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Nepantla: Views from South 3.1 (2002) 39-60



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Mestizaje Upside Down
Subaltern Knowledges and the Known

Javier Sanjinés C.


The purpose of this essay is twofold: to displace mestizaje and to turn its bodily metaphor upside down. Mestizaje is one of the foundational themes in the Americas, particularly in those areas colonized by the Spanish and the Portuguese. A complex process of interracial and/or intercultural mixing, mestizaje is the paradigm letrado elites sometimes employ to describe and interpret the mechanisms that govern society at the sociopolitical and cultural levels. In this sense, mestizaje attempts to impose a homogeneous order upon a totality whose internal coherence is built vertically by the structures of power. Illusory or not, the construction of paradigms is indispensable to knowing reality. If, as Martin Lienhardt (1997, 189) has aptly remarked, mestizaje as a paradigm is “a means, always provisional, of thinking reality,” society is captured through this paradigm only as an approximate order that may be altered. It is in this light that the proposals that follow should be understood.

In Bolivia, the paradigm of mestizaje is no more than a cultural discourse whose purpose is to justify the hegemony of a mestizo-criollo liberal upper class that assumed power at the beginning of the twentieth century. As I will show, the letrado creation of an ideal mestizo myth-symbol for nation building must also be placed in the flow of history and contrasted with the collective memory of past indigenous insurgencies. In ways similar to Dipesh Chakrabarty's (2000) description, discussing India, of the clash between a “time of history” and a “time of the gods,” we can also think of myths of chaos, violence, and fragmentation, which counteract modernity and its historical narrative with alternative ceremonies.1 One such ceremony, which has given life to present-day indigenous movements, [End Page 39] is the 1782 (Amer-)Indian rebellion led by Tupaj Katari. Caught and tortured by the Spanish, Tupaj Katari left a dismembered body that became a metaphor for social fragmentation and future liberation. These rebellions constitute the alternative story to mestizo-criollo attempts at nation building and anticipate Katarismo, the indigenous movement I explore here.2

Is Katarismo to be conceived “within” or “without,” inside or outside the system? Approaching this question will lead me to discuss—via the rising importance of the Aymara leader Felipe Quispe Huanca, alias El Mallku—the conflicting epistemologies that Katarismo brings onto the scene. Intellectuals clearly aligned with the modern state and with the construction of representative democracy need to frame El Mallku, today's most radical expression of Katarismo, within a narrativity of history that is logical and rational. But radical Katarismo seems to be keenly aware that this framing is part of a dominant strategy that relates knowledge to the homogenizing notions of state, culture, and nation. El Mallku's Katarismo counteracts intellectuals' inclination to frame indigenous movements in a recognizable logic, using a clever discourse that is both strategically ambiguous and radically impermanent.

Radical Katarismo does not aim simply to displace mestizaje. Instead, like the peasant insurgencies discussed by Ranajit Guha (1983, 36), radical Katarismo attempts to destroy or appropriate for itself the signs of authority of those who dominate in society, that is, to be a “real turning of things upside down.” It constitutes a semiotic break, violating the basic mestizo code by which the relations of dominance and subordination are historically governed in Bolivia. This turning mestizaje upside down indicates a new position on knowledge: the displacement of mestizo pedagogues and intellectuals in their control of education and value knowledge.

I thus begin this essay with a discussion of moderate and radical Katarismos, today's two contrasting indigenous ideologies, and of the place they occupy in contemporary Bolivian politics. Particularly noteworthy here is the surprising alliance between the neoliberal Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) and moderate Katarismo, a partnership that influenced the Plan de todos (MNR–MRTKL 1993), the program of reforms proposed by the MNR and the Katarismo of moderate Aymara leader Víctor Hugo Cárdenas during...

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