Narrating Native Histories is designed to foster a rethinking of the ethical, methodological, and conceptual paradigms that shape work on Native histories and cultures. The editors seek to create a space for effective and ongoing conversations between North and South, Natives and non-Natives, and academics and activists throughout the Americas and the Pacific region. Toward that end, they encourage projects that recognize Native intellectuals, cultural interpreters, and alternative knowledge producers within broader academic and intellectual worlds; projects that decolonize the relationship between orality and textuality; narratives that productively work the tensions between the norms of Native cultures and evidentiary requirements in academic circles; and analyses that contribute to an understanding of Native peoples' relationships with nation-states.

Narrating Native Histories is designed to foster a rethinking of the ethical, methodological, and conceptual paradigms that shape work on Native histories and cultures. The editors seek to create a space for effective and ongoing conversations between North and South, Natives and non-Natives, and academics and activists throughout the Americas and the Pacific region. Toward that end, they encourage projects that recognize Native intellectuals, cultural interpreters, and alternative knowledge producers within broader academic and intellectual worlds; projects that decolonize the relationship between orality and textuality; narratives that productively work the tensions between the norms of Native cultures and evidentiary requirements in academic circles; and analyses that contribute to an understanding of Native peoples' relationships with nation-states.

Andrew Canessa is Director of the Centre for Latin American Studies at the University of Essex.

INTIMATE INDIGENEITIES

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Chapter One

Clara, one of the very few creoles, that is, white people, left in Sorata, remembers the early decades of the twentieth century when Sorata, the cantonal capital, was a wealthy, bustling town: "There were beautiful houses and very fine people (gente muy decente). Now Sorata is worthless. We are left with the worst kind of people, peasants ..." In that period, Sorata was divided into two groups: the creoles, some of whom were German speaking, and the mestizos, who were the small traders; social tension existed between these two groups of people, the former associated with the Liberal Party and the latter with the Republicans. "The liberals were the gentlemen, the señores." In those days the creole elites feared the mestizos much more than the indians. During the revolution (as she referred to it) of 1920, "the republicans sacked the most beautiful stores of Sorata. The mestizos made a revolution against the whites." Another creole resident told me that her mother never forgot how the mestizos sacked her house and how she had to live with seeing people in the street wearing her clothes.

It was not simply that the creoles did not consider the indians a threat but, rather, they saw them as being on the same side. As Clara continued: "The campesinos were very respectful and always cried alongside the whites ... They would address us as 'Mamaay, Tataay ... and not as señor or señora." This form of address, "mother" and "father," with the prolonged final vowel that indicates subservience, was hated by indians, who found it patronizing and humiliating but felt required to address creoles in this way. A number of older people in Wila Kjarka mentioned this to me specifically as one of the things they disliked most about this period. But for Clara these were simply terms of respect, and before the Agrarian Reform of 1953, the campesinos "knew their place" and "were very respectful. Now they are spoiled; now they do not respect people."

For Wila Kjarkeños, Sorata is a q'ara town par excellence, notwithstanding the fact that, as Clara ruefully notes, there are very few whites left. Sorata, with its residents and history, is the simplest manifestation of a worldview that sees the lives of people such as those in Wila Kjarka and similar communities as an age-long struggle between indians and whites.

It is tempting to read the history of Latin America as a struggle between white Europeans and native indians and to see the election of Evo Morales as the final chapter in that long history (e.g., Thomson and Hylton 2007). Even from the earliest decades, however, the picture has been much more complicated; the neat administrative and conceptual distinction between the Republic of Spaniards and Republic of Indians was immediately undermined by marriages and unions with indian women. The offspring, mestizos, were formally considered part of the Republic of Spaniards but were ineligible for a wide range of positions and posts.

Even this tripartite structure was almost immediately complicated by the recognition of various admixtures of white, indian, and African "blood" and the "society of castes" (Mörner 1967; Wade 2009: 87–88) expanded into structures of eight, sixteen, and even thirty-two racial categories with various ways of social and racial improvement through mixing. Nonwhites were castas, an unfavorable category. If one considers that Spaniards were themselves a mixture of Iberians, Goths, Romans, Moors, Jews, and Africans with a fairly wide phenotypical range, it is easy to see the complications to a racial system where mestizos and mulatos were often much lighter skinned than "pure" Christian Spaniards.

Ethnic ascription was established according to a range of diagnostics such as trade, residence, marriage, language, and dress as well as phenotype. If these could not be sufficiently manipulated, the wealthy and powerful could resort to the courts and, as Lesley Rout points out, "Of course, nobody wanted to be considered casta, and requests for exemption were heard at court within the first three decades after Columbus's landing. Conquistadores like Pedro de Alvarado wanted their bastard heirs declared legitimate Spaniards, and they had enough of those magic persuaders—money and influence—to get their way. No one has ever explained how a royal declaration cleansed the blood of an innately vice-ridden casta, but this was only one example of a whole system that was riddled with logical inconsistencies" (1976: 127).

