Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

María Elena García is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College.

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Set against conventional views of Peru as a place where indigenous mobilization has been absent, this book examines the complex, contentious politics between intercultural activists, local Andean indigenous community members, state officials, non-governmental organizations, and transnationally-educated indigenous intellectuals. It examines the paradoxes and possibilities of Quechua community protests against intercultural bilingual education, official multicultural policies implemented by state and non-state actors, and the training of "authentic" indigenous leaders far from their home communities.
Focusing on important local sites of transnational connections, especially in the highland communities of Cuzco, and on an international academic institute for the study of intercultural bilingual education, this book shows how contemporary indigenous politics are inextricably and simultaneously local and global. In exploring some of the seeming contradictions of Peruvian indigenous politics, Making Indigenous Citizens suggests that indigenous movements and citizenship are articulated in extraordinary but under-explored ways in Latin America and beyond.

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Making Indigenous Citizens

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.................................................................................................ixIntroduction: Reconsidering Ethnicity and Multicultural Development in the Peruvian Andes.......................1Part I. Politics and Histories1. In the Shadow of Terror: Indigenous Peoples and the State, 1980-2002.........................................352. Race, Education, and Citizenship: From Indigenismo to Interculturalidad, 1920s-1990s.........................63Part II. Ethnographies3. Community Politics and Resistance: Challenging Representation................................................874. Conflicted Multiculturalisms: NGOs, the State, and the Contradictions of Rights Activism.....................1105. Developing Indigenous Spaces: Intellectuals and Transnational Networks.......................................133Part III. Conclusions6. Articulating Indigenous Citizenship: Intercultural Identities and Politics...................................163Notes...........................................................................................................179Works Cited.....................................................................................................189Index...........................................................................................................207

Chapter One

During my seventeen months in Cuzco, I spent many weeks in Intipacha, a monolingual Quechua community at the foot of the snowcapped Ausangate mountains. At the end of one stay in the community, while I packed my few belongings in preparation for my return to the city, Carmen, my comadre, called me into her family's eating area. They had prepared pachamanca, a special meal (in this case, potatoes, lamb, and alpaca meat) cooked in a makeshift oven underground. There was a large pail of chicha (fermented corn beer) on the ground, and I suspected that several bottles of beer, though hidden from me then, would appear later.

Huddling close to each other against the cold night air, we began eating and drinking, and gradually many in the community joined us. One man brought his guitar, another his charango, and before I knew it I was asked to change into the traditional polleras (skirts) allinta tusunaypaq (for a prettier dance). The dancing began and the drinking continued until Ral, an unusually tall and serious man whom I had seen little during my time in Intipacha, walked in. I noticed glances toward my compadres Carmen and Ignacio from most people, and an uncomfortable pause in the music confirmed the uneasiness that had suddenly enveloped the room. But, charming and proper as ever, Ignacio recovered the one glass passing around the room, rinsed it out with water, filled it to the brim with chicha, and handed it to Ral in a welcoming gesture.

Visibly pleased, Ral took the glass. After slowly and carefully scrutinizing everyone in the room, he offered some drops to the Pachamama (Earth Mother) and gulped down the cold drink. With that the music began again and we continued to dance, though I was now nervous about this man's presence. Everyone in the room seemed to understand something that had escaped me, and although I tried to ignore my nervousness, I was still uncomfortable and my gaze constantly shifted toward Ral. At the end of a song, as I took the opportunity to rest and have a beer, Ral approached me. Again there were glances, though this time first toward me and then quickly toward Ignacio. But with a sign from Ignacio, the music continued and people attempted to converse naturally. As Ral began to speak with me, however, those closest to us stopped talking and listened.

We did not exchange many words, and his comments were short and direct. He said he had come to say goodbye, although he had never said hello. And he said he had come to apologize. I was confused, and when I asked him why, it was he who became confused. He had obviously been certain I would understand. He looked to Ignacio for the answer, and I looked to Carmen. Suddenly Ignacio's cousin Mario, a short, thin, very funny (and by this time very drunk) man, blurted out: "He thought you were a terrorist and that we were all going to be blown up!"

I was in shock. All around me, though, people were laughing. The entire room found this hilarious, but even funnier was the fact that I was entirely unaware that heated debates had gone on during my first week in Intipacha (in June 1998) between Ral and Ignacio. Some members of the community had been unsure whether I was a threat to the community or simply a well-intentioned anthropologist trying to learn Quechua. While at that time the Peruvian government maintained that the years of political violence were over, for many highland and lowland communities the threat of violence was still real. Ral and several others in the community were certain that Sendero Luminoso, a Maoist guerrilla movement, had sent me to determine whether any children in the community were strong enough and smart enough to recruit into the organization. As an anthropologist, I was immediately associated with the political left, and because I spent much of my time in the school observing and working with children, my intentions became suspect.

