Assess the policies directed towards the indigenous people of Latin-America during the twentieth cen

The post-Columbian history of Latin America has been marked by the social, cultural and geographical marginalisation of indigenous people, initially with respect to Iberian born, and later to criollo (American born hispanic) and increasingly mestizo (mixed race), inhabitants. The term indigenismo (indigenism), which has become a dominant ideological tool throughout much of Latin America during the twentieth century, would seem to indicate a break with this history and a move towards recognition of the value of indigenous culture and society. In reality, however, the use of indigenismo in terms of official policies has not been so straightforward. It is necessary to make clear what is meant by indigenismo in the context of this discussion before the application and effect of such policies in individual states is examined and the true nature of indigenismo as an ideology can be evaluated.

Although ideas about the centrality of indigenous history, particularly pre-Columbian, to ideas of modern nationhood have been around since the mid to late nineteenth century, for the purposes of this study indigenismo is best viewed as an historical category, having emerged in Mexico in the wake of the 1910 revolution, due largely to the efforts of the archaeologist/anthropologist Manuel Gamio (1883-1960), and subsequently spread over the rest of Latin America after the 1940s (Lima 1993). While it is true that the various brands of indigenismo employed at different times and in different countries has varied considerably, this definition effectively delineates the debate as well as allowing scope for discussion of both similarities and significant differences between such policies in individual states.

While in Mexico, as in post-revolutionary countries such as Bolivia and Peru in the latter half of the twentieth century, the creation of citizenship for Indians and the redistribution of land to the benefit of the large majority of indigenous people constituted significant components of indigenismo policies, Manuel Gamio's reconstruction of the archaeological site of Teotihuacan, thereby transforming the site into Mexico's greatest public monument, provided the vehicle for his major achievement, namely the reinstatement of Indian civilisation as the "glorious foundation of Mexican history and culture" (Brading 1988, 76). This 'foundation' was to be consolidated in the national consciousness largely by way of a revival of native art forms. Gamio rejected neo-classical paradigms of aesthetic appraisal and was instrumental in the revival of artisan industry in Mexico, particularly the production of textiles, ceramics, lacquer, metal-work and porcelain, which he claimed preserved a native tradition even though most such crafts had originated during the colonial period (ibid, 76). Similar processes occurred in other Latin American countries. Turino (1991), for instance, discusses the way in which Andean music has become accepted as part of the Peruvian national culture due to the indigenismo policies of the revolutionary Valesco government. He notes that the commercial Andean music trend, combined with the diffusion of indigenous music in urban Peru has created a trend towards the participation in sikuri music among young rural Aymarans. That the rural youth have "largely abandoned other instrumental and dance traditions" (ibid, 278) due to similar urban influences is a matter of significance which will be discussed later. In such countries as Bolivia, Chile and Peru the celebration of an indigenous past (although one which is largely invented) also occurs through carnival in which thousands of people dance through the streets, often in Indian costume (Abercrombie 1991). Rituals such as the pouring of libations into the earth in honour of Pachamama, a chthonic deity of Quechua and Aymara origin, which has become common among Bolivians of widely varying social standing (Malverde and Canessa 1995) are another form of such celebration, although not in keeping with the original Mexican indigenismo of Manuel Gamio, to whom the hybrid pagan-Catholicism which emerged in the colonial period, and of which such rituals are essentially a part, was anathema.

Although the redistribution of land held in the colonial hacienda system was clearly to the benefit of many rural Indians, and while identification of a country's populace with an indigenous past, partly facilitated through the iconisation of 'traditional' Indian arts, may not seem inherently damaging to the ethnic and cultural interests of native peoples, the realities of indigenismo must be seen in terms of its function as an ideology of national integration. To understand the relationship between nationalism and indigenismo it is first necessary to comprehend the relevance of mestizaje (mixing) in the creation of contemporary Latin America as a ...

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Miscegenation has always been commonplace in Latin America to a far greater extent than in other multi-racial societies, and this has led to the emergence of a dominant mestizo class in many states, necessarily accompanied by corresponding attitudes to race particular to the region (see for example Beals 1969). As nationalist tendencies have emerged in Latin America, therefore, mestizaje (mixing) has come to be seen as the embodiment of national identity, the one factor which, theoretically, links each citizen to both Hispanic and indigenous past and therefore makes him or her a national of a given state. Justo Sierra a nineteenth century liberal Mexican nationalist stated that "the mestizo family...has constituted the dynamic element in our history" (quoted in Brading 1988), while in a much later era Garcia (1974) referred to miscegenation as "the point of departure for the history of what we refer to as the Republic of Ecuador" (quoted in Stutzman 1981, p.59).

