Tag: Colonialism

Chile: "The Indian Problem"

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Although colonialism has historically targeted Latin America, such effects on the Latin American people have not been enough to stop their own imperialist efforts. Issues of land and sovereignty: the uneasy relationship between Chile and Rapa Nui  details the case of Chile, where the state’s imperialist efforts were inspired through their conquering of Peruvian and Bolivian land. The resolution of the War of the Pacific granted Chile land from the beaten countries, making Chile somewhat of an imperialist state over those newly gained territories. Here, they gained the Mapuche land, which allowed them to garner exploitive methods that would expand to the newly gained territory of Rapa Nui.  Through merchant trade, Chile saw a possibility in Polynesian territory and annexed Rapa Nui.
The relationship between the Rapa Nui and Chile is complicated and has remained ambiguous across Chile’s changing government regimes. When Chile annexed Rapa Nui, it was due to a misunderstanding between the Chilean representative and the island’s chief who gave them the blessing to use the land for agricultural purposes but without ownership. Chile took this ritual as acceptance to their land ownership, which came back full circle when the Chilean Navy practiced gifting land to newly married Rapa Nui couples. In their terms, this gifted land could be used for agricultural purposes, but it was to be understood that the owners were still the state. The Rapa Nui also understood this as holding property ownership, which attests to the confusing nature of these two group’s relationship, as well as its legitimacy.
The Rapa Nui have used this confusing relationship to circumvent Chile’s rule as the laws passed such as the Inscription of 1933, La Ley Indigena of of 1933, and La Ley Pascua, which subjected the Indigenous people of Chile to regulations. These laws have created unforeseen consequences that have been to the advantage of the Rapa Nuis’ autonomy. The Inscription of 1933 made it so no foreigners could invest or own the land on the island, which benefited the Rapa Nui peoples as they didn’t have to worry about the threat of foreign land ownership. Unlike other Latin American Indigenous groups who have and are subject to foreign attractive forces, the Rapa Nui were guaranteed against that.  La Ley Indigena of 1933 made it so land redistribution became a norm amongst Indigenous groups of Chile, which was a polarizing issue amongst the island.
Since Rapa Nui culture was founded on the practice of the Kainga, ancestral lands pertaining to each klan, land redistribution would force Rapa Nui to go against the Kainga and take ownership of a specific land not spiritually given to them. The Kainga made it so land could be used communally and without specific ownership because each group claimed their own land spiritually or through historical patterns. Then La Ley de Pascua was passed in which the Rapa Nui peoples were recognized as Chilean citizens and given the right to vote, which created greater pressures on the island to distribute land in a way that would create individual land ownership. Throughout the regime transitions of Chile, the factor that has remained the same is the pressure to instill land privatization that is a characteristic of the neoliberalist policy, but such pressures to enhance this practice undermine the cultural importance of the Kainga to the Rapa Nui, which indicates an instilled sense of the state that the Rapa Nui have not assimilated to Chilean culture and are therefore undeserving of practicing that culture.
The issue of Chile to recognize the cultural importance of land to the Rapa Nui and instead pressure them into privatizing their land is indicative of their lack of understanding of indigeneity that is described in the chapter “The Problem of the Indian” in Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality. In this essay Jose Carlos Mariategui discusses how others attribute the “Indian problem,” in terms of it being an educational, religious, or administrative issue. The problem is not purely socio-economic, but it is also not purely a problem of the administrative policies or the education of some. It is also not just a land tenure problem, although that area is highly focused on as it is the most visible discrepancy of Indigenous peoples from state civilians. The complexity of what the “Indian problem” entails is similar and a relation to explaining why Chile has lacked in being able to police the Rapa Nui in the way that they have over the Mapuche. Instead of policing their land, their cultural habits, and the way they present themselves to outsiders as they have with the Mapuche, Chile has forgoed much intervention with the Rapa Nui, although they do, technically, own their land. By testifying that the problem of Indigenous assimilation or prosperity under the state is not merely due to a department of the state, but all combined, which makes the “issue” one almost impossible to define or fix.
https://muse-jhu-edu.ezproxy.carleton.edu/chapter/515052
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mariateg/works/7-interpretive-essays/index.htm

