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

A Postcolonial Palimpsest: The Work Race Does in Latin America

A Postcolonial Palimpsest: The Work Race Does in Latin America florencia e. mallon In the past generation, the linguistic turn’s emphasis on the constructed nature of all categories and forms of explanation has grown to dominate much intellectual discourse. Those of us still committed to politically relevant analysis have repeatedly faced a similar quandary. True, all social, cultural , political, and symbolic terms and relationships are constructed, and it is no longer possible to take them at face value. But what happens when, in the midst of a political confrontation or crisis, individuals or social movements deploy reified categories or images as motivation or explanation for action? Can we limit ourselves to criticizing, from an intellectual vantage point, the limitations of such a discourse? Or do we need to take seriously the ways in which such categories and images are being (re)inscribed, in a sense, as social realities? These questions are especially salient when the subject of analysis is race. In the twentieth century, especially after the Second World War, notions of biological race entered into intellectual and political decline. In Latin America , there is also an enduring belief that the region’s systems of racial classi- fication have historically been more flexible. At the same time, in recent years, many of the region’s most dramatic conflicts—civil wars, human rights abuse, struggles over resources in an increasingly globalized world, demands for regional and political autonomy—have been perceived as having a racialized component. To what extent, then, can we understand Latin America as di√erent? And to what extent can we dismiss more fixed notions of race as historically ‘‘passé’’ or ‘‘superseded’’? The essays in this volume attempt an- 322 florencia e. mallon swers to these questions by considering, as Laura Gotkowitz explains in her introduction, what Thomas Holt has called the ‘‘e√ects’’ of race, or the ‘‘work race does.’’ Given Bolivia’s emblematic place in recent political events—the Water Wars in Cochabamba in 2000; numerous popular uprisings in El Alto, the predominantly Aymara city bordering La Paz; the electoral victory of Evo Morales in December 2005, making him Bolivia’s first indigenous president; and the violent conflicts in Sucre and Santa Cruz over political reorganization and regional autonomy—it is perhaps not surprising, and in some ways very appropriate, that Bolivia is the subject of more than half the volume. Indeed, Bolivian history—especially in its more recent alternative periodizations that highlight the continuities of Aymara mobilization—emerges as an implicit plotline around which the other cases are interwoven. With conquest and colonialism as a starting point, this narrative pauses at key junctures important in the Bolivian story: the colonial crisis of the 1780s; the late nineteenth-century civil war over the location of the nation’s capital; the conflicts over education and ‘‘civilization’’ in the 1920s and 1930s; and recent attempts to ‘‘refound’’ the Bolivian nation with the Constituent Assembly of 2007. The rest of the essays in this book, more or less evenly distributed in their focus between Mexico and Guatemala on one side and Ecuador and Peru on the other, serve as confirmation, contrast, and counterpoint to the chapters on Bolivia. The juxtaposition of a Bolivian narrative with narratives in other Latin American countries suggests a path of broader generalization about how race is constructed, performed, and contested, tracing how racial struggles are reburied in a widening palimpsest of memory, only to be disinterred once again in another historical moment, reconstructed yet again and redeployed. By focusing in depth on specific cases that dialogue and reverberate among themselves, we can reflect on the intricate ways in which race interacts with and is constructed by other relations of power. As a result, however, this is a volume not so much about race as about the construction of indigeneity. The one exception is the essay by Kathryn Burns on the colonial period, which places notions of purity of blood, lineage, and religion into a context that includes Moorish, Jewish, and African-descendant groups. The depth and breadth of historical analysis that this focus permits also provide stimulating suggestions about the work race does, suggestions that can be useful and informative in other contexts. A Postcolonial Palimpsest 323 Colonial Roots and Reconstructions In her analytical e√orts to unfix colonial notions of race, Kathryn Burns explores the ways in which, in the context of...