The result of the symbolic value of the mestizo to the nationalist cause is an assumption within the principles of indigenismo that all, or at least the majority, of a nation's citizens are to some extent Indian, whether this concept is couched in terms of ethnicity or of culture. A key tenet of the ideology of Manuel Gamio, for instance, was an insistence, based on some fairly dubious empirical research, that "the bulk of the Mexican population, if defined in broad cultural terms rather than by strict linguistic criteria, were Indians" (Brading 1988, 78). Another example is the statement in 1972 of the then President of the Republic of Ecuador, General Guillermo Rodriguez Lara, of his belief that all Ecuadorians were in part indigenous and shared to some degree the blood of the Inca Atahualpa (Stutzman 1991). The concept of the Indian, however, emerged in colonial times and refers to a highly heterogenous set of peoples. The idea of a common ancestry and history can therefore serve only to obscure differences, not only between natives and white-mestizos, but also between indigenous peoples and thus is clearly shown to be an ideological tool for the validation of mestizaje rather than a true attempt to recapture the indigenous past. As Abercrombie (1991) puts it, "there may have been no Indians before Columbus, and there may be extremely few self-identified Indians in Bolivia today, but in this nation founded by the 'illegitimate' American-born among America's European conquerors there is no legitimate citizen without Indian alters to be represented" (p.119).

Ideas on the centrality of the mestizo to national identity, therefore, form part of a philosophy of repression of difference. This philosophy is based on the enduring belief that common language, common character, a homogenous race and common history are the four defining features of the true nation, a belief openly espoused by Manuel Gamio (Brading 1988). According to Gamio, the grand aim of Mexican nationalism was to create "a powerful patria and a coherent, defined nationality" on the basis of "racial approximation, cultural fusion, linguistic unification, and economic equilibrium" (quoted in Brading 1988, 82). Land reform can also be seen as serving this integrationist cause. Turino (1991), for example, discusses the relevance of the Peruvian Velasco government's plan to redistribute all large haciendas by 1975. According to him, "regardless of the reform's failings and underlying agendas, Velasco was, and still is, viewed by many peasants as a liberator and ally against the landowners" (p.273). Likewise Stroebele Gregor (1990) says of post-revolutionary Bolivia, "the achievements of the revolution- citizenship for former Indians and agrarian reform- and the populism of the MNR bound the peasants to this party and the state" (p.218).

It is clear, then, that while indigenismo policies have sought to ensure the absorption of indigenous identity by all citizens of a given nation (Malverde and Canessa 1995), and to improve the living conditions of indigenous people, they have done so as part of a drive to homogenize the populace. The implications of this fact in terms of race, culture and ethnicity must now be discussed.

While 'racial approximation' was stated to be one of the foundations of Manuel Gamio's romantic Mexican nationalism, race in itself has tended not to be an explicit part of indigenismo either in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America. Gamio, indeed, subscribed to the view of the anthropologist Franz Boas that, contrary to Social Darwinist views much favoured at the time, race had no use as an analytical category and was best replaced by the concept of culture. The apparent backwardness of contemporary Indians could therefore be "attributed to their poor diet, their lack of education, their material poverty, and their isolation from the stimulus of national life" (Brading 1988, 79) and was thus remediable by integration into the Mexican nation. Inasmuch as the philosophy of indigenismo does not explicitly entail racial discrimination, however, it undoubtedly does entail cultural discrimination. This is justified by the assertion of the cultural superiority of the European invaders and the belief that, while the indigenous people were able to contribute biologically to the new American race, assimilation into the hispanic urban culture was and is the only way for natives to contribute further to the prosperity of the nation. As Stutzman (1981) puts it in reference to Ecuador, "once the mestizo character of the developing nation is firmly established, textbook treatment of the indigenous population changes dramatically. No longer proud, progressive, or heroic figures, the non-urban, unmixed descendants of the Shyris and the Incas are presented as a people whose very soul was crushed by oppressive institutions imposed by greedy colonists to exploit indigenous labour" (p.63). The many references to 'the Indian problem' among the proponents of indigenismo are indicative of this kind of conceptualisation and also demonstrate the close reciprocity between culture and race which lies very near to the surface of governmental policy in Latin American countries; while indigenous people have become citizens of their respective Republics, with the word indio actually being outlawed in Bolivia after the 1952 revolution and replaced by the word campesino (peasant) (Malverde and Canessa 1995), the perceived 'problem' continues to be articulated in racial terms. The interrelationship between race and culture within indigenismo becomes even more clear when considering the words of Rodriguez Lara (1972) who, in qualifying his statement concerning the Indian heritage of all Ecuadorians, stated: "there is no more Indian problem, we all become white when we accept the goals of national culture" (in Stutzman 1981). The fact that Lara uses the term 'white' to describe the true Ecuadorian indicates a clear similarity between indigenismo and blanquiamiento, the philosophy much prevalent in Latin America of whitening the population both physically, through miscegenation, and culturally through social mobility, (see for instance Skidmore 1990). Stutzman indeed argues that the desirability of blanquiamiento in terms of both culture and race is widely acknowledged in Ecuador. Whether or not nationalism and indigenismo in Latin America are explicitly racist, however, the effect of mestizaje in cultural terms will be an inevitable racial amalgamation and the distinction between race and culture as grounds for discrimination therefore becomes highly blurred; irrespective of explicit intent, such policies can be seen to contain a strong element of implicit racism. Moreover, the framing of ethnicity in class terms serves to provide the possibility, however slim, of social success irrespective of race in terms of phenotype and thereby impedes the formation of racial or ethnic consciousness which might be used to prevent the erosion of indigenous culture (Turino 1991). In the words of Turino (primarily concerning Peru but applicable more generally) (1991), "romantic nationalism can be viewed as a co-optive strategy to reduce the potency of dominated groups' symbolic means of resistance. That is, the symbolic transformation of the 'Andean' into the 'national', an appropriation by elites, potentially reduces the power of Andean symbols to mark or unite competing social factions, and nationhood and unity are enacted as a social drama" (p.280). The effects for racial groups of cultural discrimination may therefore be more profound than those of direct racial discrimination.