In contemporary Peru, the official years of terror (1980-95) continue to cast a shadow over the country (Basombro Iglesias 1998). These shadows have come to seem even more menacing as reports appear in the media about the resurgence of Sendero Luminoso. Moreover, the release of the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report in August 2003 sparked new debates over indigenous rights, reparations, state accountability, and impunity. Clearly the politics of culture and development in the Peruvian Andes cannot be separated from the lingering effects of more than a decade of violence-much of it aimed at indigenous peoples.

While the present moment is full of uncertainties, I would like to note that the period during which I conducted most of my fieldwork (1996-99) was also characterized by a particular set of ambiguities, hopes, and fears. Intercultural education was being debated and implemented in the context of a tenuous transition away from authoritarianism. Though in a sense activists were continuing work that had been ongoing since the 1960s and 1970s (Burns 1968, 1971), they were also breaking new ground as they sought to broaden their linguistic and cultural work toward more explicitly political activism. Indigenous and peasant political mobilization in Cuzco, in their view, had last erupted over questions of land tenure and agrarian reform (Blanco 1972). While the 1990s bore the marks of these earlier mobilizations, for activists this decade was about a new set of concerns about culture, language, and education (Andrs Chirinos, personal communication).

When I first arrived in Cuzco in 1996, Peruvian indigenous rights activists were hesitant to discuss indigenous rights overtly. Although the war had officially ended in 1995, the political climate was still such that simply discussing politics or raising questions about human rights abuses could be (and had been) labeled subversive by Alberto Fujimori's government forces. In the place of more overtly political work, activists stressed the seemingly less controversial right of indigenous communities to multicultural education and contributed to the promotion of indigenous languages. By the end of my fieldwork in 1999, mounting international pressure for multicultural development and indigenous rights and increasing government acceptance (publicly) for multicultural policies led to more explicit discussions among intercultural activists in Cuzco about indigenous cultural and political autonomy. After the fall of Fujimori in 2000, with the transition government of Valentn Paniagua (2001) and the elected government of Alejandro Toledo, new opportunities for the advancement of the rights of indigenous communities throughout Peru and Latin America drastically reframed state-indigenous interactions. Peru began the twenty-first century with a dramatic explosion of activity in civil society. A striking increase in NGO projects and new social movements, widespread anti-privatization protests, and a proliferation of indigenous organizations characterized what some hopefully considered the post-Sendero, post-Fujimori Peru. It is difficult to write during a time of such rapid change, when news of new organizations and changes in indigenous leadership comes almost daily. Yet it is helpful to think about the cultural politics of the late 1990s in this light, since it seemed to set in motion much of the broader political activity that is evolving today. Consequently, this book focuses on the pivotal years of the late 1990s, during which Peru sought to move from times of terror and war toward reconciliation, peace, and multiculturalism.

Beginning with the internal war between the Shining Path and the Peruvian government, this chapter traces recent political history in the country. It looks closely at the shifting contexts (and their impact) for debates over indigenous rights and state policies, from relative trepidation in the countryside to cautious nongovernmental advocacy of language and education rights, and finally to bolder attempts by NGOs, the state, and indigenous communities to negotiate the terms of indigenous citizenship.

A History of Violence: Terrorism, the State, and Indigenous Resistance

SENDERO LUMINOSO AND "THE INDIAN PROBLEM" Sendero Luminoso burst onto the scene of Peruvian politics in May 1980 when the group launched its first armed offensive in the department of Ayacucho. Sendero's first attack, burning ballot boxes and voting lists in Chuschi, a small town in Ayacucho, went almost completely unnoticed by government forces. When isolated bombs began to go off in scattered parts of the highlands later that year, no one paid attention. By the end of 1980, however, Sendero Luminoso caught the nation's attention when residents of downtown Lima awoke to the sight of dead dogs hanging from lampposts. Wrapped around the animals' bodies were signs reading "Deng Xiaoping, Son of a Bitch!" According to Abimael Guzmn, leader of the group, the flaws of the post-Mao leadership in China had left Sendero as the new and only leader of world revolution. In Guzmn's words, Sendero was a force that, by encircling Peru's cities from the countryside, would "put the noose around the neck of imperialism and the reactionaries ... and strangle them" (Guzmn 1988).

Guzmn and his group, likened to Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia because of their ruthlessness, were initially seen as a revolutionary movement that fought in the name of Peru's poor. The movement invoked the ideology of Marx, Lenin, and especially Mao Tse-tung, as the following excerpt from the last public document the group released before the insurrection shows:

Marxist-Leninist-Mao Tse-tung thought is the ideology of the international proletariat and the general political line of the revolution is its application to our concrete reality, ... in all its glory the task of the coming revolution is ... to begin armed struggle. To begin the hard and prolonged Agrarian War that follows the path of surrounding the cities from the countryside, creating revolutionary bases of support. (Cited in Gorriti Ellenbogen 1999: 56)

What gave this internationalist ideology a more concrete Peruvian connection was the use of the legacy of the Peruvian philosopher Jos Carlos Maritegui.

