Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism

The Qhara Qhara is an indigenous ethnic group that straddles Chuquisaca & Potosí departments in Bolivia. It belongs to the larger National Council of Markas and Ayllus of the Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ), an Aymara ethnic organization that brings together Aymara communities not only in Bolivia, but also Peru, Chile, and Argentina. It’s important to note that the “national” in CONAMAQ doesn’t refer to Bolivia, but to the Qullana (the territory of the southeastern portion of Incan empire). CONAMAQ, founded in 1997, has a parliament of representatives from the various member ayllus (communities) & is led by an Apu Mallku (“Supreme Prince”). The current Apu Mallku is Evo Morales, elected to that position in 2006. Ironically, Evo was (until the late 1990s) little involved w/ such indigenous organizations, focusing instead on the cocalero movement. Like many rural (and urban) Bolivians, Evo has recently made the transition to an “indigenous” identity.

So what does this have to do w/ race, ethnicity, and nationalism? Well, for starters, I’ve previously noted my objection to the misuse of the term “race” when discussing social divisions in Bolivia. That is, outside commentators (particularly Americans) are too quick to argue that the “Indian race” is in conflict w/ Bolivian “whites”—as if social cleavages were neatly cut.

My problem w/ the term “race” is that it is too easily seen as something static (or, worse, purely biological). The terms “ethnicity” & “nation” are more easily seen as cultural artifacts, as social constructions. Ethnic & national identities are inherited, but they are also learned (and we inherit them by being “socialized” into our identities by our families & communities).

This is particularly important to remember when discussing Latin America, a region of the world where mestizaje—the blending of different ethnic groups (or even “races”)—has a long tradition. This doesn’t mean that racism (understood as the prejudice against different “other” groups) doesn’t exist in countries like Bolivia. But it means that we can’t really understand these prejudices by limiting ourselves to the category of “race.”

Those who use “race” as a social category often implicitly (if not explicitly!) assume that racial “purity” can exist. Social groups are essentialized, and defined in simple, static categories. Both the romanticizing & demonizing of “Indians” (whether defined as pure & noble or backward & savage) makes the same mistake: It assumes that the “Indian” is static.

It’s noteworthy that “racial” statistics in Bolivia vary remarkably. In the recent census, the proportion of “indigenous” Bolivians rose dramatically. It is now standard to note that Bolivia is comprised of a majority of “Indians” (nearly two thirds by the last Bolivian census). But this also depends on how the questions are asked. (Take for example the US census: Not only does it have trouble recognizing people of “mixed” heritage, it fails to identify important “other” groups. In the 2000 census, Middle Eastern Americans are included in the “white” category.) LAPOP (Latin American Public Opinion Project), which has been conducting public opinion research in Bolivia for a decade. The 2006 LAPOP report on Bolivia shows a remarkable trend: the percent of indigenous population in Bolivia has increased dramatically since 1998, even as the percent of whites has declined (see Figure II-3 on page 17). In 1998, more than a fifth of all respondents identified as “white,” but only a little more than a tenth did so in 2006. Similarly, barely a tenth of respondents identified as “indigenous” in 1998, but a fifth did so in 2006.

How do we explain that discrepancy? Either there was massive sampling error across all surveys (yet the biannual surveys showed a consistent trend across five different survey waves: 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006). Or people have “switched” their identities. More remarkable is that in the 2006 LAPOP survey, less than a fifth of respondents self-identified as “indigenous” (another tenth still self-identified as “white”). Again, what happened? Part of the answer lies in question wording, of course: unlike the 2000 Bolivian census, the LAPOP surveys include the category “mestizo.” Nearly two thirds of respondents self-identified as “mestizo” in the 2006 survey. Still, the LAPOP survey data shows a remarkable trend: the share of “indigenous” Bolivians has increased over time.

