39 1476-6825/08/01 039-018 $20.00/0 © 2008 A. Arellano JOURNAL OF TOURISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE Vol. 6, No. 1, 2008 The Inca Heritage Revival: Indigenismo in Cuzco, 1905–1945 Alexandra Arellano Leisure Studies (Human Kinetics), University of Ottawa, 125, University Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5, Canada The Inca heritage is intermingled in a long trajectory of histories, creations and revivals that have constantly contributed to the renewal of its imagery. This paper analyses an important Inca revival movement that has been crucial in the making and remaking of Southern Andean identities: Indigenismo Cusqueño (1905–1945). This Cuzco version of Indigenismo was a regionalist urban middle class movement that emerged at the turn of the 20th century. I analyse how these Indigenistas, or an elite of intellectual ‘legislators’ from Cuzco shaped the regional identity through the ‘recovery’ of an authenticity founded in the legacy of the ancient Empire. Four decades of the production of a heritage initiated a so-called ‘folklorisation’ process that led to the mobilisation of the peasant mass through the enactment of an ancient Inca ritual in 1944. By staging performances of identity and promoting wide partici- pation, the Indigenistas aimed at promoting a ‘regionalist’ identity campaign, attract- ing tourism-related investments and transforming the Inca capital into the ‘cradle of Peruvianness’. doi: 10.2167/jtcc104.0 Keywords: heritage, identity, Indigenismo, Latin America, race, tourism Generally defned as a favourable opinion towards native Latin Americans, Indigenismo began to take shape during the second half of the 19th century, in every country of Iberian colonisation (Favre, 1996). Impelled by the social and political changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution and exploitative forms of capitalism, this movement also expressed the emergence of a great importance attached to ‘national consciousness’ (Renan, 1882) through the celebration of cultural expressions strongly engaged in nation building pro- cesses. Beyond the precepts of defending natives in the face of injustice, Indigenismo located ‘the Indian’ as the only basis upon which to build a national identity, where the native values are those that provide the nation with its singularity. This paper examines a Peruvian regional version of Indigenismo that subse- quently attributed expressions of the Inca’s ancient civilisation to ‘Indian-ness’, to regional identity and ultimately to the nation. Indigenismo based in the city of Cuzco – the capital of the ancient Empire – was formed by an intellectual elite that emerged primarily as a result of the vastly important economic growth that took place throughout the region at the turn of the 20th century. From the production of ethnographic knowledge and academic discourses of the past, this period of Indigenismo (1905–1945) culminated in an effort to mobilise the regional