Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race

Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru

María Elena García

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520972308
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

In recent years, Peru has transformed from a war-torn country to a global high-end culinary destination. Connecting chefs, state agencies, global capital, and Indigenous producers, this "gastronomic revolution" makes powerful claims: food unites Peruvians, dissolves racial antagonisms, and fuels development. Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race critically evaluates these claims and tracks the emergence of Peruvian gastropolitics, a biopolitical and aesthetic set of practices that reinscribe dominant racial and gendered orders. Through critical readings of high-end menus and ethnographic analysis of culinary festivals, guinea pig production, and national-branding campaigns, this work explores the intersections of race, species, and capital to reveal links between gastronomy and violence in Peru.

PART ONE

Structures of Accumulation

INTERLUDE

Hauntings

I REMEMBER THE BLACKOUTS. I remember playing cards by candlelight, never sitting too close to windows, learning to open our mouths when car bombs went off so our ear drums wouldn’t burst. I remember the night my brother, maybe three or four at the time, sliced open his face, just above his eye. He had been playing, running, and hit the corner of a coffee table. I remember the flashlights, the panic, the worry of how to get to the hospital during curfew. And I remember the first time I saw Sendero Luminoso’s hammer and sickle burning on the side of one of the hills of Lima.

I don’t remember the dogs. We were in Mexico City that early morning in December 1980 when people in Lima awoke to the sight of dead dogs hanging from lampposts. But I know that image, the photograph of one of those dogs, still hanging, about to be released by a police officer. That is one of the dozens of photographs included in Yuyanapaq, the photographic exhibit that accompanied the CVR’s report. I have seen this image so often that I could say that I do, in fact, remember those dogs. Their deaths can easily become entangled with memories of that time, memories of return despite the violence, and memories of rupture. In 1985, as war hit the streets of Lima more intensely, my parents decided we would not return until that violence ended. We would not return to the arms of my grandmother, to laughter with my cousins, to the smells and sounds and sights of the city I continued to think of as home. That same year, my family moved to the United States, a move I experienced as another rupture, a radical and violent rupture.

I blamed Sendero. My parents, however, blamed Velasco for having had to leave their home in the first place. For them, as for many others in Peru, the Shining Path was an extension of the disorder General Velasco had unleashed in the late 1960s and 1970s. Narratives about Velasco emphasize the expropriation of lands, the redistribution of resources to landless farmers and poor migrants, and the nationalization of Quechua, events that many in Peru remember as the beginning of the end of order, as the moment racial hierarchies were upended. This is a time that is remembered powerfully, violently. Velasco is a ghost who lingers, who continues to haunt a nation. “Velasquismo is a traumatic, repressed phenomenon,” writes Gonzalo Portocarrero. “A history that is taboo. A ruin you do not visit. To speak of that period, of that figure, is disturbing and contentious. . . . To return to that moment in time is like descending to a dark and loud underground; a labyrinth populated by ghosts.”¹ In late 2019, a Peruvian film about Velasco’s agrarian reform unleashed some of those ghosts. Watching La Revolución y la Tierra in the theaters, a friend of mine told me, was unlike anything he had experienced. “People yelled, wept, applauded, and angrily stormed out.” Very shortly after debuting, the film became the most watched documentary in the history of Peruvian cinema.² More than fifty years after his revolution, Velasco’s ghost continues to elicit visceral responses: embodied expressions of rage, or vindication, depending on where you stand.

