[...]in the fourth section, I propose that Gavilán's return to his community confrms his Quechua identity, apprehended through the utopian Andean myth and the critical idea of Peru. 2. In their book El Perú desde la escuela, Patricia Oliart and Gonzalo Portocarrero contend that many historians and educators in the second half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century, such as Sebastián Lorente and Carlos Wiesse, considered the indigenous people to be in a state of degradation and ignorance due to the mismanagement of the criollo elite. [...]they constructed a national identity around the idea of mestizaje as an aspiration, also constituting a harmonious solution to the socioeconomic inequality between criollos and indigenous people. In the case of the criollo intellectuals of the time, they did not recognize any qualities in the indigenous people except their ability for manual labor and an idealized pre-Hispanic past that only guaranteed their potential for effective group organization. [...]the version of the indigenous subject that emerged at that