Indian Communities, Political Cultures, and the State in Latin America, 1780-1990

Author(s): Florencia E. Mallon

Source: Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 24, Quincentenary Supplement: The
Colonial and Post Colonial Experience. Five Centuries of Spanish and Portuguese America
(1992), pp. 35-53
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Indian Communities, Political Cultures,

and the State in Latin America,
I780-I 99
FLORENCIA E. MALLON

In Tlatelolco, in the symbolically laden Plaza of the T

is a famous plaque commemorating the fall of Tenoch
defence organised by Cuauhtemoc. According to the

inscribed, that fall 'was neither a victory nor a def

birth' of present-day Mexico, the mestizo Mexi

institutionalised by the Revolution of I9I0. Starting

of 1968 - which added yet another layer to the

mentation already present in Tlatelolco - and contin

force in the face of the current wave of indigenous mo

Latin America, as well as the crisis of indigenismo and of the

postrevolutionary development model, many have begun to doubt the
version of Mexican history represented therein.1 Yet it is important to
emphasise that the Tlatelolco plaque, fogged and tarnished as it may be
today, would never have been an option in the plazas of Lima or La Paz.

The purpose of this essay is to define and explain this difference by

reference to the modern histories of Peru, Bolivia and Mexico. In so

doing, I hope to elucidate some of the past and potential future

contributions of indigenous political cultures to the ongoing formation of
nation-states in Latin America.

As suggested by the plaque in Tlatelolco, the process and symbolism of

mestiZaje has been central to the Mexican state's project of political and
territorial reorganisation. By 1970, only 7.8 % of Mexico's population was

defined as Indian, and divided into 59 different linguistic groups.

Geographically and politically speaking, the Indian population tended to
inhabit the periphery of the country: Oaxaca, Chiapas and Yucatan in the
south; the Huasteca and the Tarascan and Huichol regions in the east and

west, respectively; the Yaqui in the north. When new indigenous

organisations were formed in the 1970S and i98os, the country's central
Marie-Chantal Barre, Ideologias indigenistasj movimientos indios (Mexico, 1983); Guillermo

Bonfil, 'Los pueblos indios, sus culturas y las politicas culturales', in Nestor Garcia
Canclini (ed.), Politicas culturales en America Latina (Mexico, i987); Jesus Contreras
(ed.), La cara india, la crut del 92: Identidad itnicay movimientos indios (Madrid, I988).
J. Lat. Amer. Stud. Suppl. 35-53 Printed in Great Britain

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35

36 Florencia E. Mallon

Nahua zone was not considered Indian; 'Great Councils' were set up for
Otomis, Matlatzincas, Totonacs, and so on, but not for the Nahua. The
Nahuatl group, the strongest and most numerous in Mexican territory,
was considered instead the native counterpart to the conquerors in the mix

that generated the 'cosmic race', the mestizo who occupies such a
privileged place in the national mythology. In this context, the Indians of
central Mexico are identified as impoverished peasants, pure and simple,
and they are supposedly looked down upon as rural poor rather than as
Indians. It is in this sense that we can best appreciate the political content
of the constructions of 'mestizo' and 'Indian' in Mexico, and better

understand how Judith Friedlander, writing in i975 and basing herself on

a community in Morelos, could conclude that the category 'Indian' had
no cultural content whatsoever, and served only as an instrument of clas
oppression.2
Generally speaking, the anthropological and historical literature for
Mexico reflects this politically constructed division between a mestizo

core and an indigenous periphery. Scholars writing on central Mexico

have tended to use a class analysis: their subject is a peasantry undergoing

proletarianisation. It is here where the literature on the Mexican

Revolution is richest, and where the great debate between 'campesinistas'

and 'proletaristas' was centred in the 1970S and 1980s. Indigenous

cultures are the subject of study in peripheral regions: here are located the

great anthropological traditions of Yucatan, Chiapas, Oaxaca, the Puebla

highlands, the Yaqui Valley. Often these indigenous cultures have been

studied outside of time, as scholars have searched for precolumbian

continuities in the cofradias, fiesta complexes, and other customs. Only
recently have the cultural and social processes of these peripheral regions
become more historicised.3

The Peruvian case shows important differences. In I961 the Indian

population was calculated at approximately 47 %, and concentrated in the
area of the southern highlands known as the 'mancha india'. In contrast

to Mexico, the Peruvian state has been unable to centralise its power
2 For the percentage of the Indian population see Barre, Ideolog'as indigenistas, p. 59; for

the treatment of the Nahuatl group see Jane H. Hill, 'In Neca Gobierno de Puebla:
Mexicano Penetrations of the Mexican State', in Greg Urban and Joel Sherzer (eds.),
Nation-States and Indians in Latin America (Austin, 199 ), pp. 72-94; Judith Friedlander,
Being Indian in Hueyapan: A Study of Forced Identity in Contemporary Mexico (New York,
I975).

3 Morelos is one of the most-studied regions of central Mexico. See, for example,
Guillermo de la Pena, Herederos de promesas: Agricultura, politica y ritual en los Altos de

Morelos (Mexico, i980); Arturo Warman, ...y venimos a contradecir. Los campesinos de
Morelosy el estado nacional (M6xico, 1976); Horacio Crespo (ed.), Morelos: Cinco siglos de
Historia Regional (Mexico, 1984); John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution

(New York, I968). For the debate between 'campesinistas' and 'proletaristas', see

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Indians and the State 37

through a unifying process of mestizaje, and has not relegated the Indian
to the country's periphery. Instead, the political construction of
'Indianness' has been a bipolar one: Indian highlands, white and mestizo
coast; white and mestizo cities, Indian countryside. In this context,
mestigaje separates rather than unites the population: the misti, or highland

mestizo, is a figure signifying domination. Mistis mediate between the city

and the Indian communities by accepting privileges from the whites in

order to dominate the Indians. Historically, during the twentieth century,

becoming a mestizo in urban areas often meant cutting ties with the
countryside and the community of origin.4
Roger Bartra, Estructura agrariay clases sociales en Mixico (Mexico, I974); Roger Bartra,
Campesinadoy poder politico en Mexico (Mexico, 1982); Luisa Pare, Elproletariado agricola
en Mixico: Campesinos sin tierra o proletarios agricolas? (Mexico, 1977); Gustavo Esteva,
Batalla en el Mexico rural (Mexico, i980); Arturo Warman, Ensayos sobre el campesinado

en Mixico (Mexico, I980); Michael Redclift, 'Agrarian Populism in Mexico - The "Via
Campesina"', Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 7 (July I980), pp. 492-502. Works on

