Manuel A. Fuentes: Social Realities

The Lima of the 1850s and 1860s was the compact world nurturing the outlooks of Peru's fledgling plutocrats—apart from de rigueur Parisian excursions and schooling. Not all could ignore signs of crisis, felt in daily brushes with riches and penury, ferment and despair. But better-off Limeños also absorbed a formal intellectual portrait of their rapidly changing capital. The key figure in these urban social studies was Manuel Anastasio Fuentes, Lima's remarkably prolific and versatile census taker, journalist, medical and legal expert, social commentator, administrator, satirist, historian, and folklorist. Fuentes's studies of midcentury Lima remain the starting point for all historians of the age. At the time they constructed the self-perceptions of the country's literate classes.

An audience thirsting for works such as Fuentes's was growing in size and sophistication in the guano age. As cosmopolitan port and capital, Lima had always boasted a vibrant literary and political scene. Lima hosted Peru's recognizable civil society—with several thousand well-read lawyers, teachers, literati, doctors, clerics, officials, artists, and motley other professionals and public employees. By the late 1850s at least fourteen thousand men met the literacy and property requisites to serve as political electors; some eight thousand citizens met the even stricter criteria for holding public office. Educated women mixed in innovative literary circles and charitable societies. Even before guano affluence,

observers were struck by the city's lively press (four or five major dailies, propagating the latest in international, commercial, and political news); its informal political and literary gatherings (tertulias ); its colegios and universities (the rival San Carlos and Guadalupe Academies, or San Marcos University, the oldest continuous institution in the Americas); and myriad political clubs and motley pamphleteers. The complexity and range of elite culture expanded markedly after 1850. State offices, immigration and travel, libraries, science institutes, theater, a Club Nacional, literary monthlies, and private societies spread to suit every taste and need. In 1858 Lima employed 744 public school teachers alone, enjoyed 419 self-described "artists," and drew some 21,000 foreigners from around the globe, representing over a fifth of the city's inhabitants.^[13] By the 1870s civil politics had become formalized in major lobbies (such as a Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura), professional guilds, immigrant societies, workers' and women's circles, and the galvanizing party politics of civilismo. An English-style jockey club catered to oligarchic amusements, competing with the customary watering holes of Chorrillos; Eiffel visited to draw up new monuments. Yet, however multifaceted Lima's intellectual milieu, much of its reference and style lay abroad. Thinkers were apt to have more feel for European trends than for those at home—much less for the exotic Andean land beyond. The impact of a Fuentes, along with the popular national costumbrista writers, was to shift consciousness inward.^[14] The social discovery of Lima (and later, expanding visions of Peru) was also a step to new forms of national economic thought.

Inspired by the French statistical school, Fuentes embarked between 1858 and 1878 on a series of painstakingly researched studies of Lima society and life-styles of the guano age. In 1858 Fuentes published his first and greatest tome, the 774-page Estadística general de Lima, based on extensive personal surveys of population, occupation, business, commerce, government, institutions, architecture, customs—or just about anything anyone wanted to know about the Peruvian capital. Updated

[13] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, 620-24, passim; Radiguet, Lima y sociedad peruana; Basadre, Historia, vols. 3-5, for fine overviews of intellectual and cultural developments; Yeager, "Women and Intellectual Life," for inside view.

[14] Maida Isabel Watson, El cuadro de costumbres en el Perú decimonónico (Lima, 1979). To sense the vitality of Lima's intellectual weight and variety, compare to lesser intellectual capitals: Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Weak Foundations: The Economy of El Salvador in the Nineteenth Century, 1821-1898 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), 1, insightfully suggests limited horizons of a nation starting with a "professional" class of four lawyers, four doctors, twelve surgeons, and seven druggists; cf. Véliz, Centralist Tradition, ch. 10, for possible deleterious impact of overdeveloped urban-intellectual culture.

versions followed in 1862, 1866, and 1869, and lavishly illustrated French and English editions, as well as numerous neighborhood street guides and official almanacs.^[15] A prominent journalist since the 1840s, Fuentes gathered his political-satirical prose in 1863 as the three-volume Aletazos del murciélago, from his newspaper of the same ironic title ("The Flappings of the Bat"). In it Fuentes codified the everyday life of Lima's folk in the costumbrista genre later exemplified by Ricardo Palma's classic Tradiciones peruanas . (At the time, Palma was a youthful writer with the Revista de Lima; he also conspired with the ornery radicals of the Zamacueca Política .) Fuentes pioneered in blending the genre with the people of the street.^[16]

