Contesting Citizenship: Indigenous Movements and Democracy in Latin America

Abstract

wave of political organizing across indigenous communities. Indigenous communities have formed national and international peasant confederations, law centers, cultural centers, and, more recently, political parties and platforms. Challenging the historical image of Indians as a submissive, backward, and anachronistic group, these newly formed organizations have declared, embraced, and mobilized around their indigenous identity. Their demands have included territorial autonomy, respect for customary law, new forms of political representation, and bicultural education. While the specific characteristics of organizations and agendas vary, they have commonly demanded that constitutional, democratic, individual rights be respected and that collective indigenous rights be granted. Consequently, they are contesting the practice and terms of citizenship in Latin America's new democracies. The emergence of indigenous organizations, politicization of indigenous identities, and demand for indigenous rights over the past two decades challenge historical norms and scholarly conclusions about the politicization of ethnic cleavages in Latin America. The historical record suggests that in the twentieth century indigenous communities have rarely initiated or sustained social movements that proclaimed an indigenous identity and demanded indigenous rights. To the contrary, active rural organizing within and between indigenous communities has traditionally been the reserve of peasant unions, political parties, churches, and revolutionaries. These movements have historically attempted to mobilize Indians to forge class, partisan, religious and/or revolutionary identities over, and often against, indigenous ones. Accordingly, scholars have generally underscored the weak politicization of ethnic cleavages in Latin America and concluded that ethnicity in Latin America has had comparatively little explicit impact on political organizing, party platforms, debates, and conflict, in sharp contrast to other regions in the world. I The emergence of indigenous organizations that proclaim and promote indigenous identity and rights, therefore, constitutes a new phenomenon that merits explanation.2 This article addresses why indigenous identity has become a more salient basis of political organizing and source of political claims in Latin America by comparing rural politics since 1945 in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru.