50  Race & Class 51(3)

Fujimori’s decision to anchor his appeal in the disenfranchised Andean majority was not without certain risks. Even today, racial and ethnic prejudice is deeply prevalent. In Lima, for example, the drive to whiten oneself is, for some, obsessive. Many people bleach their hair, lighten their skin and use plastic surgery to create a more ‘European’ look. Doormen at exclusive nightspots will often block people with Andean features while letting white companions enter. A non-Andean appearance also translates into economic advantages. Job listings in Lima newspapers often specify that only people of very good appearance need apply – code for non-indigenous. According to historian Juan José Vega, a mestiza or indigenous woman, although a skilled typist and a bilingual speaker of English and Spanish, understands the futility of answering an ad that says ‘very good appearance’.7 Critiquing this championing of a white ideal further still, Vega provided the example of José de San Martin, a dark-skinned mestizo who, in 1821, proclaimed Peru’s independence from Spain and is now depicted in the official congressional portrait as light complexioned with Caucasian features.8

With Fujimori, by contrast, and for the first time in Peru’s modern history, an outsider stood in the political arena – a domain that had historically belonged to the criollo elite. The underdog, an unknown outsider, presented himself as the candidate of the dispossessed. Clad in traditional indigenous attire and standing aboard a converted tractor dubbed the Fujimovil, the son of Japanese immigrants assured an impoverished, indigenous majority a new Peru. The presidential candidate promised nothing short of an inversion of Peruvian reality, a society in which the non-western ethnic other would move seamlessly from the margins into the centres of power. That his mother didn’t speak Spanish, a fact to which the Peruvian media pointed to over and again and that his own Spanish was peppered with a Japanese inflection, ultimately served to render him a more sympathetic candidate.9 Like Fujimori, a majority of adult Peruvians also had mothers who did not speak Spanish fluently, as the language, according to sociologist Carlos Franco, had only become widely diffused in the last forty years.

According to journalist Luis Gonzalez Manrique, ‘being a Peruvian of the first generation in a figurative sense was a condition shared by millions of Peruvians’. The children of Andean peasants born in the capital shared in this experience of in-betweenness. While Fujimori had to negotiate the culture of a homeland distinct from his parents and to manage his feelings of displacement despite having been born in Peru, the indigenous majority assumed an ambivalent identity ‘that simultaneously linked them to a lost rural world and to the difficult world of urban survival’.10 When taken in context, the fact that these aspects of his Japaneseness were what transformed Fujimori into an emblematic leader for the indigenous, mestizo majority begins, oddly enough, to make sense.

To be sure, the primary predicament of Peruvian nationalism lies in the disproportionate distribution of power in a country in which a small Europeanising elite rules over a disenfranchised Andean majority. Deepening the societal cleavages even more is the determination, explicit and otherwise, of all things indigenous – be it language, culture, attire – as pre-modern and backwards. Anthropologist Teófilo Altamirano describes the migration to Lima as not just a