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Food, Race and Working-Class Identity: Restaurantes Populares and Populism in 1930s Peru1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Paulo Drinot
Paulo Drinot*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
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Extract

… And tell me, which President looked to the future? It was, believe it or not, [Sánchez] Cerro. I fully recognize that he was able to look to the future and … he grabbed the rich [by the neck] and took part of their wealth, you there [he said], you’re going to give me potatoes, you’re going to give me yucca, you’re going to give me sweet potatoes, he told them, to feed the poor neighborhoods, you bring me rice, meat, you tell me you have five hundred cows, well then, kill only five cows, otherwise, slash-slash, I’m going to snuff you too, and then, no!, you have to do what Nine-Fingers [Sánchez Cerro—who lost one of his fingers during a military uprising] says. He was a strange president. What did he do? He’d bring out the military officers, the soldiers, [and he would say] you here, you’re going to cook, and he’d go off with the trucks to the poor neighborhoods with the food, all ready to eat, the people should not be dying of hunger he would say, but he saw that that too was indecent, so he built the comedores populares [sic]. Who inaugurated them? One-eyed Oscar R. Benavides, but who started them? [Sánchez] Cerro [my emphasis].

This article examines the creation, in the 1930s, of restaurants, known as restaurantes populares, which were funded and run by the Peruvian state in order to “solve the urgent problem of [the provision of] easy, comfortable and healthy nutrition to the popular classes.”

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , October 2005 , pp. 245 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2005

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Footnotes

1

I am grateful Jelke Boesten and to two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions. I also wish to acknowledge the financial assistance provided by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust, which made possible the research upon which this article is based. Abbreviations used in the footnotes: Archivo General de la Nación (Lima)/Ministerio de Interior (AGN/MI); Archivo General de la Nación (Lima)/Prefectura de Lima (AGN/PL); Public Record Office/ Foreign Office Papers (PRO/FO).

References

2 Testimony of Delgado, Andrés in Taller de Testimonio, Habla la ciudad (Lima: Municipalidad de Lima Metropolitana/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1986), pp. 25–26 Google Scholar. My translation.

3 AGN/MI/327/Particulares, Comisión Ejecutiva de los Restaurantes Populares to Director de Gobierno, 17 June 1932.

4 See Deustua, José and Galindo, Alberto Flores, Los comunistas y el movimiento obrero, in Galindo, Alberto Flores, Obras Completas I (Lima: SUR, 1993 [1977])Google Scholar; Caravedo, Baltazar, Clases, lucha política y gobierno en Perú 1919-1933 (Lima: Retama Editorial, 1977)Google Scholar; Quijano, Aníbal, El Perú en la crisis de los años treinta (Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1985 [1978])Google Scholar; Balbi, Carmen Rosa, El Partido Comunista y el APRA en la crisis revolucionaria de los años treinta (Lima: G. Herrera, 1980)Google Scholar; Anderle, Adám, Los movimientos políticos en el Perú entre las dos guerras mundiales (Havana: Casa de las Americas, 1985)Google Scholar; and Pflücker, Piedad Pareja, El movimiento obrero peruano de los años 30 (Lima: Fundación Friedrich Ebert, 1985)Google Scholar. For a study that focuses on the personal appeal of populist leaders, see Stein, Steve, Populism in Peru: The Emergence of the Masses and the Politics of Social Control (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

5 PRO/FO 371/19800, Wilson to Eden, 21 April 1936. Denis Sulmont has called the social measures of the 1930s “right-wing populism.” Baltazar Caravedo sees the measures as a product of a “neutraliz ing alliance” between the state and a new industrial bourgeoisie. Julio Cotler views the measures as a way of “undermining the citizenship’s support for APRA.” Adam Anderle stresses the “political dividends” that resulted from the measures. See Sulmont, Denis, El movimiento obrero peruano en el Perú, 1900-1950 (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1975), pp. 167–169 Google Scholar; Molinari, Baltazar Caravedo, Burguesía e industria en el Perú, 1933-1945 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1976), p. 129–131 Google Scholar; Cotler, Julio, Clases, estado y nación en el Perú (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1992 [1978]), p. 252 Google Scholar; Anderle, Adám, Los movimientos políticos, p. 284 Google Scholar.

