Tag: Introduction

In the course that set the foundation for this collective project to be made, we critically analyzed contemporary issues unfolding today with real consequences on the lives of many peoples. As a class, we aimed to engage with the literature in a critical way while being conscious of our subjectivity and positionality to these issues. We apply this understanding of our own work to our critical analysis of the literature we have engaged with in this course as their personal temporality and own biases influenced the works they created and the conclusions they reached. In the first week of our course, we explored three texts that contextualize the hopes, successes, and failures of indigenous struggles in Latin America. In 1998, Deborah J. Yashar was hopeful about the radical changes that could be achieved through the new indigenous mobilizations in the last two decades of the twentieth century. She understood these new waves of increasing political organization by indigenous communities as the radical continuation of previous mobilizations to achieve material survival. In her narrative, these new indigenous mobilizations would fulfill the incomplete political liberalization and state reforms that previous mobilizations began but were unable to complete. Specifically, Yashar understood these mobilizations as new phenomena of contestation for the practice and terms of citizenship in Latin American democracies. Yashar is representative of an optimistic group of scholars in the late 20^th century encouraged by the emerging democracies throughout Latin America, and the radical social organization that sought to define these different democracies. However, this optimism would be stifled by the rise of neoliberalism in the region.
In the 21^st century, the consequences of the indigenous movements of the late 20^th century were beginning to unfold and their successes as well as failures had lessons for new radical groups continuing the struggle against systems of oppression for marginalized groups in Latin America. To clarify the struggle these groups were engaged in, Nancy Grey Postero and Leon Zamosc’s essay label what Yashar understood as an indigenous contestation over citizenship as the Indian question. Postero and Zamoc ask through the Indian question “what kinds of rights indigenous people should be granted as citizens of democratic nation-states” (Postero, 2006: 5). While Yashar was mostly hopeful about the change that indigenous organization could achieve, the authors of this paper hold the opinion that the effect of these movements is dependent on the context of the state in which they form and they highlight the importance of plurality, history, and state relations in the claims and goals of indigenous movements. The diversity of conditions across Latin America makes it impossible to draw universal conclusions on the success and failures of the wave of indigenous social movements in the late twentieth century throughout the region.
Charles R. Hale’s article offers a more a critical assessment of the impact of the indigenous mobilizations of the late 20^th century. In his article, he reassesses the effect of these mobilizations nine years later as incomplete. He argues that the new indigenous mobilizations at the end of the 20^th century did not create a new citizenship, as Yashar predicted, but rather ended up opening spaces for some forms of indigeneity but continuing to exclude the majority. He critiques Yashar’s work for not accounting for neoliberalism’s cultural project and its violent relations with indigenous culture. While Portero and Zamosc’s article recognizes neoliberalism as a factor to take into account in the Indian question, they concentrate more on the political and economic dimensions of neoliberalism and similarly fail to fully recognize the importance of the cultural dimension of the neoliberal project. Hale uses the term “Indio permitido” to describe the way indigenous movements are being domesticated and divided by the granting of cultural rights by state’s with neoliberal projects. These articles summarize how the recent organization of indigenous groups around their indigeneity has opened promising conversations and some amount of progress in the granting of rights, but there are still questions about the progress that can be achieved when working through the colonizing states whose neoliberal projects demand the cultural erasure of indigenous culture and peoples or assimilated versions of who they are.
References
Hale, Charles. “Rethinking indigenous politics in the era of the “indio permitido”.” NACLA Report on the Americas 38.2 (2004): 16-21.
Postero, Nancy Grey, and Leon Zamosc. “The struggle for indigenous rights in Latin America.” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 11.1 (2006): 208-210.
Yashar, Deborah J. “Contesting citizenship: Indigenous movements and democracy in Latin America.” Comparative politics (1998): 23-42.