This chapter focuses on micro encounters engendered by the Yale Peruvian Expedition, exploring via textual and photographic evidence the racial scientific research that shaped encounters in Peru between expedition members and Indigenous and Mestizo peoples, some of whom served as the expedition’s workers and assistants. Reading these sources in relation to the broader context of rural unrest in the Cusco region, the emergence of an urban and university-based indigenista movement that promoted the study of Indigenous peoples, and the rise of American-led expedition science, Warren questions how different groups imagined and contested the moral and ethical dimensions of such work. He argues that when measured and photographed, Indigenous and Mestizo research subjects ultimately subverted the expedition’s efforts to document accurate visual depictions of racial types. Drawing on the concept of ethnographic refusal in Indigenous Studies while also identifying other forms of engagement, Warren criticizes the univocal conception of moral fields as the possession of imperial researchers but not of Indigenous and Mestizo people subjected to their gaze.

This chapter probes the relation of both science and Indigeneity to nationalism – and of all of these to gender. Rosemblatt focuses on a controversy that began in 1949–1950, when remains said to have belonged to Cuauhtémoc, the last Mexica emperor, were found buried in Ixcateopan, Guerrero. Two official commissions denied the authenticity of the burial, but local officials, along with the broader public, found the story expedient, and anthropologist Eulalia Guzmán lent support to their view. Intellectuals who grounded Mexican greatness in their own cosmopolitan scientific neutrality faced off against those who stressed the Indigenous roots of Mexican national identity. The episode reveals differing views of what constituted scientific proof and how science and indigeneity were related to nationalism and politics more generally. Because the pro-authenticity group was led by a woman, it provides a window onto the gendering of scientific authority. The village of Ixcateopan, the chapter argues, actively engaged science along with Guzmán and her allies.

The Latin-American premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1928 in Buenos Aires caused a sensation, and in subsequent years the work was regularly performed across much of the continent. The work also found many imitators, but Latin-American composers understood the work differently from their peers elsewhere. Whereas in Europe and North America, The Rite’s avowed primitivism appeared mostly as a lurid but non-specific signifier of otherness, composers such as Alberto Ginastera and Heitor Villa-Lobos drew direct parallels between Stravinsky’s paganism and indigenismo, the evocation of the continent’s pre-Columbian past and indigenous heritage. In a move characteristic of settler colonialism, what they found in Stravinsky’s work was not a European import but an Asiatic, pre-Christian legacy that could act as a foundation for an indigenous form of musical modernism beyond Eurocentric models. By contrast, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier associated Stravinsky’s Scythians with the descendants of the Yoruba, the largest group of enslaved Africans in Cuba. In this way, the chapter analyses transnational networks and entanglements between Russia, Europe and several Latin-American countries.

The invasion of Mesoamerica – set off by the arrival of Cortés and his followers – was neither peaceful nor simple. These events played out in three phases between February 10, 1519 when the expedition left Cuba and August 13, 1521 when the Mexica tlatoani, Cuauhtemoc, was captured. During the first phase, Moteuczoma and Spaniards sought to learn about each other. Each used diplomacy, Moteuczoma to repel the Spanish, Cortés to gain indigenous allies, to affect events. The second phase of the Spanish-Mexica war began with the Spanish arrival in Tenochtitlan and their imprisonment of Moteuczoma shortly thereafter. That phase ended with Spaniards forced to retreat after their disastrous assault on the Templo Mayor and slaughter of many Mexica leaders. Re-equipping and solidifying his alliances, Cortés and his fighters succeeded in defeating the Mexica in mid-August, 1521. Many kinds of transformations would follow including extensive depopulation and the introduction of new technologies and religious beliefs. Adjustments by Nahuas followed in social and legal affairs as well as in forms of identity. The idea of “Aztec” has tenaciously survived. It exists in contemporary Nahua communities, as an element of national history and culture in Mexico, and as a transnational idea.