Mexican anthropology are too numerous to cite except for a representative list. On the
Yucatan see Nancy M. Farriss, Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise

of Survival (Princeton, I984); and the critical-analytical study by Paul Sullivan,

Unfinished Conversations: Mayas and Foreigners Between Two Wars (New York, I989),
which summarises the experiences of other anthropologists in the region, including the
classic works by Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas. On Chiapas, the classic study
and one of the original works on the cofradias is Frank Cancian, Economics and Prestige
in a Maya Community (Stanford, I965). More recent works that attempt to historicise
indigenous and rural processes are Robert Wasserstrom, Class and Society in Central
Chiapas (Berkeley, i983); and Antonio Garcfa de Le6n, Resistencia y utopia, 2 vols.
(Mexico, I985). Critical studies on the cofradias are Jan Rus and Robert Wasserstrom,

'Civil-Religious Hierarchies in Central Chiapas: A Critical Perspective', American

Ethnologist, vol. 7, no. 3 (Aug. i980), pp. 466-78; and John K. Chance and William B.
Taylor, 'Cofradias and Cargos: An Historical Perspective on the Mesoamerican CivilReligious Hierarchy', American Ethnologist, vol. 12, no. X (Feb. I985), pp. I-26. On
Oaxaca, an excellent revisionist work is Marcello Carmagnani, El regreso de los dioses. El

proceso de reconstitucidn de la identidad itnica en Oaxaca (Mexico, 1988). A good review of

the literature on the isthmus of Tehuantepec appears in Howard Campbell, 'Zapotec

Ethnic Politics and the Politics of Culture in Juchitin, Oaxaca (I 3 50-I990)', PhD diss.,

Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, I990. Other relevant works include: for Tlaxcala and the

Sierra de Puebla, Hugo Nutini and Barry L. Isaac, Los pueblos de habla ndhuatl de la region

de Tlaxcalay Puebla (Mexico, 1974); Hugo Nutini and Betty Bell, Ritual Kinship: The
Structure and Historical Development of the Compadrazgo System in Rural Tlaxcala
(Princeton, 1980); Hugo Nutini, Ritual Kinship: Ideological and Structural Integration of the

Compadrazgo System in Rural Tlaxcala, vol. 2 (Princeton, i984); Hugo Nutini, Todos
Santos in Rural Tlaxcala (Princeton, I988); Lourdes Arizpe, Parentezcoy Economia en una
Sociedad Nahua: Nican Pehua Zacatipan (Mexico, I973); Bernardo Garcia, Los pueblos de
la sierra: Elpodery el espacio entre los indios del norte de Puebla hasta 700oo (Mexico, i987).

On the Yaqui see Edward Spicer, The Yaquis: A Cultural History (Tucson, I980);
Evelyn Hu-Dehart, 'Peasant Rebellion in the Northwest: The Yaqui Indians of

Sonora, I740-1976', in Friedrich Katz (ed.), Riot, Rebellion and Revolution: Rural Social
Conflict in Mexico (Princeton, i988), pp. I41-75.
4 Indian population figures come from Barre, Ideologias indigenistas, p. 49. Concerning the
process of mestiZaje and ethnic relations, one of the classic original works is Fernando

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38 Florencia E. Mallon
Peruvian social science has reflected and reconstructed these dualisms.

In the I96os and 1970S, sociologists and anthropologists tended to adopt

a modernisation perspective through which to view 'traditional' (read

'Indian') political, social, and economic systems in the countryside.

Commercialisation in the rural areas and migration to the city were seen
as parallel processes that together would incorporate the Indian into the
modern world, through cultural transformation. In the cases where this
transformation was considered complete, it was called mestigaje; where it
remained incomplete, it was termed 'cholification'. After the guerrilla

movements of I965 and the I968 military revolution a new variant of

dualism began to emerge, in which the Indian would disappear thanks to
the development of capitalism, proletarianisation, and unionisation. In the

place of indigenous peoples would emerge a socialist worker-peasant

alliance. But in the I98os, with the beginnings of the present civil war, the
failure of the military's development project and of the electoral left, once

again the social science literature has fragmented and scholars have
rediscovered the pure and idealised Indian, while the concept of the
Andean utopia has gained ascendancy.5

Though Bolivia shares with Peru, in a general sense, the bipolar

construction of Indian and white ethnicities, historically and culturally
speaking this construction has a different internal dynamic. Rather than a
highland-coast or urban-rural opposition, we find a variety of regional

and ethnic fragments being constructed and recombined across time:

Quechua and Aymara plateau versus Quechua and mestizo valleys: white
elites versus Indian popular classes; a colonial silver economy centred in
Sucre-Potosi versus a 'modern' tin economy in Oruro-La Paz. Mestizaje

Fuenzalida et al., El indioy elpoder en el Peru rural (Lima, I970). For an original and new

perspective see Marisol de la Cadena, '"Las mujeres son mas indias": Etnicidad y

genero en una comunidad del Cusco', Revista Andina, vol. 9, no. i (July I991), pp.
7-29.

5 Representative examples of the literature from the I96os and I970S are: Jose Ma

Mar et al., Dominacio'ny cambios en el Peru rural (Lima, 1969); Francois Bourricaud, Pow
and Society in Contemporary Peru, translated by Paul Stevenson (New York, 1970); J
Cotler, Clases, estadoy nacidn en el Peru (Lima, 1978); Robert G. Keith et al., La hacie
la comunidady el campesino en el Peru (Lima, 1970); Giorgio Alberti and Rodrigo Sanc

Poder y conflicto social en el valle del Mantaro (Lima, I974). For the literature

proletarianisation, see Victor Caballero M., Imperialismoy campesinado en la sierra cen

(Huancayo, I98i); Florencia E. Mallon, 'Microeconomia y campesinado: Hacien

comunidad y coyunturas econ6micas en el Valle de Yanamarca', Anilisis, n

(Jan.-April 1978), pp. 39-5 I; Florencia E. Mallon, The Defense of Community in Per
Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, I86o-1940 (Princeton, 9

For the Andean utopia, see Manual Burga, Nacimiento de una Utopia: Muert

Resurreccion de los Incas (Lima, 1988); Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca: Identid

y Utopia en los Andes (Lima, I986).

