The Independent Republic of Arequipa: Making Regional Culture in the Andes

Arequipa, Peru\u27s second largest city, has the most intense regional culture in the central Andes. Arequipeños fiercely conceive of themselves as exceptional and distinctive, yet also broadly representative of the nation\u27s overall hybrid nature—a blending of coast (modern, white ) and sierra (traditional, indigenous ). The Independent Republic of Arequipa investigates why and how this regional identity developed in a boom of cultural production after the War of the Pacific (1879-1884) through the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on decades of ethnographic fieldwork, Thomas F. Love offers the first anthropological history of southwestern Peru\u27s distinctive regional culture. He examines both its pre-Hispanic and colonial altiplano foundations (anchored in continuing pilgrimage to key Marian shrines) and the nature of its mid-nineteenth century revolutionary identity in cross-class resistance to Lima\u27s autocratic control of nation-building in the post-Independence state. Love then examines Arequipa\u27s early twentieth-century mestizo identity (an early and unusual case of browning of regional identity) in the context of raging debates about the national question and the Indian problem, as well as the post-WWII development of extravagant displays of distinctive bull-on-bull fighting that now constitute the very performance of regional identity.https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/linfauth/1084/thumbnail.jp