Prado y Ugarteche, Javier (1871–1921)

Javier Pradoy Ugarteche (b. 1871; d. 25 July 1921), a Peruvian sociologist with extremely anti-indigenous, pro-European cultural views. In Estado social del Perú durante la dominación española (1894), he argued that drunkenness and coca leaf addiction were signs of the cultural inferiority of the indigenous population of the country. He saw such practices as an outgrowth of frustration at not being able to rise to the level of Europeans. He attributed to Afro-Peruvians the genetic qualities of thievery and lasciviousness, traits he argued they had inherited from Africans. The son of former president Mariano Ignacio Prado, Prado finished a doctoral dissertation at age twenty and in public competition won a chair of modern philosophy at the National University of San Marcos. He condemned the Spanish past of Peru for its deleterious effect upon the masses of people. To counter these ills, he argued that the national educational system should teach Peruvians a sense of social solidarity, civic virtue, and technical awareness. These qualities would awaken a desire in the citizen to acquire material wealth and thus would benefit the entire nation. Like many social scientists of his day, he was largely unaware of the local sources of investment and banking that had begun to tap the economic potential of Peru.

See alsoIndigenous Peoples; Race and Ethnicity; Sociology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Thomas M. Davies, Jr., Indian Integration in Peru: A Half Century of Experience, 1900–1948 (1974).

Alfonso W. Quiroz, Domestic and Foreign Finance in Modern Peru, 1850–1950: Financing Visions of Development (1993).

Additional Bibliography

Wade, Peter. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. London: Pluto Press, 1997.

                                   Vincent Peloso