Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Postmulticultural Bolivia - Hardcover

Postero, Nancy Grey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804755191 ISBN 13: 9780804755191

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2006

Synopsis

The book traces current Indian activism in Bolivia, arguing that a new social formation is emerging to challenge racism and the harsh effects of the dominant neoliberal economic model.

About this title

About the Author

Nancy Grey Postero is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She is coeditor of The Struggle for Indian Rights in Latin America (2004).

From the Back Cover

Upon winning the 2005 presidential election, Evo Morales became the first indigenous person to lead Bolivia since the arrival of the Spanish more than five hundred years before. Morales's election is the culmination of a striking new kind of activism in Bolivia. Born out of a history of resistance to colonial racism and developed in collective struggles against the post-revolutionary state, this movement crystallized over the last decade as poor and Indian Bolivian citizens engaged with the democratic promises and exclusions of neoliberal multiculturalism.
This ethnography of the Guaraní Indians of Santa Cruz traces how recent political reforms, most notably the Law of Popular Participation, recast the racist exclusions of the past, and offers a fresh look at neoliberalism. Armed with the language of citizenship and an expectation of the rights citizenship implies, this group is demanding radical changes to the structured inequalities that mark Bolivian society. As the 2005 election proved, even Bolivia's most marginalized people can reform fundamental ideas about the nation, multiculturalism, neoliberalism, and democracy.

From the Inside Flap

Upon winning the 2005 presidential election, Evo Morales became the first indigenous person to lead Bolivia since the arrival of the Spanish more than five hundred years before. Morales's election is the culmination of a striking new kind of activism in Bolivia. Born out of a history of resistance to colonial racism and developed in collective struggles against the post-revolutionary state, this movement crystallized over the last decade as poor and Indian Bolivian citizens engaged with the democratic promises and exclusions of neoliberal multiculturalism.
This ethnography of the Guarani Indians of Santa Cruz traces how recent political reforms, most notably the Law of Popular Participation, recast the racist exclusions of the past, and offers a fresh look at neoliberalism. Armed with the language of citizenship and an expectation of the rights citizenship implies, this group is demanding radical changes to the structured inequalities that mark Bolivian society. As the 2005 election proved, even Bolivia's most marginalized people can reform fundamental ideas about the nation, multiculturalism, neoliberalism, and democracy.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Now We Are Citizens

INDIGENOUS POLITICS IN POSTMULTICULTURAL BOLIVIA By Nancy Grey Postero

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5519-1

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................ixList of Abbreviations......................................................................xiiiIntroduction: Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Bolivia.......................................11. Regimes of Race and Citizenship.........................................................232. An Indigenous Federation in Boomtown Santa Cruz.........................................553. A Crisis of Leadership in Bella Flor....................................................874. Multiculturalism and the Law of Popular Participation...................................1235. Forming Neoliberal Subjects: NGOs and "Responsible" Self-Government.....................1646. Popular Protagonism since 2000..........................................................189Conclusion: Toward a Postmulticultural Bolivia.............................................216Notes......................................................................................233References.................................................................................257Index......................................................................................285

Chapter One

Regimes of Race and Citizenship

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. —Karl Marx

An Old Grief

One warm night in 1998, the leader of the Capitanía Zona Cruz (CZC), Don Álvaro Montero, took me with him to the community of La Cañada, about ten kilometers north of the city of Santa Cruz. Several of the young leaders of the capitanía's technical team, Equipo Técnico Zonal (ETZ), had just returned from a national Guaraní youth meeting and they wanted to share their experiences. There was also a birthday among the group, so we were invited to a small party at the home of Rosana Moreno, one of the ETZ members. The capitán grande drove his car, a run-down Toyota sedan of the kind Cruceños ironically call "transformers," after the children's toys. These used cars with the steering wheels originally on the right side have been imported from Japan and brought across the border illegally. Somewhere along its way, the steering wheel had been switched to the left side, leaving a gaping hole on the right. Don Álvaro filled the gap with cassettes, one of which he played at full volume during our drive.

