What do the Tupac Amaru rebellion, Peru's independence, the achievement of women's suffrage in the country, and the expansion of the Peruvian state into the Amazon have in common?

The first answer might be that they are all relevant episodes in Peruvian history, but an equally valid one would be that global forces decisively influenced them all in their historical development.

Political scientist and analyst Alberto Vergara (Lima, 1974) has edited the collective book “Global Peru,” published by Planeta, an effort by Peruvian and foreign researchers to highlight the external forces at play in the most relevant Peruvian historical processes. This work serves to raise awareness of something often overlooked in Peru: the global dimension and implications of its history.

From the Chinese immigration that arrived in the 19th century to fill the labor shortage on the haciendas resulting from the abolition of slavery, to the role of American feminists in securing the right to vote for Peruvian women, and the journey of the Andean rebel Tupac Amaru to become a symbol reclaimed by African American rappers.

Everything in “Global Peru” connects Peru to the world.

BBC Mundo spoke with Vergara on the occasion of his participation in the Hay Festival Arequipa.

You have coordinated a book by several authors on the impact of external global forces on a country like Peru, which sometimes gives the impression of being too self-absorbed and focused on its internal problems. Does Peru have an outward-looking perspective?

No, not at all.

However, this book addresses a whole series of historical episodes and processes that have been decisive in shaping Peruvian reality and describes how external forces have had a decisive influence.

We had the project of writing a history of a global Peru that would overcome the strict traditional division between universal and national history in the history taught in schools in Peru and many other Latin American countries.

We go through school and university classrooms observing these two worlds as if they were watertight compartments that never touch, and in recent years there has been a rise in what has come to be called global history, which is the effort to try to somehow dilute that difference and understand that national histories can be told from other spatial points of reference.

The proposal is to try to tell a history that is not tied and limited by the borders of the nation-state, but rather a cosmopolitan history of the country, in which its characters and events are analyzed from the point of view of exchange and negotiation between the national and the global.

The book explains how, from the very origin of Peru as a nation, from its independence, events such as the Spanish invasion by Napoleon's French troops and figures like the Venezuelan Simon Bolivar and the Argentinian Jose de San Martin. Are these external influences on Peru's birth as a nation properly considered?

I think they are considered, but perhaps not included in a more comprehensive view. The book mentions the origin of Peru, but in reality, the conquest, from the very beginning, is also an encounter between two people like Atahualpa and Pizarro, representing two empires—which we could call transnational, though perhaps that's a bit of a stretch. Even before that, when Pizarro first arrived in Peru in 1528 and sent men to explore Tumbes, two African slaves disembarked from the ship.

The book even addresses pre-Columbian cultures whose extinction resulted from climate change and ocean currents. In short, none of that originates in the realm of the national. It all has to do with a much more global dimension of history.

The role of San Martin and Bolivar in Peruvian independence is widely acknowledged, even in the national anthem, while there are a series of local processes that are not very well known and do not form part of the common sense of the national narrative.

Between 1812 and 1815, there were a series of revolts in favor of national independence, somewhat aligned with what was happening on the continent, many of them in the Peruvian highlands, and all of them were repressed. The Viceroyalty of Lima managed to put them down. But it is curious that the other dimension of independence is much more widely recognized.

We should give these clearly national attempts at emancipation a place in the construction of historical memory.

Although they failed militarily.

One of the attempts was that of Tupac Amaru. The book recounts how he failed in his rebellion against Spanish rule in 1780, but succeeded over time in becoming a symbol that transcended the borders of present-day Peru.How did he end up being a figure championed by such diverse people internationally?

That is a chapter written by Charles Walker, who first shows how Tupac Amaru is part of the era of the Atlantic Revolutions. But then he traces how, despite the desire to erase him completely, the figure of Tupac Amaru, his family, and his rebellion became a Latin American icon.

That has endured in Latin America in a series of plays, poems, and films.