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Indians and the State 39

as a process seems to affect the Quechua more than the Aymara, and to
occur more in the Cochabamba valley than on the La Paz plateau. And in
the city of La Paz, the presence of Aymara intellectuals, students and
entrepreneurs is impressive when compared to Peruvian cities.6
The distinction between plateau and valley, Aymara and Quechua, can
also be discerned in scholarly production about Bolivia. On one side we
find the anthropological works about Yura, K'ulta or the Norte de Potosi,
which generally emphasise the continuities in Indianness - whether
Quechua or Aymara - since before the Conquest, and contrast the Indian
community with mestizo or white society. On the other side we have the

literature on the 1952 Revolution, the Cochabamba Valley, or the

mineworkers, which emphasises mestizaje, radical politics, and social
movements oriented around class. Despite the analytical richness of many
studies, the literatures tend not to dialogue between themselves, claiming
instead that their object of study is the 'true' Bolivian reality. This
occurred with the work of Tristan Platt about the nineteenth-century
'reciprocity pact' between Andean communities and the state, work
which though based on the reality of the Norte de Potosi, was for quite
a while accepted as a general model for Bolivia.7
6 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Oppressed But Not Defeated: Peasant Struggles Among the
Aymara and the Quechwa in Bolivia, 900-I9o80 (Geneva, I987); Rene Zavaleta Mercado,
Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia (Mexico, i986); Erick Langer, Economic Change and Rural

Resistance in Southern Bolivia, i8S0-I930 (Stanford, I989); Erick Langer, 'Rituals of

Rebellion: The Chayanta Revolt of 1927', Ethnohistory, vol. 37, no. 3 (1990), pp.
227-253; Erick Langer, 'Persistencia y cambio en comunidades indfgenas del sur
boliviano en el siglo XIX', in Heraclio Bonilla (ed.), Los Andes en la Encrucijada: Indios,
Comunidadesy Estado en el siglo XIX (Quito, i99I), pp. 133-68; Javier Izko, 'Fronteras
etnicas en litigio. Los ayllus de Sakaka y Kirkyawi (Bolivia), siglos XVI-XX', in
Bonilla (ed.), Los Andes, pp. 63-132; Gustavo Rodriguez Ostria, El socavdny el sindicato.
Ensayos histdricos sobre los trabajadores mineros, siglos XIX-XX (La Paz, i991); Gustavo
Rodrfguez Ostria, 'Entre reformas y contrarreformas: las comunidades indigenas en el

Valle Bajo cochabambino (I825-I900)', in Bonilla (ed.), Los Andes, pp. 277-334;
Brooke Larson, Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia: Cochabamba, f 0o-1900oo

(Princeton, I988); Tristan Platt, Estado bolivianoy ayllu andino: Tierraj tributo en el Norte
de Potosi (Lima, 1982).

7 The anthropological literature includes, Platt, Estado boliviano; Tristan Platt, 'The
Andean Experience of Bolivian Liberalism, i825-I900: Roots of Rebellion in i9thCentury Chayanta (Potosi)', in Steve J. Stern (ed.), Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness
in the Andean Peasant World, i8th to 20oth Centuries (Madison, I987), pp. 280-323; Olivia
Harris, 'Complementarity and Conflict: An Andean View of Women and Men', in J. S.
LaFontaine (ed.), Sex and Age as Principles of Social Differentiation (London, I978), pp.
21-40; Olivia Harris, 'El parentesco y la economia vertical en el ayllu Laymi', Avances,

no. I (I978); Olivia Harris, 'The Dead and the Devils Among the Bolivian Laymi', in
Maurice Bloch and Jonathon Parry (eds.), Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge,
I982); Thomas Abercrombie, 'To Be Indian, To Be Bolivian: "Ethnic" and

"National" Discourses of Identity', in Urban and Sherzer (eds.), Nation Sta

Indians, pp. 95-130; Thomas Abercrombie and Mary Dillon, 'The Destroying

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40 Florencia E. Mallon

In all three countries, these different political and intellectual

constructions of ethnicity have had an impact on the role played by
indigenous cultures and utopias in the elaboration of oppositional
movements and ideologies. In Mexico during the twentieth century, with
few exceptions (such as the Yaqui during the 910o Revolution, and the
COCEI in Juchitan during the i98os), indigenous cultures and ideologies
have been marginal to the big popular movements. In Peru, by contrast,
already in the I920s Jose Carlos Mariategui noted that the Indian problem
was inseparable from the land problem, suggesting that the construction
of a truly Peruvian socialism needed to begin from the Indian. In recent
years as well, there has been much talk of the Andean utopia - that only
if one starts from Andean and indigenous traditions, from the visions of
the future and of change constructed in the highlands of Peru, will it be
possible to elaborate a truly successful and inclusive national project. In

Bolivia as well, Katarismo was born in the I970S, taking the name of
Tupaj Katari, Aymara leader of the Andean civil war of 1781-2. Though

seeking to form a multi-ethnic and multi-class alliance of peasants,

students, workers, and intellectuals from around the country, Katarismo
has taken as its unifying banner the indigenous and Andean traditions of

the Aymara plateau, and it is there where the movement has had its
greatest force.8

Starting from a common past in Spanish conquest, how do we explain

these differences? Do they have profound roots in the indigenous cultures
themselves, and in the conquest and colonisation processes, or are they the
result of more recent, perhaps even twentieth-century political changes?

An Aymara Myth of Conquest', in Jonathan D. Hill (ed.), Rethinking History and Myth:
Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past (Urbana, 1988), pp. 50-77; Roger

Rasnake, 'Images of Resistance to Colonial Domination', in Hill (ed.), Rethinking

History and Myth, pp. 136-56; Roger Rasnake, Domination and Cultural Resistance:
Authority and Power Among an Andean People (Durham, 1988). Literature on the

revolution and the proletarianisation process includes Rodriguez Ostria, 'Entre

reformas y contrarreformas'; June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us.

Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines (New York, 1979); Jorge Dandler, El
sindicalismo campesino en Bolivia: Los cambios estructurales en Ucureia (Mexico, 1969); James

Malloy, Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution (Pittsburgh, 1970). Attempts to synthesise

the material are few, but include, Rivera Cusicanqui, Oppressed But Not Defeated; and
Xavier Alb6, 'From MNRistas to Kataristas to Katari', in Stern (ed.), Resistance, pp.
379-4'9.

8 For information on the COCEI see Campbell, 'Zapotec Ethnic Politics'; for the Ya
see Hu-Dehart, 'Peasant Rebellion'. The link between the Indian problem and the

problem is made in Jose Carlos Mariategui, Siete ensayos de interpretacion de la real

peruana (Lima, 1978). For the Andean utopia see, especially, Flores Galindo, Busca
un Inca. Concerning Katarismo, see Rivera Cusicanqui, Oppressed But Not Defea
and Alb6, 'From MNRistas to Kataristas to Katari'.

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Indians and the State 41

Is it possible to elaborate an explanation that combines both deep and

more recent causes? Such distinct results must be explained, first of all,
through an examination of the historical processes of the past zoo years.
But we should not forget that the long and violent processes of ethnic,
economic and political reorganisation through which Spain formed and
reproduced its colonial system, in relation to the particular economies and
political systems that evolved in the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain,
had already given different meanings and context to being Indian, mestizo
or white in the various subregions of the Spanish empire.