We drove out of the crowded city, through the surrounding agricultural country. Vast cattle ranches owned by the elite stretched away from the highway, alternating with fields of tall sugarcane. Guaranís migrated here to work the zafras (sugarcane harvests) in the 1950s and 1960s and stayed to work on the large haciendas as peons for the local patrones (ranchers). The nearly twenty-five communities that made up the capitanía were scattered all around the city's periphery, especially near the cane fields and the large farming zones. The community of La Cañada had grown up around the sugar refinery of the same name and had a small Guaraní neighborhood for the workers. Rosana's father had worked at the refinery for nearly twenty years.

Rosana's house was in the town center, right in front of a large park under construction. It looked like any other home in the neighborhood, made of adobe and block, with a small backyard containing a latrine and washing post. Rosana proudly showed off her pig, which she had bought as a suckling and was raising for sale. Her mother had added on a small store to the front, where she sold sodas, bread, beer, and other essentials. We sat under the palm roof of the patio, listening to popular Bolivian dance music called chicha, and enjoyed a cold beer — always welcome in Santa Cruz's tropical climate. Rosana and fellow ETZ member Samuel Tapera told us about the youth meeting they had attended in Camiri, in the south, organized by the national Guaraní federation, the Asociación del Pueblo Guaraní (APG). The meeting marked the anniversary of the January 1892 massacre in Kuruyuki, where the Bolivian army had put down a massive Guaraní rebellion, ending a century of revolts and insurrections. (This history is discussed in more detail throughout the chapter.) Samuel, a young man in his early thirties, recounted the meeting and the ritual dances on the last night. "It was so moving to be with so many other Guaranís," he said. "It made me remember the warrior side of our people, the strength of being together. It was something I can't measure, just the feeling of being Guaraní. We danced for hours, listening to the Guaraní music, feeling the drums inside of us."

Don Álvaro retrieved a cassette from his car and popped it in Rosana's boom box. It was traditional Guaraní music and everyone got up to dance. "This is our music," he said. "My father played the violin, and whenever I hear it, I remember the old ones, the old ways." He arranged us in a circle and we all held onto each other's arms, moving slowly and rhythmically to the mournful violin and drum tune. The young folk, Samuel, Rosana, and the others who had joined us, eagerly followed his lead. As we danced and talked that night, Don Álvaro told them stories about the Guaraní past, especially about the queremba reta (warriors) who had fought their enemies so valiantly. They remembered their forebears' reputation for ferocity: only the Mapuche of Chile had resisted pacification by the Spaniards longer than the Chiriguano had. "Imagine," said Samuel, "this massacre was only a hundred years ago." For these young Guaraní leaders, raised in the suburbs of a large city, the tragedy — and the challenge — of Kuruyuki are not altogether in the past. "We are still forced to be queremba reta," said Rosana at the end of the evening, "but now it is in a different kind of struggle."

The bittersweet pride the Guaraní of Zona Cruz hold for their bellicose past reflects the long history of domination and subjugation of Indians in Bolivia. This struggle, which began more than five hundred years ago with the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas, continues to affect the lives of Indians today in numerous ways. The evening at Rosana's house made clear that the long-lasting impact of such a devastating event is experienced at an emotional or psychic level: the pain and losses are seared into the memories of its victims' descendants, like the Guaraní. But this history also continues to affect Indians as contemporary members of Bolivian society. Domination of Indians did not only happen through massacres, but also through the establishment of regimes of social order that naturalized such domination. These regimes laid out categories of belonging and Otherness that continue to operate today. These governing systems and their accompanying "languages of contention" (Roseberry 1996) have changed since the colonial period, but each regime has left its cumulative traces in the culture and social relations of Bolivian society. This chapter examines regimes of the past, rendering visible the political and discursive techniques by which Indians have been included and excluded. Readers will note the troubling echoes between the present and the past.

