The Marketing of El Cholo Toledo

The Marketing of El Cholo Toledo

In 1990, the now infamous Alberto Fujimori ran for president against the renowned writer Mario Vargas Llosa calling upon “chinitos” (an allusion to himself) and “cholitos” (working class Peruvians) to join forces against “blanquitos” ( Vargas Llosa and the elite circles surrounding him). El Chino, as he came to be known, promised a government that would promote “technology, honesty, and work.” Once in power, he implemented a neoliberal economic plan and requested that the chinos and cholos forget their collective battles and instead struggle individually against poverty by becoming micro-entrepreneurs. The 2000 electoral campaign, the first act in the year-long drama that finally drove the increasingly corrupt and dictatorial Fujimori from office, pitted him against Alejandro Toledo, a Peruvian of working class origins, whose campaign evoked the complexity of Peruvian mestizajes.

Migration and education, like in most stories of mestizaje, play a crucial role in Toledo’s public life story. This emphasizes his poor origins in an Andean village and his success in earning a Ph.D. from Stanford University. However, rather than using education to silence his origins, like the ideology of decency would have indicated, throughout his electoral campaigns, Toledo loudly claimed cholo identity. Yet, this identity is not simple. On the contrary, “el Cholo Toledo” is multifaceted; the images he uses to fashion his electoral persona draw—perhaps independently of his intentions—from the historical rhetoric of Peruvian mestizaje and its multiple meanings.

At the most obvious level, Toledo’s electoral campaign connects with the Incanist, anti-mestizo tradition promoted by Valcárcel’s indigenismo. As the symbol of his political party he chose the “Chakana,” described as an Inka symbol that signaled the dawn of a new era. Within the same script, very important political gatherings have been held in Cuzco, where the candidate opened the demonstrations with a ritual salute to the Andean deities that surround the city, and Eliane Karp, (his anthropologist wife) addressed the crowds in Quechua, the indigenous language. Not surprisingly, “el Cholo” has also been labeled Pachacutec, allegedly the most important Inca.

Less obviously, but summoning the attention of a crucial sector of the electorate, Alejandro Toledo’s image wearing a chullo and a tie connects with indigenous views of mestizaje—those that, for example, see Quechua and vernacular Andean practices as compatible, even coming to fruition, with a university degree and economic success. However, and notwithstanding the candidate’s reverberant claims to a working class cholo identity, he also connects with elite views of mestizaje. His university degree, his “studies abroad,” (and of course his marriage to a foreign white woman) loom large, and thus “Alejandro”—as his elite peers familiarly call him—represents an “ironed” choloness, one that has been tamed by education and is a useful political strategy. Alvaro Vargas Llosa—the writer’s son—praised Toledo’s “cool calculating mind of a Stanford and Harvard academic” and his ability to “understand life from a viewpoint rooted in analytic rigor and scientific information.” Coinciding with his son’s opinion, Mario Vargas Llosa, expressed his support of Toledo by describing him as a “modern Indian, a cholo without grudges or inferiority complexes.”

But Toledo’s mestizo identities aside, and considering the historical trajectory of race (and racism) in Peru, a question remains: What happened at the end of the twentieth century that allowed for the profusion of racial images in a country used to silencing the racial identity of public figures and to the denial of racism? Att