6 See, among others, Pareja, Piedad, Anarquismo y sindicalismo en el Perú (Lima: Ediciones Rikchay Perú, 1978)Google Scholar; Blanchard, Peter, The Origins of the Peruvian Labor Movement, 1883-1919 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Stein, Steve, ed., Lima obrera, 1900-1930, 2 volumes (Lima: Ediciones El Virrey, 1986-1987)Google Scholar; Portocarrero, Julio, Sindicalismo peruano, primera etapa 1911-1930 (Lima: Editorial Gráfica Labor, 1987)Google Scholar; Tejada, Luis, La cuestión del pan: el anarcosindicalismo en el Perú (Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura/Banco Industrial del Perú, 1988)Google Scholar; and Sanborn, Cynthia, “Los obreros textiles de Lima: Redes sociales y organización laboral 1900-1930” in Panficht, Aldo and Portocarrero, Felipe, eds., Mundos interiores: Lima 1850-1950 (Lima: Universidad del Pacífico, 1995), pp. 187–215 Google Scholar.

7 For a similar point, in different geographical contexts, see Lesser, Jeffrey, Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, especially chapter 2; and Rénique, Gerardo, “Race, Region, and Nation: Sonora’s Anti-Chinese Racism and Mexico’s Postrevolutionary Nationalism, 1920s-1930s” in Appelbaum, Nancy P., Macpherson, Anne S., and Rosemblatt, Karin Alejandra, eds., Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 211–236 Google Scholar.

8 In this sense, this article seeks to contribute to an ongoing reassessment of the history of labor and the “populist” state in Latin America pioneered in studies such as James, Daniel, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946-1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; French, John D., The Brazilian Workers’ ABC: Class Conflicts and Alliances in Modern Sao Paulo (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Weinstein, Barbara, For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paulo, 1920-1964 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Klubock, Thomas Miller, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Temente Copper Mine, 1904-1951 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Rosemblatt, Karin, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920-1955 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), among othersGoogle Scholar.

9 For a pioneering work in the Latin American context, see Pilcher, Jeffrey M., ¡Que vivan los tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

10 Quoted in Belasco, Warren, “Food Matters: Perspectives on an Emerging Field,” in Belasco, Warren and Scranton, Philip, eds., Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 2 Google Scholar. Of course, philosophers, psychoanalysts, sociologists and anthropologists have studied the interconnection between food and culture for some time now. For a sample of such studies, see the essays in Counihan, Carole and Van Esterik, Penny, eds., Food and Culture: A Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1997)Google Scholar. An early interpretation of the socializing and identity-conferring power of food and eating was formulated by Georg Simmel, who noted in 1910 that “communal eating and drinking, which can even transform a mortal enemy into a friend for the Arab allows us to overlook that one is not eating and drinking ‘the same thing’ at all, but rather totally exclusive portions, and gives rise to the primitive notion that one is thereby creating common flesh and blood.” See Simmel, Georg, “Sociology of the Meal,” in Frisby, David and Featherstone, Mike, eds., Simmel on Culture (London: Sage Publications, 1997), p. 131 Google Scholar.

11 Bauer, Arnold J., Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 194 Google Scholar.

12 As historian Malcolm Deas once pointed out with characteristic wit, Northern Ireland is as fragmented a society as one is likely to find, yet one would be hard pressed to infer this from sampling its cuisine. Malcolm Deas, comment at a seminar, Latin American Centre, University of Oxford, c. 2000.