The Coloniality of Gender

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In the Western world, discussions on the struggles produced by colonialism tend to be myopic. For example, the application of western feminists theories in non-western societies falls shorts of fully demonstrating the complexities of the subjugation of people based on gender within the colonial state. In general, western feminist thought lacks an understanding of how gender became a tool to oppress people. Maria Lugones writes “The Coloniality of Gender” to offer more insight on the confluence of gender and colonialism. She critiques the discussion on the coloniality of power concept by Anibal Quijano with the help of feminist theoretical frameworks by Women of Color feminists. Her essay explores her interest in the intersection of “race, class, gender, and sexuality” within the colonial power structure to highlight the shortsighted discussions of liberation and struggle by men, and in particular, men of color.
The coloniality of power describes the concept of how modernity resulted from the legacies of colonialism through the domination, exploitation, and oppression of people under the Eurocentric capitalism and from racialization in the Americas [1].  Lugones criticized this model for being too narrow because it “veil[s] the ways in which non-’white’ colonized women were subjected and disempowered. She explains that she understands how Quijano sees the subjugation of people through the “axis of the coloniality of power,” and how he sees gender within this restrictive framework. However, his shortcomings demonstrate how women of color are overlooked even in academic discussions. Lugones then lists examples of the coloniality of gender.
Lugones describes the inconsistencies within gender assignation and its relation to understanding biological sex. For example, intersex people are 1 in 4 globally, and depending on which genitalia they were born with, they would be assigned a sex identity. However, even within this assignation, Lugones explains, notions of subordination based on gender are imposed. This ties with what Oyéronké Oyewùmí explains about the implementation of gender in the colonization of the Yoruba people. With colonization, gender subordination and race inferiorization were imposed on the Yoruba thus stripping their social structures. Paula Gunn Allen also explains how many North American indigenous communities were gynocratic and their belief systems revolved around female deities, yet that changed with colonization. Subordination of women came through the “the decimation of populations through starvation, disease, and disruption of all social, spiritual, and economic structures,” Gunn Allen adds that indigenous men were complicit in the restructuring of their social order especially after many were taken to England to learn the “way of the English.” This demonstrates the extent which sex, gender, and sexuality were colonized by the Euro-centric capitalist power. Lugones then describes how the feminist movements of the twentieth century were not designed for the use of women of color. The feminism of white women, bourgeois white women, only focused on their subordination and did not so because they did not see themselves in the “intersection of race, gender and other forceful marks of subjection or domination.” Stereotypes about women and men of color emphasize the importance of seeing this because it manifested how the norm for gender expectations and relations were centered around white men and women, first the bourgeois and later middle class. Likewise, heterosexuality is a construction that arose and marked the appropriate relations between people as they aligned with the colonial/modern gender system.
These examples demonstrate how gender is also a tool for establishing domination over colonized places. Because gender is not always investigated separately, it can be missed in conversations about the struggles of decolonization. In this article, Lugones demonstrated how colonization created a new gender system, and how it affected the social structures that people and made them more susceptible to exploitation from Europeans. Within these examples, Women of Color feminists demonstrated the depth of change necessary to leave societies vulnerable to oppression and how these become overlooked.
These insights are helpful within our Latin American context because we have read on examples of how gender affects Indigenous Peoples. We read on about the Muxe of Oaxaca, and how indigenous women are seen as more indigenous than men, to list some examples. Colonization profoundly transformed people and societies. It is easy however to dismiss the impacts of it when discussions about it are dominated by men, and men of color, who do not perceive gender to be influential topics. Within our class, it was helpful to read about women’s experiences because they launched conversations on the role gender plays in history the indigenous people of Latin America.
 
Lugones, Maria. “The Coloniality of Gender.” Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise 2, no. 2 (2008): 1–17. https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/projects/wko-gender.
[1] Quijano, Anibal, and Michael Ennis. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (November 1, 2000): 533–80. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/23906.