Even in the case of the celebrated American rapper Tupac Shakur (whose mother named him in homage to the Andean rebel).

Obviously, that has very little to do with the initial context of this rebellion; rather, it is a gradual construction of an international icon from a specific national experience.

All official histories, national narratives, contain some uncritical glorifications, and the book highlights some that have been made in the case of Peru, such as the idealization of the abolition of slavery, which in reality in Peru was a late process and encountered resistance from much of the Creole oligarchy that had promoted independence. Do Afro-Peruvians have the recognition they deserve? Has their history been written correctly?

No, no. Unfortunately, segregation and a series of prejudices against the Afro-Peruvian population, which has made a fundamental contribution to the country, survive.

There is no historical rehabilitation of these communities.

In the second volume of the book, which will be published next year, we have another chapter on the importance of Afro-Peruvian culture in Peruvian identity and its relationship with the rest of the world. And what are the forces inside and outside Peru in 2025 that continue recognition to prevent this from happening, preventing the role of that other Peru, the Black and Andean Peru, which is not the official Peru of independence led from Lima? There have been some efforts to tell several of these stories. What is lacking is their incorporation, in any sense other than as second-class citizens, into official history, into the distribution of roles in the national drama. That has not yet been built, but it is certainly something that is gradually being done within academia and is part of intellectual and cultural work.

Just as there has been less attention paid to the history of these Afro-Peruvian and Indigenous people, there are now voices denouncing that their descendants also do not receive due attention. I insist on the question: What are the forces that hinder this equality in 2025?

There is, evidently, an asymmetry of resources and power that manifests itself in who appears and who does not appear in the histories of countries. This is not only the case in Peru.

History is dominated by a way of telling it that places much more emphasis on certain political elites than on sectors like those you allude to.

Even so, since the 1980s there has been a tremendous emergence in what are called subaltern histories, which focus on the perspective of the other side; the expression "the vanquished" was used. All of this has been the subject of a great deal of research in recent decades.

The book also addresses current processes to which Peru seems to be especially vulnerable, such as climate change. Do you think Peruvians today are truly aware of the seriousness of this threat and the international actors contributing to it?

People are aware, although they may not know the details of the seriousness of the issue. They know very well that there is a growing water problem on the coast and that the glaciers that once supplied small farmers have been melting for a long time.

And what about the international actors influencing this? We have seen how the current US administration has radically changed policy on this issue. Peru, with its repeated political crises and changes of president, sometimes gives the impression of not paying much attention to happening things abroad that could affect it.

This is a characteristic of Latin America. All countries are caught up in their own problems and all are convinced that their problems are unique.

Public opinion is very nationalistic, and the level of awareness of international affairs is really low.

The book shows how mass international tourism to Machu Picchu has turned it into a Peruvian national symbol. Its fame contributed to integrating the indigenous and Andean element into Peruvian identity. But at the same time, there is a need to idealize the Inca past as the lost essence of a primitive and genuine Peru. Isn't the challenge of defining a modern, republican Peruvian identity, one that is both inclusive and recognizable abroad, still pending?

That has been the challenge for our countries for 200 years. These are countries that, at their birth, have practically no cultural traits that distinguish them from one another.

It has been the challenge for our countries for 200 years. At the time of independence, the inhabitants of Quito, Buenos Aires and Caracas pray to the same God and speak the same language. The new nation-states face the task of constructing a national identity that, in many cases, did not exist before. In Latin America, there has been success in building national communities of citizens, but that does not necessarily mean that a community of equal citizens has been built, with similar degrees of influence in the public sphere and with equal respect for rights. In Peru, a national identity was successfully constructed from symbolic artifacts, such as Machu Picchu.More recently, for Peru, food has been the most successful national identity-building artifact of the last few decades. These cultural and symbolic dimensions are needed to build a national community.

The thing is, I think we shouldn't place too much hope in the nation, because the nation can be liberating and inclusive, but also despotic and oppressive.

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