13 The events are studied in detail in Blanchard, Peter, The Origins of the Peruvian Labor Movement, 1883-1919 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. In the late 1970s, Rosemary Thorp and Geoffrey Bertram challenged the widely held belief that increases in food prices were linked to the expansion of export crops such as cotton and sugar, by arguing that the land devoted to foodstuffs remained constant during the first decades of the twentieth century. More recently, Augusto Ruiz Zevallos has suggested that previously unexamined sources confirm that the percentage of land devoted to foodstuffs fell in the period. See Thorp, Rosemary and Bertram, Geoffrey, Peru 1890-1977: Growth & Policy in an Open Economy (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Zevallos, Augusto Ruiz, La multitud, las subsistencias y el trabajo. Lima, 1890-1920 (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2001)Google Scholar.

14 Zevallos, Ruiz, La multitud, p. 213 Google Scholar.

15 Zevallos, Ruiz, La multitud, pp. 207–09 Google Scholar.

16 See, for example, Levano, Cesar, La verdadera historia de las 8 horas: una epopeya heroica de la clase obrera peruana (Lima: s.n., 1964)Google Scholar and Parker, David S., “Peruvian Politics and the Eight-Hour Day: Rethinking the General Strike,” Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire 30 (1995), pp. 417–38 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Peloso, Vincent, “Succulence and Sustenance: Region, Class and Diet in Nineteenth-Century Peru,” in Super, J. C. and Wright, T. C., Food, Politics and Society in Latin America (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), pp. 54–59 Google Scholar.

18 Ruiz Zevallos, La multitud, p. 150.

19 La Razón, 10 May 1919, cited in Ruiz Zevallos, La multitud, p. 162.

20 Horowitz, Roger, Pilcher, Jeffrey M., and Watts, Sydney, “Meat for the Multitudes: Market Culture in Paris, New York City and Mexico City over the Long Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 109:4 (October 2004), p. 1059 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 On anti-Asian racism see, McKeown, Adam, “Inmigración china al Perú: Exclusión y negociación,” in Histórica XX: 1 (July 1996), pp. 59–92 Google Scholar; Fukumoto, Mary, Hacia un nuevo sol: Japoneses y sus descendientes en el Perú (Lima: Asociación Peruano Japonesa del Perú, 1997)Google Scholar; Pastor, Humberto Rodríguez, Herederos del Dragón: historia de la comunidad china en el Perú (Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2000)Google Scholar; and Bracamonte, Jorge, “La modernidad de los subalternos: Los inmigrantes chinos en la ciudad de Lima, 1895-1930,” in Maguiña, Santiago López et al., Estudios culturales: Discursos, poderes, pulsiones (Lima: Red para el desarrollo de las ciencias sociales en el Perú, 2001), pp. 167–88 Google Scholar.

22 Although, naturally, not all members of the Lima working class espoused racist views of Asians (as I show here, anarchist workers explicitly rejected the racism), there is considerable evidence that such feelings were widespread among urban workers in Lima. On the role played by racism in articulating social hierarchies in early twentieth-century Peru, see, among others, Portocarrero, Gonzalo, ‘El fundamento invisible: Función y lugar de las ideas racistas en la República Aristocrática’, in Aldo Panfichi and Felipe Portocarrero, eds., Mundos interiores: Lima 1850-1950 (Lima: Universidad del Pacífico, 1995), pp. 219–59 Google Scholar; Manrique, Nelson, La piel y la pluma: Escritos sobre literatura, etnicidad y racismo (Lima: SUR, 1999)Google Scholar and Poole, Deborah, Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

