A proposito del debate Herrera-Galvez de 1849: breves reflexiones sobre el sufragio de los indios analfabetos

Starting from an analysis of the debate about suffrage for the illiterate in general and for the Indios in particular that arose within the Peruvian Chambers of Deputies in 1849, this essay aims at highlighting the reasons why until the late nineteenth century the Peruvian legislators continued to enforce an indirect electoral system ad to adopt a definition of political citizenship which, due to lack of cultural and economic requirements, enfranchised a large percentage of the male population, including the Indios, most of whom illiterate.The rationale included the demographic weight of the Indios, who made up more than 60 percent of the inhabitants, and the difficulty in denying such a large cohort of the populations those rights that the Cadiz Constitution had already granted them. The main reason, however, was the effort to forge a national identity out of citizens' community which ethnic segmentation made troublesome. The shared suffrage, therefore became the epitome of the existence of such a community and, at the same time, a citizenship school projected into the future. Finally, as historian Jorge Basadre argues, the idea of "encontrar en lo indigena los dos elementos que anhela como raiz nutricia todo nacionalismo: el pueblo y el pasado" accounts for the indigenism of the independence generation leaders.