future, looking toward their transformation into mestizos (as some indigenista intellectuals may have thought), but in the past, as they would return to being what they had once been. In this regard, these concepts also contrast with the modernist idea of linear development.

Such a discourse corresponded to deep millenarian and utopian currents prevalent in the Andes and was far from being a unique feature of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ However, it had an important advantage for converts, as it allowed them to embed new habits within a traditional framework, presenting them as continuity rather than as novelty. From the Adventists' perspective, the Catholic Church and Catholic Indians had broken away from the past by following the degenerate Catholic customs.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ By converting to Adventism, veterans were simply purifying Christianity of contamination, reviving the Indian who had fallen into decline, and restoring his pride and past glory. Paradoxically, returning to an authentic, unimpaired state of Indian grandeur involved learning Spanish and dressing in European clothing.

Conversion, therefore, was an interpretative paradigm that altered meanings, rearranged priorities, and changed the focus of attention. It gave veterans a way out of the conundrum in which they were entangled: how to act like a mestizo while remaining an Indian. Or, to put it differently, how to incorporate certain cultural traits that were associated with mestizos and also essential for upward mobility, without delegitimizing themselves as Indians. Through the interpretative paradigm of conversion, veterans were able to resist the view according to which learning Spanish stood in direct contrast to being an Indian, since an Indian was necessarily illiterate, rural, and traditional. It also allowed them to resist the notion that obtaining cultural capital, which enabled social mobility, alienated them from their social, cultural, and genealogical roots by turning them into mestizos. However, redefining the meaning of “Indian-ness,” and proposing a new way to conceptualize and discuss these changes, were not in and of themselves sufficient to achieve social and political mobility. To achieve that goal, veterans had to find ways of exchanging their cultural capital for economic viability and political power, The Seventh-day Adventist Church helped them do so.

Political and Economic Aspects of Conversion

Under the auspices of the missionaries, and based on their knowledge of the mestizo world, converts established new paths for economic and political mobility. In this regard, conversion also offered a solution, albeit partial, to the economic and political difficulties that plagued veterans’ efforts to reintegrate and left them at the margins of the community. In the Indian communities, politics was essentially “done” through reciprocal relationships, and one's political influence extended as far as his social networks carried him. Such relationships were built over time and through various daily interactions. For some veterans, the long absence from the community also resulted in a lack of social and political patronage and clientele.

Missionaries stepped into this void, offering veterans an alternative means of social and political outreach that could serve as a counterforce to the local authorities. As aforementioned, Adventist missionaries enjoyed the support of liberal elites in Lima who believed that Protestantism was much more progressive than Catholicism. Specifically, Seventh-day Adventists were able to recruit some important allies from various social and political arenas. Among them were men such as the Puno indigenista José Antonio Encinas, the Cusco intellectual Luis Valcárcel, and numerous politicians and journalists who believed that these missionaries offered a solution to the “Indian question.” Missionaries were not shy about enlisting supporters to promote and protect the missions’ interests and those of their converts. Therefore, by converting and forging relationships with missionaries, veterans were able to create alternative social networks and to compensate, at least to a degree, for relationships they did not have.

To be clear, it was not that Indians were completely dependent on missionaries, or that they were incapable of forging long-term relationships or strategic alliances without them. For years, Indians had been advocating for accessible education and demanding better treatment from local authorities; they had commissioned the help of liberal politicians and intellectuals long before the Adventists arrived in Puno.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Nevertheless, the missionaries were foreign white men who lived among Indians and intervened on their behalf regularly. Considering Andean racial politics, this was an important advantage, and a rare one. After all, even the most progressive indigenista did not consider moving into an Indian's home—as US-born Adventist missionary Ferdinand Stahl had done.Footnote ¹¹¹ Stahl often used the advantages ensuing from his race and nationality to protect and promote the interests of converts. For example, on occasion he threatened to involve the US embassy if Adventist Indians were not given their rights. Footnote ¹¹² In this sense, Stahl negotiated and intervened on behalf of “his” converts in the same manner that hacienda owners did for “their” Indians.