I am basing my analysis, therefore, in a dialectic between colonial

ethnic patterns, and an examination of more recent historical processes.
Throughout the essay, I will use the Mexican, Peruvian and Bolivian cases
in analytical and historical counterpoint. I begin with the crisis of the

colonial system in the last decades of the eighteenth century, a key

moment during which, at one and the same time, the contradictions of

previous ethnic and political constructions were revealed, while the

colonial heritages to be faced by nineteenth-century states were being
constructed. I then consider the reorganisation of the oligarchical political
systems in the nineteenth century, and the form taken by oppositional

ideologies during those years. Next I analyse the twentieth-century

movements that have attempted to connect national-popular traditions to
an emerging mestizo hegemony. Then, after reflecting on the recent crises
of mestizo hegemony and the rise of new counterhegemonic movements
and ideologies, I conclude with a reconsideration of the role of intellectuals

in the construction of distinct images of 'Indianness' in the three

countries.

The crisis of the colonial system: Hidalgo and Morelos, Tupaq Amaru and

Tupaj Katari
Both in Mexico and the Andes, the colonial crisis at the end of the
eighteenth century was marked by popular movements that attempted to
define a new political community and a distinct political agenda. Though
in myriad variations endlessly debated by historians, the movements of
Hidalgo and Morelos found their greatest strength in Mexico's central

regions, among the peasant and Indian communities of Guadalajara,

Michoacan, Morelos and Guerrero, and in the mestizo mining zone
known as the Bajio. These were movements from within the Viceroyalty's
economic and political centre, directed at the very same core of colonial
power. In Peru and Bolivia the pattern was different: the Great Andean

Civil War of 1780-2 was not led by creole or mulatto priests, but by
indigenous authorities who laid claim to authentic lineages. From the
centre of Andean power, on the plateau of Tawantinsuyo between Cuzco

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42 Florencia E. Mallon

and La Paz, participants wrapped themselves in their version of

precolumbian Quechua and Aymara traditions. Tupaq Amaru predicted a

return to the Incaic period while he criticised and attempted to transcend
the system of colonial domination. Tupaj Katari prohibited the use of
Spanish, and it is said that his forces did not eat bread because it was made
from a European grain. As we can see in the opposition between Cuzco

and Lima, and in the siege of La Paz by Tupaj Katari's forces, the
movements of 1780 and 178I were organised from the centres of

indigenous power, toward the centres of colonial power. Put a different

way, they were movements from the periphery of colonial domination,
toward the periphery of Andean power. And the repression suffered by

those who fought with Tupaq Amaru and Tupaq Katari helped to
recreate, once more, the dualistic division of power and identity that had
emerged in the colonial Andes.9
In Mexico, the independence movement helped to confirm a colonial
process during which the Spanish state had been established in the very
centre of the Aztec empire, reclaiming and reorganising the same territory

but with more success. Having arrived in Mexico during a generalised

rebellion against Aztec abuse, the Spanish were able to establish, at least
on the central plateau, a relatively stable system of domination that offered

benefits to the peasant and Indian communities of the centre-south of the

Viceroyalty. Toward the north, the principal economic route connected
with the Bajio, where from early on the mining labour force was mainly
'free'. This kept the communities of the central zone from suffering the
onerous burden of the Andean mita. The 'Indian problem' in New Spain
9 My summary of the Mexican case is based on the following sources: Brian R. Hamnett,

'Royalist Counterinsurgency and the Continuity of Rebellion: Guanajuato and

Michoacan, 1813-I820', Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 62, no. i (Feb. i982),

pp. 19-48; Brian R. Hamnett, Roots of Insurgency: Mexican Regions, r7o0-1824

(Cambridge, I985); William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial

Mexican lVillages (Stanford, 1979); Eric Van Young, 'Moving Toward Revolt:

Agrarian Origins of the Hidalgo Rebellion in the Guadalajara Region', in Katz (ed.),
Riot, pp. I76-204; John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of

Agrarian Violence, r7fo-i940 (Princeton, I986). The comparison between the

movements of Tupaq Amaru and Tupaj Katari is a hypothesis based on the following
sources. For a general overview, see Steve J. Stern, 'Introduction to Part I' in Stern
(ed.), Resistance, pp. 29-33; Leon Campbell, 'Ideology and Factionalism During the

Great Rebellion, I780-I782', in Stern (ed.), Resistance, pp. 110-I39; and Zavaleta

Mercado, Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia. For Peru, see especially Magnus Morner and
Efrain Trelles, 'A Test of Causal Interpretations of the Tiipac Amaru Rebellion', in
Stern (ed.), Resistance, pp. 94-109; Scarlett O'Phelan Godoy, 'La rebeli6n de Tiipac
Amaru: organizaci6n interna, dirigencia y alianzas', Histdrica, vol. 3, no. 2 (I979), pp.
89-121; Scarlett O'Phelan Godoy, Rebellions and Revolts in Eighteenth Century Peru and
Upper Peru (K6ln, 1985). For Bolivia, see Rasnake, Domination and Cultural Resistance;
Larson, Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation.

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Indians and the State 43

was relegated to the frontier and peripheral regions: the northern

missions, the Maya of Chiapas and Yucatan, the ethnic mosaics of the
Huasteca or Oaxaca. The peasant war that supported Hidalgo and
Morelos, multi-ethnic from the start, reflected this process of ethnic and
political construction.'?
In the Viceroyalty of Peru, the colonial state was established on the

coast, in an area that underwent rapid depopulation due to war and

epidemic. The Lima bureaucracy faced the mountains, looking toward the
distant core of the mining region in Potosi. In between stood Cuzco, the
ancient Inca capital, and the Indian communities, reorganised in the last
decades of the sixteenth century in order to serve as a source for tribute

and mining labour. This system of state extraction reorganised the

indigenous structures of ethnic power in order to use them in the process
of colonial domination, recreating and reproducing a dualistic or bipolar
structure - Indian highlands, versus a white, Black and mestizo coast. We
know there were exceptions to this structure, such as the Mantaro Valley
in central Peru or the Bolivian Cochabamba Valley, where throughout the
colonial period there arose strongly commercialised peasant communities
with high levels of mestiaaje, a pattern more closely resembling central
Mexico. But the difference was that, in the Andes, these regions were the
exception to be explained historically, rather than the dominant pattern,

as in New Spain."
Though the popular movements around Independence were heavily
repressed in both regions, the differences in the processes of repression
helped to create distinct heritages and options for the nineteenth century.
In Mexico, a strong counter-insurgency campaign organised by royalist
creoles left the Morelos movement fragmented and dispersed, and its heirs
had no choice but to agree to a conservative declaration of independence

in I82z. Nonetheless, the popular political culture that had begun to

10 The analysis in this paragraph is a hypothesis based on the suggestive essay by
Friedrich Katz, 'Rural Uprisings in Preconquest and Colonial Mexico', in Katz (ed.)
Riot, pp. 65-94. See also William B. Taylor, 'Banditry and Insurrection: Rural Unrest
in Central Jalisco, 1790-1816', in Katz (ed.), Riot, pp. 205-46. At the same tine, it is
important to recognise that the relationship between the colonial state and Indian
communities in central Mexico was not reproduced in the mining regions of the
'north' where the rebellion had its origin. See especially David A. Brading, Miners and

Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, I7683-I8io (Cambridge, I97I); David A. Brading,

Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajio: Leon, i680-860o (Cambridge, 1978); and

Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution.

l For the colonial system in Peru, see Steve J. Stern, Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge
of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (Madison, I982); Karen Spalding, Huarochir': An
Andean Society Under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford, 1984); and Irene Silverblatt, Moon,
Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton, 1987).
Exceptions are the valleys of Mantaro and Cochabamba, treated in Mallon, The Defense
of Community; and Larson, Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation.

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44 Florencia E. Mallon

emerge from the experience of 810o re-emerged repeatedly during the

nineteenth century, articulating with federalist movements in the i83os
and I84os, and forming part of Juan Alvarez's radical liberal movement
as of I855. Even though they were unable to conquer state power, these

popular movements on the Mexican central plateau maintained an

important presence in 'national' politics, offering an alternative conception of the nation that began with the free municipality, local political
autonomy, and just access to the land. Over and over again, the Mexican

state - beholden as it was to landowning, commercial, and mining

oligarchies - was forced to repress these regional agrarian movements and
their radical political platforms; yet between i855 and I876, these same
movements lent political and military support to the forces of change. In
this context, the 1910 Revolution can be explained as the continuation, at
a greater than regional level, of this popular agenda-in-the-making.12

In Peru and Bolivia, the repression after the Andean Civil War was
violent and deep. In Peru, the communities had generally remained united
with their kurakas; these ethnic authorities were stripped of their legal
status, and the individuals who had collaborated with Tupaq Amaru were

severely punished. Indian communities thus lost their most active

authorities and ethnic intellectuals. In Bolivia, one of the most radical

impulses to the movement of Tupaq Katari was a critique, carried out

inside the communities themselves, of kurakas who had allied themselves
with the colonial state. Katari himself was a rebel authority who

confronted the kurakas who had 'sold out'; and this confrontation ga

Katarismo a radical Aymara tone that was missing from the multi-class and

multi-ethnic tendencies of Tupaq Amaru. In contrast to Peru, therefor

the repression that followed the rebellion in Bolivia did not attempt
decapitate an active and legitimate ethnic ruling class. And yet despi
these differences, in both regions the repression was ethnically based,

helped to recreate and deepen cultural and spatial distances betw

whiteness and Indianness, lending a more hierarchical and exclusiona

quality to the independence process, in which Indian communit

scarcely participated. Elites seeking to create postcolonial states in Pe

and Bolivia would confront this fragmentation, which during t

12 Hamnett, 'Royalist Counterinsurgency...'; Leticia Reina, Las rebeliones campesina

Mexico (N89-i9o6) (Mexico, 1980); John M. Hart, 'The 1840s Southwestern Me

Peasants' War: Conflict in a Transitional Society', in Katz (ed.), Riot, pp. 249
Peter Guardino, 'Peasants, Politics, and State Formation in Nineteenth Centu
Mexico: Guerrero, I820-1856', PhD diss., Univ. of Chicago, I991; Florencia E.
Mallon, 'Peasants and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Morel
I848-I858', Political Power and Social Theory, vol. 7 (I988), pp. 1-54; Florencia
Mallon, 'Peasants and the Making of Nation-States: Mexico and Peru in th
Nineteenth Century', (manus., n.d.), chs. 5 and 7.

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Indians and the State 45

nineteenth century contributed dramatically to the failure of attempts at

national consolidation.13

Indeed, despite the abolition of slavery and Indian tribute, despite

massive peasant resistance to the Chilean occupation during the War of
the Pacific, the modernising oligarchical state that began consolidating in

Peru at the end of the nineteenth century based itself on the ethnic
refragmentation of Peruvian territory - white, mestizo, and Black coast;

Indian highlands. Gamonalismo, the notorious Peruvian variant of

caudillismo, found its strongest impulse in the need of the Lima state to
control highland populations, not directly through their integration into
a national project, but indirectly through the gamonales - those landowners

or merchants who, in exchange for the repressive support of the state,

guaranteed the political loyalty of 'their' regions.14
In Bolivia, on the other hand, creole elites experimented with two quite
distinct methods for governing the indigenous minorities during the
nineteenth century. The first, the famous Andean 'pact' between the state
and the Indian ayllus, rested on the ongoing financial support provided by

Indian tribute, while granting a relative internal autonomy to the

communities. With many regional variations, this pattern was maintained
- though facing increasing competition from a more 'integrated' liberal
model of land privatisation - until after the War of the Pacific. Already in
1866, dictator Mariano Melgarejo tried to privatise communal lands; and
it was before the War of the Pacific, in 1874, that the Ley de Exvinculacion

was promulgated. But only after the conflict did creole elites begin to
prefer the integrated liberal model, based on the privatisation of communal

lands. In response to this direct attack, an Indian uprising led by Aymara

authority Pablo Zarate Willka allied with the La Paz liberal faction during
the i899 civil war, aiding the construction of a modernising oligarchical
state. But once again the creole elite, reliving its 'nightmare of the siege

of La Paz' since the eighteenth century (as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui so

succinctly put it), based its new state on yet another repression and
fragmentation of indigenous political culture, justifying its actions with
references to social darwinism.l5
In this way Mexico, Peru and Bolivia reached the turn of the twentieth
3 In addition to the references in note 9, see Rivera Cusicanqui, Oppressed But Not
Defeated; Heraclio Bonilla and Karen Spalding (eds.), La independencia en el Perti (Lima,
1972); Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca.

14 Mallon, 'Peasants and the Making of Nation-States', chs. 6 and 8.

15 Rivera Cusicanqui, Oppressed But Not Defeated, p. z2; Platt, Estado boliviano; Platt,
'Liberalism and Ethnocide in the Southern Andes', History Workshop Journal, no. 17

(I984), pp. 3-18; Platt, 'The Andean Experience...'; Marie-Daniile Demelas,

'Darwinismo a la criolla: El darwinismo social en Bolivia, 1880-I910', Historia

Boliviana, vol. I, no. 2 (98 I); Zavaleta Mercado, Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia.

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46 Florencia E. Mallon

century with oligarchical state structures that, instead of incorporating

popular indigenous and mestizo agrarian movements into a broad

national project, had been constructed on the corpses produced by
repression. In all three countries, therefore, the success of a national
project - in the sense given to it by Zavaleta Mercado when he asserts
'that if the nation does not include all the people it is not really a nation
at all'16- was still very much in the future. At some point during the
twentieth century, anti-oligarchical groups in each country would try to
build oppositional ideologies based on the articulation of a part of the
popular heritage of the previous two centuries to an emerging mestizo,
national-popular project. The success and longevity of these efforts, as
well as the form taken by the crisis of these hegemonic national projects,
has been conditioned by the specific history of each case, but also by the
previous constructions of popular and indigenous political cultures that
formed a part of each historical legacy.
Attempts at national hegemony: Mexico i9io, Bolivia I9J2, Peru I168

The Mexican Revolution of 910o was the first social revolution of the
twentieth century, the first in Latin America and, some might argue, the

most successful and longlasting of its cohort. As we have already

mentioned, its origins can be traced to the popular struggles of the
nineteenth century, including Independence, the Liberal Revolution of
I855, and the broad mobilisations that supported Porfirio Diaz in i871

and I876. Between 190o and 1920, the sociopolitical alliances that
emerged from the violent decade allowed the inscription, within the new

postrevolutionary state, of a part of the popular political agenda

formulated on Mexico's central plateau. The revolutionary ideologies that
emerged from, inspired and justified this process were definitely multiethnic. Especially for the process of consolidation and institutionalisation
going on in the I920s and I930s, we might say that they were ideologies
elaborated by mestizo intellectuals, and that they glorified the mestizo.

The postrevolutionary state was corporatist, articulating the people

directly to the state through occupational organisations - unions, ejidos,

peasant organisations, etc. The Indian past was glorified, but contemporary Indians found they had to 'incorporate' themselves into
society through education, agrarian reform, and state-sponsored development programmes, while their 'autochthonous' cultures were

reconstructed as folklore and tourism.17

16 Zavaleta Mercado, Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia, p. I22.

17 For the role of 'the popular' in the revolution, see especially Womack, Zapata; Adolfo
Gilly, La revolucidn interrumpida: Mexico, 9o10-I920: Una guerra campesina por la tierra y

el poder (Mexico, 1971); Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge,

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Indians and the State 47

In Bolivia, the historically parallel process began in 1952. Here also, it

involved an attempt at mestizo hegemony, based on a political alliance

among urban middle sectors, mineworkers, and mestizo and Quechua

peasants from the Cochabamba region. The state project that emerged had

much in common with the Mexican one: to give impulse to capitalist

development through state investment and intervention, nationalisation
of the mines, and agrarian reform. At the beginning, mestizo intellectuals
and politicians glorified the worker-peasant alliance, but in practice the
state attempted to organise the countryside along paternalist, hierarchical

and corporatist lines. On the Aymara plateau, where the indigenous

communities maintained their strong presence, state hegemony remained
weak. Starting with the military coup of 1964, the state sought support

from an alliance between the army and peasant unions - the famous
Military-Peasant Pact. But already at the beginning of the I970S, two
trends began to unravel the Bolivian project for mestizo hegemony. On

one side, a renaissance of Aymara culture among students and urban

intellectuals in La Paz occurred together with the organisation of
autonomous peasant and communal groups on the altiplano. On the other,

the fierce repression of Cochabamba's Quechua and mestizo peasantry

during the tax protests of 1974 broke permanently with the populist
promises of 1952. Together, these two trends helped to generate a new
counterhegemony, defined in ethnic terms: Katarismo.l8
In Peru, the 1968 military revolution was a parallel project that also
attempted to construct a mestizo hegemony. The state attempted
hierarchically to articulate popular organisations, reforming the agrarian
and industrial sectors in order to give peasants and workers direct material

participation in the nationalised enterprises. National confederations of

peasants and workers, as well as specific unions in each sector and firm,
were also created. One of the most popular posters of the agrarian reform
made clear that the overall state project meant to idealise the Indian past,

while incorporating and educating contemporary Indians. Over an

idealised figure representing Tupaq Amaru, appeared the following
1986); Arnaldo C6rdova, La politica de masas del cardenismo (Mexico, 1974). For postrevolutionary indigenismo and mestiZaje, see Luis Villoro, Los grandes momentos del
indigenismo en Mexico, 2nd edn. (Mexico, 1979); Alan Knight, 'Racism, Revolution, and
Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940', in Richard Graham (ed.), The Idea of Race in Latin

America, 87o0-194o (Austin, I990), pp. 71-113. For the continuity of the popular
agenda and racism as an arm of repression see Mallon, 'Peasants and the Making of

Nation-States', chs. 8 and 9.

8 Malloy, Bolivia; Dandler, El sindicalismo campesino en Bolivia; Alb6, 'From MNRistas to
Kataristas to Katari'; Rivera Cusicanqui, Oppressed But Not Defeated; James V. Kohl,

'The Cliza and Ucurefia War: Syndical Violence and National Revolution in Bolivia',
Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 62, no. 4 (Nov. I982), pp. 607-28.

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48 Florencia E. Mallon

slogan: 'Peasants: the landowners will no longer eat your poverty'.

Quechua became an official national language, whilst the system of
bilingual education attempted to 'incorporate' Indian children into
national society; Indians would be transformed magically, in the words of
the agrarian reform slogan, into peasants.
And yet, in a contradictory way, the decrees and laws promulgated by

the government seemed directed at an Indian subject who had not

experienced any kind of differentiation, a subject still imprisoned within
an agrarian feudalism that no longer existed in reality. The Sociedades
Agrarias de Interes Social (SAIS), through which highland haciendas were
transformed into cooperative enterprises and administered by the state,
are conceptualised as if the hacienda peasantry were separate from the rest
of peasant society: the inhabitants of neighbouring Indian communities,
who had participated historically - through seasonal labour and grazing
rights for their livestock - in the hacienda economy, were marginalised
from any active role in the economy of the SAIS. It should not surprise
us, therefore, that when Shining Path entered the central highlands twenty

years after the beginning of the military revolution, one of their more
popular policies in the high punas of the Mantaro Valley would be the
destruction of the SAIS. And for the Indian communities themselves, the
Communities Statute promulgated by the military government assumed,
as a point of departure, that all members were permanent residents in the
village. By making such permanent residence a precondition for access to
communal land, the statute created deep new tensions between villagers,
especially for the elevated percentage with traditions of seasonal migration
and with years of residence outside.19
Among these three attempts at national hegemony, the Peruvian was
the weakest. Not only did it begin last, but it started to break up first.
Almost from the beginning, the military regime began repressing popular
movements that extended beyond the relatively rigid boundaries of what

it considered proper. In 1974, a mere half decade after the start of the
military revolution and in the middle of the agrarian reform process, the
government brutally repressed a movement of thirty thousand Indian
peasants in Andahuaylas province who were trying to regain access to the
land of 70 haciendas. Thirteen years later (i987), one of the surviving
19 Alfred Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, 1978);
Abraham F. Lowenthal (ed.), The Peruvian Experiment (Princeton, I975); Abraham F.