23 El Obrero Textil, 6 December 1919.

24 El Obrero Textil, 13 January 1920.

25 Los Parias, Año VI No 48, June 1909.

26 As another article noted: “especially in Lima, poverty would be all that much greater were it not for the Chinese traders, who, sober and content with little gain, sell cheap goods, making them accessible to the poorest of all.” Los Parias, Año IV No 43, September 1908. Abelardo Gamarra penned a description of one of the Chinese ‘fondas’ in 1907: “a single Chinaman serves two hundred patrons and from a whole street away one can hear his beckoning call, rice on its own, meat with rice, steak, pudding [‘aló solo, cane con aló, cane sola, bite, dulce requesón’]. One can see the throng of people coming and going, hardly sitting down, fed in one minute. Dishes are set down and taken way and everything is presented [to the costumer]: the menu, the bread, the tea, all is presented as if moved by a spring.” Quoted in Cabrejo, Fanni Muñoz, Diversiones públicas en Lima, 1890-1920: La experiencia de la modernidad (Lima: Red para el desarrollo de las ciencias sociales en el Perú, 2001), p. 168 Google Scholar. On the development of Chinese restaurants, or chifas, as they are known in Peru, see Pastor, Rodriguez, Herederos del Dragón, pp. 213–266 Google Scholar.

27 On the association of Chinese immigrants and disease, see Pastor, Humberto Rodríguez, “La calle del Capón, el callejón Otaiza y el barrio chino” in Panfichi and Portocarrero, Mundos interiores, pp. 397–430 Google Scholar; and Cueto, Marcos, El regreso de las epidemias: Salud y sociedad en el Perú del siglo XX (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1997)Google Scholar, esp. Chapter l.

28 El Comercio, 31 January 1901 (evening edition).

29 El Comercio, 12 July 1901 (evening). This theme was reworked regularly in the press in the 1900s. As Fanni Muñoz notes, “in several issues of the magazine Fray K. Bezón, edited by the progressive and liberal Francisco A. Loayza and published from 1907, one can find several caricatures that ironically portray the lack of cleanliness of the Chinese. One can see images of food prepared in Chinese restaurants made with rat, cat and dog meat. The Chinese are presented as rachitic persons with long hair, dirty nails and a sinister gaze.” Muñoz, , Diversiones públicas en Lima, pp. 168–169 Google Scholar.

30 Bedoya, A., “Balance Alimenticio de Lima, Callao, y Balnearios” in Revista Médica Peruana XIV: 158 (February 1942), p. 54 Google Scholar.

31 See Palacios, Leoncio M., Encuesta sobre presupuestos familiares obreros realizada en la ciudad de Lima, en 1940 (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1944)Google Scholar.

32 Derpich, Wilma, Huiza, José Luis and Israel, Cecilia, Lima años 30, salarios y costo de vida de la clase trabajadora (Lima: Fundación Friedrich Ebert, 1985), p. 52 Google Scholar.

33 Palacios, , Encuesta, pp. 168–69, p. 192Google Scholar.

34 Bedoya, A., “Balance Alimenticio de Lima, Callao, y Balnearios” in Revista Médica Peruana XIV: 158 (February 1942), p. 54 Google Scholar.

35 As was the case in May 1909, when a mob of hundreds of urban workers attacked Chinese businesses and individuals in the city. See Zevallos, Ruiz, La multitud, pp. 103–21 Google Scholar.

36 This is not to say that the food prepared in Asian restaurants was necessarily healthy or nutritious. It is likely that in many cases it was not. But then, it was also probably no more unhealthy or innutritious than that offered in restaurants owned by Peruvians.

37 State-run restaurants were a feature of other political projects in the early twentieth century, including Bolshevism. See Borrero, Mauricio, “Food and the Politics of Scarcity in Urban Soviet Russia, 1917-1941,” in Belasco, Warren and Scranton, Philip, eds., Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 258–76 Google Scholar.

38 To get a sense of the value that this represented, we may consider the fact that according to a 1938 menu from Santiago Cordova’s “Restaurant El Morro Solar” in Chorrillos 0.30 soles bought a costumer a single dish of steak and rice, whereas a costumer in the Restaurante Popular would get a full three course meal for the same amount. “Menú del día,” 9 November 1938, Restaurante el Morro Solar (Lima: Librería e Imprenta El Misti, 1938)Google Scholar.

39 Ugarteche, Pedro, Sánchez Cerro: Papeles y recuerdos de un presidente del Perú, v. IV (Lima: Editorial Universitaria, 1969), pp. 31–6 Google Scholar.