The politics of memory in Peru, as in most places, are fraught. A few years ago, I took a cab to the LUM, the Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social (The Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion), a relatively new museum dedicated to archiving memory and sustaining conversation about the times of violence in Peru, meaning the violence of the 1980s and 1990s.³ The address from the LUM’s website did not register on Google maps, and the cab driver was confused and unsure where to go. I had been there once, before the museum’s official opening, so I had a sense of where it was located. As we drove, the cab driver suddenly told me he remembered a big square building around the area I was indicating. “That must be it,” he said. “I always wondered what that was. But why do we need another museum like that? We should look to the future, not to the past.” I was not surprised by the driver’s lack of awareness of the existence of this new museum. His emphasis on moving on, looking toward the future and letting go of the past, is a common narrative in Peru, where despite the horrific impact of this violence on tens of thousands of Peruvians, many prefer not to remember. Yuyanapaq (“to remember” in Quechua), the photographic exhibit that accompanied the CVR’s report in 2003, has been relegated to the sixth floor of what used to be the Museo de la Nación (now the Ministry of Culture) and is visited mostly by school groups, scholars, and some tourists. And the CVR’s report continues to be mired in controversy. This is the historical context in which the LUM operates. The museum was inaugurated in December 2015, but since the beginning of its conceptualization and construction (in 2009), decisions about how to represent this history have been the focus of many debates and discussions.⁴ This was even the case among activists and artists, who were divided between challenging state-sanctioned histories of the internal conflict and accommodating exhibits to fit within socially accepted terms and understandings of the conflict.⁵ Despite these tensions, there would seem to be more space for discussions about Sendero than about Velasco. Perhaps Velasco’s ghost is harder to exorcise for some. Regardless, in the struggle over memory in Peru, there are many who still have little choice in what they can or can’t remember.⁶

Andean notions of temporality (in both Quechua and Aymara worldviews) render the past not as something that we have left behind, but as that which lies before us. This is not to say that Andean peoples are somehow “stuck” in the past, but that the temporality of violence in Peru is far from linear.⁷ The Quechua term for the past, ñawpa pacha, can literally be rendered as the space that we see before us. The Aymara phrase for the past, nayra, also refers to what we see in front of us and, like ñawpa, etymologically connects with the word for “eye.” The past then is literally what we can see, unlike the future, which is spatially behind us. Violence continues to operate, albeit unevenly, over the centuries. The unevenness of violence, like the willingness to think about it, has much to do with race and coloniality and thus has deep implications for understanding the nation and its limits, that is, who counts and who does not.

ONE

Gastropolitics and the Nation

I WALKED THROUGH THE BUSY STREETS of San Isidro, one of the more exclusive districts in Lima, passing high-end boutiques and restaurants and searching for Astrid & Gastón’s new locale.¹ Chef Gastón Acurio’s renowned restaurant, the first in Peru to be recognized as among the “The World’s 50 Best Restaurants,” had recently moved from Miraflores (a wealthy neighborhood and popular tourist destination) to this new space in the heart of San Isidro, an even wealthier district.² I worried about finding it until I arrived. There was no way to miss it.

The restaurant, housed in the renovated Casa Moreyra, the three-hundred-year-old main house of the old hacienda in San Isidro, was stunning. The house stands on a glamorous avenue between Avenida Los Incas and Avenida Los Conquistadores. It sits majestically across the street from a striking church, La Virgen del Pilar, which originated as the chapel of the old hacienda of the Moreyra Paz Soldán family; the family later gave it to Catholic missionaries, who used the property to create a new convent and rebuild the church in a neocolonial style. The restaurant is also walking distance from one of the more important archaeological sites in Lima, the Huaca Huallamarca, a pyramidal structure used by the Hualla people and other Native peoples since approximately 200 BC.³ San Isidro pulses with the activity and wealth of a modern financial district, but one cannot help but feel the layers of history upon entering the almost blinding whiteness of the Casa Hacienda Moreyra.

