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Elucidating Peruvian anarchists views of the indigenous other and their emancipatory practices to end indigenous oppression and marginalisation poses a number of challenges. The documentary record to reconstruct anarchist-indigenous relations during anarchisms heyday in Peru between the 1890s and the 1920s is decidedly scarce and fragmented. Systematic state repression of anarchist activists, study groups, cultural associations, and labour organisations scattered and destroyed countless source materials. Much of what remains are anarchist presses and publications linked to Limas anarchist movement, which constituted the largest and most influential collective of anarchist militants in Peru. Relying strictly on the writings of Lima-based anarchists, however, risks overlooking and misunderstanding the distinctive perceptions and actions of anarchist individuals and groups located throughout Perus diverse regions. At present, the historiography of Peruvian anarchism suffers from a nearly singular focus on Lima and its adjacent port city of Callao.1 Another serious impediment to understanding the ways anarchists thought about and interacted with indigenous peoples is the dearth of indigenous accounts. Illiteracy in Spanish as well as in native languages was pervasive among indigenous Peruvians in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Fortunately, the existence of a few biographies and memoirs of bi-cultural indigenous anarchists does at least partially fill the void.2 Still, it is no surprise that only a smattering of scholarly articles, and a single text, directly attempt to grapple with Peruvian anarchists engagement with indigenous emancipation.3
This diminutive historiography can be classified in terms of two schools of thought. The first school casts Peruvian anarchists as hopelessly wed to a Eurocentric outlook informed by liberalism, positivism and Western universalist ideas of rationalism and progress. The second school emphasises their penchant for romanticism and utopianism. Both interpretive schools acknowledge that anarchists demonstrated a genuine concern for Perus oppressed indigenous inhabitants, but sharply criticise anarchists tendentious perceptions of the indigenous other.4 According to the Eurocentric school, anarchists equated Indians with backwardness and anti-modern cultural traditions and customs. In doing so, they tended to essentialise Indians and ignore their cultural particularities. Consonant with their positivist leanings, anarchists elided ethnic considerations and engaged indigenous people based on class identification.5 For scholars of the Utopian school, anarchists did not so much neglect cultural aspects as romanticise them. Specifically, they idealised the Inca past...