40 Perú, , Ministerio de Salud Pública, Trabajo y Previsión Social, Dirección de Previsión Social, Acción social del estado en el Perú (Lima: s.n., 1938), p. 6 Google Scholar. These restaurants were aimed at obreros, or blue-collar workers. A white-collar restaurant was created in the early 1940s but its existence was short-lived in part because empleados, white-collar workers, resented the fact that blue-collar workers also made use of the restaurant. See Parker, David S., The Idea of the Middle Class: While-Collar Workers and Peruvian Society, 1900-1950 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p. 205 Google Scholar. It is likely however, that poorer empleados made use of the obrero restaurants on a regular basis.

41 [ Gerbi, Antonello], El Perú en marcha: Ensayo de geografía económica (Lima: Banco Italiano-Lima, 1941), p. 305 Google Scholar.

42 Quoted in Junta Departamental de Lima Pro-Desocupados, Memoria del 1 de enero de 1935 al 31 de diciembre de 1936 (Lima, 1936), p. xlviii.Google Scholar

43 See Junta Departamental de Lima Pro-Desocupados, Memoria del l de enero de 1942 al 31 de diciembre de 1944 (Lima, 1946), p. 5 Google Scholar.

44 Quoted in Soria, José Ignacio López, El pensamiento fascista (Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1981), p. 101 Google Scholar.

45 This rhetoric was clearly inspired by Italian corporatism, but, as Orazio Ciccarelli has shown, Benavides “obviously had no intellectual commitment to fascism” in contrast to what contemporary critics claimed and some historians sustain. See Ciccarelli, Orazio, “Fascism and Politics during the Benavides Regime, 1933-1939: The Italian Perspective,” Hispanic American Historical Review 70:3 (1990), p. 432 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although wrapped in a corporatist discourse, the rhetoric, and the policies that derived from it, was more likely a pragmatic response to the economic and political circumstances that Benavides encountered when he rose to power.

46 “Mensaje presentado al Congreso del Perú por el Sr. General de División Oscar R. Benavides, Presidente Constitutional de la República, 1939,” quoted in y Estenos, Roberto Mac-Lean, Sociología del Perú (Mexico: UNAM, 1959), p. 160 Google Scholar.

47 State capacity is understood as “the ability of the state to affect society, which in turn implies an ability to collect information, to influence people, and to control resources.” See Alan Knight, “The Modern Mexican State: Theory and Practice” in Miguel Angel Centeno and López-Alves, Fernando, The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 214–215 Google Scholar.

48 See Werlich, David P., Peru: A Short History (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), pp. 201–220 Google Scholar; Klaren, Peter F., Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 276–281 Google Scholar.

49 Populism is, of course, a debated concept. For a useful conceptual discussion, see Knight, Alan, “Populism and Neo-Populism in Latin America, especially Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 30:2(1998), pp. 223–248 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 La Tribuna, 31 May 1931.

51 Portocarrero, Gonzalo, De Bustamante a Odria: El fracaso del Frente Democratico Nacional, 1945-1950 (Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1983), p. 49 Google Scholar.

52 AGN/PL/3.9.5.1.15.1.16.56, ‘Partido Aprista Peruano, Cooperativa de Comedores, Economía del Comedor, N. 9’ [15 October 1934].

53 AGN/PL/3.9.5.1.15.1.16.56, “Partido Aprista Peruano, Cooperativa de Comedores, Economía de Comedor, N. 9” [15 October 1934].

54 On “incorporation,” see Collier, Ruth Berins and Collier, David, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

55 The success of the restaurantes populares can perhaps be gauged from the fact that in the cam paign for the 1936 presidential election, which was cancelled by Benavides, the Union Revolucionaria called for a further expansion of the state’s role in overseeing public nutrition and for an expansion in the number of restaurantes populares: “We want a strictly supervised public nutrition; the prohibition of excessive speculation and profit associative with the sale of foodstuffs; severe penalties for those who adulterate food; the Public Nutrition Agency [Dirección de Alimentación Pública], to be given sufficient power to take control of the production, transport, and commercialization of foodstuffs; and the large-scale expansion of restaurantes populares, milk programs, and school refectories.” Boletín del Partido Unión Revolucionaria (Abancay), No. 1, August 1936.