Settler Colonialism

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The crises of American states and indigenous struggles is that at their core they are relationships formed and reproduced by colonialism. Colonialism as a process establishes a complex hierarchical relationship and is founded and justified through a series of systems. The continuation and legacies of European colonialism beginning in the 15h century with the arrival of Columbus have profoundly transformed our world today. Settler colonialism is characterized by a logic of dispossession and elimination. The term is rooted on a problematic binary of the expropriation of land as opposed to the expropriation of labor that distinguishes it from extractive colonialism as popularized by Patrick Wolfe (Speed, 2017).
Recognizing Settler Colonial Strategies in Latin America
M. Bianet Castellanos points out the struggle of recognizing the settler colonial structures in Latin America because the term did not originally account for the Latin American case but was formulated as a way to differentiate British colonialism in North America from black slavery, and the lack of an appropriate translation of the term in Spanish (Castellanos, 2017; Speed, 2017). As a result, it can be difficult to conceptualize the term in within and about Latin America. Shannon Speed argues that in Latin America colonialism always operated with elements of both extractive and settler colonialism, and furthermore draws on studies that argue that settler colonialism emerges from the formation of the state in Latin America after independence (Speed, 2017). This argument negates the image of a general progression of liberties and rights over time, as it is with the end of traditional European colonial ties in Latin America that the new independent states began to dispossess and eliminate indigenous persons with a new fervor to create a homogenous state under certain economic systems. Juan Castro and Manuela Picq use the case study of indigenous land dispossession in Guatemala as a case study to highlight how settler colonial structures have evolved over time in the central American country. “Guatemala’s modern democratic state is anchored in the colonial state and operates under the logic of settler colonial states” (Castro, 2017: 799).
Mestisaje as a Tool of Colonialism
Castellanos argues that the myth of mestisaje as a racial ideology to consolidate national identity in Latin America functions in a settler colonial state to eliminate indigenous identities (Castellanos, 2017; Speed, 2017). The idea and language of mestisaje in the 20th century is applauded by leftists for celebrating not only the European heritage of Latin Americans but also its African and indigenous historical roots. However, in this text we see that the formation of the idea of mestisaje comes around with formations of new forms of white nationalism in the global north. As a political project, the mestisaje concept takes a totalizing agenda by erasing the loving afro-Latinos and indigenous persons.
Reversing the “Irreversible”
Pineda addresses the dilemma of perceived irreversibility of settler colonialism that in the words of Patrick Wolfe aims to destroy and replace. The article concludes by offering the reader to reflect on the impact of settler colonialism in Latin America and in indigenous struggles working within state-centered systems. Ultimately, it is important to recognize the settler colonial tools used by Latin American states to dispossess, erase, and kill indigenous persons in order to take their lands and use them for neoliberal economic strategies of extraction. In these way, extractive and settler colonialism function together in the region. These texts challenge us to see beyond the seeming irreversibility of these powerful and totalizing systems of oppression.
References
Castellanos, M. Bianet. “Introduction: settler colonialism in Latin America.” American Quarterly 69.4 (2017): 777-781.
Castro, Juan, and Manuela Lavinas Picq. “Stateness as landgrab: A political history of Maya dispossession in Guatemala.” American Quarterly 69.4 (2017): 791-799.
Pineda, Baron. “Indigenous pan-Americanism: Contesting settler colonialism and the Doctrine of Discovery at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.” American Quarterly69.4 (2017): 823-832.
Speed, Shannon. “Structures of settler capitalism in Abya Yala.” American Quarterly 69.4 (2017): 783-790.
 

Theme: "Lettered Society"

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[et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”]Key Theme: “Lettered Society”

This concept is mentioned in Brooke Larson’s article “Forging the Unlettered Indian”, in Joan Rappaport’s book “Politics of Memory,” and in Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s article “The Notion of Rights and the Paradoxes of Postcolonial Modernity.” Through these texts, the written word and literacy are conveyed as powerful tools for colonization, which are used as an exclusionary tool kept away from Indigenous communities and used to control, oppress, and set them apart. Because literacy played such an important role throughout colonization and subsequent law and land reforms, it is important to understand how literacy operated in this historical context and how it was used as a tool to oppress Indigenous communities and later as a tool by Indigenous people to empower themselves and stand up against their colonization.

In Larson’s article, she discusses how “lettered elites” were in control of the government and made Bolivian legal, political, and economic decisions. Because literacy was seen as such a powerful tool in this society, it was kept from many indigenous people. Larson describes an education reform in which a “dissident group of intellectuals hijacked the liberal idea of universal literacy and schooling to push forward a model of Indian schooling that subordinated universal literacy to specialized labor.” This supports that literacy was used as an exclusionary tool to maintain that those in power remain in power. Cusicanqui’s article discusses how it was the literate apoderados in Bolivia who were empowered to voice complaints and demands for their communities. She discusses how it was the literate who were able to contribute to political discourse and decision making and it was through this discourse that a “literate public opinion” and “literate culture” developed. Exclusion from literacy perpetuated indigenous exclusion from these spheres as well. Finally, Rappaport discusses the weight put on literacy in her book Politics of Memory. She uses the term “fetishization of the written word” to emphasize the priority and power placed within the ability to read and write. She also discusses Quintin Lame’s use of the written word to gain a voice in the society and to gain legitimacy for the history he writes down about his people. He is able to find power for himself and his community through his literacy.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column]
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Theme: Neoliberalism

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Neoliberalism has been a central theme that we have examined throughout our course.