As you walk up the steps into the foyer, you feel as if you are stepping into another moment in time. Quite a deliberate move, taking us back to the time of colonial grandeur, control over production, and perhaps idealized visions of “good” patrones (landowners/bosses) and orderly workers, before the time of Velasco’s agrarian reform. As you arrive in the foyer you are greeted by an elegant hostess who asks you graciously to wait while your table is made ready. The tasting experience, which features either seventeen courses or thirty-four, begins with a few cocktails and appetizers on the terrace before you are escorted to the main dining room for what our hostess describes as “a taste of Peru, an embrace from Peru to the world.”⁴ For me, the experience was a bringing together of art, alchemy, and gastronomy. I was especially struck by two features. First, you can eat your alcohol. The traditional pisco sour was served on a plate, chilled, with a hint (in the form of a spray) of pisco. And second, the guinea pig, or cuy, arrived hidden, beautiful, never betraying the rodent it once was. The animal appeared in two small circular bits, and when you popped one into your mouth, it dissolved into air, with just a hint of the flavor of cuy meat.

A COUNTRY TRANSFORMED

It is almost impossible to talk about Peru’s culinary revolution without talking about Gastón Acurio. He is perhaps the most beloved public figure in Peru today, and he is without a doubt considered the leader of the gastronomic boom. Acurio is credited by most Peruvians with spearheading the success of Peruvian cuisine and transforming the country into a leading global culinary destination.⁵ This process of transformation is narrated as a story of metamorphosis made possible by Gastón (as Peruvians call him). The story goes that he turned Peru from a country torn apart by violence, inequality, and economic precarity into a nation proudly unified by its culinary and cultural history of fusion.⁶ Consider the words of renowned Spanish chef Ferran Adriá:

In the Gastón phenomenon, we find . . . an innate cooking talent, the good luck of living immersed in a formidable culinary tradition, surely the richest and most varied in all the Americas, a great knowledge of this same gastronomy, the ability to use high cuisine as a platform to make products known . . . and export them. And next to this, a political and social consciousness that…with unusual determination has allowed him to carry out a project that seems as if it were from a novel (parece casi de novela). It is a magical realism story, or a fable from Italian neorealism, but without jokes or fictions. This is the most serious thing I have seen in my entire life.⁷

But this story, of the chef turned national savior and hero, is itself a product of the gastropolitical machine. As much as it is about power and political economy, gastropolitics in Peru today is also a set of stories and performances. It generates narratives—about enlightened and patriotic chefs, about the expansion of economic opportunity, about racial tolerance and beautiful mixture—that in turn enable the strategic cultivation of a fierce nationalism.

Despite claims to include all of Peru, this is a vision of the nation that centers the capital city of Lima and, I argue, tries to reestablish dominant hierarchies.⁸ Gastropolitics crafts stories that loudly celebrate difference and diversity (or “fusion”) as central to repositioning Peru as an exemplary (and marketable) nation. Through online campaigns (like the Peru, Nebraska, video) and initiatives such as alliances between Indigenous producers and (mostly White, mestizo, and male) chefs, the promotion of iconic Peruvian products from the Andes and Amazon, and social development projects targeting marginalized youth, Acurio and other gastropolitical elites call attention to difference and inequality in order to, paradoxically, make it harder to see. The gastronomic revolution, in other words, can be read as yet another settler colonial strategy to eliminate the other; gastropolitics manages, cleanses, and beautifies difference.⁹ Astrid & Gastón’s move to Casa Moreyra is significant here. By reclaiming, restoring, and rewriting this old hacienda’s history, Acurio and his collaborators carefully craft a story of return: a return to the imagined colonial grandeur of the “City of Kings,” to the time before waves of rural migration “stained” the city and “destroyed Lima’s monumental patrimony.”¹⁰ Most important, this is a return to the time before the agrarian reform of the late 1960s that, at least in theory, ended feudal rule in Peru by expropriating land holdings and redistributing these to campesinos. If, as Peruvian anthropologist Enrique Mayer suggests, the agrarian reform is made up of “ugly stories,” gastropolitics offers instead beautiful stories of Peruvian success.¹¹ Two of the most important are the intertwined stories about the rise of a chef and the rebuilding of a nation.

THE CHEF

Acurio’s origin story—at least the one he shares widely—is by now well known. His father, Gastón Acurio Velarde, a prominent politician, expected his son to follow in his footsteps. He enrolled Acurio at one ...