The Guaraní and the Spaniards

According to historians, the ancestors of the people we now know as the Guaraní apparently migrated from Brazil to the Chaco area between what is now Santa Cruz and Paraguay (called the Cordillera) sometime in the 1400s.4 Part of the Tupi-Guaraní family, they had come in search of La Tierra Sin Mal (the land without evil), the mythical land where they could live in peace and find bountiful sustenance for their families. The Tupi-Guaraní intermarried with the Chané people who already lived in the zone, and the resulting blend of these two groups was called the Chiriguano (Saignes and Combes 1995). They formed communities throughout the zone, farming, hunting, and engaging in battles with other lowland tribes as well as occasionally with the far frontiers of the Inca empire (Pifarré 1989). The descendants of the Chiriguano are known today as the Guaraní.

After the conquest of the Inca empire in the Peruvian highlands, Spaniards set up colonial administration of the former Inca empire, which included what is now Bolivia. From the 1540s on, the rich silver veins of Cerro Rico in Potosí were exploited with the labor of the well-organized highland Indian population, and La Paz was established as a commercial and trans-shipment center (Klein 1992: 35). This silver-mining boom lasted late into the 1600s, and a criollo (Creole) class of settlers developed on large haciendas, especially in the Cochabamba valley, to support the mining project (ibid.).

The eastern lowlands, however, had no silver, so this region was left mainly to missionaries and rubber producers. Spanish explorers from Paraguay seeking paths to the silver mines from the Atlantic side arrived in the late 1500s and, not finding a way up the mountains, settled in the area. The city of Santa Cruz was founded in 1561 by explorer Ñuflo de Chavez and slowly grew into a sugar- and cotton-producing zone (Gill 1987; Pifarré 1989). For several centuries the Chiriguano forcefully resisted the Spanish invasions and settlements. Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries established numerous missions, bringing dispersed Guaranís into reducciones (mission towns), in which they were forced to participate in mission agricultural schemes. These invariably lasted a short period, as Guaranís revolted and often killed the missionaries. As Spanish settlers increased in numbers, establishing large farms and cattle-ranching haciendas in the area, military invasions attacked the "savage" and "dangerous" Guaranís, driving them off their lands and farther into the Cordillera. The histories of this period are filled with accounts of insurrections and brutal repression, followed by short periods of peace and then additional cycles of uprisings.

The years between 1727 to 1735 were an especially violent period. Apparently, one explosive incident involved the Chiriguano, who were frustrated about missionary control and the penetration of their lands. A Spanish officer in the Tariquea valley brutally whipped a Chiriguano who had been going from community to community, encouraging resistance. As a result of the whipping, Chiriguanos across the region began preparing for war. In a short time, nearly seven thousand warriors gathered and began a new cycle of war, in which missions were burned, missionaries killed, and haciendas taken over or destroyed by the Indians. These uprisings led to swift and brutal repression, as the Crown sent out army expeditions to punish and subdue the insurrectionists (Pifarré 1989: 232ff). As in the rest of Latin America, this repeated process of extermination and subordination resulted in a sharp drop in the Guaraní population—a result of massacres, epidemics, warfare, and the loss of farmland and means of subsistence. Meanwhile, inevitable processes of mestizaje began, as the Chiriguano began to be españolizado ("Spanish-ized") (ibid.: 140).

Despite these processes, however, the Chiriguano remained a determined and rebellious force. The last uprising of the Guaraní, who were desperate to protect their lands, occurred in January 1892. In the years immediately before the uprising, a young ipaje (healer or shaman) named Chapiaguasu had gained the reputation for extraordinary powers of healing and vision. The people called him Tumpa Hapiaoeki, a term of divinity, and flocked to hear his oracular pronouncements. He told them that they should not fear the guns of the soldiers, which would "only spit out water" (cited in ibid.: 376). Instead, Chapiaguasu told them, those who waged war against the soldiers would have a new life. His presence among the people would guarantee the Chiriguanos' victory and the combatants' invulnerability.