The movement's full name-In The Shining Path of Jos Carlos Maritegui-and its highland origins led many to assume, wrongly, that this new organization was a uniquely Peruvian indigenous revolutionary movement. Maritegui, one of the most respected social theorists of the 1920s, glorified the socialist Inca state, forged important links with indigenista intellectuals, and founded the Peruvian Socialist Party. His ideas about socialism were informed by what he saw as the persistence of "communist" Andean traditions. I will discuss Maritegui and indigenismo at length in Chapter 2, but what is relevant here is the ideological connection between Maritegui and Guzmn. For Maritegui the so-called Indian problem in Peru (how to integrate indigenous populations into the nation) was an economic problem, not a cultural one. It was a problem of land (ownership), labor, and exploitation (Maritegui 1994 [1928]). Although Maritegui wrote about "indigenous claims" (reivindicacin indgena) and "indigenous resurgence" (resurgimiento indgena), he was also passionate in his insistence that "indigenous claims lack historical concreteness as long as they remain on a philosophical or cultural level. To acquire [concreteness] ... they have to be transformed into economic and political demands" (Maritegui 1972 [1928]: 12). Although Maritegui became "an ever more silent icon" in Sendero's proclamations (Gorriti Ellenbogen 1999: 56), Guzmn was clearly influenced by his writings about the revolutionary spirit of indigenous populations, and he may have heeded the claim made by Luis Valcrcel (another important indigenista intellectual) that "this indigenous proletariat awaits its Lenin" (Valcrcel 1972 [1927]). It is more likely, however, that Guzmn saw himself as a Peruvian Mao.

Following Maoist revolutionary logic, Sendero originated and developed in the rural countryside. Its birthplace was Ayacucho. In Quechua, Ayacucho means "corner of the dead." It has historically been one of the most neglected regions in the country. Even during the years of agrarian reform in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, land redistribution was not successful, and some large landowners and haciendas remained in place. For Guzmn and his followers, Ayacucho was the place from which revolutionary peasants would emerge. Moreover, part of their strategy was to establish themselves in the countryside, consolidate their stronghold by gathering peasant support, and "strangle" the cities that constituted the center of political power.

However, the assumption that Sendero was an ethnic movement, or a movement advocating indigenous rights, was clearly wrong and later dismissed by most observers. Actually, Sendero demonstrated tremendous hostility toward indigenous practices and traditions. Echoing the chilling metaphors of Senderistas, the historian Florencia Mallon states:

The failure politically to engage indigenous traditions and practices, which emerged in the twentieth century among a variety of oppositional political groups in Peru, was reconstructed with the class-based leftist discourses and practices of the 1960s and 1970s, intensified in the Shining Path vision of the 1980s popular war. Indeed, within Senderista strategy, a historically created blindness to Indian-ness, linked to the imperative of total war, transformed communal culture and politics into one more insect to be squashed. (Mallon 1998: 115-116)

During the first few years of organization and struggle, much support for Sendero came from teachers, university professors, and young university students in Huamanga, the departmental capital. Recognizing the significance of the education system for the propagation of their ideology and as an important source of cadres for their movement, leaders of this new organization infiltrated the national teacher's union (SUTEP) as well as various universities throughout the highlands (Hinojosa 1998) and maintained close relationships with highland teachers (Degregori 1998a). Many students at the University of Huamanga came from rural communities in the area, and as the educated children of peasants, they were more easily able to garner support from indigenous peasant communities. Many returned to their homes to promote the Senderista cause. Another important support group were rural youth without a university education, for whom Sendero Luminoso could be a path toward social mobility and away from the "traditional and backward" ways of their parents (Degregori 1998a: 128-131). In a discriminatory system that left many of them with little or no hope for social or economic advancement, Sendero presented concrete steps toward social ascent. Testimony collected by the anthropologist Carlos Ivn Degregori (1998a: 130) from a young man in a community in Ayacucho highlights this idea: "[Senderistas] said that Ayacucho was going to be a liberated zone by 1985. A famous illusion that they created among the muchachos was, way back in 1981, that by 1985 there would be an independent republic. Wouldn't you like to be minister? Wouldn't you like to be a military chief? Be something, no?"

During the early years of the "popular war," Sendero accumulated significant support from indigenous peasant communities in Ayacucho. Senderistas reminded community members of the state's neglect, their lack of medical facilities, and the need for better schools for their children. Initially, Senderistas were viewed positively by some as promoters of new forms of community justice and authority. During public trials, for example, they punished cattle rustlers, violent husbands, thieves, and others who were perceived as harming the community. However, by establishing local "people's committees" as replacements of local authority, Sendero also began to alienate elders and others in the community who recognized this as a challenge not only to the authority of the state and individual landowners but also to traditional community customs. Gradually, in an effort to restrict food supplies to the cities, Sendero tried to close weekly markets and control what the community could and could not sell. Eventually militants insisted that farmers produce only enough sustenance for the community and the Party, and forbade them to produce for the market. They banned religious ceremonies, which they considered manifestations of "archaic superstitions," and began to forcibly recruit increasing numbers of children, some as young as seven or eight years old, into their movement.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Making Indigenous Citizensby Mara Elena Garca Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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