Across the literary traditions of Spanish America, Indigenous peoples appear as resource materials for non-Indigenous authors and as emblems for national identity, rather than as literary creators themselves. Acclaimed examples from the mid-twentieth-century canon of what Angel Rama termed “transculturated narrative” are no exception: despite overt attempts to create works expressing solidarity with Indigenous peoples, these do not elude the colonial legacies, which have obliged Indigenous peoples to cede control of their words and the contexts that make these words meaningful. However, by working at the intersection of Latin American and Indigenous literary studies, this essay pursues those other contexts beyond the nation frame and returns to Miguel Angel Asturias’ Hombres de maíz and José María Arguedas’ Los ríos profundos. It charts Latin American literature and criticism across two historical transitions: the transition produced by indigenismo toward the horizon of a national identity discourse more centered on “the Indian”; and the transition produced by Indigenous movements away from that emblematic “Indian” and toward the horizon of Indigenous self-determination. To what extent can these Spanish-American novels, product of the first transition, be harnessed to that second transition to offer a window onto native ways of conceiving Latin American space and time?

Across the literary traditions of Spanish America, Indigenous peoples appear as resource materials for non-Indigenous authors and as emblems for national identity, rather than as literary creators themselves. Acclaimed examples from the mid-twentieth-century canon of what Angel Rama termed “transculturated narrative” are no exception: despite overt attempts to create works expressing solidarity with Indigenous peoples, these do not elude the colonial legacies, which have obliged Indigenous peoples to cede control of their words and the contexts that make these words meaningful. However, by working at the intersection of Latin American and Indigenous literary studies, this essay pursues those other contexts beyond the nation frame and returns to Miguel Angel Asturias’ Hombres de maíz and José María Arguedas’ Los ríos profundos. It charts Latin American literature and criticism across two historical transitions: the transition produced by indigenismo toward the horizon of a national identity discourse more centered on “the Indian”; and the transition produced by Indigenous movements away from that emblematic “Indian” and toward the horizon of Indigenous self-determination. To what extent can these Spanish-American novels, product of the first transition, be harnessed to that second transition to offer a window onto native ways of conceiving Latin American space and time?

Within scholarship on indigenismo, it is commonly held that the Indigenous uprisings in the southern Andes at the turn of the twentieth century spurred the cultural and political activities that we understand as the indigenista movement. Under the growing global demand for wool, these violent uprisings responded to new injuries accreted to old in a region where a variety of colonial relations, within an imaginary of coloniality, persisted. In this understanding of indigenismo, strangely, Indigenous peoples’ protest is interpreted to be an inspiration for indigenismo writ large. In contradistinction, this chapter reconceptualizes indigenismo by drawing on literature usually excluded by that term. The point is twofold: to illustrate the complex web of practices, often undertaken by Indigenous peoples themselves, in which indigenismo arose; and to reinvigorate our understanding of how local responses to transnational economic flows embodied a cultural imaginary that brought elite and nonelite actors together.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.

Chapter 7 examines how General Jorge Ubico, a strong-arm dictator (1931–44), rapidly expanded the state into the countryside and challenged planter sovereignty in the midst of the rise of German National Socialism. Ubico replaced forced wage labor with vagrancy laws and instituted sanitation and militarized rural education programs. Even as he expanded the repressive state apparatus, Ubico also appealed to the masses through direct intervention in local affairs, particularly on behalf of poor women, and by promising access to civilization in the future via sanitation and eugenic programs. Ubico’s efforts at state centralization, however, were countered by the consolidation of regional identities in Alta Verapaz around Tezulutlán, the name given to the region by the Nahua allies of Pedro Alvarado. This anti-imperialist regional identity expressed growing anti-German nationalism. Ladinos and Germans also sought to possess Maya culture as a source of authenticity and timeless tradition as they competed for claims to the region. These new celebrations of Maya authenticity provided a place for Maya patriarchs to reassert their authority as representatives of rural Mayas.

In the aftermath of this political upheaval, Guatemalans embarked on a tenuous democratic experiment across the 1920s. A group of radicalized Q’eqchi’s formed a branch of the Unionist Party and demanded that the state end forced wage labor, abolish debt contracts, and grant citizenship to all Mayas. For the next decade, Q’eqchi’s engaged in labor strikes and land invasions, which articulated another history of time and space based on memories of prior possession and land alienation. At the same time, urban reformers and intellectuals, including Miguel Angel Asturias, increasingly sought to move beyond the failed ladino nation-state that had taken power in 1871. To do so, they looked to Alta Verapaz to imagine a new nation based on modernization through prosperous coffee plantations and European immigration, which had yielded an alternative mestizaje project based on interracial mixing between German immigrants and Mayas. Guatemala’s decade-long democratic experiment came to an end with the Great Depression and Central America’s 1932 Red Scare.