This rhetoric, which combined several features of Guaraní myth, mobilized thousands of Indians from across the Cordillera region. The Spanish army responded to the growing "warlike euphoria" and sent a brigade of soldiers, which engaged several groups of rebels in small actions, defeating and dispersing them. In the final battle on January 28, 1892, the Guaraní insurgents were brutally defeated by the military. Historian Francisco Pifarré has estimated the dead at six hundred to nine hundred and the wounded, most of whom perished later, at eight hundred (ibid.: 385; see also Sanabria Fernandez 1972: 159–69). After the rebellion was put down, the Chiriguano people were dispersed, some escaping to the mountains. The communities that remained came under the economic and political dominance of the regional elites. Many other Chiriguanos were sent off to the Amazon, where captive native people were employed in rubber tapping. There the near-slavery conditions in the rubber boom (which lasted from the late 1880s to the early 1900s) decimated the Amazon populations already greatly affected by missionary reductions. The remaining Indians, far from their homelands, gradually became part of the region's mestizo poor (Herrera Sarmiento 2002).

The Dual Republics

Colonial domination in the highlands took a different path. There the Indian population was much greater, and the Inca empire had left a preexisting system of indirect rule. The Spanish assumed control over this system, leaving land in the hands of the native peasants and the local governing power in the hands of caciques, local elites whose authority was inherited from their Incan nobility forebears. Indian communities were divided up into districts called encomiendas, large extensions of lands given to Spanish grantees (encomenderos). In exchange for religious education of the Indians, the encomendero was given rights to the Indians' yearly tribute payments, which could be paid in crops (Klein 1992: 37; see also Service 1954 and Thomson 2002).

Although the encomenderos were officially prohibited from extracting Indian labor, they had enormous power over their charges and used their labor for their own interests. In response, in the mid-1500s the Spanish Crown attempted to break the feudal power of the encomenderos, to control Indian labor needed for the growing silver mines. Through the reforms administered by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, the Crown set up two separate legal and institutional systems: the república de los españoles for Spaniards and the república de indios for Indians. Indians became a separate juridical and political category of subjects from Spanish, criollos, or mestizos, with separate rights and obligations. Indians were allowed to hold and use communal property in what were called comunidades indígenas (indigenous communities), and they maintained the right to local self-governance under the cacicazgo system. In exchange, in what anthropologist Tristan Platt has called the "tributary pact" (Platt 1982), Indians contributed their labor to the Crown and were required to pay tribute taxes, which provided an important source of revenue to the Crown. The caciques collected the tax and delivered it to the Crown. Indians were entitled to royal protection on the basis of their "inferior condition" and their fulfillment of their tributary obligations (Barragán Romano 1999: 52).

Despite the semblance of protection offered to Indians, however, the relation between the two republics was essentially exploitative. The centerpiece of the labor system was the mita, based on the pre-Columbian collective labor system. Sixteen mita districts from Cuzco to Potosí were established, from which one-seventh of the adult males were subject to one year's service at the mines (Klein 1992: 39–42). In a century and a half, the forced service of these laborers, called the mitayos, produced enough silver to triple the total European reserves and turned Potosí into the richest city in the Americas. As historian Eduardo Galeano has chronicled, the silver from the "open veins" of the Americas passed through Spanish coffers to the rest of Europe, stimulating economic development. Yet the natives of the Americas paid the enormous cost of this economic transformation. More than eight million Indian lives were lost to brutal servitude, mercury poisoning, and freezing temperatures in the mines (Galeano 1973).

The colonial tribute system was paired with and justified by a biological discourse about race, which established categories based on purity of blood. This system, called the sistema de castas, ranked Spaniards (considered to be people of pure blood) at the top, castas (mixed-blood people) in the middle, and Indians and Africans on the bottom (Cope 1994: 4). Of course, such artificially created categories quickly became impossible to police, as intermarrying between groups produced new racial categories, such as mulattos, mestizos, and zambos. Cultural and spatial mixtures also resulted as native people migrated to the cities and Spaniards moved into the lands that were supposedly Indian (Larson 2004: 40). Racial identity quickly became a matter determined more by social markers than biology. People could pass from one category to another by changing their dress, place of residence, language, or working conditions. Historian Douglas Cope has argued that subordinate groups were not passive recipients of this elite ideology; rather, they often resisted the definitions to promote social mobility, group solidarity, and self-definition (Cope 1994: 5).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Now We Are Citizensby Nancy Grey Postero Copyright © 2007 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804755191
• ISBN 13: 9780804755191
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 312