One of Peru's premier scientific historians, Fuentes collected and published documents that underscored historic republican change. Fuentes also translated and edited key works of French political economy (such as those by the social-sciency Pradier-Foderé, who came to Lima as an adviser), dabbled in legal theory, and in 1877 was charged with producing Peru's official economics textbook—presumably to finish the pacification work that Silva Santisteban could never quite complete. In the mid 1870s Fuentes organized Pardo's new faculty of Political Science and Administration, directed Peru's first scientific national census (1876), and put together seven volumes of results and spin-off studies, such as his own scholarly monograph on Lima's "floating population" (vagrants). Aside from such literary and scientific pursuits, Fuentes was a bona fide member of Peru's economic plutocracy. He was, for example, a founder (and then "chief consultant") to the 1862 La Providencia bank, the first of the oligarchic finance institutions that were to shape the latter half of the guano age.^[17] Fuentes was not just in touch with Peruvian reality—he was its major student and propagator.

[15] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima (1858); a nonexhaustive list of analogous works includes Guía histórico-descriptiva, administrativa, judicial y de domicilios de Lima (Lima, 1860); Lima: Apuntes históricos, descriptivos, estadísticos y de costumbres (Paris, 1866-1867); Lima, or Sketches of the Capital of Peru, Historical, Statistical, Administrative (Paris, 1867; rpt. 1925); Guía industrial y mercantil de Lima y el Callao (Lima, 1869); and various guides of late 1870s, when Fuentes headed department of statistics.

[16] M. A. Fuentes, Aletazos del murciélago: Colección de artículos publicados en varios periódicos (Paris, 1866), 3 vols. Watson, Cuadro de costumbres, ch. 8, "M. A. Fuentes: el Cuadro como reflejo del pensamiento científico"; Trazegnies, Idea de derecho, 130-35, 221-25; Basadre, Historia 3:1362-76.

[17] Carlos Milla Batres, ed., Diccionario histórico y biográfico del Perú: Siglos xv-xx (Barcelona, 1986) 5:91-92; Camprubí, Historia de bancos, 39. Perú, Dirección de Estadística, Resumen del censo general de habitantes del Perú hecho en 1876 (Lima, 1878), 7 vols; Manuel Fuentes, Estadística del movimiento de la poblacion de la provincia de Lima en un periódo de cinco años y en el año de 1877 (Lima, 1878).

Known for his traditional elitism (even monarchism) in political thought, Fuentes reveals throughout his obra an acute sensitivity to social dilemmas and a skeptical slant on official variants of liberal progress. Above all Fuentes would graphically, even didactically, convey the emerging "social question" of liberalism to his readers—its manifest impact on the shape and people of Lima. The 1858 Estadística general de Lima exemplified these concerns. As it went about quantifying and sketching recent transformations of Limeño life and economy, it never brushed over the underside of guano prosperity.

Spurred by its commercial windfall, Lima had burgeoned from a sluggish postindependence town of some 55,000 to an overcrowded city of 94,195 inhabitants by 1857, more than a third of them solid white citizens. Initial census chapters of the Estadística de Lima, posed in the objective form of exhaustive occupational surveys, soon began focusing on urban dilemmas and above all on Lima's chronic underclass "vagrancy." Fuentes identifies more than 5,500 Limeños—one-fifth of adult males—"without profession." This number exceeded the 4,152 men gainfully employed in all commercial pursuits. As Fuentes warns, "Nobody can deny, however great their patriotism, that Lima is among the world's cities hosting the largest proportions of vagrants and corrupted men." No doubt such corruption loomed greatest among the city's 10,000 blacks and 13,000 mestizos. Adopting the tone of scientific moralist, he moves on to dissect the peculiar vices of Lima's mass idleness—gambling, begging, drunkenness, crime, social diseases, prostitution. Somehow Fuentes identifies 640 full-time prostitutes, 316 "perpetual drunks," and 490 chronic beggars—of whom "439 seem rather healthy in appearance."^[18] Closer analyses of hospital, court, charity, and prison populations illustrate the challenges facing the city's civic elite. Even the vaunted diversion of guano funds to Lima's huge control-conscious model penitentiary (with its panopticon-style workshops) cannot attenuate these lurking dangers.

