Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910 (review)

This masterful book is an expansion of Larson's important extended essay on nineteenth-century indigenes in the Andes—"Andean Highland Peasants and the Trials of Nation Making during the Nineteenth Century"—which first appeared in the Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas (New York 1999), III, 558–703. Larson established herself as an authority with her initial work on indigenous society in Cochabamba, which culminated in a study originally published in 1988 and reissued in an expanded edition as Cochabamba, 1550–1900: Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia (Durham, 1998).

Trials of Nation Making is inherently interdisciplinary, as is the work of almost all ethnohistorians, since the field draws on studies by both historians and anthropologists. The present book is a synthesis of findings; as such it does not focus on research techniques or methodologies.

Larson has a commanding knowledge of the monographic literature about Andean indigenes. She uses it deftly to lay out the varying historical patterns in relations between governments and Spanish American elites on the one hand, and indigenous communities on the other, in the transition from colonial corporate forms to the multiple modes of exploitation in emerging market economies in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Larson describes and explains variations in patterns of these relations, shaped in part by geographical and demographical, as well as sociopolitical, differences.

One major overall theme is the weakening or destruction of indigenous corporate communities through the division and alienation of community land, as well as pressure to use indigenous labor in a market economy. The circumstances of indigenous communities differed significantly in the four countries treated. The demographic strength of the indigenous population was greatest in Bolivia (possibly 80 percent of the population). This strong indigenous presence was reinforced by the proximity of much of that population to the political centers of Sucre and La Paz. Indigenes represented a smaller proportion of the population in Peru (about 60 percent), and their concentration in the Andes separated them from centers of European culture on the coast. In both Bolivia and Peru, indigenous communities retained relatively more autonomous control than in Ecuador, where indigenes making up about half the population were, for the most part, landless workers and where community corporate structures were therefore ended with relative ease.

Colombia presents an extreme departure from Bolivian and Peruvian patterns. By the late colonial period, indigenes comprised no more than 20 percent of the population. In Colombia's eastern highlands, the formerly indigenous population became substantially Hispanic by the late colonial period. By 1860, most indigenous community land in this region had been divided and alienated. However, in western Colombia, particularly in the south (Cauca and Nariño), indigenous communities retained their lands and relative autonomy through most of the nineteenth century.