Histories of Race and Racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present

Indian Ruins, National Origins: Tiwanaku and Indigenismo in La Paz, 1897–1933

Indian Ruins, National Origins: Tiwanaku and Indigenismo in La Paz, 1897–1933 seemin qayum The storied archaeological site at Tiwanaku became the source of local, regional , and national appropriations and dissensions in early twentiethcentury Bolivia. A landscape of abandoned ruins was intellectually reconstructed into a political monument that stood for a potent past, a past imbued with nationalist meaning that salvaged the present from a history of ostensible racial and civilizational decline. After generations of republican debate over the relative merits of the Inca and Spanish empires, Tiwanaku emerged as a compelling alternative to both Inca-centered and Spanishcentered narratives of the past. The discourse and practice of archaeology and history were instrumental in the reconstruction of the local and the national even as they relied on ‘‘fabrication, invention, and imagination’’ for their authentication.∞ The Geographic Society of La Paz, an institution on the cusp of state and civil society, produced a body of historical and ethnographic knowledge asserting the primordial status of ancient Tiwanaku as an Andean and American civilization, and as fundamentally Aymara. The Society marshalled the intelligentsia of the Liberal Party, which governed for most of the first two decades of the twentieth century, its membership spanning the upper echelons of Bolivian society, including statesmen, hacienda and mine owners, scientists, and intellectuals.≤ Making manifest the ‘‘inseparability of the spheres of professional and public knowledge, of academic and nationalist motivations,’’ the cult of Tiwanaku symbolically condensed the Society’s vision of the Bolivian nation as projected from La Paz.≥ A revealing source for understanding the symbolic potency of the site is a 160 seemin qayum political tract published in 1897 that deemed Tiwanaku the origin of South American civilization and, therefore, the foundation for modern Bolivian nationality. The tract stands as one of the first definitive expressions of indigenista nationalism in Bolivia. By claiming Tiwanaku’s precedence over the Inca empire, with its center at Cuzco, Bolivian indigenistas framed their nationalist project against Peruvian culture and society. Emphasis on the ancient archaeological site at Tiwanaku made possible an alternative version of Andean history, one that was Tiwanaku-centered rather than Cuzcocentered . According to this vision, the Bolivian nation and its Creole elites no longer had to summon up an imperial Inca past that was closely associated with Peru.∂ For the new century they had a glorious, primordial Aymara past situated geographically within Bolivian territory. Yet Bolivian Creole intellectuals also had continental pretensions, for Tiwanaku gave them an original claim to American identity. Through the use of scientific, racial, and civilizational discourses, the Geographic Society made Tiwanaku the cradle not only of Bolivian nationality but also of American civilization. Tiwanaku was an ancient city-state located just south of Lake Titicaca on the altiplano, or highland plateau, of La Paz. Emerging around 200 c.e., Tiwanaku became the leading political and religious site within the Lake Titicaca basin by about 500 c.e. It subsequently became the center of an extended territorial and trade network expanding westward to coastal Peru, to the fertile valleys east of Lake Titicaca as well as to Cochabamba, and reaching as far south as northern Chile. Tiwanaku suddenly entered into decline and collapsed around 1100 c.e.∑ As the Inca state expanded in the fourteenth century, it sought legitimacy through symbolic links with the Titicaca basin and the prestigious Tiwanaku civilization. When Spanish chroniclers such as Pedro Cieza de León arrived in the region in the mid-sixteenth century, they collected Inca and local Andean origin myths involving this sacred site.∏ In the nineteenth century the ruins were visited by a long list of European travelers and scholars who published studies or memoirs of their stays.π It was on these foundations that turn-of-the-century letrados (the lettered elites discussed by Brooke Larson in this volume) associated with the Geographic Society of La Paz would construct their indigenista interpretations of the local and national significance of Tiwanaku. Indigenismo has taken a variety of forms in twentieth-century Latin America. The term refers commonly to a reformist movement led by mestizo and Creole intellectuals and artists who sought to defend a marginalized Indian population and vindicate its cultural past or future potential. Indi- Indian Ruins, National Origins 161 genistas criticized the abuses of a backward, ‘‘feudal’’ order in the countryside , and their concerns helped to motivate social and agrarian reforms on the part of modernizing and populist state...