There was, however, substantial legal precedent for this as the Spanish Crown shored up its position vis-à-vis ethnic minorities and their descendants after the Reconquista of Iberia by restricting offices to those of pure Christian blood. However, the "Purity of Blood Laws," first codified in 1449, had to deal with the thorny problem of the fact that large proportions of the nobility had a history of intermarriage with Jews and Moors. This was neatly resolved by declaring that all nobles ipso facto possessed pure blood. An elegant solution, no doubt, but it did open up a number of challenges to the developing racial system in the New World as well as Spain, since the Spanish arrived with a racial system that was open to legal petition (Rout 1976; Twinam 1999).

Since the time of Pedro de Alvarado, the question of who is white, mestizo, or indian has not been straightforward. For much of the colonial period, being indian was arguably a fiscal category (Harris 1995), wherein indians were required to offer their labor for the mita in the mines but were not liable for tax. In the Republican period—especially after the expansion of the haciendas in the nineteenth century—many indians were serfs on large estates and were not allowed to leave without the consent of the hacendado.

Throughout all these periods, people were able to undermine the system by a number of means, notably money, marriage, and migration. Several historians have shown how color, occupation, and wealth have affected racial ascription (e.g., McCaa 1984; Seed, 1988; Spalding, 1970). In a very influential work, Verena Martínez Alier (1974) showed how gender and sexuality were key elements in this system of racial hierarchies, as white male elites maintain their racial purity by controlling the sexuality of their women and their "legitimate" offspring. Within this hierarchy, however, lie the seeds of its own destruction. The population of white women in Latin American colonies was very small, and some poorer white men might marry the daughters of wealthier mestizos. The historical and contemporary situation is much more complex than this simple formulation might suggest, but there is no doubt that there are numerous examples of using marriage as a means of social ascent and in order to "whiten" (Wade 2009: 168–75).

To do justice to the historical and contemporary complexities of racial and social mobility is far beyond the scope of this book, but for our purposes here it is important to note that racial, ethnic, gender, and class categories are never straightforward. Sex and marriage serve to uphold racial hierarchies even as they can also undermine them. This leaves us with a highly complex situation in which race and ethnic identities are inherently unstable categories.

Billie Jean Isbell (1978) has suggested that one of ways of understanding Andean social structure is as if it were viewed through a kaleidoscope; more recently Laura Lewis (2003) has suggested that ethnicity and identity in Latin America are a "hall of mirrors," with an infinite number of reflections, as difference and identity constantly rebound on each other. I find this refractive view of race and ethnicity useful in understanding the world from the point of view of Wila Kjarkeños: A slight shift in the kaleidoscopic lens or a movement left or right in the hall of mirrors and a whole new set of configurations emerges. I can think of no better way to describe identities in the Andes and, in many ways, each chapter of this book can be understood as another turn in the kaleidoscope.

In the next two chapters we will look at how Wila Kjarka's identity has been configured historically, but here I want to look at the social geography of Wila Kjarka and surrounding communities, where people can be described as whites, mestizos, and indians in English; criollos/vecinos, mistis, and campesinos/indios in Spanish; or, alternatively q'ara, misti, and jaqi in Aymara—but these terms are very awkward translations of each other, as we shall see.

SORATA

The area around Wila Kjarka is economically and politically dominated by the provincial capital, Sorata, stunningly located at the foot of the great Illampu-Ancohuma massif.

Sorata (population 2,000) was one of many towns founded during the colonial period, but it is relatively unusual in that a considerable proportion of this colonial architecture has remained. Many of the area's hacendados maintained residences in the town, but it was in the beginning of the twentieth century that Sorata enjoyed its period of greatest wealth. Strategically situated on the walking route from the highlands to the Amazon jungle, it was ideally placed to profit from the rubber boom. Sorata's twentieth-century wealth was based on trade rather than agriculture, and its citizens were able to enjoy all the luxuries of the period—luxuries that were initially brought over the mountain by mule or oxcart and later by truck.

The first half of the twentieth century saw Sorata dominated by creoles, while a substantial number of mestizos periodically challenged the status quo. In those days everyone spoke Aymara: Indians did not speak Spanish and, since elite children were brought up by indian women and needed to speak Aymara to their servants, the creole elite as well as the mestizos were fluent speakers of Aymara.

Even before the 1952 Revolution, Sorata was beginning to change. The U.S. Government put a lot of pressure on the Bolivian authorities to curtail the commercial activities of the Sorata Germans, who were open Nazi sympathizers, as indeed were most of Bolivia's expatriate Germans. The exception, of course, was the substantial German Jewish community, which had its own school in La Paz as well as a German-language radio station (Spitzer 1998). By insisting that all imports be cleared at Customs in La Paz instead of Sorata, the town lost its role as an important entrepôt. There were still, however, many wealthy white families residing there after the Second World War, but many of the haciendas around Sorata were sacked during the 1952 Revolution and there was a major exodus of creoles. Over time the town came to be dominated by peasants from the surrounding area and their children.

