Reseña de Indigenous Peoples in Latin America

Latin American Research Review, Austin: 2001. Tomo 36, Nº 3; pg. 163, 20 pags. Philip Oxhorn Oxhorn reviews various books, including Indigenous Peoples in Latin America: The Quest for Self-Determination by Hector Díaz-Polanco and Taking on Goliath: The Emergence of a New Left Party and the Struggle for Democracy in Mexico by Kathleen Bruhn. In many ways, indigenous movements present the most fundamental challenges for understanding the quality of democratic regimes and for theories of social movements. Their distinctly non-Western experience, history of violent abuse, and understanding of rights in collective rather than liberal-individualist terms all seem to set them apart from other movements, and perhaps even from the context of "civil society" in which they are frequently placed. Yet the nature of their struggles is directly related to questions of democracy, difference, and political economy, as suggested by the two books under review looking at indigenous movements: Héctor Díaz-Polanco's Indigenous Peoples in Latin America: The Quest for Self-Determination and Kay Warren's Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Mayan Activism in Guatemala. Theoretically, these struggles can be understood in terms much like those applied to other movements of disadvantaged groups. What is unique about indigenous movements serves to highlight the shared strengths of much recent research on social movements in Latin America. The starting point for Díaz-Polanco is Latin America's colonial experience. Although he tends to understate the violence of hundreds of years of intra- and inter-state warfare that created this experience, Díaz-Polanco argues that Western European capitalist development did not have to confront the problem of social heterogeneity. Instead, "the bourgeoisie proposed a model of society based not on sociocultural or ethnic differences but on the unity established by 'equality' among citizens, free labor, the regulatory action of the market, and open competition" (p. 5). In Latin America, this example led the region's elites to view ethnic heterogeneity as a major obstacle to capitalist development that had to be overcome through assimilation if not physical elimination. Their task was only complicated by colonial rule. The feudal institutions that the Spanish Crown relied on to maximize resource extraction meant that "ethnic stratification was superimposed on the class structure, complicating and reinforcing it" (p. 8). The wars for independence were only the first step as modernizing elites attempted to create the kind of homogenous society they felt was necessary for development. According to Díaz-Polanco, "the criollos' emerging national consciousness [was] incapable of incorporating living Indians into a viable national project" (p. 14). Their communal organizations were viewed as "a cancer that had to be extirpated" (p. 16). Díaz-Polanco tends to analyze the colonial experience in structural terms that lead him to overemphasize the material interests of the actors and to ignore the overtly racist discourses and ideologies that justified them. He nonetheless makes an important point in Indigenous Peoples in Latin America about the contingent nature of indigenous culture. The syncretic melding of Catholicism with preexisting indigenous religions, the ways in which colonialism selectively preserved and restructured indigenous institutions of self-government (often with the collusion of traditional indigenous elites), and the re-creation of indigenous communities around "Indian towns" built by the colonial authorities to fragment and disarticulate larger indigenous communities all underscore the artificial and contested nature of "indigenous cultures." As Díaz-Polanco concludes, "the colonial system created the Indian," and the continuing challenge since then has been to recover "a unity of purpose that transcends the communal and parochial world in which indigenous peoples were submerged by the colonial regime" (p. 58). Only in the 1940s did a less violent alternative began to emerge, what Díaz-Polanco calls "integrationist indigenism." Although the stated goal of such policies was to integrate indigenous peoples into national societies while respecting their social and cultural uniqueness, these policies retained the same modern-tizationist assumptions that equated indigenous culture with backwardness. Assimilation was still the long-term goal, and these policies generally "left behind a tragic trail of cultural dissolution, destruction of identities, political repression, and ethnic-national conflict" (p. 68). After reviewing centuries of failure, including what Díaz-Polanco considers an "inverted ethnocentrism" that essentializes indigenous culture by positing its inherent superiority to anything Western, he perceives an unprecedented opportunity in the emergence of a new kind of indigenous movement that seeks to articulate indigenous peoples' demands with national democratic projects. Such projects are based on the idea that "the firmest [national] unity is based upon respect for diversity" (p. 141). Reaching out to other actors as potential allies, indigenous movements throughout the region are basing their incorporation into national society on the premise of regional autonomy, but an autonomy that respects the territorial integrity of existing countries. Some of Díaz-Polanco's examples seem to undercut the persuasiveness of this alternative (such as the former Soviet Union and Spain's Second Republic of the early 1930s, and his brief references to the former Yugoslavia and Tibet in China). But the goal, as pressed by indigenous movements themselves, may be the ultimate example of how differences need to be mediated by alternate ideologies or discourses as well as novel institutional mechanisms.