THE CH'IXI IDENTITY OF A MESTIZO: REGARDING AN ANARCHIST MANIFESTO OF 1929

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

The document I will analyze here, La Voz del Campesino, is a notable example of the particularities of anarchist thought and action in Bolivia before the Chaco War (1932–1935). Its author, the mechanic Luis Cusicanqui, was one of the most creative and persevering libertarian ideologues of La Paz. Together with anarchist seamstress Domitila Pareja, he gave life to the group La Antorcha (The Torch) that existed in La Paz from the early 1920s. In 1927 Cusicanqui became part of the Local Worker Federation (FOL) and became their general secretary in 1940, when the libertarians had already suffered the buffeting of state repression, forced recruitment, and the corporatist policies of cooptation and neutralization by the postwar governments of David Toro and Germán Busch. For her part, Domitila did not live to see the founding of the FOL, dying of tuberculosis in La Paz at twenty-six years of age.

Cusicanqui's trajectory does not seem to have been an exception. In the anarchist archive that survives, we find texts of philosophical and doctrinal reflection, journalistic chronicles, essays, and plays. Like Cusicanqui, many men and women of the cholo/a urban working class linked manual labor with a broad humanistic self-education and the daily work of agitation and propaganda. They wrote philosophy and dabbled in essays and the theater without ceasing to work in their respective manual jobs or becoming armchair ideologues or politicians. Rather, their political philosophy and critical writing were closely intertwined with their daily work of manual labor and solidarity organizing. They were determined in their desire to reveal the arrogance and arbitrariness of the misti (now we would say q'ara), elite, with its lack of authentic culture and its illegitimate hold on wealth and power. The continuity between the colonial oppressor and the bourgeois oligarchy nurtured the memory of suffering and violence, and denoted a qhipnayra sense of historical time. In these brief notes I will try to elucidate these aspects of the history and thought of the La Paz anarchist movement, considering this singular text and the personal seal of its author in the context of the intense mass participation of the cholo and indigenous populations of the hills of La Paz and El Alto.

I

Even though we do not know the exact context that surrounded the manifesto's diffusion, recent research by historian Roberto Choque (2009) shows that La Voz del Campesino had widespread distribution in the countryside, in rural regions, and among the urban artisan cholo class, bearer of the labor energy that gave life to the city. The La Paz anarchists' verbal and written style, which combines a Spanish full of archaisms and distortions with a metaphorical and politicized Aymara, resembles a ch'ixi fabric interwoven with their reflections and experiences. This is a dialect that threads its doctrine through the twisting crosshatch of castimillano (Aymarainflected) Spanish: an intercultural lingua franca that permitted the anarchists to adapt and re-create libertarian and indigenous metaphors through a dense testimonial fabric.

La Voz del Campesino is directed at the countryside and written in the first person. In this we see the first contradiction, since the author wrote it in the city rather than the country. Is this a calculated gesture, a paternalist approximation of the reality of an Aymara free communies and hacienda colonos by an urban mestizo artisan in an attempt at demagoguery or impersonation? Or was the document really written by an Indian, in which case it is only the urban anarchist translation of an Indian's thought? As any middle-class vanguardist or rearguard Indianist could affirm, seeing the color of his skin next to Domitila's: you just have to see his face to know he is an Indian! But things are never so simple. Because of his education, because of the imbrication of two languages that permanently battled in his brain, because of his family trajectory, Cusicanqui was what we would call a ch'ixi mestizo, an Indian spotted with white, transculturated in an agonizing, ambivalent, and unruly manner.

Throughout the manifesto, the "I" and the "we" — more frequently the first person plural — refers to the Indian, even though a few times he uses the word "peasant." The title, rather than denoting the real content of the text, actually obscures it. In the subtitle the identification is clearer, but it moves along an oppositional path; this reads: "our challenge to the great mistes of the State ..." Miste, misti, State = misti; a term that denotes caste. It means we, the Indians, face our enemies, the mistis and the State.

It is worth clarifying that in the 1920s the term "peasant" did not carry the ideological khumunta it was later given during the era of revolutionary nationalism of the post-Chaco period. Between the misti classes it was simply a term used as a euphemistic synonym for Indian — which is largely the way it continues to be used today — perhaps due to the shame of the elites who,...