This term has been brought up throughout many of the readings both about Bolivia and Columbia.We have discussed how neoliberal ideologies promoted the privatization of services (water, gas, etc.) in Bolivia in the 1960’s and 70’s. The essay by McNeish, “Extraction, Protest and Indigeneity in Bolivia: The TIPNIS Effect” discusses a modern effort in Bolivia to “forge together a new socialist alternative to neoliberalism through the ALBA (McNeish, 222). The article discusses the influence of the neoliberal era in Bolivia on modern day politics and policies. In order to properly understand criticisms to this capitalist notion of progress we must understand what neoliberalism ideology promotes and how it functioned in Latin America.
Further, it is important to understand neoliberalism and its effects on land conflicts and reform in Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America. Neoliberal ideals spurred many land reforms with the goals of pursuing a profitable extractive economy. In Yashar’s article “Contesting Citizenship,” she discusses how Latin American indigenous communities commonly voiced opposition to state reforms that had neoliberalism as the “symbolic target” (Yashar, 36). In addition, she discusses how neoliberalism “has become synonymous with the culpable state and has enabled indigenous movements to target the state for retribution, justice, and guarantees” (Yashar, 36).
In summary, we should define neoliberalism to understand its influence on the history of political and economic state goals in Latin America throughout the 1900’s. Neoliberalism could operate also as a theme and so it should be up for debate whether to define neoliberalism as a key term or key theme in our syllabus.

History of Assimilation in Bolvia and Columbia

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Key Term: Assimilation
Definition: The absorption of the culture and practices of one group of people into the culture and practices of a dominant group with the aim of marginalizing the first group.
Significance: The term assimilation is key to the topic of indigenous rights because of the way in which is has underlined state-community relations for the past few centuries. Hybrids of colonial and pre-colonial power structures were still in place but the new liberal governments in Columbia and Bolivia wanted to get rid of these colonial practices post-independence. One of the manifestations of this change in ideology was several neo-liberal reforms in both countries which targeted at creating a nation and assimilating the indigenous population into the dominant culture. Understanding the history and consequences of these assimilationist policies enacted by the Bolivian and Columbian governments towards the indigenous people informs as to why assimilation is not the answer to current indigenous demands and how the indigenous identity is under threat. The books Revolutionary Horizons and Politics of Memory demonstrate the ways in which on political and economic levels, the indigenous population shifted to being termed as “peasants” and the government attempted to assimilate them into the dominant culture. In Revolutionary Horizons, Hylton and Thomson write, “Bolivian liberalism in the nineteenth century has been described as ethnocidal since it aimed to turn ‘Indians’ into ‘Bolivians,’ without granting them the rights and status of ‘citizens.’” [1] Political movements to incorporate indigenous communities into the nation were seen as progressive in contrast to the colonial system of two separate republics. However, Hylton and Thomson note how for the indigenous people, equality and citizenship were still out of reach. They write, “The document noted the gains of the national revolution as well as its limits – among other points, Aymara-Quechua peasants were ‘foreigners’ in their own country due to the culturally homogenizing policies of the MNR and the military.” [2] By terming the policies of the government at this time as “culturally homogenizing,” Hylton and Thomson convey the extent to which political movements at the time aimed to take the cultural diversity in Bolivia and weld the people into one people who followed one Bolivian culture. The consequences of this were that indigenous people continued to feel excluded from the nation because they didn’t want to sacrifice their indigenous identity. Hylton and Thomson describe this as the concept of mestizaje which, “implied a distillation of Bolivia’s distinct Spanish and Indian racial and civilizational essences into a blended national unity.” [3] While the term national unity and everyone being made citizen seemed progressive and beneficial to everyone, the failure to recognize the separate indigenous identity and history meant that many of the policies in actuality were assimilationist and contributed to the erasure of the indigenous identity. I think that the term assimilation and its history is very important to include in our syllabus so that anyone reading can have a good understanding of how governments have treated indigenous communities in the past and how the consequences of those actions are shaping present day indigenous movements.
[1] Hylton, Forrest, and Sinclair Thomson. Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics (London: Verso, 2007), 47.
[2] Hylton, Forrest, and Sinclair Thomson. Revolutionary Horizons, 87.
[3] Hylton, Forrest, and Sinclair Thomson. Revolutionary Horizons, 80.
Sources Used:
Hylton, Forrest, and Sinclair Thomson. Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics. London: Verso, 2007.
Rappaport, Joanne. The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes. Duke University Press, 1998.