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Revolutionizing Repertoires: The Rise of Populist Mobilization in Peru

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-7575756

1527-1900

Geneviève Dorais,

Politics and Society in Latin America

Sociologist Robert S. Jansen tackles the genesis of political change and creative social action through a detailed case study of Peru's first experience of populist mobilization in the early 1930s, long neglected by scholars in favor of Brazil and Argentina. By focusing on Peru and the role of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro in fostering lasting changes in Peru's political practices and in the Latin American style of populist mobilization, Jansen makes a welcome, though limited, contribution to the history of populism in the region. In the field of sociology, Revolutionizing Repertoires corrects structural approaches to populism by insisting on political actors' role in advancing political innovation. For historians of Latin America, the book usefully reminds them to return to the past and to places like Peru to better appreciate the differential origins and development of populist mobilization throughout the region.Jansen seeks to produce a comprehensive theoretical model for political innovation. Jansen aptly tracks the different factors that made populist mobilization possible in 1931 Peru. The first was the social and political context, as he explains in chapters 2 and 3, which together display Jansen's solid capacity for historical synthesis and clear explanation of broad historical forces and cycles. Jansen adopts macro-level analysis to trace the social and political changes that began to transform Peru from the twentieth century's turn onward. He notes the importance of Augusto B. Leguía's 11-year presidency (1919–30), less for its governing style than for its attacks on traditional political elites, which created space for new candidates. Jansen also explains how interrelated social changes, including increased migration from provinces to Lima and the progress of labor organizing alongside the formation of a working class, encouraged the growth of a culture of association in the Peruvian capital. This element proved crucial, according to Jansen, because it granted the “infrastructural capacity” for people to organize when political outsiders began to seek incorporation into the electoral process (p. 77).Chapters 4 and 5 turn to these nontraditional candidates and their political parties: Haya de la Torre's Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) and Sánchez Cerro's Unión Revolucionaria. The originality of these two pragmatists, stresses Jansen, was to understand the potential of populist mobilization for gaining power. As outsiders and exiles, they had access to political experiences that traditional candidates lacked. The 1931 presidential election accelerated their political innovation and development of populist rhetoric. Regardless of the election's outcome—Sánchez Cerro won—“the creative, problem-solving actions” of these candidates' political parties “revolutionized political practice in Peru,” argues Jansen (pp. 53–55). From then on national politics worked either against or for this type of mobilization, which became inescapable in twentieth-century Peru.This book is somewhat puzzling to review for an audience of historians because it is ultimately less about populism's history than about repertoires of political change. Jansen's core contributions are primarily theoretical. To be sure, his reasoning throughout the book is coherent and meticulous, and his methodology is likewise well conceived, comprehensively executed, and obviously in line with other works of sociology. But there's ultimately little historians will learn from his conclusions. The theoretical model that Jansen extracts from his case study, a corrected pragmatist approach that pays attention to both individual agency and larger social and political structures, will look overdone to historians. So too will the author's insistence on the need to contextualize change to understand how it comes about. I suspect historians won't need a sociological model to teach them what they do best.Another problem lies in a dearth of evidence substantiating Jansen's claims. Too many times the reader is asked to trust that Jansen's intuitions are correct. Take, for instance, the conclusion in the sixth chapter that a repertoire of political change results from the elaboration of a new mode of political practice combined with its subsequent routinization. The entire book focuses on the former, without substantiating the claim that other Latin American politicians “recognized” and “repeated” Peru's experience after 1931 (pp. 191–92). Jansen notes this limitation but nevertheless makes this intuition an important argument of the book, which will not be well received by historians. Moreover, despite a limited but cogent use of primary sources—mostly political propaganda as well as journals and correspondence between APRA members—much of Jansen's demonstration rests on secondary literature. He relies too heavily on the work of Steve Stein, a prominent historian of Peruvian populism who himself drew heavily on official APRA propaganda and interviews with APRA leaders with their own political ambitions. Thus while Jansen's book advances an original argument about political innovation, it does so without employing a significant body of historical evidence or providing new historiographical insights.Those aiming to read new scholarship on Peruvian history, specifically on APRA or the short-lived government of Sánchez Cerro, will not learn much from this book. Those looking for new ways to approach questions of populist mobilization, reflections on sociological theory, or class material for comparative approaches to populist experiences will find in Revolutionizing Repertoires excellent fodder for thought.