Further into his work, Fuentes scrutinizes the city's remaining artisan workshops, exposing such social difficulties as poor nutrition, substandard housing, and rising rents. Lima still employed 10,497 "artesanos y obreros"—if true, this was Lima's largest occupational category after the elites' personal army of domestic servants, cooks, and maids. Artisans

[18] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, pt. 1, Población y censo; 164-68, 209-11, 609-11, 660 (quotes, 74, 608); Giesecke, Masas urbanas y rebelión, chs. 3-4, an analysis of urban social relations based on Fuentes's surveys; cf. Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, for core perceptions.

were scattered among the city's 1,093 formally recognized master workshops, with the largest numbers in tailoring (193 shops), shoemaking (192 shops), and woodworking (153). Fuentes found disproportionately few apprentices here (480 overall), a sure sign of contracting prospects for work. Obviously, all such numbers need to be carefully treated by historians with so many "artisans," for example, shifting in and out of building trades and other services.^[19] Here strong criticisms rang out against the new practice of contracting foreign workers and businessmen to perform urban services, amid so many native unemployed. A telling anecdote concerns the repaving of city streets in 1847, which imported not only workers but even the more prestigious European stones. After absorbing these portraits of enforced idleness, could liberals still cling to alleged "lack of arms" (labor shortage) as the central explanation for the country's hobbled development? But the elitist Fuentes was equally wary, at times openly contemptuous, of the artisans themselves: labor and discipline must "moralize" a sluggish people. He assails guild market restrictions, the crude work habits of Peruvian craftsmen, and productive energies lost on objects of luxury.^[20] All in all, the Estadística de Lima might have augured the disturbances erupting the year it appeared.

Fuentes's Estadística de Lima devotes a full chapter to Lima's "industria fabril y manufacturera." Only one of the 1840s industrial projects survived through 1858; yet Fuentes significantly pauses in studied descriptions of each factory's plan, plant, and sad saga. It is as if he was mulling over the frustrated modernization of his city and one foreclosed solution to its social malaise. Fuentes takes readers on a tour of the abandoned Tres Amigos plant and of Sarratea's barely consummated silk works. He admiringly dubs them "the industrial factories that began to root in our soil with such happy results—under the protection of our independent government."^[21] The paper mill (which alone made it

[19] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, "Cuadro de las profesiones de todos los habitantes de la capital," 621-22; 702; "Cuadro de las personas empleadas en las fábricas y talleres de la capital," 724-25. Fuentes's sources (mainly tax registers) and methods often remain vague; for distinct set of tax-based calculations (and broad problems thereof), see Gootenberg, "Artisans and Merchants," app. 1; for general critique, Rory Miller, "The Population Problem of Late Nineteenth-Century Lima" (paper presented to the International Congress of Americanists, Amsterdam, 1988).

[20] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, 74, 621-22, 655, 673-79, 679-705, 724; see Fuentes, Guía histórico-descriptiva (1860), ch. 3, for even greater detail on artisan pursuits.

[21] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, 719-24; quote, 720; Fuentes is fullest of contemporary factory histories, with some (like Sarratea's story) from personal communication.

through "every sort of obstacle") wins praise for providing work to scores of paupers, who scrounge for raw material in the city's discarded rags.

How does Fuentes account for Lima's imposing monuments of industrial failure? Fuentes seemingly downplays stock class slogans: those framing the factory debacle as proof of Peru's natural "incapacity" for modern industry or listing the inevitable and innumerable obstacles at work. Instead, Fuentes reminds Peruvians of grave "humiliations" suffered by the entrepreneurs from the state: "These establishments needed strong capital, but would offer at the start certain losses and had to sustain the stiff competition of European manufactures. They needed strong and resolute protection by the government, to start producing those advantages the country should have enjoyed from them."^[22] The paper mill, adds Fuentes, managed to pick up the pieces only by ignoring the "disincentives" and "disillusions" of erratic officials, hanging on without protection. In keeping alive positive memories of industrialism, Fuentes pointedly recalled the withdrawal of government support the decade before.

The Estadítica de Lima is also an exegesis of commerce. Limeños learn that the city consumed more than $7.8 million in every conceivable type of foreign imports, up $1.8 million in only a few years. Pages of descriptions and statistics of varied marketplaces and products reveal the cornucopia of Lima's new consumption habits. By 1858 more than half of the top 264 merchants in the consulado were Europeans. Fuentes laments what was already becoming a local developmental cliché: "The scarcity or, better put, total dearth of factories has made it necessary to import almost everything needed for a comfortable life." Further on Fuentes labels the "sultanic despotism" of resident foreigners, who sense no "social obligations" to Peru, save their "own interests," depriving locals in city contracts and commercial speculations.^[23] Such misgivings about overseas influence seem in line with studies of Fuentes's more literary works, which reveal a profound criollo ambivalence about rising foreign cultural sway and protonationalist middle-class morals—drawn to show that Peruvians can and should advance on their own.

Similar motifs sound throughout Fuentes's later publications of the 1860s—amounting to a drawn-out critique of social ills of Peru's liberal-

[22] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, 699, 720-23.

[23] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, 665-66, "Industria mercantil," 705-15; Watson, Cuadro de costumbres, 127-28, 134, for literary analysis of criollo nationalism.

ism of excess. With his scientistic realism Fuentes remains closely attuned to the condition of artisans, their new mutual aid societies, their modest productive advances and their plight with overseas competition, as illustrated, for example, throughout his 1860 Guía histórico-descriptiva administrativa, judicial y de domicilios de Lima . In fact, Fuentes was involved, if marginally, with artisan causes. As early as 1850 he published a report on elections (during the guilds' last meaningful mobilizations) critical of exclusion and exploitation of popular—that is, darkskinned—electors; in 1858, in the aftermath of the artisan riots, his signature graced the guilds' protectionist petition to congress.^[24] The Aletazos del murciélago brims with uncompromising barbs of venal high politics, particularly manipulation of the masses, and many a challenge to liberal icons, albeit conservatively inspired. For example, liberal writers from José Simeón Tejeda (1852) to Silva Santisteban (1859) customarily attacked guild pleas for tariff protection by denouncing in turn guild monopoly and privileges. This was a disingenuous posture since by 1850 guild market restrictions existed only on paper at best. In raising "freedom of industry" as the most hallowed slogan of Peruvian laissez-faire, liberals could blame artisans for their own plight.^[25] Fuentes turns empty slogans and liberal-protectionist polemics on their head, for example, in the satirical verse "La libertad de industria":

Poor Industry! In Peru there is no industry
And why are there no industriosos ?
Because we lack industriosos
     And furthermore why not?
'Cause the government doesn't protect it.^[26]

Fuentes was by no means a romantic, unlettered, or even consistent antiliberal. His knowledge and translations of, and his devotion to, Continental political economy bear this out. He was, for example, an architect of Peru's modernizing commercial codes; his 1877 school text, Catecismo de economía política, is based on the thought of Jean Gustave

[24] Fuentes, Guía histórico-descriptiva, ch. 3, "Artesanos y obreros," passim; M. A. Fuentes, Relación sucinta de los principales hechos ocurridos en algunos pueblos del Perú, con motivo de la ingerencia de los funcionarios políticos en la renovación de los colegios electorales (Lima, pam., 1850); Artesanos, 2: guilds (and their opponents of 1859) already refer to Fuentes for vital statistics.

[25] José Simeón Tejeda, Emancipación de la industria (Arequipa, pam., 1852); Silva Santisteban, Breves reflexiones sobre los sucesos con la importación, 11, 21-25 (from Fuentes figures); for analysis of "freedom of industry," see Gootenberg, "Guilty Guilds?"

[26] Fuentes, Aletazos del murciélago 1:160.

Courcelle-Senueil, one of the most radical French free-traders of the century (and the region's earliest maligned "foreign adviser"). His was to Fuentes "a science that, today more than ever, should be propagated in Peru." Yet in 1879, amid the full-blown export crisis, Fuentes, in his survey Movimiento de la poblacion, could suggest a concerted state job-creation program to head off urban unrest, a conclusion verging on the most interventionist critiques of the time.^[27] In short, Fuentes, fully cognizant of liberal imperatives, developed and spread a studied ambivalence to theoretical systems from a firsthand feel for their consequences. Not just widely consumed, Fuentes was literally the social constructor of Limeño reality.