Kenneth Fuentes

The impact of the scientific method in the conceptualization of

race has resulted in many implications, in terms of preferences and
vantages, in the identity process of people. The implementation of
natural science, as a mean to separate and represent role in constant
societal unfolding, in order to develop a concept of race has, therefore,
resulted in racial superiority, racial hierarchy and other forms of
subordination between civilizations. The unofficial census conducted by
professor Albert Gieseckes in Cuzco, Peru, illustrates the conflict
arising in defining race. The case of the cuzqueo populace in
reflecting the tendency to self-misrepresentation lighten the way
towards the historical background in which previous generations
conceived their social constructs for understanding race.
The historical context between the European scientific definitions
of race and the Latin American elites, most of which were a racial
mixture of indigenous people and Europeans, namely mestizos,
introduces the causes of self-classification in racial distinctions, and
others, which resulted in a tendency among generations. Racial
determinism, being another attempt to conceptualize race, sought to
understand not merely through the confinements of sciences but
through the geographical and demographical backdrop of its regions.
The sierra, an open, unexplored and wild landscape of the Peru,
became associated with the unsophisticated and underdeveloped. The
representation of growth, advancement and sophistication was along

Kenneth Fuentes
the coastline. The presence of political power, driven by racial
distinctions, was well accommodated and consolidated in the limeo
elite. This is the racial group that represented progress, power and
authority.
As has always been the case, over time, specifically by the end
of the nineteenth century in the case of Peru, the political growth is
evident and it begins to form ideologies that seek to address issues
arising from a very contextualized regional perspective. For those living
and producing out of the highlands the concerns were of a single-sided
oriented administration of the region, one being mainly administrated
by the central elite of Peru. In other words, the administration of land,
whether of the highlands or the coastline, became associated with the
elite in the capital of Lima. The distinctions of this political debate were
coined as regionalismo, which represented the struggle for equal
participation of the administration in their own region, and centralismo,
which represented administrative power and authority converge in
Lima.
While the central elite of Peru became associated with European
criteria for racial identity and intellectual capacity for politics, the
Cuzco subordinated elite merged provincial interests across their
region (those of the cuzqueo elite and of the more indigenous groups
of the highlands) with a more indigenous approach, namely
indigenismo. The progress of this political ideology turned it into a

Kenneth Fuentes
movement displaying intellectual capacities thought to be particular of
the limeo elite. The integration and consolidation of this political
ideology, i.e., indigenismo, within the history of Perus politics is
presented as one of the essential strategies, if not the principal, in
order to start to shorten the hierarchical distances that existed and
prevailed among groups.
But such a move would have been of less impact had they not
move toward the proposals of a new understanding, from the
indigenistas reality about race and superiority, about racial
interpretations among the main social elites. Differences among
mestizos and indigenous people were placed in the moral definitions
rather than on biological ones. Some similarities had been proven by
the intellectual advancement in the political arena. However, it
remains a puzzling distinction by the indigenistas about the regional
mestizos as being, contradictory enough, given their apparent belief
for racial equality, a hybrid of the highlands, and also different from
the ambiguous dark-skinned description.
Overall, This case study is a suited representative of the
interaction and understanding of ethnic identity in the resulted new
ethnic groups across Latin America, in other few indigenous survival
groups and as part of the social phenomenon of evolving civilizations,
which interpret and understand themselves as individuals based on
racial-driven factors or socio-political stereotypes.

Kenneth Fuentes