Despite this and the fact that many merchants use Aymara to sell to indians, Spanish has remained the dominant language in Sorata; in fact, Aymara is spoken less now than it was fifty years ago, when everyone—creoles and indians alike—spoke the language. Contemporary residents, themselves children of peasants, are uncomfortable with the continuing immigration from the countryside. Some express concern that these campesinos are preventing the town from progressing and are particularly worried about the effect they have on their children: The presence of significant numbers of Aymara speakers in the classroom is believed to bring down educational standards generally. "They are simply not civilized," as one resident told me, and another: "They haven't learned citizenship." This is an exceptionally succinct expression of the ways indians simply are not considered—even today—as part of the nation. Citizenship has been defined since the dawn of the Republic as being Spanish-speaking and possessing European culture. The 1952 Revolution was revolutionary in that it offered the possibility of this liberal citizenship to indians, so long as they conformed to its tenets; it embraced rather than challenged the idea of Bolivia as a Spanish-speaking, culturally Western nation.

Wila Kjarkeños do not feel comfortable in Sorata; they don't feel that they belong, and they certainly do not trust the police and other officials. The difference between Wila Kjarkeños and Sorateños is that the latter live from trade; they buy and sell, but do not grow anything. They pay others to work their land if they have any, and they do not work with the people they hire. The traders use Aymara to talk to Wila Kjarkeños and other campesinos, but it is often in a sharp and impatient tone, which, even in commercial relationships that go back decades, conveys little amity, let alone affection.

Wila Kjarkeños mistrust the police, who since the "siege" of 2002, are confined to the town limits and do not venture into the rural communities—not that they ever showed much interest before. It would be a rare event indeed for a Wila Kjarkeño to go to the police if he or she were in trouble. Nor do they have much faith in civil justice. As Zenobio told me, "The judges are not going to believe anyone like us; they will not listen to us [literally 'give us the word']. They will say: 'They are just jaqi.' "

In decades past, indians were not allowed to traverse the main plaza; now it is full of old and young people from the countryside. On one Saturday morning I found Clara sitting on a park bench and sat down beside her. It was market day, so the plaza was full of people, sitting, walking, and eating ice cream. As we both watched people pass, she began to tell me what Sorata was like when she was young: "There were lots of people, many families. Now no one is left." This may seem like something of an odd thing to say when the plaza was absolutely full of people, but Clara was not seeing people, she was seeing indians. In a similar vein, another criolla of Sorata bemoaned to me once that there were only "five families" who lived in the town. For these women, gente, that is, people, means gente decente, which is a synonym for white.

And so there we sat in the middle of the square full of ... well, people. She was dressed in a housecoat and slippers, complaining because her maid had locked her out. As she lamented the splendor of those days of yore, before us passed two young girls dressed in fine polleras and shawls and what looked to me like brand-new hats at a jaunty angle on their heads. They passed with a spring in their step and laughing freely, the very image of the social confidence among indigenous people who were about to elect Evo Morales to the presidency. The contrast could not be greater: a tired and defeated creole from the colonial past before bright and challenging youth of an indigenous present.

Clara's maid eventually arrived and paid no attention to the complaints of her mistress. She was sharp and impatient with Clara whom, she said, should never have gone to the plaza by herself. Off they went, with Clara shuffling behind her impatient servant, who marched toward the gates of the old house, keys in hand. This was in August 2005, four months before Evo Morales was elected with a clear majority of the votes, casting aside the traditional creole elite in the process. I watched them go and reflected on how they incarnated the new order of Bolivia.

VILLA ESQUIVEL AND SAN PEDRO

Downriver from Sorata are the villages of San Pedro and, across the river, Villa Esquivel. Many of these residents are quite fair skinned, and before the Bolivian Revolution there were very sharp distinctions between the mestizos of these communities and the indians of the surrounding communities.

Villa Esquivel is about eight hundred meters down the mountain from Wila Kjarka (i.e., it lies at approximately 2,200 meters above sea level) and, as such, enjoys a different climate: There are many more birds and the people of Villa Esquivel can grow tropical fruits that cannot be produced in Wila Kjarka. Today, few people live in Villa Esquivel; this mestizo village was much more populous in the past. There is little visible nowadays to mark the difference between this and other communities, other than the houses being larger and constructed around a central courtyard; kitchens are substantial structures, and carving on balconies is more ornate.

Fifty years ago the people of Villa Esquivel looked down upon the indians of Wila Kjarka, and many older people in Wila Kjarka today express considerable bitterness at the disdain they received in the past. They remember well how the mestizos would not sit with them, would not eat with them, and would not offer them maize beer in a glass—which is what they used—but in a tutuma—a gourd. They are also all very aware of how the Mamani family suffered at the hands of the Villa Esquiveleños. Mateo Mamani, although from Wila Kjarka, worked for a man in Villa Esquivel, Juan Botello. In those days the land in Villa Esquivel was very productive and a substantial amount of wheat was grown, but now, I was told, "the rains do not fall when they are supposed to and there is a drought." The mestizos did not work the land, however, and paid indians to do it for them.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from INTIMATE INDIGENEITIESby Andrew Canessa Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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