56 La Voz del Obrero, No. 19, 19 May 1937.

57 Peru, , Ministerio de Salud Pública, Trabajo y Previsión Social, Dirección de Previsión Social, Acción social del estado en el Perú (Lima: s.n., 1938), p. 6 Google Scholar.

58 See, in particular, James, Resistance and Integration and French, The Brazilian Workers’ ABC.

59 James, , Resistance and Integration, p. 25 Google Scholar.

60 James, , Resistance and Integration, p. 263 Google Scholar.

61 James, , Resistance and Integration, p. 39 Google Scholar.

62 James, , Resistance and Integration, p. 34 Google Scholar.

63 La Voz del Obrero, No. 19, 19 May 1937.

64 Available sources say little about who were the ideological architects of the restaurants, although what evidence exists suggests that Edgardo Rebagliati, a lawyer who played a central role in the creation of Peru’s social security system, was a key figure. Along with Manuel B. Llosa, Peru’s foreign minister, Rebagliati co-signed the introduction to the book.

65 This may have had some results. In 1937, the Chilean National Nutrition Council established restaurantes populares with identical goals to the Peruvian restaurants. See Huneeus, Carlos and Lanas, María Paz, “Ciencia Política e historia: Eduardo Cruz-Coke y el estado de bienestar en Chile, 1937-1938,” Historia (Santiago), vol. 35 (2002), pp.151–186 Google Scholar.

66 As such, they represented a local example of worldwide development in the early twentieth century: the growth of food and nutrition science and the increasing role of the state in regulating the production and commercialization of food. See Smith, David F. and Phillips, Jim, eds., Food, Science, Policy and Regulation: International and Comparative Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar.

67 See Parker, David S., “Civilizing the City of Kings: Hygiene and Housing in Lima, Peru,” in Pineo, Ronn and Baer., James A. eds., Cities of Hope: People, Protests, and Progress in Urbanizing Latin America, 1870-1930 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), pp. 153–178 Google Scholar.

68 On the influence of neo-Lamarckian eugenics in Latin America, see Stepan, Nancy Leys, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

69 Parker, “Civilizing the City of Kings.” On the association between public health and the civilizing impulse of modernizing elites, see also Cueto, Marcos, El regreso de las epidemias: Salud y sociedad en el Perú del siglo XX (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1997)Google Scholar; and, for the nineteenth century, Lossio, Jorge, Acequias y gallinazos: Salud ambiental en Lima del siglo XIX (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2003)Google Scholar. On housing policy, see Crupi, Thomas, “Nation Divided, City Divided: Urbanism and its Relation to the State, 1920-1940,” in Proyecto Historia Uni, ed., Construyendo el Perú II: Aportes de ingenieros y arquitectos (Lima: Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería, 2001), pp. 155–177 Google Scholar.

70 Lack of space prevents a discussion of the gendered dimension of the conferment of values in the restaurantes populares. However, the presence of “family only” dining areas and the provision of free meals to children suggest that the intellectual architects of the restaurants also hoped to contribute to strengthening traditional gender roles and to the state’s maternalist policies. On maternalist policies in this period, see Mannarelli, María Emma, Limpias y modernas: Genero, higiene y cultura en la Lima del novecientos (Lima: Ediciones Flora Tristan, 1999)Google Scholar.

71 This raises the question of whether this was what the architects of the restaurantes populares had intended in the first place. I believe that this is unlikely. It would have required a degree of intellectual sophistication (and cunning) in matters related to working-class identity that was uncharacteristic of the time.

72 La Voz del Obrero, No. 19, 19 May 1937. Note the change in stress from Chinese to Japanese restaurants, a reflection of broader anti-Japanese sentiments in the late 1930s born out of fears regarding Japanese militarism and the belief that Peru’s Japanese community were preparing the way for an invasion.