What we are seeing in Bolivia today is not merely a conflict between oppressed “Indians” & elite “whites” (though this is clearly part of the story). Rather, we are also seeing a change in the self-identification—a change, if you will, in how Bolivian citizens “imagine” themselves (to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term). After the 1952 National Revolution, Bolivia embarked on a nation-building project. Like other nation-building projects, it sought to bring together an ethnically fragmented society into a homogenous Bolivian nation. In short, it turned “Indians” into campesinos (“peasants”). Using the early 20th century ideology of indigenismo, a Bolivian national mythology was constructed that, though rooted in a distant (but “safe”) indigenous past, projected out to a modern future. That project has, since the 1990s, broken down.

Ironically, as Bolivia embraced democratic pluralism (the 1995 Constitution explicitly declared Bolivia a “multiethnic, pluricultural” state), it opened political space for the articulation of new political communities. At the heart of the Bolivian political struggle today is not about who should govern Bolivia, but rather the fundamental question: What is Bolivia? And, of course: What does it mean to be “Bolivian”?

The new indigenous political movement that has grown in Bolivia since the 1990s has benefited from pluralist political reforms. But it’s not the only such movement. There is also a social movement for Afro-Bolivian communities. Nor is the indigenous movement monolithic. It took nearly two decades for Aymara communities to overcome their own regional divisions to establish a single organization. In the last decade, that movement has incorporated (though not always smoothly) various Quechua communities as well. But lowland indigenous peoples have their own organizations. And even when these work together, it’s important not to equate this broad social movement w/ a “race.” There is no such thing (really) as an Indian “race” in Bolivia (just think for a moment of how 18th century such a statement sounds!). Rather, there are a number of ethnic communities. Over time, these are perhaps becoming one larger ethnic community.

(After all, ethnic communities can be constructed. For example, I just finished reading about the social construction of Tharu ethnic identity in Nepal, which brings together a number of ethnic communities w/ no shared history, kinship networks, or even language. See this revious post.)

What is remarkable, is that new regional ethnic communities are being constructed in Bolivia as well. The Nación Camba movement is one such movement. As the radical wing of the eastern lowlands regionalist movement, Nación Camba is analogous to the highland Ayllus Rojos. But the more moderate regionalist movements in Santa Cruz, Beni, Tarija, and even Sucre-Chuquisaca today are no less “ethnic” than the more “indigenous” social movements. These movements have defined themselves as culturally different from the Bolivian national identity. Their leaders point to a history of past abuses (as Anderson, Gellner, Hobsbawm, and others point out, national or ethnic identities are often spearheaded by local intellectuals or elites who use history for such purposes). We can learn much from public monuments, and a drive through Santa Cruz is an eye opening experience.

Returning to my main point: My objection to the simplistic portrayal of the regionalist movement in Santa Cruz as primarily motivated by “race” (“white” elites against “Indians” led by Evo) hides some important truths. If you spend enough time w/ cambas, you’ll soon notice that their anger against collas isn’t limited to those who are indigenous. The term is used to include upper class, criollo (“white”) paceño elites, too. Meanwhile, cambas will point to their own mestizaje—which includes a dialect heavily infused w/ Guaraní words (in this, the Camba ethnic/national identity is similar to the Paraguayan). Santa Cruz regionalists don’t think of themselves as “white”—they think of themselves as cambas. And, even more ironically, a great number of such cambas are second (even first) generation immigrants from the Andes.

Most problematically, reducing the conflict to one over race almost always implies that the non-white “other” is oppressed by some white “elite.” So if an “Indian” Bolivian president is opposed by a regional movement, that movement must be led by “white” oligarchs. Such a portrait fails to account for some important facts: “white” paceños equally resist efforts by Santa Cruz regionalists, while non-white residents of Santa Cruz side against the government.

Part of the problem w/ the American interpretation of Bolivian politics (or any other international phenomenon) is that American observers find it difficult to understand external phenomenon w/o projecting their own American perspective. In the US, we think of race as a fixed item. (Obama is black, regardless of the fact that he has a white mother & was schooled in Hawaii & Indonesia.) But the concept of “race” isn’t very useful for understanding a society crisscrossed by a number of overlapping, dynamic identities. Nor is the Darwinian idea that “races” are locked in some epic, zero-sum struggle against one another.