Similarly, the Adventist Church enabled veterans to create and maintain new patronage networks. The Adventist classroom was the main space in which these reciprocal relationships were established. In exchange for the teacher's knowledge and education, students and their families were expected to build a school and home for the teacher, as well as show respect and contribute to various church activities.Footnote ¹¹³ Personal relationships between teachers and students seemed at times to resemble compadrazgo as students entered into a lifelong commitment towards their teachers.Footnote ¹¹⁴ For example, Luciano Chambi, who would become a leading missionary, describes the various ways in which he expressed his gratitude toward Manuel Camacho, who had taught him to read and write.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Interestingly, in the same testimony Chambi recalls that his father paid Camacho for these lessons. Chambi's testimony highlights how an economy based on paid services did not supplant traditional forms of reciprocity. Respect, and the social ties that were embedded in these relationships, were still a crucial part of how one established authority.

The fact that these relationships were forged within a religious framework was also significant. Reciprocal relationships were legitimated through a series of Catholic rites. The Seventh-day Adventist Church, in this regard, served as an alternative source of legitimation in a social and cultural environment where religion and politics were tenaciously tied to each other. By the same token, Adventism offered an alternative to the politico-religious system that governed Indian communities—in Adventism's social hierarchy, greater fluency in Spanish and the ability to “move” between worlds also translated into positions of leadership. In this sense, veterans were able to turn the cultural capital they had already accumulated on the coast into political capital in their communities, without performing the onerous duties that were required for entry into the Indian politico-religious system. Thus, conversion offered a solution for those who aspired to leadership positions but found themselves marginalized.

Finally, the fact that the church offered access to new kinds of careers should not be overlooked. As I have argued, reintegration into the rural economy, in the apogee of capitalist penetration and competition over natural resources, was one of the greatest challenges that veterans faced. However, it was also during this period that Indians were demanding education in increasing numbers. Indian delegations from across the Andes had set out for the nation's capital to petition that schools be built in local communities.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In 1903, the civilista government launched an educational reform to centralize the educational system under the auspices of a ministry of education. This centralization aimed to bring about a more balanced and equal allocation of resources that would provide education for larger sectors of the population.

Nevertheless, its success was partial at best, as Peru's educational system remained highly unequal and inaccessible to Indians.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The fact was that the progressive elements within the government did not have the power to overcome objection from the ranks of the conservatives or the sierra landlords. The state's incompetence opened the door for individual, extra-official initiatives to satisfy some of the demand for education. Yet, without strong institutional support these schools had little chance of surviving, and ended up closing their doors due to the inability to secure teachers’ salaries, the lack of educational materials, and further pedagogical training for teachers.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The Seventh-day Adventist Church filled part of the vacuum left by the state. It provided Indian teachers with training, supplies, a steady salary, and considerable protection. Furthermore, the church offered additional opportunities for social mobility in opening positions for translators and, eventually even for missionaries and heads of mission stations, schools, and clinics.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Adventism thus opened opportunities for a “professionalized” career in which income and social status did not depend on ownership of natural resources, or access to them. In this sense, it contributed to dissociating the condition of being “peasant” and from being “Indian” in the same way that it disassociated the Spanish language from other cultural traits linked to mestizo-ness. If, as Marisol de la Cadena demonstrates, mestizos could be “indigenous,” then within the boundaries of the church, Indians could be “mestizo-ized” without actually becoming mestizos.Footnote ¹²⁰ At the same time, conversion also emphasized the strength of Christianity. One Christian ideology, as it appears, could be replaced only with another Christian ideology. Hence, rather than completely breaking from the past, conversion to Seventh-day Adventism manifested both change and continuity, as it brought about important changes that were linked to an existing Christian world view.