In this 1943 speech, delivered on “Radio Nacional”, José Sabogal praises the cultural and technological accomplishments witnessed on a recent trip to the United States, and argues that Peru needs to preserve its culture by building a museum for ancient, colonial, and modern art and culture, an argument inspired by the great museums he visited in the United States. Sabogal begins his radio address in Lima by describing the visual impact of both the geographic and technological monuments of the United States. Sabogal explains that the United States’ greatest achievements are its skyscrapers, bridges, elevators, plumbing, and electricity. However, he also greatly admires its museums, and how it has preserved American native culture, including that of Peru, as well as the cultures of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Sabogal recommends an initiative to collect and display all of the pre-colonial cultures of the hemisphere within a single museum (a project which could be realized in the United States because, he notes, it possesses the best collections of these artifacts). But, he ends by calling for the creation of an “integral” museum in Lima, which would house ancient Indian art, “Mediterranean era” art (i.e., colonial), and contemporary art.

José Sabogal (1888-1956) delivered this speech on “Radio National” in Lima on March 21, 1943, following a seventy-two-day tour of the United States, which was sponsored by the State Department’s Division of Cultural Relations in Washington, D.C. He remarks that because of his limited English, his experience of the United States was an emphatically visual one, during which he identified many similarities between its majestic landscape and that of Peru’s. Sabogal, however, tells that he was most impressed by its technological achievements in building, especially bridges and skyscrapers. In the area of culture, he does not discuss the development of visual arts in the United States, but instead extensively praises its museums, and how pre-Columbian American culture, including that of Peru, has been preserved in its many impressive museums. It is of note that the Pan-American politics that established the historical context of his trip—and motivated the U.S. State Department to sponsor Sabogal’s visit during a crucial year of World War II—are suggested by Sabogal’s argument that the ancient art of all of the Americas should be gathered in a single museum, where a “centro de estudios americanos” could be established. Sabogal explains that the time is ripe for this kind of endeavor because of the “. . . rising wave of spiritual integration that is occurring in this moment of mutual recognition . . .” throughout the hemisphere.