Lowenthal and Cynthia McClintock (eds.), The Peruvian Experiment Reconsidered

(Princeton, 1978); Albert Escobar (ed.), El reto del multilingiismo en el Peru (Lima, 1972);

Alberto Escobar (ed.), Peru, pais bilingue? (Lima, I975); Caballero M., Imperialismoy
campesinado; David Winder, 'The Impact of Comunidad on Local Development in the
Mantaro Valley', in Norman Long and Bryan R. Roberts (eds.), Peasant Cooperation and
Capitalist Expansion in Central Peru (Austin, 1978), pp. 209-40.

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Indians and the State 49

leaders of this movement, Hugo Messich, was rumoured to be military

commander for all of Shining Path. And in 1975, a new coup against the
populist faction within the Peruvian military would initiate the 'second
phase' of the military revolution, turning back the clock on most of the
accomplishments of the 'first phase'.20
Without a doubt, the Mexican attempt at mestizo national hegemony
was the most effective and longlasting. The crisis of 1968, even though it

spawned a new and critical intellectual generation with an extremely

pessimistic vision of the revolutionary state, did not ultimately challenge

the political health of the system as a whole. Attempts at indigenous

rebellion, perhaps strongest in the 1970s, were incorporated through
official indigenismo or some limited land redistribution. Even when
ethnically indigenous movements survived as such - in Chiapas or the
Isthmus of Tehuantepec -- they were politically marginalised or, as in the
case of the COCEI, when links to the Left were established, they were
violently repressed. But the best evidence of the success of the Mexican
hegemonic project comes in the form taken by the new counterhegemony
that emerged in the i980s. Cuauhtdmoc Cardenas, Lazaro's son, organised

his National Democratic Front invoking the same populist-mestizo

tradition that gave impulse to the 910o Revolution, that same popular
tradition elaborated in the centre of Mexico and partially institutionalised
by his father with the founding of the PRI. No Indian utopias or ethnic
organisations here: counter-hegemony emerged from the PRI itself, from
its left wing. Even the name of its leader represented the cosmic blending
of races dominant in present-day Mexico: Cuauhtemoc, Aztec nobleman

who died defending Tenochtitlan; Cardenas, mestizo from Michoacan

who institutionalised mestigaje as political project and practice.21
' We Have Seen the Enemy, and He is Us': intellectuals and the Indian and
national questions

In his recent work on K'ulta ayllu, on the Bolivian altiplano, Thomas

Abercrombie plays with the image of the chullpas (precolumbian mummies
found in prehispanic tombs), and of their 'domestication' or 'civilisation'
through myth and ritual, in order to make a more general point about the

production and reproduction of culture. In K'ulta, according to

Abercrombie, the comunarios engage in ritual processions through the

village with llamas and other symbols of nature or the wild, taking
advantage of their power and productivity, only to remove them
20 The best source on Andahuaylas is Rodrigo Sanchez, Toma de tierrasy conciencia politica
campesina. Las lecciones de Andahuaylas (Lima, 198 ). The transition to the second phase
is discussed in Stepan, The State and Society.

21 On the COCEI, see Campbell, 'Zapotec Ethnic Politics...'.

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50 Florencia E. Mallon

afterward, exiling them once again from the community's civilised centre.

Abercrombie sees an interesting parallel between this ritual and the

celebration of carnival, an urban ritual where Indian culture is allowed to

enter urban space, only to be expelled once again at the end of the fiesta.
'Like rural dwellers', writes Abercrombie,
who call upon the dead and Chullpa forces to aid them in production, only to exile

them once again, city people do likewise with the Indian within them,

externalized in dance as a form of personal sacrifice, and then dutifully 'rerepressed'.22

I think this same image can help us clarify the attempted mestizo
hegemonies in Mexico, Bolivia and Peru during the twentieth century. In

the revolutions of 191o, 1952, and 1968, mestizo politicians and

intellectuals called on Indians, those savage 'others' created by conquest
and colonisation, in order to incorporate their energy and productivity
into their project for 'national civilisation'. The Indian chullpas headed a
symbolic procession around the national stage, after which mestizo leaders

attempted to exile them once again, through official indigenismos,

corporatist organisations, and folkloric festivals. In Mexico, where
political power had long been constructed ethnically according to a
centralising and mestizo plan, the attempt at exile was successful. But in
Bolivia and Peru, the chullpas refused to return to their graves.
We have seen that this difference between Mexico and the Andes began

to emerge with the very processes of colonisation, when colonial states

spatially organised their power differently. Independence and the

organisation of nineteenth-century oligarchical states recreated, though in
new contexts and under new conditions, this distinction. But it was the

twentieth-century attempts at hegemony that most clearly emphasised

how different were these forms of ethnic organisation.
When we distinguish so dramatically between Mexico and the Andes,
however, we end up minimising the differences between the Andean cases.
On one level, this allows us to point out an important similarity: the
mestizo revolutions failed, precisely because they could not 'domesticate'
Indianness. But at another level, the two cases are not homogenous. By
contrasting Bolivia and Peru, we are able to understand that the Bolivians

have been better able to build on the intellectual legacy of the I952
revolution, even with its defects and failures, than the Peruvians have
been able to take advantage of I968.
In Bolivia the Katarista movement, a new popular counterhegemonic
project, begins from a critique of I95 2, but a critique that is able to rescue
some positive elements. Rather than discarding the concept of a multiethnic alliance in the consolidation of a nation, Katarismo reorganises it.
22 Abercrombie, 'To Be Indian, To Be Bolivian', p. 20.

