Galindo, Alberto Flores. In search of an Inca: identity and utopia in the Andes, ed. and tr. by Carlos Aguirre, Charles F. Walker, and Willie Hiatt. Cambridge, 2010. 270p index; ISBN 9780521598613 pbk, $21.99; ISBN 9780521591348, $75.00. Reviewed in 2010dec CHOICE.
Peruvian historian Alberto Flores Galindo (d. 1990) originally published Buscando un Inca in Spanish almost 25 years ago to broad critical acclaim, including winning the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize. His work on the creation of Andean identities and utopian ideas from the Spanish conquest through the Shining Path guerrilla insurgency in the 1980s is a fundamental text for Andean studies. Flores Galindo's probing analysis of messianic and millenarian movements--and his argument that rather than holding on to distant utopias that never existed, Andeans need to build better futures--remains as relevant today as when he first penned this essay. An English edition has long been in the making, and it has been well worth the wait. Historians Aguirre (Univ. of Oregon), Walker (Univ. of California, Davis), and Hiatt (Long Island Univ.) have expertly rendered Flores Galindo's text into English. Aguirre and Walker include a very useful introduction that situates the work both historiographically and politically. Editorial footnotes throughout the text and the updating of Flores Galindo's citations make this classic more accessible to a non-Peruvian audience. Indispensible for an understanding of Latin America. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. -- M. Becker, Truman State University