Adopting the Indian heart: class and Indigeneity in Hugo Blanco’s politics in La Convención, Cuzco (1959–1969)

Occurring in the era defined by the Cuban triumph, the land reform from below in the valleys of La Convención and Lares in Cuzco is often narrated by presenting its most visible face – the Trotskyist mestizo (ethnically mixed) Hugo Blanco as ‘the Peruvian Che Guevara’ or, more moderately, as a ‘quasi-guerrilla leader’. This faulty interpretation does not allow us to fully understand the roots and significance of the events of La Convención and, in particular, Hugo Blanco’s uncommon adoption of ‘the Indian heart’, where the Indian side of the peasantry emerged as a medium and standpoint for the revolutionary efforts. This article presents Blanco’s socialist proposal – of the importance of the Indian side of the Andean peasantry – as a break in the 1960s revolutionary scenario of Latin America, a time of the hegemony of a class-centric focus on the rural Indigenous population. To do this, I locate the Indian place in Blanco’s politics until 1969 in three sections: first, I will present Hugo Blanco’s early political path within the broader context of the socialist revolutionary moment of 1960s Latin America; second, I will show how the encounter between Trotskyism, peasant unionism and the Indigenist cultural movement became a fertile ground for Blanco’s desire to adopt a working-class, peasant and Indian position; and third, I will present how the union organisation of strikes and land reform from below functioned as the political ground from which the centrality of Indianness among the peasantry emerged.