The assimilation of indigenous people into individual nations throughout Latin America has been and continues to be facilitated by the diffusion of the ideologies of 'civilisation', 'modernisation' and 'progress' which are biased by the value system of the dominant hispanic and Western culture (Stroebele Gregor 1994) and therefore perhaps more accurately described as 'Europeanisation', 'industrialisation' and 'urbanisation'.

In Latin American societies, therefore, integration has not been, and indeed was never intended to be, based on 'cultural fusion', irrespective of the rhetoric. The nation, rather, was to be an essentially white-mestizo construct into which the indigenous peoples would be absorbed with little more than token recognition of their potential cultural contribution. In many cases the perfunctory nature of national recognition for Indian arts is demonstrated by their relegation to the status of 'folklore'. Turino (1991) observes that in Peru "music is defined as European music, and 'fine art' is circumscribed by the European tradition, while Andean arts ('folklore') are placed outside of, and I would add, below these categories" (p.271). In early Mexican indigenismo this process is demonstrated by the failure of Manuel Gamio to consider any cultural value in the indigenous people other than their artistic production. According to Brading (1988), "the all-important fact that contemporary Indians in Mexico preserved in their daily lives the essential configuration of pre-hispanic civilisation was not for Gamio a cause for national exaltation, offering an enduring base on which the nation could be refounded or constituting a source of social values hitherto eroded by foreign influence, but rather embodied an obstacle to mestizaje, and signified economic backwardness and cultural stagnation" (p.83). Even severely limited cultural recognition may in fact have the effect of furthering national integration of itself as well as indirectly by serving to valorise mestizaje. The resurgence of Andean arts in Peru has served, as was noted earlier, to validate certain forms of music in the eyes of the rural youth but, in doing so, has led to the rapid decline of others. Turino (1991) contends that "it may have been precisely because Andean arts were ignored or marginalized in the context of a rigid hierarchy that they have been maintained to the surprising degree still evident today" (p.279).

The education of the indigenous population has also been central to the process of national integration in most cases. While in Peru the Quechua language was made a national language on a par with Spanish, and with corresponding legal status with respect to education and the courts (Turino 1991), this has been the exception rather than the rule. In Mexico, for instance, extensive education, in Spanish, of rural native children was undertaken due to the belief that, "by reason of their many languages, rural isolation, poverty and illiteracy, the Indian communities constituted a series of separate countries, Pequenas patrias, whose inhabitants did not participate in the 'national life' or exercise their rights as citizens of the republic" (Brading 1988). Malverde and Canessa (1995) describe the effects of the universal education promoted in Bolivia to achieve similar nationalist ideological goals, observing that much class time is employed "to teach Indians how to read and write the official language of the state; to teach Indians about their country and to be proud of it" and noting (after Soria 1992) that "education can be read as 'bolivianisation'". Likewise, in Ecuador, while "those who have received a formal education have a sense of themselves as Ecuadorians which is firmly rooted in a significant pre-Columbian past" (Stutzman 1981, p.58), the present day culture which they are prepared for is essentially European (ibid). Aronowitz (1987) neatly sums up the reality of nationalistic school systems within Latin American countries, stating that, through education, "a notion of geographical and cultural territoriality is constructed in a hierarchy of domination and subordination marked by a centre and margin legitimated through the civilising knowledge/power of a privileged Eurocentric culture" (p.112).

While policies of indigenismo may vary considerably throughout Latin America, the similarities are far more profound; all varieties are characterised by an emphasis on nationalism and integration into an essentially hispanic, European culture. While citizenship for indigenous people and land reform have meant improvements in the material conditions of rural Indians, they have also served to bond these people to the state. Furthermore, the glorification of a largely invented Indian past based around mestizaje as the embodiment of national identity and consolidated by the perfunctory acceptance of indigenous art-forms has served both to obscure and to facilitate the destruction of contemporary Indian ways of life. This destruction has been compounded by the nationalist education of the indigenous rural youth.

While the nature of policies aimed at indigenous Latin Americans may well change in the future, particularly with the increased ethnic awareness of such people (see for instance Rappaport 1992), in the light of the evidence it is fair to say that indigenismo movements in Latin America have, up to now, always been much more about creating a national, mestizo, identity than about indigenous people.

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