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Indians and the State 5

The Indian element is no longer the chullpa needing to be exiled, but

instead the central and majority element around which a new hegemonic

project can be built. Instead of beginning with a class alliance around

mestizo culture, Katarismo begins from ethnically Indian political culture
and incorporates class politics into it. Thus Katarismo incorporates the
positive from 1952, and discards racism in the process.
In Peru, it seems that present-day counterhegemonic movements have
thrown out the positive elements of 1968 and kept the worst. Shining
Path, emerging from a critique of the political process of the 1970S, has

demonstrated repeatedly its intent to destroy all popular forms of

organisation that developed over those years. The non-Shining Path left
has also shown an inability to incorporate or channel the vast popular

energy unleashed by the process of 1968. Instead, what has been

maintained from the period of military revolution is the authoritarianism
and the hierarchical, top-down forms of political organisation, reproduced
not only in Shining Path, but in other leftist parties as well. Meanwhile the

army and the conservative political parties, up to their necks in repressing

the civil war, have helped to recreate the ethnic fragmentation between

coast and highlands as a partial justification for the cruel and bloody
repression carried out against the rural and migrant populations.23 Plus fa
change...

Mestizo political culture is therefore constructed differently in Bolivia

and Peru, even if it is not dominant in either society. In Bolivia, it has
represented a promise of unity and integration which, even if ultimately
false, has re-emerged in a new coalition that begins from Indianness. In
Peru, mestizo political culture has remained dominating, authoritarian,
and racist - in the army, in the political parties of the right and left, in
Shining Path. The Peruvian promise of unity and integration ends, by the

close of the I980s, with the worst of all worlds: the bloody and
authoritarian destruction of Shining Path's civil war pitted against Mario

Vargas Llosa and his neo-liberal repudiation of Peru's popular and

indigenous traditions.

There is an even more profound problem created by a comparison

between Mexico and the Andes: we tend to minimise the similarities. Of

course, mestizo political culture has dominated in the former and not in
23 For the current situation in Peru, see NACLA (North American Congress on Latin
America), Special Number on Peru (New York, i990); Alberto Flores Galindo, Tiempo
de plagas (Lima, 988); Carlos Ivin Degregori, Sendero Luminoso: I. Los hondosy mortales
desencuentros. II. Lucha armada j utopia autoritaria (Lima, 1986); Nelson Manrique, 'La
decada de la violencia', in lMargenes, nos. 5 and 6 (989), pp. 137-82; Robin Kirk, The

Decade of Chaqwa: Peru's Internal Refugees (Washington, I99I); Deborah Poole and
Gerardo Renique, 'The Chroniclers of Peru: U.S. Scholars and Their "Shining Path"
of Peasant Rebellion' (manus., n.d.).

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52 Florencia E. Mallon
the latter; of course Indianness has a more central place in the latter rather

than in the former. But we must also remember that the very categories
of Indian and mestizo were created by the Conquest, and by the colonising
process that affected both regions. Since then, mestizo and Indian have
been constructed historically and politically, in mutual interaction and
conflict, in both areas. In this context, a national project that bases itself
in mestizo political culture, aiming to incorporate Indians into something
different, still has colonial roots. And this forced incorporation, whether

through political or cultural violence, ethnic fragmentation or exile,

reproduces and recreates authoritarianisms with a neocolonial base.

The Mexican case helps us to understand the costs of such as

incorporation. At a very general level, the postrevolutionary state was
built on an implicit contract, in which the pay-off for suffering the

authoritarianism of political mestigaje would be social and economic

redistribution, plus an indigenista model of development. During the
I98os, however, the privatisation of the state sector, and the complete

opening of Mexico to markets and capital in the United States have

jettisoned the principles of redistribution and economic nationalism,
development and indigenismo that defined the original pact. What has
remained is only racism and authoritarianism.
The breakdown of western promises of development has been a general

trend in Latin America during the g980s. The return to democracy,

awaited with such enthusiasm by Latin American peoples has turned out
to have feet of clay. Military officers remained unpunished for crimes
against the people; poverty and hunger are more widespread; the market
has not brought prosperity; forests and other natural resources are ruined
while cities become more polluted; Indians remain the favourite victims
of repression and progress. It seems that Latin America already has all the
problems of development, without many of the benefits.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in many places, including Mexico,

indigenous movements are offering us a fresh perspective on the various

aspects of the 'national question'. In the middle of the Nicaraguan

revolution, for example, the Indian peoples of the Atlantic Coast
demanded and received political and linguistic autonomy. Could it be
possible that democracy needs to stop being a centralising force, and
become instead decentralising and respectful of cultural differences and
autonomy? Faced with centuries of violent colonisation, the peoples of
the Amazon have fought tenaciously to maintain their natural resources

and lands. Could it be possible for development to stop its polluting

disrespect for nature, and instead guarantee human beings a life in
harmony with their environment? In Guatemala during the I970S and
i98os, guerrilla organisations finally understood that they could not grow

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Indians and the State 5 3

unless they took seriously the indigenous question. Could it be that, in the

future, the principle for political organisation will stop being the
centralised party structure, substituting instead the idea of coalition?24
As the experiences of the last decade - not to mention the last 5 oo years
- have shown, the important political and ethnic lessons are only learned
through blood and suffering. Also in Peru, from the violence, blood and

warfare of the eighties, a new alternative begins to suggest itself.

Although in some of its forms it tends to recreate past ethnic dualisms, the

concept of the Andean utopia - especially as elaborated by Alberto Flores

Galindo -can help us reweave the history of Peru. Beginning from

Indianness, from an Andean utopia historically created and reproduced by

mestizo and Indian intellectuals and whose promise sometimes also

involved creoles, Flores Galindo challenges us to imagine the Peruvian
equivalent of Katarismo.25 It would be, then, Tupaqamarismo: building
a popular nationalist project with Indianness as the organising principle.
In this future project, creole and mestizo political culture - the
authoritarianism and racism of the last 500 years - would be the chullpa in

the procession, only to be permanently exiled.

Without rebuilding false dualisms, without idealising indigenous

political culture, it seems important to consider the cultural, ideological
and organisational alternatives offered by present-day Indian movements.
They are no longer chullpas, but hegemonic principles. Five hundred years
of hegemony at the hands of a European 'other' should be enough for
anybody.
24 For Nicaragua, see Martin Diskin, 'Ethnic Discourse and the Challenge to

Anthropology: The Nicaraguan Case', in Urban and Sherzer (eds.), Nation-States and
Indians, pp. I 56-80. For the situation in the Amazon, see Janet Hendricks, 'Symbolic

Counterhegemony Among the Ecuadorian Shuar', in Urban and Sherzer (eds.),

Nation-States and Indians, pp. 53-7I; Barre, Ideologias indigenistas. For Guatemala, see
Carol A. Smith (ed.), Guatemalan Indians and the State, Ij40 to 1988 (Austin, I990).
25 Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca.

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